Satan sits enthroned in Pandemonium, outshining the wealth of Ormus and Ind, and opens council by asking whether the fallen host should resume open war or covert guile. He frames his elevation as merit earned in defeat, insists Hell's shared misery prevents Heaven's old faction fights, and invites speech. Moloch rises first, fiercest by despair, and demands immediate assault on Heaven's towers: turn torture into horrid arms, meet God's thunder with infernal black fire, and accept that nothing here can hurt them worse than passive vassalage under an inexorable scourge. He argues ascent is natural to angels while descent is adverse, yet fears only provoking worse ruin; still he would rather disturb Heaven with perpetual inroads than accept vassalage without hope of end, and his frown denounces desperate revenge to less than gods.
Belial answers with honeyed reason, praising war in theory while proving assault is suicide against God's all-seeing power. He catalogs worse punishments than counsel: sevenfold flame, impendent horrors, rocks transfixed, chains under boiling ocean where groans would be unrespited and unreprieved. Better endure, he argues, until fire grows soft and darkness light; perhaps God will not mind offenders so far removed if they stop procuring more woe. Mammon wins loud applause by rejecting forced hallelujahs in Heaven and urging a free empire in Hell: mine gold, build magnificence from pain, prefer hard liberty to servile pomp, and make torment an element to be mastered by industry rather than assaulted by folly.
Beelzebub then reveals Hell is God's dungeon, not refuge, and proposes an easier enterprise: rumor of a new race called Man, favored yet weaker, living on Heaven's exposed border. Destroy them by Hell-fire, possess them, or seduce them so God destroys his own work and human sons curse their frail origin faded so soon. Milton notes the counsel was first devised by Satan and only partly proposed by Beelzebub, yet the bold design pleases every infernal state; the council votes assent with sparkling eyes. When no champion will take the voyage, Satan names the ninefold gates, the void of unessential Night, and the hard way out of Hell; then volunteers before rivals can claim cheap repute, forbids partners, and rises while peers extol him equal to Heaven's Highest for despising personal safety.
Trumpets spread the decision through Hell's four winds; cherubim explain the result while the hollow Abyss returns deafening acclaim. The host disbands to pass empty hours until their chief returns. Some race like Olympian athletes or form cloud armies; others rend hills in Typhoean rage until Hell scarce holds the uproar. Milder spirits sing their fall and complain fate enthralled free virtue to force or chance. On a retired hill, eloquent devils debate Providence, foreknowledge, free will, and fixed fate until lost in wandering mazes Milton calls vain wisdom, though the sorcery charms pain awhile. Squadrons explore Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegeton, Lethe, and the frozen extremes where damned souls alternate fire and ice yet cannot drink oblivion guarded by Medusa. Milton interrupts: devils hold firm concord while men under grace levy cruel wars on one another, wasting the earth each other to destroy.
Satan alone puts on wings toward Hell's thrice-triple gates and meets Sin, fair to the waist then serpent-tailed, with hell-hounds kenneled in her womb, and Death shapeless as night with a kingly crown. They nearly duel until Sin cries out against parricide and tells how she sprang from Satan's head during the heavenly conspiracy, bore Death in rape, and received the key God commanded her to keep. Satan smooth-talks daughter and son, promising empire and endless prey abroad in the purlieus of Heaven. Death grins; Sin unlocks adamant doors no Stygian power could move, and the burning gulf opens onto Chaos: eldest Night, warring Hot and Cold and Moist and Dry, Chance umpiring atoms Milton calls dark materials from which more worlds might form.
Satan spreads sail-broad vans into the surging smoke, plummets ten thousand fathoms through vacuity, recovers on fire-charged cloud, and struggles half flying through bog and strait like a gryphon chasing stolen gold until Chaos's throne appears with Rumour, Tumult, and Discord. He bargains with the anarch: restore old Night's sway if directed toward the new world hanging from Heaven's golden chain encroaching on Chaos's frontier. Chaos points him upward through fighting elements, harder than Argo's pass or Ulysses between whirlpools; Milton foreshadows that Sin and Death will later pave a bridge for easier passage. Light glimmers at Nature's verge; Chaos recedes; Satan eases on calmer waves and beholds opal-walled Heaven, once his native seat, and beside the moon a pendant Earth small as a star. Book II ends with him hurling toward that world in a cursed hour, freighted with revenge the council believed it had freely chosen.
