Trial of Pain
There is no sound when the shadows that swallowed you tear apart.
The world you came from is gone and you find yourself standing within a chamber made of flesh and bone.
The walls pulse faintly, slick with translucent veins that crawl like rivers of light beneath thin skin. The air is metallic and sour. Each breath scrapes your throat raw, as if you are inhaling through someone else’s wound.
You move. The ground moves with you.
A slow tremor rises through your feet; not stone, not soil, but something alive, listening. It hums along your spine, matching the rhythm of your pulse until you cannot tell which heart is yours.
Then, the first ache blooms.
It doesn’t stab. It's much deeper.
A vibration coils through your bones and takes root in the marrow. Pain begins as if a thought whispers into shape. It swells, methodical, tidal, each wave stripping something away: warmth, form, memory, self.
The air tastes of salt and copper as your outline fades.
Your hands blur at the edges. The walls tighten, and shapes begin to swell beneath their surface; silhouettes, faceless yet familiar. They twitch as you do: every flinch mirrored, every gasp echoed.
They are not torturers though. They are witnesses.
Your suffering is their litany.
Each tremor of agony becomes a chant. Each heartbeat, an offering.
Piece by piece, you are hollowed. Peeled back to what remains when all thoughts, all masks, all hopes are gone.
Then, through the pain, something moves.
A figure tears itself free from the wall; not entirely human, but carved in the suggestion of one. It kneels before you. Though it has no eyes, you feel its gaze, cutting through you like light through fractured glass. It extends a trembling hand.
Lines of fire mark its palm: names and scars of those who came before.
Behind it, the chamber groans and suddenly opens, revealing a narrow path of cool, dim air; an escape.
Pain shudders through you again, sharper now. Your body convulses. Your name trembles on your tongue, the last fragment that still belongs to you.
You lunge toward the wound in the wall.
Your feet drag against the pulsing floor as if the chamber mourns your departure. A hum of voices grows frantic, almost pleading. Then it stops.Silence.
You emerge into a corridor that isn’t a corridor at all. An endless throat of shifting flesh opens before you, one that tightens as you move. The light fades the farther you go, replaced by a rhythm that devours your pulse. Soon you realize: you’re not walking out, you’re being swallowed.
Your form begins to stretch thin; your voice becomes a vibration, your thoughts smear into echoes. You feel a thousand others brushing against you - murmuring fragments of choices that could have been your own.
At last, the path opens into a vast hollow where everything that ever tried to escape now gathers: silhouettes of sound and memory, drifting like ash in reverse. You are among them. You are one of them.
You escaped the chamber, but not its body.
You have become part of its pulse.
The world forgets you.
And your journey ends here.
Every dimention narrows to that single point where flesh meets flesh. The pain digs beneath the surface, searching for your name. And finds it. You feel each letter carved into you, as though the world insists on remembering you.
The chamber of flesh, the watching silhouettes, the trembling ground, all fade away. Finally, the light recedes and you find the mark transfered on your palm. Among the countless traces of those who came before, your name now blends quietly, like a heartbeat shared across time.
The figure lowers its head, its form dimming until it’s no more than a shadow and still, your mark burns faintly, alive, refusing to fade.
You are no longer lost.
And somewhere beyond the dark, a new road opens for you.
All written content is original, drawn from myth, memory, and madness.
All images are generated via Midjourney using custom prompts by the author, unless otherwise stated.
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