The Storm

In the poem it is the circle of the lustful, where «la bufera infernal, che mai non resta, / mena li spirti con la sua rapina» (Inf. V 31-32); in the game it is a ledge eight metres eighty wide with rock on one side and nothing on the other, and the wind pushes you toward the edge, puts out the lamp and carries off the trace a living body leaves.

There are two winds and they cancel along a single line, the seam: there the ash stops flying and falls straight down, and it shifts along the ring without stopping, so the road is never twice in the same place. Opposite, at exactly half a turn, the two collide and have nowhere to go but up.

The edge is a real drop and falling costs. Nothing here asks for a weapon: you walk, you look, you take cover. The two who go together are Paolo and Francesca, the only pair in the whole of Hell who are not alone, and that is their punishment and not their consolation. The heap of ash under the wall, framed, says it is what the wind has ground down over a thousand years and dropped in the one place where it loses its grip, and that it tells you where the calm is.