Supercreepy/morbid idea

[Ripheus23]

While asking myself recently if I would be willing to go to Hell or not, I came up with an idea for a story about someone who dies and goes to Hell. The idea is that people are re-killed over and over again in Hell, but that otherwise the environmental factors are more than less "natural." So, the Lake of Fire is actually a massive (infinite) expanse of water, with a surface intermittently covered in oil. For unknown reasons, the oil is constantly being ignited (this would be explained near the end of the story, sort of...) so people who stay near the surface of the Lake risk getting burned to death. However, most people end up having to choose between drowning in the water over and over again, or burning up, or switching between these two fates.

I supposed, to explain the imagery anyway, that children would be harder pressed to assume they could swim on the surface of the Lake and avoid the ignition episodes (more often it would be adults who would be so defiant or obstinate or what), so most children in Hell would end up drowning forever. Now there's supposed to be a place deep in the Lake where horrible Worms exist ("and their worm does not die"), so people who stay under the water might get chomped on by the Worms, but anyway I made up a situation where unfathomable numbers of dead children (not just human but from any planet with sentient beings) "sacrificed" themselves to form a pocket in Hell, shielded from the water of the Lake and the Worms. Since the water is infinite in scale, I figured it would produce some gravitational effects that would suffice for the pocket realm to "look like" a planet surrounded by empty space (when I say "unfathomable number," I mean enough for there to be a solar-system sized region around the Hell-planet). There are also supposed to be giant sentient insects that keep re-dying on the surface of the Lake, so their enormous quasi-corpses can be climbed onto to protect others from the fire of the Lake. These are the "Carcass Cities," and I thought of one as named "the Cauldron," where one of the protagonists starts out from.

So, let's suppose you survive the major dangers in Hell and die from old age. Usually a person is resurrected right where they died before, but if they die from old age, they end up teleporting to some random location near/at the surface of the Lake.

Now, the source of the fires is supposed to be a specific monster, a demon, let's just say "Satan" for now. Satan looks kind of like

except with 3 splitting heads and a humanoid torso, and dragon-wings. So, Satan is a tremendously massive entity who is trapped in a throne with hydraulic gears for torture devices set into it, and it uses drops of blood that are cultivated from all the other damned in history to push the gears. So, he's always trembling in pain and the oil is his blood, dripping into the water, and when his tears collide with the oil, there's a chemical reaction that ignites the oil.

Now, at some point in the story, the protagonist are supposed to find a way out of Hell, that leads into the dreamworld. One of them wants to go back to the living world but discovers that he will have to be transformed into a being made purely out of sadness to do so. Meanwhile, the antagonist frees Satan with the Sword of Wishes, which can be used three times to cut through anything the wielder wishes it to---so: Satan's chains, spacetime itself so that Satan can go to the living world, and... Well, the antagonist then holds the world hostage by telling Satan that he'll kill the demon if the demon doesn't obey him (sending Satan back to Hell), or he WON'T kill Satan (if people try to resist the demon contrary to the will of the antagonist).

THE END

[Pagliacci]

You've developed a rather unique story here, well done!

Are there any specific themes or philosophies you'd be exploring within this story?

If there is a Hell then does that suggest there is a Heaven as well?

Edited November 9, 2018 by Pagliacci
Spelling correction.

[Ripheus23]

11 hours ago, Pagliacci said:

Are there any specific themes or philosophies you'd be exploring within this story?

If there is a Hell then does that suggest there is a Heaven as well?

As far as Heaven/non-Hell locations---and themes/philosophy by implication---I was going to advert a lot of this to the dreamworld. The initial notion was "an epic fantasy, with adventures and wars and prophecies and blablabla but in this Hell-dreamworld setting." (Actually this also tied in with the "army of books" image I came up with earlier, via a buried evil tree, but 'tis another story for another time...) Now, I was thinking having the dreamworld be three-layered, with the supposed real world being a dream within a dream within a dream. So some people who "wake up" to the regular dreamworld (in death) then get it in their heads that THAT is the real world, but then some of those find out that the whole dreamworld as such, is just another level of another dream. The spiritual puzzle would be, what happens if you actually wake up, into the actually-awake state? Real reality, Heaven, X...?