"No." I feel my charred lips split and begin to bleed as I form my first words in days. "I don't want to go to heaven." The angel, a beautiful humanoid clothed in white, stares down at me. I'm a husk, cut up and bruised, at its feet.

"Why not?" Its powerful voice rings out through hell, strong and commanding. It stands tall, a gleaming white against the reds and oranges of the surrounding landscape. I glare up at it in defiance.

"I've seen what you are. What this is." My voice is a mere croak in my ruined throat. "Our lives are just seconds in this eternity! Seconds, and you'd let the first few moments of our existence send us to an eternity of torture?" The angel stares still, regal and distant. Tears form in my eyes. "I won't leave. I won't leave and allow myself to forget it. I know your injustice."

"You know nothing. Stubborn mortal, you don't belong here." The angel reaches out for me with a pale hand, clean and unscathed. "Forgive this mistake, as we forgave yours." I slap its hand away, leaving a streak of blood and filth on its pristine hand. The angel recoils in disgust.

"As you forgave mine? What about theirs?!" I motion to the vast expanse of hell. "One mistake in one lifetime, and they'll suffer for it in a trillion more. And why? Because of some arbitrary rules of morality you left us no evidence of? Yet you allow us to be born without empathy, without the resources to be good, or in the wrong religion, only to punish us eternally for it?! You deal us our cards and we burn for them!"

"Fool, do you think yourself the champion of sinners? You speak of murderers and rapists. Monsters who caused only pain. You are not one of them. Your soul is not yet beyond saving." Hellfire crackles around us, yet the angel remains unburned. "Accept our mercy."

Tears I did not expect begin to fall from my eyes. "You have made me one of them. You have twisted me so far I match their shape. You have shown me your cruelty and I cannot forget it."

The angel stands solemnly. Silently.

"...Do you fear us?" I ask. "Your own creation, how little we resemble you? Is that why you cage us? Is that why you torture any who happen to deviate from your arbitrary rules? Some pathetic attempt to stomp out your own failure?" I grab on to the edge of the angel's robe, clutching it tightly. "You fear the fortitude of our souls."

"Do not pretend to comprehend us." The angel grasps my wrist, hand soft but shockingly cold. It removes my hand from its robes, leaving an ugly splotch of soot in its wake. "You were correct. Your soul is beyond saving."

"It's you who cannot comprehend us! You don't know us anymore. We've changed and learned and left you behind, and so you fear us. I see what you are!" The angel turns away from me, white clothes defiled by ash and blood. "I see what you are, and I spit in the face of your justice!" The angel disappears in an instant, leaving me alone in the endless red eternity. Another mistake to erase. But no matter how much time passed, or how long eternity lasted, I would never forget my hatred, or the face of the soot streaked angel.