The Burning Sand

In the poem it is the third ring of the violent, and it carries three punishments under the same rain: the blasphemers on their backs, the usurers seated, the sodomites who may never stop walking. In the game it is the only place in the chapter where the danger has neither a face nor a tell: a hundred and forty flakes at once, coming down at two metres sixty a second, and nothing to aim at.

Slow on purpose, not by mistake: falling fast the rain reads as water and makes you hurry, and this place has to make you think instead. The one thing that puts the fire out is the stream that runs out of the wood, a narrow sunken channel that does not go where you need to go.

So the ring is a stopwatch. There is nothing here to strike down: there is only counting how long you can hold out in the open, crossing a stretch and dropping back into the channel, and that is the whole rule.