Draemons, Barons of Hell

          Tomorrow never comes. At least, that's what the mobster was thinking when he pulled the trigger. It was an excuse he had heard countless times before, and one which never failed to irk him to the point of immediately ending the conversation. Tonight had been a rerun of numerous encounters with borrowers in the past. You turn up on the agreed day, yet somehow no money is presented, and you shoot the bugger. What pathetic last words, eh? 'Tomorrow, I swear, just give me until tomorrow!'
          Tonight's unfortunate borrower hardly had time to register what happened before his soul was on the way to Hell. His jumbled thoughts crashed about inside his translucent purple head. Not that he really had a head anymore. Like all that had sinned before him, his soul took the form of an amorphous violet jelly as it tumbled down through the dimensionless abyss that separates our naive world from Hell. Suddenly he felt himself liquefying in the three-hundred degree inferno of Hell's turbulent red clouds. When he was still a minute or two from hitting the ground, the storm abated and the ground revealed itself far below. Curved mountain ranges erupted from the blackened earth, defining four circular enclosures, each many miles across. The circles formed a line, increasing in size from left to right as seen by the falling sinner. A violent wind abruptly gusted out of nowhere and directed his fall towards the second-smallest circle.
          With a resonant slap, he impacted the dirt near the circle's centre. The violet jelly that was now his body miraculously held together, and he managed to coordinate himself into a standing position. He had no eyes, yet there was a particular patch of his jelly where his point-of-view was located. Having shifted it to the top of the gelatinous pile, he looked around. The orange fog of Hell shielded the circle's mountainous circumference, but within his limited vision he saw other piles of purple gloop: some smeared along the ground, some hopping about, but most sat still, shell-shocked.
          They all felt the ground tremble and quake as something approached from the fog. Telepathic screams from other purple blobs terrified the ones clustered around our sinner. Never again would they have a peaceful mind; from now until the end of Hell itself, they would feel nothing but devastating terror. And, starting from now, agony.
          A set of jaws thirty feet long crashed shut around the group of hapless souls, spraying violet fluids everywhere. The jaws rose into the air to be level with their body's shoulders, nearly sixty feet up. This creature was one of the four draemons - dragonish demons - who were the Barons of Hell. Each had their own Plate populated by sinners' souls who had been killed in a particular way, denoted by the Barons' names. This draemon was Bitterblood the Green; his jurisdiction covers souls that are killed outside of war. Every night the four Barons drag their scaly, spiked, four-legged bodies from caves overlooking the Plates, to feast on their portion of the day's arrivals. Well, usually just their own.
          Bitterblood whipped around as he heard slurping coming from within the fog. Stomping towards the source of the noise, he soon discovered Halcyonic the Blue stealing some souls. Poor old Halcyonic; he was by far the slightest and scrawniest draemon, owning the smallest Plate as he did. His jurisdiction was souls that died peacefully of age.
          Not many of those ever made it to Hell.
          "Halcyonic, you abhorrent leech!" bellowed Bitterblood. "I don't care how hungry you claim to be, DO NOT steal from ME!" With that he exhaled a plume of green flame that licked at Halcyonic's feet. The lesser Baron yelped as he limped off, back to his own miserable Plate.
          "Hmph," Bitterblood snorted. Having cleared his Plate, albeit with some help, he stalked off back to his cave. As he arrived at the summit of the tallest mountain between his Plate and the next, he looked over to see Patrimori the Red sitting by the entrance to his own cave, gazing in the direction of the fourth and biggest Plate. Patrimori dealt with souls slain in the heat of battle, ranging from world wars to guerrilla insurgencies. Fights over souls who could fairly be allocated to either Bitterblood or Patrimori were common. "Hey Patrimori, what are you looking at?"
          "I haven't seen Viral all day," came the reply. "I can't see him now either. He never misses our nightly feasting, something must be up." Patrimori and Bitterblood were quite similar in size, due to humanity's unsuppressible urges to kill each other. But the final Baron of Hell, by far the biggest of all, was the almighty Viral the Black. His enormous Plate was nearly always teeming with souls, for his allotted sinners die of sickness and disease. Viral himself causes most diseases, by fusing exotic elements in his sprawling cave system.
          As if in response to Patrimori's assertion that something was up, a great explosion rocked the Plates. Emerging from a billowing bank of black smoke, Viral strode out of one of his caves, a ten-foot glass tube of foul orange fluid in a pouch hanging around his neck. He was well over a hundred feet tall at the shoulder, yet his grossly distended belly almost scraped the ground. So over-gorged was his middle, you could see individual scales stand out against his mottled gray skin. His titanic luminescent wings shone as he stretched them out to either side, his five red spikes glowed on the back of his neck. The ground beneath him cracked under the combined pressure of him jumping and the wall of air slammed down by his wings. Patrimori gingerly felt a scar beneath his eye which had been inflicted by one of Viral's twelve-foot claws countless eons ago. The eternal mental screams of devoured souls wailed as Viral flew towards Earth, ready to unleash a brand-new pandemic on the world.