"O weary souls!" Dante cried out. "Come speak to us, if none deny it!"
Dante looked up into the blackness. He saw them—the "carnal sinners" who had let their reason be swept away by desire. They were tossed like autumn leaves in a storm, never resting, never touching the ground.
"A Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it," she whispered. "That day, we read no further."
She described how they were murdered by her husband—Paolo’s brother—before they could repent. As she spoke, Paolo did nothing but sob, his grief a silent echo to her tale.
Virgil stepped forward, his voice a calm anchor in the chaos. "Hinder not his fated going. It is so willed where power is what it wills; ask no more."
This was , the dread judge of the underworld. He didn't look like a king; he looked like a nightmare. With a tail that coiled around his massive torso like a whip of scales, he snarled at the approaching poets.
"Keep your head down," Dante shouted over the roar, though the words were instantly snatched from his lips. Virgil, composed even in the face of the tempest, merely pointed toward a massive, jagged throne of rock where a figure loomed, colossal and grotesque.
Minos growled, a sound like grinding stones, and turned back to a trembling soul before him. As the sinner confessed their life of lust, Minos ’s tail lashed out, encircling his body exactly . With a silent, horrific velocity, the soul was flung into the dark air, sucked into the vortex to join the millions already swirling there.