The cold fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. In an instant, the silent, white flames consuming my hospital bed simply ceased to exist, leaving behind a scorched, blackened mattress and the smell of ozone that I now recognized as the breath of Purgatory. The fire alarm continued to blare, a shrill, piercing beep that seemed sacrilegious in the supernatural stillness that remained.
The room door burst open and two nurses entered, stopping dead in their tracks at the sight. Their faces went from professional panic to utter disbelief. They saw the burned bed, the strange smell, and me, sitting calmly amidst the remnants, unharmed.
It was Mateo who took control. He moved with a calm that belied the madness of the situation. He stepped between the nurses and me, holding up a hand. "False alarm," he said, his voice a balm of authority. "A short circuit in the bed motor. It's contained. Please, deactivate the alarm. We'll take care of this."
Dr. Serrano, who had observed everything with the pale face of a scientist who had just seen a ghost, seemed to awaken from her trance. She backed Mateo's story, adding technical jargon about lithium batteries and electrical failures that sounded convincing enough to calm the bewildered nurses.
As they hurried to comply, the doctor closed my room door and turned to Mateo. The doubt in her eyes had been replaced by a fear tinged with awe. "You... you knew," she whispered. "You knew something like this could happen."
"I knew his connection was strong," Mateo corrected. "The physical manifestation... that's new. And very alarming. And also, incredibly informative."
He led us all out of the contaminated room, back to the safety of his office, locking the door as if he could keep the rest of the world safe from the impossible truth that had erupted on my hospital bed.
We sat in the same tense silence as before, but everything had changed. There were no more skeptics in the room. Everyone had seen the breach. They had felt the cold heat of the fire from the other side. My family no longer looked at me as a sick person, but as a kind of walking portal, a doorway to a terrible place that, for some reason, now had a connection to our world.
Mateo, for his part, did not seem scared. He seemed... invigorated. The manifestation of the fire had not been a crisis for him; it had been a confirmation. The definitive proof of his forty years of research. He paced back and forth in the small office, his energy that of an explorer who has just found land after a century at sea.
"The breach is real," he murmured to himself. "The connection is bidirectional. The confession of a truth deep enough acts as a key..."
He stopped and turned to look at me. His blue eyes, usually tired, now gleamed with an almost feverish excitement. "Kenji. I have to ask you one last question. The most important one of all. It's a question I didn't dare ask the other returned ones, because they were too broken, too scared. But you... you are different."
He came closer, his gaze intense. "We've talked about the places, the trials, the lessons. We've mapped your pain. But I want you to think beyond that. I want you to think about the... consciousness of the place. In your entire journey, from the first staircase to the last door, the whispers of the shadows, the screams of the storm, the silence of the feast... were they just the levels speaking to you in their own symbolic language? Or..."
He paused, and the question hung in the air, laden with impossible weight.
"...did you ever hear something else? A singular voice? A separate intelligence, distinct from the echoes of your own mind? A presence... speaking to you?"
The question was so strange, so out of place, that my first instinct was to deny it. My journey had been a solitary experience, a struggle against my own inner demons. There had been no guide. No judge.
"No," I replied. "It was just... the echoes. My memories. My own madness."
"Think deeper," Mateo insisted, his voice soft but unyielding. "Don't look for a conversation. Look for an anomaly. A thought that didn't feel like your own. A moment of clarity you didn't earn. Think about the moments of transition. In the absolute silence between levels. When you were on the edge, between one state and another."
I closed my eyes, obeying. I let the memory of the hospital office fade and plunged back into the blackness. I traveled back, through the fire, the garden, the forest. I reached the void. The void after I had shattered the mirror. I remembered the despair, the acceptance of my own uselessness, the decision to simply let go, to dissolve.
I was there, on the brink of annihilation. And then... the spark. The thought. What if I can?
In my memory, I had always assumed that had been my own will to survive, a part of me refusing to die. But now, under Mateo's scrutiny, I examined it more closely. The thought had not arisen from my despair. It had come to my despair. From outside. It didn't have the timbre of my own internal voice. It was quieter. Older. It wasn't an affirmation, but a question. A suggestion planted in the fertile ground of my broken soul.
And then, I traveled to the other extreme. The very end of it all. The oak door. The farewell to Koro. The moment I placed my hand on the doorknob and turned. I remembered the explosion of light, the assault of the subway's senses. But just before that, in the last nanosecond of silence in the void, there was something. A final impression etched onto my consciousness. I hadn't heard it with my ears. I had felt it.
A single word.
Live.
I opened my eyes. I looked at Mateo.
"There were... two times," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "In the void, after the burning city, when I was about to give up. Something... something asked me: 'What if you can?' It gave me the idea to fight."
I paused, the enormity of the memory hitting me for the first time.
"And at the end," I continued, "just before crossing the door, I felt a word. Like a command. 'Live.'"
Mateo stared at me, his face completely unexpressive. The silence in the room was absolute. For a long second, I thought I had disappointed him, that my answer wasn't what he expected.
Then, a strange, small laugh escaped his lips.
It was a choked sound at first. Then it grew, a laugh that seemed to come from deep within his belly. It turned into a roaring guffaw, and then a full-blown bellow. Mateo threw his head back and laughed with utter abandon, hysterically, a laugh that was equal parts terror and euphoria.
My family and Dr. Serrano looked at him as if he had gone mad. And, in a way, perhaps he had. It was the laugh of a man who had spent forty years searching for a legend and had just discovered that it was not only real, but he'd had coffee with it.
Finally, the laughter subsided, leaving him breathless, tears streaming down his wrinkled face. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
"Forty years..." he gasped, shaking his head in disbelief. "Forty years reading the forbidden texts. The Gnostic gospels, the Nag Hammadi fragments, the alchemists' journals. They all speak of him. The guardian of the threshold. The administrator of the crucible where souls are tested."
He leaned in towards me, his face a mask of absolute awe.
"Purgatory isn't the hell of the Bible, Kenji. It's not a place of eternal punishment. It's a workshop. A forge. And it has a smith. An intelligence that runs it. An entity as old as the first lie a man told himself."
His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, filled with a mad joy. "The first returned one I met, a poet from Lisbon who was lost in the Feast of Mirrors, gave him a name. Not the one priests use to scare children. His original name. His original purpose."
He pointed a trembling finger towards me.
"LUCIFER!" he exclaimed, and the word seemed to vibrate the air in the room. "The Light-Bringer! The one who holds the candle in the darkest room of your soul, not to burn you, but so you can see the filth you've swept under the rug! He's not a demon, he's the cosmos' most severe and demanding schoolmaster!"
His face was now inches from mine, his eyes gleaming with the light of revelation.
"The voice that gave you that spark of hope in the void. The one that gave you the command to live as you crossed the threshold. It wasn't a part of you! IT WAS HIM! THE SMITH! THE GUARDIAN! LUCIFER HIMSELF, SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO YOU! In forty years of research, I've never heard anything like it! The others barely survived. But you! You caught the attention of the headmaster! The smith didn't just temper you, he spoke to you!"
Mateo burst into laughter again, a sound of madness and triumph that filled the small office.
"YOU, KENJI! You didn't just survive his hell! You met Lucifer! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
And I stood there, in my hospital bed, surrounded by my shocked family, staring at an old man laughing like a lunatic, as the most impossible and terrifying truth of all settled over me: my journey had not been a random test. It had been a private audience.