"O weary souls!" Dante cried out. "Come speak to us, if none deny it!"

"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.

"A Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it," she whispered. "That day, we read no further."

The air in the Second Circle of the Inferno didn’t just move; it shrieked. If the First Circle had been a sigh of eternal longing, the Second was a physical assault—a relentless, buffeting gale known as the .

Like two doves returning to their nest, the pair descended from the gale. They were and Paolo Malatesta . Francesca spoke, her voice weeping even as she found words. She told of a book—the story of Lancelot—that they had read together one afternoon.

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.

The weight of their tragedy, the realization that their eternal togetherness was actually their eternal punishment, became too much for Dante. The wind, the weeping, and the sheer pity for their lost souls crushed his spirit. His knees buckled, the world turned to ink, and he fell to the rocky floor like a dead body falls.