hollow-- a curse

The room was alive in a way it shouldn’t be.

The air was thick, a suffocating weight that pressed against his chest, every breath a struggle. The walls were alive, too—shifting, twitching, breathing in the dark. It wasn’t a room anymore. It was a tomb. The flickering bulb above cast twisted shadows across the floor, crawling like something inhuman, as if the very darkness had a life of its own.

He was frozen—his hands clenched around the skull, the jagged bones slicing into his palms, but he couldn’t let go. It wasn’t just a skull. It was something worse.

Alive.

There was no face, but the absence of eyes made it feel like it was always watching him. The skull was feeding on him. Every jagged edge was sinking into his flesh, and it knew.

It felt.

The mask on his face was cracking, splitting down the middle with a sound that should’ve been impossible—like dry earth shattering. It peeled back, revealing what was underneath: not skin, not a face. Just a hollow, empty shell of a man.

He tried to scream, but nothing came out. His throat burned with the absence of sound. His mouth—the one he had used to speak, to beg, to scream—was sewn shut. The room held him in place. The skull in his hands was tighter than a vice, and his blood—his very blood—was dripping onto the floor, pooling, dark and thick. But he didn’t feel the pain.

He only felt the hunger.

It whispered, that voice.

The voice that wasn’t a voice at all. It filled the room like smoke, like something crawling in his veins.

How long will you carry the ghost of your past?

It sounded like him, like something torn from the deepest pit of his soul. The question echoed, but it wasn’t just in his ears.

It was inside him—twisting, pulling, scratching at his thoughts. The darkness seemed to stretch, like a living thing, twisting and crawling along the walls. Figures moved in the corners, faces—faces he recognized—laughing without sound. Their mouths opened wide, wider than they should’ve, and their hollow eyes stared at him, pulling him in. You can’t escape.

The skull squeezed tighter, its teeth sinking deeper, scraping against his bones. The blood on his hands had stopped flowing. The warmth faded, and his skin turned cold, as if life itself had drained away. His heart wasn’t pounding anymore. It was stilled, slowed to a pulse that didn’t sound right.

How long?

It was no longer a whisper. It was a scream—a scream that came from the very walls themselves. The air was gone. His breath caught, choked in his throat, as if the room had swallowed it whole. His skin crawled.

The shadows were stretching, reaching out to him, curling like tendrils in the dark. He could feel them. Them. Figures, shapes—no, they weren’t shapes at all. They were eyes. Thousands of eyes, too many to count, filling the dark. They were watching him.

He couldn’t move. His body was frozen, his limbs stiff. Every muscle felt like it had turned to stone. And the skull—it was still in his hands, still feeding, still alive.

His mind was unraveling. He could hear them now—the whispers. The voices of the people he’d failed. The voices of those he’d abandoned, of those he’d crushed beneath the weight of his own silence. They weren’t shadows, not anymore. They were here.

And the skull—it was laughing. No sound, but the laughter was inside his head, a deep, jagged thing that echoed in every bone. His eyes widened, tears of blood streaming down his face as the laughter grew louder, filling the room.

It wasn’t a question anymore. It was a demand. How long will you carry the ghost of your past?

The shadows tightened, the room narrowing in on him, as if the darkness itself had become a beast.

It coiled around him, pressing in, suffocating him, and then—a sudden, unbearable pressure in his chest. His ribs cracked, the bones splitting with the sound of dry twigs breaking. It was suffocating. His blood ran cold, but it wasn’t his blood anymore. No, it was the past.

The past had bled into him. His blood had turned into the poison of his regrets, his sins, his mistakes.

The skull pulled him closer, its teeth digging deep. And then, in the suffocating silence, a crack. The skull—no longer solid—broke in his hands.

The bone split, and something else poured out.

Blackness.

Tendrils of pure darkness that swarmed like insects, filling his hands, crawling into his chest. He could feel it, feel them, twisting in his veins, eating him alive.

He tried to scream again, but his voice had been stolen. He tried to run, but his legs wouldn’t move. And then, in the deepest pit of his mind, he saw it.

The truth.

The skull wasn’t just a reflection. It wasn’t just a mirror of his face. It was him. His past. His face. Empty. Hollow. The ghosts, the figures—they were the faces of the people he had abandoned. His father, his mother. Faces burned with betrayal. Faces he had suffocated with his own selfishness, with his silence.

And now, it was coming for him.

The past wasn’t a thing. It was a curse. A curse he had carried, unwilling to let go. A curse that devoured everything.

And as the darkness closed in, as the last shred of his soul was swallowed by the ghosts he couldn’t outrun, the question didn’t just echo in his skull. It roared.

How long?

And the answer—his answer—was silence.