After Laurelai left the oasis, she was twice as careful. She suspected everything in hell was out to get her. Whether that meant molesting her or worse, she couldn't say. For two days, that viewpoint served her well, and she ran into no new trouble. Then she heard the distant baying hounds and diverted her course further from the mountains to avoid them. She didn't know if they were just one more denizen of the depths to avoid or if they were looking specifically for her. That didn't matter, though. She didn't understand how hellhounds could track her scent from the air anyway, but she'd already accepted that things didn't necessarily have to make sense in the way she was used to down here.
There were no directions here that mattered here. There was no east or west. Just the punishing sun above and the distant mountains growing ever larger. Now they grew slower because she was taking the long way to get there by diverting over rocky badlands to shake any would-be pursuers. It was full of steep escarpments and jagged boulder fields that eventually rose up to become the foothills of the mountains that she would have to climb to escape this layer of hell. That destination was days or weeks away, though, depending on how much hell was playing tricks with perspective. For now, it was enough that anyone pursuing her on the ground would have to take a circuitous and complex route to follow her.
That day she took refuge in a rocky crag near the peak of a small granite outcropping. It wasn't much, but nothing without wings would be able to harass her up so high, and it would keep the sun out of her eyes while she slept for a few hours. Her nap passed without incident, though with the erotic nightmares she'd had to endure, it wasn't particularly restful either. She woke with her hand on her pussy, but resisted the urge to do more. She tried to tell herself that this was just a product of hell and that as she escaped the pit to somewhere less tainted, it would improve, but deep down, she feared it was the crest, and she would never really be free of these terrible ideas and urges ever again.
She took to the skies once more, even though she appeared to be no closer to the mountain that was her goal. Even though it was embarrassing to fly naked like this, it was only when she was in the sky that she felt almost clean and truly free. The demons had taken so much from her, but they hadn't taken that.
Hell was a resourceful place, though, and after a few hours, Laurelai saw something that just might: a hazy dark band on the horizon that meant only one thing: A dust storm.
She began to look for shelter, but in this part of the desert, there was little besides rocky hills and the occasional canyon. A canyon might do in a pinch, of course, but she didn't fancy the consequences of being buried alive if the storm got really intense. Instead, she took to the sky, slowly climbing higher and higher. If she couldn't hide from the storm, then she would just go over it.
That proved unwise. The higher she flew, the worse the turbulence got. This storm might be the most visible at ground level, but air currents in hell were as vicious as any she'd faced before, and the idea of fighting them for hour after hour would be exhausting if it was even possible.
Reluctantly the angel began to lean towards the idea of turning around to stay ahead of the storm. Even if that was the worst idea in the long run, it might be the only way to survive in the short run; the idea of having her skin flensed from her bones by the wind and sand was even worse than the idea of being recaptured by the demon Lord, though.
She was in the midst of turning around when she saw it. What she'd taken for just another rock in a boulder field had what was very clearly a stone door on it now that she was looking at it from the other side. That one little detail made the whole area she was flying over change in her mind. It wasn't an aimless collection of stones... it was the ruins of a city that had been almost completely buried.
It was a slender thread to hang her life on, but it was all she had, so she took the risk and began diving down the hundreds of feet to the desert below. It took less than two minutes to reach the doorway, but by the time she arrived, that sand had almost reached her, and the world had plunged into a twilight gloom. Anything could be hiding in the darkness within the ruins. She knew that. It didn't matter, though. Inside there could be anything, but out here, there was certain death, so she flew in heedlessly, dropping into a defensive crouch when she landed to try to be ready for whatever came next.
No blow landed, though, and no enemy revealed themselves, so Laurelai slowly stood up and slowly looked around as her eyes adjusted. The building was a large and sturdy edifice made of ageless stones, with doorways going further back into the darkness. Once there had been frescos on the wall, but they'd been sandblasted into non-existence, and whatever clues about its purpose that might have once been visible on the floor were buried under feet of sand. Now it was only a tomb, and a temporary place of refuge.
Laurelai stayed in that main room until the winds picked up so much that she was forced to retreat further into the darkness to avoid the spray of sand. No matter how far she retreated, she couldn't escape the roar of the storm outside, though. In the end, she was forced to rely on the light of her crest to guide her, and even though it was humiliating, she was grateful for it. Once, she'd had a halo and had never known darkness. She could summon the lights of the heavens with a thought. Now though, all she could do was grope clumsily down the corridor while the tiniest glimmer of lust lit her way.
It was awful, but it was still better than dying.
