Overview
In Dante's story, as in mine, the Seventh Circle is divided into three different subdivisions, or Rounds. Dante's First Round is for The Violent Against Their Neighbors, and the inmates there, those that killed during the course of their lives, are forced to dwell evermore in boiling blood.
Dante also has two portmanteau beasts featured in this Round, and I fully exploited their symbolism in The Infernova. The first is the Minotaur, the half-man and half bull abomination kept in Crete's labyrinth. (The second type of creature is the centaur, half-man and half-horse, a variant of which will show up in my Second Round of the Seventh Circle.)
In The Infernova, the Seventh Circle is the first of three that lie inside the Walls of Dis, demarcating Lower and Upper Hells. Upper Hell is the realm of Logical Fallacies and errors in thinking that anyone might make about most any subject, and hence are a more minor variety of "sin." It is in Lower Hell where the more pernicious are kept. The trait that they share is that they profited from fallacious or illogical thinking, or specifically preyed upon those that did.
The first example of such people are those that inhabit the First Round, and they are simply those that peddled bullshit in order to make a buck. Because they'd generally mix truth about their wares with extravagant claims about them, they are a kind of half-truth, half-bullshit generator. So it was fitting that their punishment would involve the Minotaur.
