Lucifer is the emperor of the dolorous kingdom, held in the ice of Cocytus, at the center of the Earth, in Canto XXXIV. He is described as a creature with three faces, six eyes that weep, and two great featherless, bat-like wings under each face, whose beating produces the wind that freezes the lake in which he is held. In each mouth he tears a sinner: Judas in the middle, and Brutus and Cassius at the sides.
Dante does not describe what he felt: he says he neither died nor remained alive, and bids the reader imagine it, if he has a flower of wit. He reasons from the ugliness: if he was as beautiful as he is now ugly, and raised his brows against his Creator, all grief must proceed from him.
The exit passes through his body. Virgil, panting like a weary man, clings to Lucifer's hair and descends from hair to hair; at the point where the thigh turns, the center of the Earth, he turns his head to where his legs had been and begins to climb. Dante believes they are going back into Hell, but they are already under the opposite hemisphere, where it is morning when it is evening there. They follow a hidden path, without rest, and come out through a round hole.
The last verse of the cantica, which names no one, says that from there they went out to see the stars again. It is the word that also closes the other two canticas.