The Gallery of Souls

Here was a massive chamber, wide and long and tall. The ceiling was lined with thick buttresses of stone from which hung chains of varying lengths, thousands of them. At the end of each was a long, thin, metal, barded hook, the Unklar's Love they were called. For they held the damned on high for all to see. Devils of Aufstrag gathered those so condemned and hoisted them on high and impaled them on the hooks, through their torsos, arms, legs, necks, whatever extremity was marked in the Torture Gardens above. There they hung, shouting cries of pain and agony.

Those were the fortunate, those condemned to the hook. Others were condemned to the stake. The floor of the Yard was like a forest of tall post, shaped to dull nubs on their upright ends. Metal rings were set in the floor around each. Those sent to the stake were lifted by a pack of screeching devils and set upon upright, tied to the rings and slowly, over many long days, pulled down and impaled.

The Gallery was a mad house of insanity, of death and dying, of people befouled in all ways imaginable. Here men hung on hooks from on high or sat stretched over stakes, pulled until their lives were pushed out of them. At any one time thousands suffered thus.

This was the Gallery of Souls.

~The Gallery of Souls, Aufstrag

©Chenault and Gray Publshing, 2015