He pushed the tips of his wings through the thick tar that constituted the endlessly deep ocean surrounding his nest. The black globules sizzled and popped as the shifting plates of his skin moved with his vast musculature.
A talon, longer than a a country, plunged into the soil around the pool, severing the femur of a tortured semi-corpse panting at the end of the pool. He flicked the sufferer into the pool of tar with a thought, watching his skin and fat crackle off his bones. He would be resurrected, screaming, at the top of Hell, to navigate the infinite maze of hatred once more.
He had been given two choices. He had suffered greatly, but had done his best to help others as he was taught by his parents. His choice was an eternity of joy and bliss, impossible to describe or imagine, or the task of vengeance on a scale no mortal can describe. He had chosen to become the avatar of his people.
He was a grim being of focused misery and cold satisfaction. At first he had hesitated, he had wondered if it was selfish to give in to his base instincts and revel in the joy of punishment. Perhaps heaven had been the better choice, but if his memory served, the thought hadn't been particularly appealing. He wanted revenge. He knew he was the one to do it. He'd always enjoyed hurting others, but had been taught right from wrong, even if he'd never viscerally understood it, and had been taught the benefits of helping rather than hurting. Society's constraints had never seemed particularly difficult to be held down by, and he'd lived a perfectly pleasant life.
He snapped his beaks. The spinning vortex of five dimensional flames past his mouths blazed, shooting sparks and memories through the tears and rips in his body. A solar flare of rage arced from his eyes, and he took flight. His subtly patterned wings, each as wide as a continent and long as an ocean beat the sooty fluid that claimed to be Hell's sky.
Barbed chains rose from the bubbling pitch, each spike holding the struggling form of a sinner he'd found particularly repugnant. He kept them close to torment them personally, billions of miniature humans tethered to chains as long as a mountain range, billions of barbs still empty, awaiting their turn.
As a young man he had been beaten and kidnapped, dragged into a truck and driven to the docks. He'd been deported, and sent to Risiera di San Sabba. The brick building echoed with screams as he was led down the hallway to a room. He was tortured, a doctor taking his right hand for further study. He had been a stone carver for local cathedrals, doing skilled repair. That was taken from him.
He was put in another train, buzzing with flies and rotting around him. He'd awoken in a colder place. His mind had collapsed, he was surrounded by people who spoke none of his language, but spoke the language of misery and suffering. He'd tried to help those around him, more out of habit than commitment, and found each friend he made taken from him.
He remembered dying in a field, undramatically, alone and cold. Nothing had happened to him, his body was simply too weak to power his organs any longer.
His chosen reward suited him well. Time in hell was a difficult concept, each second of human life existing as a catalogue before his eyes whenever he chose to squint at the grainy reality. He could torture whom he wished, shame who he wanted, murder rape and savage by his whim and impulse. With all those possibilities, he had decided today to do something he had never done, and greet those who had killed him. He'd been avoiding this for reasons he didn't quite understand- waging a proxy war against history's greatest monsters but avoiding the ones under his bed.
He chose the moment in time with a blink and stood at the gates of hell. The impossible scale of his ten thousand mile wide body shrunk to a human figure, a shrivelled Italian stone carver. He waited at the gate, savouring the anticipation. He stroked the stump where his right hand had been.
The man stumbled through the gate, brass buttons and ribbons glittering in the ruddy light of smouldering piles of human grease and fat.
He smiled, and felt his dry, malnourished lips crack at each end. The man tentatively smiled back.
Behind him a train rolled up, steel wheels squeaking and squealing on the rails, meticulously carved from living human femurs, the tracks built on the still attached piles of agony below.
He smiled and led the shuddering man into the train and embraced him.
"Thank you for coming to me."
The train wheels lurched, the bones below cracking and burning. A chorus of screams followed the train.
The two men sat, crosslegged, on the train's floor, knowing the only difference between them was the luck of being born the wrong thing.