On my fifth day in Hell, I found a praying mantis. It was during a break between classes, though that should not be taken to mean a break for rest. We were merely waiting for the arrival of our next instructor, and along with many of my classmates I had wandered into a courtyard of the university. The university is built entirely of black metal, some sections plated together like the hulls of immense battleships, covered in rivets and outsized nuts threaded onto bolts as thick around as trees…and other sections seemingly molded as a single, titanic piece of iron. All of it is streaked and caked in red rust like drying blood. Some of that might be, in fact, drying blood. On my third day here, it rained blood. In pounding torrents. When the rain was over, the grounds of the university steamed with scarlet pools and there were even squirming, flopping eels and jellyfish in those pools that I realized were actually organs and entrails. One of my classmates speculated that it was all waste ejected by a local torture complex.
