When a soul enters the Vaults of the Damned, it takes a form as large as the scale of the cruelty it wreaked on Earth.
Neda's small, spiteful life left few scars on the world she left behind. When she entered through the gate, it was alongside a thousand other tiny scurrying wretches, who no sooner learned that they were dead than they were snapped up by the fistful, by warlords, queens and senators who stood waiting for them, on whose love handles Neda's consciousness might so easily have wobbled in impotent anguish for eternity.
But by cunning and luck she was not eaten right away, and she escaped to sparser regions of the Vaults, where she learned how to find souls even smaller than her own, and drag them into hidden places.
As she ate, she grew, slowly at first, but she soon found more and more ways to ensnare reliable meals without venturing near the perilous gate.
For a while she had an army, but it scattered, as all co-operative groups scatter in the Vaults. In any case, it has been centuries now since she needed any help to capture larger prey, for the Vaults belong to her alone.
A few have risen to challenge her in the years since she consumed the last of her rivals- great despots from Earth who came with the arrogance of conquerors, and wisps like her who grew in secret and studied her for weaknesses, but all so far have settled gently in her bowels.
She can feel their agony at every moment, theirs and millions of others', all as vivid as if it were her own, and all the sweeter because it is her own, forever, and they know how it makes her feel. Every time she runs her fingers through them, and feels the supple weight of them, soft and tremulous as a stilled sea, the horror of it awakens in them again, as fresh as the moment they first succumbed to her, and it sears her in its intensity, for surely it's a pleasure greater than the purest soul in paradise could ever know.

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