Chapter 31
The Outsider
The chapter begins with Marcus, who found himself waking from a strange dream that had haunted him. The Pharaoh of Death had finally left him, but he was still in that cursed desert where pyramids flew above him in a black, cracked sky. From within it, a massive black entity loomed while the sky around it shattered with stars, nebulae, and a red moon that illuminated the dark desert of death. That night, that night the marc dreamed of many a woe
Before him stood the third pyramid, the one bearing the Star of David on its apex. The apex was descending upon this outsider. He did not only dream of calamities but also of all his fellow soldiers from that war. He saw them in the shadows, taking the forms of witches, demons, worms, and a large coffin that devoured them. The long, miserable nightmare consumed him and those who fought alongside him.
The unhappiness brought back memories of the war, filled with fear and sorrow. Miserable, he looked back at the past through the long, lonely hours and vast rooms that entered his mind—gloomy rooms with black curtains and mad rows of black holes, strange clocks that turned, and twilight gardens of giant, alien fields weighed down by despair and sorrow. A silence loomed over him, controlling him from the outside and suffocating him from within. So many things, yet the gods had given him disappointment, indifference, and shattered hopes. Broken Marcus, yet strangely content, clung to those memories of his life, even if they were all tragic. When his mind threatened him with reaching the outsider, the other, his memories became blurred. He no longer knew why he had gone to this island or when he had been thrown into this dead desert. He said the pyramids were infinitely ancient, .
boundless, and terrifying, as if they were not created by any being but by something incomprehensible. They were filled with dark passages and high ceilings where the eye could not reach, inhabited only by the hated creatures of the night, much like him. He was on the roof of the Jewish pyramid when he entered it, finding nothing but spider webs, crow nests, and bats. Below, rats and snakes crawled as if fleeing from something darker. The red light of the moon slightly illuminated the pyramid, and black lightning struck from the cracked sky.
The desert storms, filled with poison and blood, choked him. Black sand destroyed his respiratory system, but he continued to walk. There was a curse or the smell of death everywhere, as if it were the piled-up corpses of forgotten and dead generations. There was never any light in that pyramid, and he could not consider the red moonlight as literal light. So, he tried to light a fire for comfort, but there would be no comfort, as was the case in the entire world. There was no sun or doors, only sandy passages and hieroglyphic drawings mixed with Jewish symbols and depictions of entities from another world worshipped by the pharaohs. There was a single black ladder leading to the unknown outer sky, beyond time and space, but it was destructively punitive and impossible to climb due to its broken and cracked protruding parts.
Marcus was afraid, but his greatest fear of the pyramid drove him to go on. He continued walking through the endless darkness, loneliness, and ancient horror. There were loud buzzing sounds. He entered the pyramid. Marcus was in a state of panic and made a decision to go inside, feeling he had no choice but to climb, hoping that the stairs would lead to light and salvation, not to darkness and hell.
He began to climb, and when he reached the top, he realized the truth. He realized that he had never reached the top at all; he had been at the bottom from the very beginning. Gravity had reversed, and Marcus fell toward the cracked violet sky, falling into the mouth of that black entity that was at the top, beyond spacetime. Its mouth was filled with stars and dead children, and its form was incomprehensible. Marcus could not comprehend it.
Then, when he entered its dark mouth, he found it to be a place of absolute truth, a place that held the truth of everything. He found himself in the void and began to fall again, and with him fell all the children who had died in the Mushroom War. Their faces were terrifying; they laughed and pointed at him, chanting, "Devil, devil, devil." It didn't matter if there was something that could stop his fall, even if it could save him. He would be at the peak of nothingness.
The fall had no end.
Marcus no longer knew if he was actually moving or if space itself was shrinking around him, swallowing him bit by bit. When he lifted his head, he saw something that defied logic. It was a massive entity, a creature that refused to have a fixed form, a body sculpted from chaos itself.
Arms extended, twisted, and pulsed with life.
