The ascent up the sixth staircase was an act without thought. My arms, marked by the red lines of my own punishment, felt alien. My legs moved by pure muscle memory. My mind, the plundered and burned house of the previous level, was in a silence that was not peace, but devastation. It was the silence of a battlefield after even the crows have gone. Fragments of images—a porcelain smile, a pregnancy test, a twisted bicycle frame—floated in the void like debris in space, stripped of their emotional weight, mere corrupted data on a damaged hard drive.
I knew I was approaching another threshold. Another world built from another of my failures. I no longer wondered what it would be. Curiosity is a function of hope, and hope had been the last casualty in the garden of unspoken futures.
I crossed the archway and hell greeted me with a fiery embrace.
The silent, cold air was replaced by a deafening roar and a wave of heat so intense it made me instinctively recoil. The smell of sulfur, burning plastic, and something terribly organic, like charred flesh, invaded me, making me cough and gag.
I was in the middle of a street. A street that could have been in Colonia Roma, Mexico City, or a district in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The buildings were an impossible mix of both architectural styles, but that wasn't the strangest part. They were on fire. An urban inferno stretched in all directions. Orange and yellow flames licked at the windows of skyscrapers, which bent and melted like candles. Cascades of molten glass poured onto the street. The sky was not a sky; it was a ceiling of thick, black smoke, illuminated from below by the apocalyptic glow of the blaze. Hot ash rained constantly, stinging my eyes, coating my skin and my clothes with a layer of gray grime.
This was no subtle purgatory. It was no garden of metaphors or landfill of symbolism. This was hell, in its most classic and terrifying form. The chaos, noise, and pain were overwhelming. And in the midst of that sensory overload, the last, thin thread holding my mind together finally snapped.
I fell to my knees on the hot asphalt, which burned through the fabric of my pants. The pain was real, sharp. And for some reason, it made me feel a flicker of an emotion I thought dead: a primitive desperation. The desperation of a trapped creature.
I looked up at the smoke-filled sky, a ceiling that suffocated any possibility of escape. And for the first time since I arrived in this place, I prayed.
"God," my voice was a gasp choked by ash. "God, if you're there... please. Please, get me out of here."
The words felt foreign, a script learned from a previous life. But the plea was genuine. It was the last resort of a soul utterly stripped bare.
"I'm sorry. For everything. For Yuki, for my parents, for Valeria... for the... for the baby... I'm sorry. I admit everything. I've learned the lesson. Isn't it enough? Please, just make it stop!"
My only answer was the roar of the flames and the cracking of a nearby building as it collapsed, sending a shower of sparks and debris onto the street.
The silence of an absent god was more deafening than hell itself.
Panic seized me, an animalistic panic. "Jesus Christ!" I shrieked, tears of grime and pain streaming down my face. "Son of God, save me! Have mercy! I'll do anything! I'll convert, I'll go to church every Sunday, I'll be a good man! I swear on my life! Just save me!"
The fire grew, the flames from an overturned car rose higher.
"Buddha! Allah! Amaterasu! Quetzalcoatl! VISHNU!" I began shouting names, pulling them from the depths of my history classes and my grandparents' stories. "ANYONE! IS ANYONE OUT THERE!? DOES ANY GOD HEAR THIS!?"
My scream was swallowed by the roar of the fire. And in that moment of absolute abandonment, when the last door of hope closed and dissolved in the heat, something inside me laughed. It wasn't my laugh. It was a cold, ancient laugh, the laugh of madness itself.
Nobody. There's nobody, fool. You've always been alone.
I stood up, trembling, the silent laughter echoing in my skull. The world began to warp. The flames were no longer just flames. They began to take forms. I saw faces in the fire, faces contorted in agony that formed and disappeared. And from the black smoke, figures began to coalesce, unstable silhouettes made of ash and embers. They glided towards me, and whispered.
"You told her you loved her," hissed a figure vaguely shaped like Valeria. "You promised you'd try harder," murmured another in my mother's voice. "You made them believe you were a tortured soul," whispered a third, in my own voice.
They were my lies. My self-deceptions. Every excuse, every broken promise, every half-truth I had used as a shield, had now become a smoke demon to torment me.
"No..." I moaned, backing away.
The writing on the canvas of my mind began to corrupt. The words lost their form.
