#minos: I'm selfish for feeling bad about what I must do :(

[8o8o8o8o8]

Giving Minos depression about his work as Judge of Hell <33

cw for gore, mention of a murder

The smell of rain heralds the arrival of a Ferryman in the city of Lust. Minos looks up just in time to see the ship's hull breaches the violet clouds, making its way towards him. A full boat hold of sinners to judge. At least this isn't the Ferryman with the factory ship that makes him feel like a fisherman processing a catch.

He steps onboard, twin parasite snakes sliding off of his arms and rushing towards the hold. He suppresses faint disgust with centuries of practice. There's little to be done about the gleeful cruelty of demons.

Minos steps down into the hold.

Unmoving bodies stack upon each other, bare and cold. Disturbingly few of them are intact; he can see peeling muscles and open ribcages, broken limbs and necks and spines—

He kneels down on what little visible ground there is by the ladder. The parasites promptly drop the nearest corpse on his lap. It—They're damp, soaked through with the smell of the Ocean Styx, and a hint of gunpowder. Jarringly impeccable hands. He desperately wants it not to mean anything. He turns their face towards his.

"Annika Young." A name he has never spoken flows out of his mouth with unnatural ease. "Seventy two souls lie dead for your carelessness. Your greatest sin is your apathy towards those in your care." Annika Young does not say thing. No one does. They only ever look emptily at him. "For this, you will be sentenced to Violence."

The parasites pull her away. By the end of the day, he and they would have made neat little piles out of these people. Like meat at the market. This work is not meant for the human soul, he knows. It would be much easier to let go of his sanity and humanity, to simply be the Judge of Hell, another dutiful cog in this infernal machine.

Another corpse lands on his lap. He's stopped feeling any horror for their eternal fates, only his. How disgustingly selfish.

They look up at him. There's hundreds more (there's endless more). Now is not the time to wallow in his fate.

Minos takes in a rotten, salty breath and let out the name of the dead once more.