Chapter 30
The demon world
The chapter begins with Carl, who began to see something that no creature had ever seen before and that no creature could ever comprehend. He was finally seeing our world as it really is.
To the left was a living field of nature, but the trees weren't trees—they were entities pulsing with life, their trunks whispering, their leaves nothing but eyes staring at him. This was the realm of life, but life here wasn't a gift... it was a curse, nature aware of itself, realizing it was trapped, trying to escape its green body.
To the right was hell itself. Burned lands, fires that didn't illuminate but consumed, cracks in the ground oozing green lava, and black towers rising from nothingness, surrounded by shadows resembling embodied human nightmares. This wasn't the hell of myths... it was the hell from which all myths originated.
The Celestial Bodies... the great entities watching.
Karl realized he was standing on a surface with no end, a strange fabric, not earth, not water, but something in between. And in the midst of this expanse were small planets, celestial bodies orbiting themselves, but they weren't dead rocks.
Each planet was a prison, each planet a world, inside which entities unknown to humanity were trapped, ancient entities imprisoned behind cosmic glass shells, watching him from within, whispering to him in voices he couldn't understand but that echoed in his soul. Above it was written: "The Realm of Fear."
One of these worlds was a black ocean, its waves not water but drowned souls, human hands appearing momentarily, screaming, before being dragged back into the darkness. Karl couldn't comprehend the name of this world.
Another was a maze of bones, skulls stacked to form entire cities, each whispering in forgotten languages, calling out to any weak mind to listen. Above it was written: "The Realm of the Undead."
And another was a bottomless pit, shadows dancing around it, disappearing and reappearing, as if consuming light, consuming existence itself. Above it was written: "The Realm of the Void."
The End... Falling Again.
Karl couldn't comprehend all of this. His eyes began to tear up, but the tears weren't water—they were a black liquid, drops of the void itself. His mind tried to reject it, but his body no longer belonged to him.
Kazia looked at him, her eyes still cold, and whispered, "This is the true world... you humans only know its surface."
Then, before he could scream, Kazia pushed him with force.
He fell again.
But this time, it wasn't a fall into nothingness... it was a fall into absolute truth.
Karl stood in the embodied darkness, in the void that wasn't a void but a rotting memory of what the world once was. Kazia was beside him, her face half-visible, the other half obscured by something he couldn't comprehend. A faint smile faded on her lips as she whispered:
"Look, Karl... this is what you once were... this is your true past."
Before Karl, the scene began to form slowly, as if time was replaying itself within a nightmare trapped between life and death. He saw an ancient bridge, a bridge with no end, crossing a dead land. On it stood a hunchbacked man, dressed in heavy clothes as if taken from an ancient shroud. But the man wasn't human—he was a mix of flesh and shadow, of meat and void.
He was dragging a rusty cage behind him, inside which were small children, unnaturally quiet. They weren't crying, they weren't screaming. They just stared ahead with empty eyes. Their fingers were too thin, as if stretching through time itself, and their bodies weren't breathing but trembling in silence.
Along the path behind the bridge stood two men wearing tall, pointed hats. Their faces weren't clear, but they looked as if they were drawn in a style not belonging to humans, like an ancient painting eroded by time. They held strange staffs, striking the ground with a steady rhythm, and the sound of the strikes resembled the beats of a giant heart.
Before them was an army... but not of humans. They were giant human heads, growing from the ground like poisoned plants. They had no bodies, just heads with hollow eyes and open mouths, as if screaming but without sound. Some were smiling, others crying black tears, but all were watching, all were waiting for something.
In a corner of the scene, a wretched man ran, trying to escape. He was tied to a long rope, extending to the hand of a creature that wasn't there yet, as if the rope was connected to something in the void, something invisible but felt. The man ran with all his might, his feet sinking into mud that wasn't mud but rotting remains of unknown creatures.
With every movement, his body melted slightly, his limbs shrinking, his skin cracking like an old piece of paper burning slowly. He wasn't running from death but from something far worse, something Karl didn't understand but felt in the marrow of his bones.
At the far end of the scene, a massive face appeared, a face that transcended the size of reality itself. It had no body, just a giant skull hanging in the void, smiling an unnatural smile. Its eyes were empty but filled with life, with hatred, with hunger.
This wasn't an ordinary face... it was something looking directly at Karl, as if seeing him through time itself. That skull knew him, knew him well, perhaps had been waiting for him for a long time.
In the center of the scene, a wooden house appeared, abandoned but still inhabited by something. In front of it stood massive creatures, their bodies covered in rotting flesh, their eyes too wide. They weren't smiling, but they weren't angry either. They were watching, waiting, as if aware they had been here before humans and would remain after them.
The air was saturated with their murmurs, not words but sounds drowned in submission and waiting.
Suddenly, Karl rose, entering a living flashback, as if an invisible force lifted him up. He saw the city from another perspective. The houses all looked small, like cages and nothing more. Giant shadows swam above them, like ancient spirits looking at what remained of their former world.
One of these creatures was a mix of human features and dead insects, floating in the air as if melting in time itself.
7- The Final Rituals... The Eternal Farewell.
In front of another house, a crowd of strange creatures gathered, all similar... round faces, wide black eyes, mouths almost sewn shut as if stitched with needles. They were lined up, as if waiting for something, as if in a ritual Karl didn't want to understand.
At the last moment, Karl realized something terrifying:
These entities weren't strangers to humanity... they had lived among them. They were humans, and humans were nothing but distorted copies of them.
Kazia turned to him, her eyes still cold, and whispered:
"That's why they abandoned you... because you became too stupid for anyone to care about, let alone cosmic entities. This flashback you saw was before the Great Flood, when humans were intelligent and could be of use."
And suddenly, the entire scene collapsed.
Karl fell. But this time, he wasn't falling alone.
The eyes above were watching him... and they were smiling.
And he finally woke from the fall to find himself thrown into a terrifying and strange Amazonian forest, as if it had come from one of the legends of witch forests in ancient myths and stories.
The green fog began to fill the place and the screams and sounds of owls, crows and wolves filled the horizon and made Carl scream hysterically from the intensity of madness. The highest pyramid of madness is this.
End of chapter