My idea is that hell is the place of redemption, where you go to have to earn forgiveness, and I mean actually do the hard work of forgiveness.

Basically rehabilitation through labor for eternity until every person you’ve ever wronged finally lets go of what you’ve done to hurt them.

Those folks are in what I think of as purgatory, the place of unburdening, which is a lot nicer than what Danté pictures IMO, basically just paradise as you’d imagine it and you can just stay there forever holding whoever’s wronged you by never forgiving them, but until you let go of that last person who’s hurt you the most, you’ll never get past the veil into heaven, the place of bliss.

Basically, whatever this life is meant to shape us for, the bliss is that greater purpose, think of it as heaven, as nirvana, as oneness with the karmic essence of everything, whatever state of final peace for the most virtuous your faith imagines, it’s something of both all of those things and none of them, because it’s the true incomprehensible truth of the cosmos that cynics like Lovecraft think ought to drive people to madness upon witnessing.

The King in Yellow is said to embody nothingness and humanity’s innate fear of emptiness, but honestly, I think that emptiness is the essence of where we go once we’ve made ourselves ready to move on from what this life teaches us. The Emptiness is the final state as far as can be conceived from this side of the wall between it and us, The King in Yellow is scary to us because we aren’t yet ready in this life to understand what it is to enter that state of being. Maybe a figure of his sort is the gate guardian who judges if a soul is ready to move on or not lol.