Crimson Sky

The night I fractured, the sky bled crimson, its scarlet tears sinking into the earth like the lifeblood of some ancient beast, whose death was written in the stars. Beyond my window, the world twisted, contorted—grotesque hues bleeding into one another like the dying scream of a wounded animal. The dusk itself seemed to have been strangled, suffocated by invisible hands that dragged it deeper into some fathomless void. Inside me, a storm raged, a tempest unholy and ravenous, gnawing at the fragile sinews of my sanity. Shadows slithered up the walls, not merely moving, but living—tearing at the very fabric of reality, whispering tongues ancient and forgotten. My heartbeat thundered like a death knell, and in its rhythm, I felt the undoing of everything I had struggled to preserve.

For years, I had forged my mind into a fortress of reason—a stone upon stone of cold, unyielding logic, sealed with detachment. A citadel of reason and precision, built to keep the chaos at bay. But that night, the walls trembled. The cracks did not come slowly, like the quiet erosion of time—they splintered, they cracked like the sound of bones breaking. Hairline fractures bloomed across the battlements of my mind, seeping unspoken fears, venomous truths I had buried beneath layers of buried whispers. The corridors of my mind, those once-steady paths of certainty, began to stretch and contort, twisting into grotesque labyrinths, their shifting passages devouring any rational thought, any semblance of order.

My fortress—the one I had spent so long constructing—no longer held the same promise. No longer was it a bastion against the storm, but a prison from which there could be no escape. The echoes of the past began to bleed through the cracks, like water creeping under a door, filling the empty spaces of my mind. And as the floodwaters rose, so did the voices—those alien sounds that had lingered just beneath the surface of my consciousness for years, now rising up, demanding attention.

They weren’t whispers anymore. No, they were screams. Their tones grating, unholy—somewhere between a hymn to the darkest gods and a cacophony of suffering. At first, I tried to block them out, to press my hands against my ears, but the sound was inside me—inside my skull, inside my veins. It was relentless, as though the very air around me had become polluted with their presence. Their words, indistinguishable, were like knives scraping the inside of my mind, each thought itched away, slowly, bit by bit.

And then it came.

The rupture.

The dam that held my soul together—my semblance of self—broke wide open. The floodgates opened with the deafening sound of bones snapping, and in that split second, time fractured, not in the soft, fluid way that memories slip from our grasp, but like glass shattering, each shard a moment, a feeling, an unspoken truth. The scream—oh, the scream that erupted from my throat—was not mine. It was an ancient scream, born not from the throat but from the marrow of my bones. It was the scream of the world’s forgotten horrors, the scream of everything I had hidden from, of every decision I had avoided. It was not me, and yet, it was everything I had ever been.

The silence shattered like glass. The walls of my sanctuary—of my mind—convoluted and alive, began to pulse, as if the very structure of my thoughts was no longer solid. The shadows that had once clung to the edges of my vision now writhed like snakes, their forms grotesque, monstrous, crawling with malignancy. They became real—tangible in their malevolence—and they were not alone. From them, voices emerged—voices that were not human, not even of this earth. They spoke in a language older than civilization, older than time itself, a tongue that rattled my bones and twisted my soul into knots.

The air itself began to thicken, and my breath—labored and shallow—felt like it was being sucked from my lungs, as if the walls themselves were inhaling my very existence. I could not escape. My body, now not even my own, became the vessel for something greater, something terrifying. My limbs no longer obeyed the laws of flesh and bone—they moved like marionette strings, pulled by unseen hands. I fell into the abyss, not gently, but violently, as though I had been pushed off a precipice into some unimaginable darkness. A vast, gaping maw opened beneath me, an empty chasm of hunger and thirst, a place that was both void and reality, both living and dead. The fall was infinite—there was no end, no bottom, only a spiraling descent into madness.

The depths of the abyss were endless, and in their depths, I saw it—my life, unmade. The child I had been, the man I had become. Every experience, every decision that had ever shaped me, now danced before my eyes, distorted and broken. I was no longer a single soul—I was every part of myself, scattered like dust, lost in the void. The laughter of ghosts filled the spaces between the moments, their whispers like the flutter of moth wings, grazing my soul, reminding me of everything I had tried to forget.

They were my failures. My regrets. My lost opportunities, each one hanging like a noose around my neck. And within this darkness, I was not just a victim—I was both the architect and the ruin. My mind had become the very thing I had feared, my thoughts were the blackened landscape, and I was lost within it. I had become the monster I had been running from my whole life, the very embodiment of the terror I had built my walls to avoid.

But the abyss had a voice—a voice that wasn’t just a whisper, but a presence. It was not an enemy, nor was it an ally. It was something different—something neither malevolent nor benevolent. It was simply existence. It spoke to me not in words, but in pure, unfiltered understanding. It was not a voice that would give solace, nor a voice that would torment—it simply was, and in its existence, it made me feel all that I had ignored.

It told me the most terrible of things—that I was not broken because of some external force, but because I had chosen this—chosen the walls, chosen the lies, chosen the suppression of self. I had made myself this way. I had willed it, because the truth—unbearable, terrifying—was that I had been running from myself. The abyss did not mock me—it simply showed me what I had built within. And in that reflection, there was no condemnation, no judgment—only the terrifying realization that I had constructed this cage with my own hands.

But there was something else—something stirring deep within me. It was not light, nor hope, nor peace, but something darker—something more primal. It was a flicker, a fragile ember in the churning darkness. I reached for it, trembling, unsure if I could grasp it. It did not feel like salvation. It felt like something far more dangerous—a power that could consume me, or consume everything around me.

And I grasped it.

It roared to life. The ember became fire, and the fire became an inferno, churning through the abyss and burning away all that had held me captive. The flames ravaged me, consumed the phantoms that had clung to my soul, burned away the whispers, the shadows, the endless torment of self-doubt. The storm within me quieted as the flames burned through the wreckage of my being. And yet, as the fires raged, there was no pain—only release. Only freedom.

When I opened my eyes, the sky still bled crimson, but the world no longer seemed so distant. The shadows still writhed, but they no longer held dominion over me. The fortress had crumbled into dust, leaving only the ruins of what had been. And from these ruins, something new had begun to stir—something not born of logic, not born of reason, but something wilder, something older. I had fractured, yes, but in that fracture, I had been remade.

The taste of resurrection lingered on my tongue—bitter, sharp, and sweet, all at once. And for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, I did not fear the dawn. It was no longer a promise of another day to endure, but an invitation—an invitation to something darker, something truer. And with it came the realization that I had embraced the abyss, not as an enemy, but as part of myself. The dawn, with its cold light, no longer terrified me. I had learned to walk with the shadows.