Wooden walls pressed in around me. Space shrunk until I was suffocating. Panicking. Too close. Too tight. Not enough space. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t need to. My heart wasn’t beating. It didn’t need to. I couldn’t hear the blood rushing in my ears. There was no blood in my ears. This was wrong. So wrong. What was wrong? Why was this happening? What was going on?

  The darkness was suffocating me. I was alone. It was too quiet. I was alone. It was too loud. I was alone. How long had I been alone? I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? There was no need for me to know. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. No. Things mattered. Everything mattered. Why didn’t I have a heartbeat?

  Voices. I heard voices in the distance. Were those voices? Yes, those were voices. What were they saying? I didn’t know. I didn’t need to know. It was comforting, hearing those voices. I had always heard those voices. What? No. I had never heard those voices. Evil voices. Whispers. Sharp tongues upon my mind. I couldn’t take it anymore. Was there anymore? What was this anymore? My ears. My aching ears. My bloodless, aching ears. Too loud. Not loud enough. Where was my heartbeat?

  A silent scream echoed in a darkened tomb beneath the suffocating earth. It reached no ears, not even those of its owner. Nothing changed, as it was want to do, yet it still remained the same. Change and entropy were as natural to it as permanence and eternity, for it was nothing, and nothing remains the same.

  White walls. They were too lose. Too tight. Too restrictive. Too freeing. Too bright. Too dark. Where was I? What was I? Who was I? Was I a who? Or was I a what? Was I an I? Was I a he? Was I an it—inanimate, unalive? No. I was an I. I thought. Did I think? Yes, I thought. Why did I think? It didn’t matter. It just was. I just was.

  Other things like the I moved within the white walls. Hes and Shes… Its? No. They were things like the I. They were hes and shes. I was a he. That much the I knew. Why did it know that? It didn’t matter. They were hes and shes. What were hes and shes? I was a he. Hes were like I. What were shes? Shes were like I, yet unlike I. Unlike I how? It didn’t matter. No. It very much did matter. Shes were different. Different how? I didn’t know. I did know. I had forgotten. Why had I forgotten? What was I? No. No more of that. What was a heartbeat?

  A face. An unfamiliar face. A face dressed in a white coat. The walls were white. Was I white too? It didn’t matter. The face pressed something against the I’s chest. It was cold. Too cold. Too hot. What was cold? What was hot? Why did it matter? It didn’t.

  Something in the face changed. The face—The he? Yes, the he.—turned away. The he raised something and moved a finger across its surface. What was a finger? It didn’t matter. Did it matter? It didn’t matter. None of this mattered.

  Sensations assailed the I. They didn’t matter. Hes and shes bustled about, looking at him with strangely shaped faces. Was this normal? What was normal? Where was my heartbeat? What was my? Was it I but different? No. It was I but the same, just in a different way.

  But who was I?

  I was falling. It was a disorienting sensation, unlike any other kind of fall I had ever had before. There was not leveling out, just a constant, unending jerk in the gut like the moment of the initial drop. There was no wind, either. The only thing I had to go off of was the sporadic pattern of broken fractals spiraling through the infinite darkness in patterns so simplistically complex they caused something in my brain to scream in pain.

  Each fractal branched into numberless arms, flashing with visions of the past and the potential future. Some memories were filled with terror, some with joy, and some with that fulfilled sensation you get from sitting by the fire on a cold evening.

  But most were just black. They weren’t empty, per-se. There was certainly something in them, they just held no sight to be seen. All they held were thoughts. Thoughts I had thought, once. Dreams I had dreamed. Fears I had once felt in that endless prison I had once called shelter.

  Not all of the thoughts were coherent. They hadn’t always seemed that way, even to me. Once they had been reasonable questions to ask, and reasonable answers to the questions posed. But the question “how square is a stair’s greed” had very little meaning to me anymore.

  Those fractals dropped away into the abyss beneath me, traveling into the endless void of my memories. Other memories were mixed in there as well, memories I did not recognize. They were not my own, but they were similar in nature. Panic was common, dread was plentiful. Yet none of them held the same tinge mine did—that hope of absolution, of eventual freedom. All that was in those other memories was darkness. Total. Complete.

  I was the only one to have survived that grave.

  It wasn’t a literal grave. No, it was a prison. A well intentioned prison, but a prison nonetheless whose makers had died before its opening.

  Little in me was left from before the days of that suffocating void. And the pieces that remained were scattered and broken, left lying in a shadowed place within me where the forgotten things dwelt. They were precious to me, but too fragile to take out and play with. For that reason they lay there, forgotten like their fellows, waiting for the day they might see the light again.

  But that was not today.

  Today, I had to do something about my situation. I was stuck inside the Shadow of Madness, looking in on madness itself. Now, there’s no real way for me to describe what madness looked like. I’ve told you of the fractals, but those aren’t what make up madness. They are just the results. You can think of the fractals as branches, if you like—the visible, tangible, evident results of madness. But that ignores the roots.

  The roots are the madness itself, and you could… see wasn’t quite the right word for it. I could sense them out in the darkness beyond and between the fractals. They felt like the oil residue left on a pan after the meal. They were contaminants, leeches, parasites. And they led me to a rather uncomfortable realization.

  Madness was a creature. Many things were, in the grand scheme of things. Space was a kind of creature. So was Time. But instead of helping like time and space did, Madness destroyed and ate what was good.

