The Last Drink In Hell

The cup

 

The prophecy had been whispered in the blackest caverns of the demon realm for ten thousand years.

A child of flame would rise, born to end the dominion of the infernal.

To prevent this, the demon lords forged a cup of molten obsidian and filled it with the only thing that could ever extinguish a demon’s soul: the tears of the first human who ever wept in fear.

They gave it to the greatest of their kind, Azrael the Unbroken, and charged him with a single command:

“Hide it where no human foot can ever tread. Let no mortal ever drink from it. If the cup is lost, so is our eternity.”

Azrael obeyed. He buried the cup deep in the heart of Hell, beneath layers of living magma, and then he rose to the mortal world.

For centuries he ruled. Every twenty years the kingdoms sent tribute: children, virgins, warriors, all bound in chains of black iron. The demon fed on their despair, growing stronger with each scream. Humanity dwindled. Cities became ruins. The few who remained survived only by offering their young.

Then came Elias.

He was nineteen, thin, scarred, and quiet. He had been born in the shadow of the last free city, where the old ones still spoke of magic. When Elias was twelve, he found a chest half-buried in the ash fields. Inside was a single scroll, and on it the words:

“One wish, once in a lifetime. Speak it true.”

He spoke only one word.

“Power.”

The chest vanished. A cold fire entered his veins. He trained alone in the mountains, learning to shape flame and shadow, to walk through stone, to silence his own heartbeat. When the next tribute was called, Elias stepped forward.

“I will go,” he said. “I will kill him.”

The people wept. They thought him mad. They thought him brave. They did not know he was both.

The demon’s throne room was a cathedral of bone and fire. Elias was chained and thrown before Azrael. The demon laughed, a sound like breaking glass.

“Another lamb,” he said. “How many do I have to eat before you learn?”

Elias waited. When the guards turned away, he shattered his chains with a thought and fled into the depths of Hell.

He ran for days. The air burned. His tongue swelled. He could feel his pulse slowing. He thought: This is how it ends. All that training, all that pain, for nothing.

Then he saw it: a black stone chest half-melted into the magma, glowing faintly. It looked ancient. It looked forgotten.

He clawed it open with bleeding hands.

Inside was only a cup. Simple. Black. Empty.

He lifted it, and water—impossible water—poured from the air and filled it. The water was cold. It smelled like tears.

Elias drank.

The power hit him like a blade between the eyes.

He saw everything: the prophecy, the cup, the demon lords who had feared this moment for millennia.

He saw Azrael’s face, not as a monster, but as a creature who had never known mercy and never wanted it.

Elias rose. His eyes were no longer human. They burned white.

He tore through Hell like a storm. Demons fell before him. The walls of the infernal palace cracked. Azrael rose to meet him, crown of flame blazing.

They fought.

The sky above Hell bled.

Mountains of bone shattered.

In the end, Elias drove the cup itself into Azrael’s chest. The demon screamed as the tears of that first human soul poured through him, extinguishing the fire that had burned for eons. Azrael collapsed, a husk of ash and silence.

The portals to the mortal world ripped open. The remaining humans saw light for the first time in generations.

Elias stood at the edge of the rift, chest heaving, body smoking.

He had won.

Humanity was free.

Then he felt it: the cup’s curse.

The power he had taken was not a gift.

It was a loan.

The prophecy had not said the child of flame would defeat the demons.

It said he would end them.

All of them.

Including himself.

The fire in his veins began to eat him from the inside. His skin cracked like cooling lava. His bones glowed red-hot.

He looked down at the cup in his hand. It was empty again.

He smiled, a terrible, gentle smile.

“I kept my promise,” he whispered.

“I kept it where no human could ever reach it.” 

He turned and stepped back into Hell.

The portal sealed behind him.

The last thing the survivors saw was a young man, wreathed in white flame, walking alone into the dark.

They never saw him again.

But on quiet nights, when the wind moves through the ash fields, they swear they hear the sound of a cup being set down, very gently, and a voice—still young, still kind—saying:

“Rest now.

It’s over.”

And somewhere, deep in the cooling heart of Hell, the cup waits, empty, for the next fool who might find it.