"It's not TRUE. I̷ ̸t̴r̴i̷e̴d̴. I̵ ̷a̷l̷w̷a̷y̷s̵ ̷t̷r̴i̴e̷d̴. The p̸a̴i̷n̴... my p̴a̴i̷n̴ ̸w̴a̸s̴ ̸r̷e̴a̸l̷."
A burning beam fell in front of me. I dodged it, my heart a runaway drum. The city itself seemed to be attacking me. And I realized. The buildings... they weren't made of brick and concrete. They were made of papier-mâché, of layers and layers of documents. I saw the facade of a building crumble, revealing it was made of my old school reports, my university rejection letters, my unanswered résumés. All burning. The building of my failures.
Across the street, I saw a burning theater. The marquee read "I'll do it tomorrow." The box office was made of my broken promises.
This wasn't just hell. It was my hell. A city built with my lies, and the fire was the truth finally consuming them.
My mind fractured further. Language ceased to make sense. It was a hindrance to the pure experience of chaos.
The ground trembles. The lies tremble. 🔥🔥🔥. The air is ash and tastes like my own burned words. Smoke demons surround me, their eyes are b̴r̴a̵s̵a̵s̴. They sing me the song of my life. A song of falsehood. I am a king 👑 on a throne of ashes. A false king in a kingdom of LIES.
I ran. I ran aimlessly through the burning streets. Madness was a warm blanket now. It protected me from the horror. If nothing was real, then the pain couldn't be either. Ha. HAHahaHAHAha.
I reached a circular plaza in the center of the city. Unlike the rest of the city, the plaza was untouched. The ground was of polished black marble, strangely cold to the touch. There was no fire here. No smoke demons. Just an expectant silence in the eye of the fiery hurricane.
And in the exact center of the plaza, there was a single object: a full-length mirror, with a simple, unadorned silver frame.
I approached, drawn by its stillness. My reflection walked towards me. It was covered in ash and dried blood. My eyes were wide, pupils dilated by terror and madness. But the figure in the mirror... was different.
It was me. The Kenji from the subway. The one who fell asleep. His clothes were clean. His face was that of a bored, apathetic young man, not a tortured madman. His gaze was cynical, but sane.
He looked at me from the other side of the glass. And spoke. His voice was not a smoke whisper. It was my own voice, clear and calm, resonating in the plaza's silence.
"Poor you," the reflection said, with a hint of mockery. "Subjected to all these trials. Forced to feel all this pain. You're a victim, aren't you?"
"Shut up," I whispered.
"That's always been your favorite story," the reflection continued, ignoring me. "The misunderstood boy. The sensitive soul in a cruel world. The tortured artist with no art to create. You clung to your sadness like a shipwreck survivor to a piece of driftwood. It gave you an identity. It gave you an excuse."
"MY PAIN WAS REAL!" I shrieked, and the sound seemed weak in the vast plaza.
The reflection smiled, and it was the cruelest smile I had seen in all the hells.
"Was it?" it asked softly. "Answer me honestly. For once in your life. Were you ever happy? Or did you just convince yourself you were miserable because it gave purpose to your emptiness? Was it pain... or was it just laziness?"
The heresy.
The ultimate lie. The lie I told myself that upheld all the others. That my unhappiness was an imposed condition, a noble affliction. And no, the truth was far simpler, and far dirtier. I had chosen it. I had cultivated my misery because happiness required effort. Joy required gratitude. Love required sacrifice. And I was too lazy for all of that. It was easier to be the sad boy.
The truth hit me with the force of a sun exploding in my skull.
The last piece of my mind shattered.
NO. N∅. N̷O̷N̷O̷N̴O̴N̵O̷.
Words are stuck. My throat is ̸a̸s̴h̷. The mirror LIES. The FIRE lies. EVERYTHING LIES.
I AM r̸e̷a̶l̵.
M̴y̴ ̴p̷a̶i̶n̴ ̵i̸s̵ ̴r̸e̸a̴l̸.̴
M̶y̵ ̸p̷a̶i̶n̸ ̵i̸s̴ ̴M̵I̸N̸E̸.
With a scream that was not human, a sound torn from the depths of madness, I lunged my fist at the mirror. The glass shattered, exploding into a thousand fragments that flew across the silent plaza, each reflecting my broken face and the hell that burned around me. The world dissolved into a star of white pain in my hand and the darkness that finally came to claim me.