Putting the finishing touches on her first set of notes, Muur quickly glanced around. Most of the class was doing the exact same thing as her. Namely, jolting down information pertaining to the Hells they hadn't studied for their report.
At the bottom of the amphitheatre, the old lecturer had become silent so that his class could finish absorbing the information, but he wasn't idle by any means. Standing as ramrod-straight as his body allowed it, he'd taken to scanning the room for any sort of slacker. His judging stare never lingered on any one person, but whenever it passed over her, Muur could feel him studying her and taking her measure before moving away.
She wouldn’t lie and say it didn’t bother her, but she did make a point of turning that into fuel to show she wasn’t just some two-bit tourist adventurer malingering here for lack of anything better to do. Muur was actually, genuinely considering joining the clergy in the proper sense. That was not a decision done lightly and she needed as good an understanding of the Twins and what they reigned over to make her choice.
Flipping to a blank page of her notebook with one hand, she dipped her quill in ink with the other and got to writing her second set of notes as soon as the parchment had settled in place.
Where her previous notes were all about the sort of people being sent into the Hells and the reasons thereof, these were meant to chronicle the other side of the coin: the punishments to be inflicted upon these wicked souls.
Interestingly, the punishment that the Twelves had concocted for those sinners had very little irony to them. Although, considering the elemental nature of the Hells, it was perhaps not that much of a surprise that their logic was less ‘for having been obsessed with gold and hungering for it in life, you shall now be fed molten gold for eternity’, and more ‘Fuck you, suffer. Go go gadget; Flesh Rending Winds!’...
Actually, considering the Hell of Wind punished bandits and defilers, perhaps the flesh rending winds were meant to make them suffer the sort of injuries that they inflicted on others as part of their ‘career’? She made a quick note on the margins of the page to look into that later.
The Hell of Lightning was, as she'd noted previously, Rhalgr’s personal pitching practice. Once again, she silently cursed the student that had been called to explain this hell for her piss poor performance. All of the other gods were rather detached and simply allowed the Hells to function by themselves. The Destroyer, on the other hand, seemed to be actively punishing the sinners that had displeased him. That alone would have been a goldmine of data on what sort of people would worship him and how to approach individuals guilty of the crimes he abhorred. Alas, she got fuck-all on the matter, so another note to go dig deeper on the topic it was.
By contrast, the Hell of Water was almost comically detached in its method of punishing sinners. It just… drowned them. The wicked were more or less dropped into an expanse of endless waters and left to deal with that. On one hand, it was considerably less violent. On the other, anyone saying that it was a less cruel method of punishing people clearly never had a near-drowning experience. Considering there hadn't been any mention of the weather, or of beasts in the water, and that the student that had given the overview seemed to be quite studious, it probably wasn't a factor… Muur still jotted down a (lower priority) note to look into it. It may’ve been omitted due to time constraints.
The Hell of Earth would make a certain forest ranger proud. There, sinners were buried ‘alive’ and turned into nutrients that would nourish the earth. Sadly, just as the array of sinners seemed odd, the punishment was rather vague as well. It felt like Muur only had half of a puzzle to work off of… maybe she needed to look into the heavens to make sense of it? The growing of trees could very easily tie into it.
The Hell of Fire had honestly surprised her a little. With a name like that, you'd expect some sort of fire-wreathed land where people burned endlessly. But no, not quite. Oh, there was fire aplenty. Almost unreasonable amounts of it, even, and that was a bona fide pyromaniac talking. However, this was paired with stones that fell from the very sky. It didn't sound targeted like Rhalgr’s fastball special, which implied that this the the by-product of something else. Faintly, she recalled overhearing something about rubble from the Heaven of Fire tumbling down to its corresponding hell. More reason to look into the heavens.
Alas, without more information to chew on she was forced to poke at the Hell of Ice. Icicles were clearly involved, the overview had made that clear. But the student that had been tapped had spent most of their research on the ‘sinner’ aspect of the hell, leaving the punishment one woefully undercooked and vague. Case in point, ‘Hallone's icicles’ could mean a number of things. It could be that she was as involved as Rhalgr’s and summoned them to directly punish those that were trapped in her hell. Just as easily, it could be a recycled byproduct like her hunch about Fire. She just had no way of knowing right now.
With one last flourish of her quill, Muur sighed. She'd learned quite a lot, and yet at the same time, so little. Glancing at her roommate, she found her doing her damndest to double the weight of the page she was writing on through sheer density of ink and had to grimace at the horrible state of her formatting.
For all her bitching about it, Muur had to give the girl some credit. Having been the only one dedicated enough to look up the Seventh Hell, she'd given Muur the biggest piece of data of the lesson.
It didn’t have anything to do with the Hell itself. Like the girl had said, people were maddeningly incapable of agreeing on just what it was. Everyone agreed that it was here, but she'd quoted five different sources, each declaring the Seventh Hell to be something completely different. One had claimed it was total cessation of existence, another claimed that it was The Void and so on.
No, the really important thing was that Orliane had mentioned that sinners were meant to arrive at the doors to the Seventh Hell after enduring all six hells! That alone recontextualised everything else. The punishments weren't ironic twists of the sin, or hyper-specific punishment tailored to the sinner, because they were trials. The one facing them was to endure them, and thus find repentance.
Once all Elemental Hells had been crossed, they would be judged upon the threshold of the Seventh Hell. If they had found enlightenment and truly repented for the wrongs they had committed in life (instead of just begging for the pain to stop), they would be allowed to start a journey that would guide them to the Six Heavens. But if they didn't? Just like Anubis would have his crocodile-lioness buddy devour Egyptians whose hearts failed to pass muster, the door to the Seventh Hell would swing wide open and claim them, ensuring they would ‘suffer forevermore’.
Which made no sense given the cessation of existence theory, but that was theology for you. Chances were that it had been cast that way on purpose, keeping an air of dreadful mystery around it to make sinners fill in the gaps with their imagination and fears.