Its limbs resembled octopus-like tentacles, massive, coiling around floating rocks that swam in the void. Their texture seemed slimy, saturated with the color of decaying flesh, interspersed with glowing tissues like veins under the skin. Some of the arms pulsed with an inner light, as if they carried trapped souls within them, emitting whispers without language, only a sense of pleading and despair.
Its face... or rather, the absence of a face.
In the heart of that fleshy chaos, there was something resembling a head, but it was not a human head or even a comprehensible being. It wore a black metallic helmet as if it were part of its body and not just armor. There were no eyes, but from within the openings, a cold blue light emerged, a light like a blade piercing the darkness. Behind that metallic mask, long black horns extended, as dark as nothingness itself, wrapped in an electric blue glow, as if they emitted uncontrollable cosmic energy.
The space around him was dying.
There were massive boulders, like remnants of planets shattered eons ago, floating around him without order, slowly torn apart by the entity's claws, as if it were reshaping them to create something new, something that should never have existed. The stars themselves were dying, dissolving in the red light emitted by the burning nebulae behind it as if the universe was decaying in its presence.
Marcus was not floating; he was being dragged toward it.
There was no air, no gravity, but his body felt as if it was being pulled, his soul sucked in. The world was fading, and something older than time itself was opening before him.
Then he fell back into nothingness and sorrow once again, that Outsider.
The fall was not a fall... it was erosion.
Marcus was not falling into the void; the void itself was consuming him, tearing him apart from within before his body even touched it. Colors faded, the light became a mere memory, and the air had never existed from the beginning. The silence was absolute, but his mind screamed inside him, screamed until his distorted senses trembled before the coming scene.
Marcus was not looking at a familiar universe, but at another reality, a reality he should never have perceived. His eyes widened, not in awe, but in absolute terror, as distances began to collapse before him. Here, physics was a myth, and perception itself was a tool of torture.
Above him, there was a cracked glass-like dimension, glowing with colors that had never existed—a void that was not a void, but an impossible entanglement of dimensions. This was "hyperspace," where worlds slid like mercury in an invisible grip, overlapping, shattering, and reforming themselves in patterns that defied explanation.
Beneath that deep chaos, something resembling a galaxy stretched out, but it was not a galaxy; it was a curved fabric of space and time itself. Strange stars were glowing with a cold green light, "Zothic stars," as if they were eyes staring from times before the creation of the universe. Beside them, worlds of dreams gathered, small planets suspended in the void, each glowing with a different light, like memories from dead minds.
But this was only the surface...
The world Marcus thought was the center of the universe was merely a bubble, floating above the great abyss. The boundaries of matter, "the Veil," were nothing but a thin layer separating reality from the lurking abyss beneath.
And there, below, was "what lay beyond" the Veil.
The realm of material shadow... "the Outside."
There was a strange light emerging from the void, a green waterfall flowing from the world downward as if it were a memory fading or an entity being slowly drained. This was not water, not energy, but information. Every thought, every secret, every moment forgotten by someone, was leaking through this rift, heading toward its inevitable fate.
At the bottom, there was something deeper than knowledge, deeper than existence itself. The informational shadow... the Akashic Record. A pale blue sea, pulsing with unnatural ripples, as if whispering every story that had never been told. Everything was recorded here, every choice not made, every life not lived.
But the worst was not inside... it was outside.
Beneath this world, where nothing should exist, there were black creeping roots, twisted like the arms of a creature lost in the void. They extended from nothingness, clinging to the bottom of the universe as if trying to infiltrate it. Some of these roots moved slowly, pulsating as if breathing.
Then...
Marcus saw the hand.
A human hand, but it was not human. Protruding from beneath existence itself, as if trying to hold onto the edge before falling into the ultimate abyss. Its fingers were slender, its skin cracked, its nails long, but the worst was its color. It was not a color, but a void. It was impossibly dark, like a black hole in the shape of a hand, absorbing all light around it.
Then the fingers moved... slowly.
Marcus did not scream; there was no sound here. But his mind screamed, and his scream was enough to shatter the scene, or perhaps it was only enough... to make him fall deeper and deeper and deeper than anything in the universe He felt different from other humans at that moment. He felt like he was the Outsider.
End of chapter