Circle Nine: Round One and Round Two

Virgil and I stood together in the dark pit at the bottom of the well. We were even father down that the giant's feet could touch. From the darkness itself, I heard someone warn me not to step on any heads. I turned from my view of the wall and looked at my new surroundings. A lake, frozen in ice was under my feet and stretched farther than my vision allowed me to see. I felt that the lake had never known a liquid state. The ice was so thick that, for once, I wasn't fearful of falling. 

The dead are cemented into place in this ice. I briefly considered the process by which they were inserted in. Each sinner perfectly exemplified one plagued with cold. Tears clogged their eyes as they froze. So numerous were the sinners here that I noticed two whose hair grew together into a nest. Different parts of sinners faces were blackened with frost bite. One man had even lost his ear to the cold. 

I will never feel the chill of snow again without the images of this place coming to mind. I was distracted my the cold as we moved toward the center and mistakenly kicked one of the sinners below my feet. He cursed me so that I was compelled to yank at his hair. In this same section of the ice, I saw two souls together in a single hole. One of them seemed to be a helmet for the other. The head on top clasped his jaw onto the skull and neck of his meal. His gnawing wasn't out of hunger though, it was out of spite. 

I wanted to know their story.