  But what kind of creature is it? Well, I’m afraid I don’t really have an answer for you on that account. Not even at the time of writing this do I truly know what exactly those transcendental creatures are. I only know a small piece of the story—one that I cannot share directly in ink. One thing I can tell you, though, is that they cannot create. They can only affect creation. That is their limitation. Take comfort in this revelation.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Not even the gods can do that.

  If you understand what I am saying, you know enough to be properly and foundationally terrified. If you don’t, and you are truly desperate to know, there’s a certain bookshop on the corner of Death’s Door and the unnamed road that can help you. It’s called The Font of Wisdom, and it will hold what you seek. The shop is a little hard to find, but if you need to get in, you will find it.

  For those of you either only passingly curious or content to stay in the dark, I envy your ignorance. Would that I had remained as you are.

  But I did not.

  There, in that space-that-was-not-a-space inside the Shadow, I fell. There I flew. There I found pieces of myself I had not seen since a time long ago. Memories from before my adoption. Memories of people, still but vague shadows on the wall, but now unearthed along with the pain they brought.

  A father, standing tall, crystal clear in the obscuring mists. A mother, face undone, lost before memory could define her face. A brother and sister, curled and gray, dead before the light of the sun ever reached their eyes.

  Only shadows, nothing more.

  That was the nature of this place—this ever-sleeping, ever-deepening, ever-dying place. And I had to tear it all down. The shadow of a being that dwelt above the demonic gods themselves.

  But did I? That hadn’t been the original plan, just the mad hope of a dying man. Besides, I didn’t see how I could destroy this… this infinite structure built on fundamental decay. Though, I suppose Decay is a separate, higher thing itself. Madness was a lesser Shadow, after all. Though, the distinction between lesser and greater seemed meaningless now.

  I examined the space around me and, surprisingly, got a response from my Identify. I hadn’t used this feature very much of late, but give me a break, I was still brand new. I couldn’t be expected to remember everything. And besides, even if I had spent years honing my skills(non-dungeon-integrated) and preparing for these days, I hadn’t done so in over eight years now. That was plenty of time for a guy to become rusty.

  Domain of Madness (ERROR)

  Leave. Now.

  WARNING: In entering the Domain of Madness, you have drawn Madness’ attention. And being broken—yet able to control your brokenness—has only further interested him. Good Luck. You will need him.

  That… was a rather ominous message. It also gave me next to no information about the place I was in. I had assumed it to be some kind of domain—I’ll explain those later when they become more relevant to the tale—but the information given was surprisingly unhelpful.

  Also yes, Luck was another one of the Shadows. How did you know?

  None of this answered my first and foremost question: how did I get rid of the Shadow? There was a vague plan in motion, but none of us had known exactly what was going to happen at the time.

  Could I do something with my will? No, that wasn’t it. That would basically be hoping and praying for the Shadow to miraculously die. Not that it couldn’t happen, but it wasn’t a feasible possibility. Could I use my soul to wrap around the thing and choke it? No, I wasn’t nearly skilled enough with the essence of my very existence to use it in that way. Using the soul outside the body like that was reserved for Masters and above. I snorted a laugh just thinking about it.

  And then a presence appeared.

  I can’t call it anything else, as that was what it was. Yet it was completely unlike any presence I had ever had the pleasure or displeasure to experience. It was more like a physical thing impressed upon the metaphysical. Normal presences are the exact opposite, being a metaphysical thing—the person’s anima, psyche, and whatever other components they were made of—impressed as a (mostly)physical force. It had some effects on the metaphysical as well, but presences were much more geared towards the physical.

  [Sorry about all the condensed philosophical speech, but it’s the best I can realistically do to describe this phenomenon. The next step I could take is a metaphor. Actually, you know what, I’ll do exactly that. Or I’ll try, at any rate. Forgive me.]

  Normal presences felt like spiritually pressing down on a tire pump, or having a lead blanket draped over your chest depending on which side of the presence you were on. This one felt like my chest was being torn open in a sensation not unlike a letter being opened by the index finger. And I didn’t even have a chest in this place.

  This wasn’t from the presence exerting itself upon spirituality, either. No, it was just from its sheer existence in the first place. All it had to do was be and I was falling apart, being torn to shreds in the most violent and sickening fashion you could think of. Pain rippled through me—terrible pain, more brutal than that of the lash or the knife or the fire.

  Madness was here. I was here. The two did not mix.

  Words that were not words entered into my consciousness. They twisted and ripped and shredded and bled so much insanity that they managed to outdo my own inner voice. That was hard to do, considering.

  “Why dost thou venture unto depths beyond thy means, O little one?”

  I could not answer. Not because I was afraid, though I was that; nor yet because I had no answer, as I did. No. I could not answer because I had no voice. So I just thought at him, and apparently that was enough.

  “I see. Thy actions may be excused, then. I see no reason for such a farce to continue. Thou art a child of mine, art thou not?”

  Confusion. Realization. Understanding. Tentative agreement. Confusion again.

  “Indeed. As such, I shall bestow upon thee a parting gift. Take upon thyself mine own mantle, Child of the Ancients. Take upon thyself mine Shadow.”

  The world lurched, and I felt myself being gently pushed from the realm of fractured dreams. Light grew quickly, returning to the white void from whence I had come, to the endless darkness and the kindly prison.

  But in my last moments in that Domain, even after all sight had faded, I heard that voice speak one final time.

  “Chase thy Death, and may it find thee peacefully at the end of the road.”