Chapter 34
The chapter begins with Marcus, who continues his deep fall into the darkness, into the void of oblivion, heading towards the lurking fear. The more your intelligence increases, the deeper your fall, the worse your luck, and the more you become aware of the lurking fear. Every time you go through those moments where you lose everything, you lose your intelligence, your philosophy, your consciousness, and your personality, and you turn into a lump of flesh. But the only thing you cannot lose is your fear. It seems to me that the brain is organic and may not withstand what lies within.
What was in Marcus's mind was not organic or human; it was not meant to comprehend true fear. It was not from the void or its monsters, but from repetition and human recurrence. The humans on this island are no longer human. They have lost their emotions, their hearts. They have lost meaning and also their humanity.
They have turned into empty bodies carrying nothing but sadness and loss. They have become outsiders. They have turned into monsters and are lost forever. They were like the dead who can see and breathe, as if watching their lives from a television inside their minds. They have lost meaning. The lurking fear was feeding on them. The god of fear, the god of anger, the god of sorrow, the god of pain, the god of blood, the god of sadism, was watching them every day. Perhaps he was enjoying it, or perhaps he did not care about their fate. The sorcerer of fear was watching him in the midst of the void and destroying him daily. The sorcerer of fear, or the god of fear, or...
Rey de miedo،, as he was known in our past worlds, was relentlessly pursuing them. He was chasing them, along with the master sorcerer of terror, who was known in our world as Hatred. The hatred he acquired after the war, which made him refuse to deal or speak with humans again. It was as if he were a strange alien to them; he hated them and felt bored when he saw them. He had no friends, no family. Until Marcus came into his life, and he was similar to him. And perhaps that is why he is now here, in this place. Where he imprisons everyone who does not belong to this Earth, this skin-like Earth that has no name, where there is nothing, only truth. Where the fall is eternal, and the void swallows everything.
Marcus realized that he was an outsider among humans here. In fact, everyone here is a stranger, belonging to no one, and no one belongs to them. The great truth that the masters must realize is that this island exists in our real world and consumes millions of humans daily, swallowing them into a void larger than the universe itself. Alone in this void, far from everything.
Perhaps you, too, are falling into the void right now.
—
Imagine yourself alone in the entire universe. Would you feel happiness? How would you endure this nothingness? Perhaps in your childhood, you imagined finding happiness in solitude, but is that what would truly happen? Imagine living for thousands of years, eating the same food, and living the same dark moments, with nothing changing. Imagine being alone in an infinite void. How would that be? But do not rejoice and tell yourself that you have people around you, because even if there are billions with you in the same room, if solitude chooses you, you will be alone, and you will feel as if no one else exists in the galaxy except you….
Marcus is now feeling what everyone on this island feels. Anger was consuming him, anger at everything he had lost, at everything he had lost one day. Is there anything stronger than the anger of losing something important? Is there anything more precious than this? But is there really anything of value? But is there anything at all? This is what was going through his mind as he fell.
But before his mind ceased to function under the weight of these thoughts, he continued his eternal fall.
—
Marcus fell.
He fell, an inevitable fall, until he no longer felt his body or his mind. Only a cold flow through his spine, as if it were made of glass and ice.
Then... everything stopped.
—
There was no more falling, no movement, no air.
Only him... and the scene that no human eye could endure without exploding.
—
He saw himself standing on the edge of a dark abyss. No ground beneath his feet, no sky above him, only a living blackness pulsating in every direction, writhing, undulating, as if the universe had become a dark sea boiling from unfathomable depths.
—
And in the face of this nothingness, the moon rose.
But Marcus quickly realized it was not a moon.
It was not a celestial body, not a planet. It was a face.
—
A dead moon, its skin made of dust and ruin, pockmarked with craters, scorched by ages, yet it breathed... and it had fangs.
Its eyes? No, there were no eyes, only two cosmic voids, true black holes, from which silence emanated... a silence that screamed in the depths of your mind. Not a sound you hear with your ears, but one you feel in your bones.
—
Its mouth... was a smile.
A massive smile, stretching across half the lunar sphere, made of thousands of teeth that looked like mountains carved from the bones of the dead. Each tooth taller than a tower, each molar wider than a city, and every laugh exhaled a breath of gray lava.
—
The smile was not human. It was animalistic, insane, defying logic, defying mercy.
The red moon resembled a human skull laughing.
—
And beneath this nightmare, a city stretched.
A giant fortress, built of ash and cracked marble, towering, twisted, bending the laws of geometry, as if following the designs of a blind, mad being. Its towers never ended, its windows were dark, and light refused to touch it.
—
Clouds coiled around it, like ropes of smoke from the mouth of a dying god.
And eyeless black birds flew, screaming without sound, circling the highest towers, as if waiting for something to awaken... something inside the moon, or behind the city... or in his own mind.
—
Marcus gasped.
But there was no air.
—
And when he tried to retreat, his body did not move.
He was stuck, suspended in the air, as if held by invisible threads, or like a doll in the hands of a cosmic child who had lost its mind.
—
The moon's face smiled wider, and the sky cracked.
And Marcus understood the truth.
This was not an external scene.
It was internal.
This city dwelled within him. This face resided in his mind.
—
Then, in the midst of eternal nothingness, at the base of the infernal fortress, he heard a voice echoing across the horizons, words as if this place was sending a message.
Shut out my Phantom, yeah, me,
and my haters be Phantom, yeah
Walk around, hold my hands up 'cause I got too much bands, yeah
All white like dandruff
The stomach hurts up
She letting' me hit before I use my damn thumb, -
He returned to falling into the void once more, thinking about this message. Fear consumed him, and he screamed intensely—screams that were unheard, unseen, and carried no meaning. They were the screams of a dead man falling into darkness. His skin began to turn into darkness, but then something stopped it.
Then... the rose of darkness bloomed.
Marcus saw the being, the nameless being.
It stood in the midst of space, on a shifting, misty body, as if the nebula itself exhaled beneath it. No ground, no sky, no air... only it, and that thing.
Its body was a fusion of two creatures: the lower part like the body of a massive horse, covered in a dark metallic hue, as if its skin were made of hardened nebula and stars. It seemed as though each layer of that celestial, rigid skin contained the ashes of an extinct star. Its four legs ended in cloven hooves, piercing the nothingness as if tearing through the fabric of the universe itself.
On its left hand was a black hole, and on its right, another black hole, as if it were holding them.
But the upper part was even more terrifying.
A swollen human torso, crafted from multiple stellar explosions, forming its green body. Its muscles twitched with unnatural spasms, and its veins pulsed with an otherworldly rhythm. Its arms were long, ending in twisted, claw-like fingers, each nail glowing with a dark green pulse, as if poison flowed beneath its skin.
But the head... the head was the catastrophe.
It was not a head, but a massive dome, as if someone had planted a winged jellyfish atop its body—half transparent, half solid, riddled with cracks and holes. Slanted openings on its sides emitted a dead light, while the center of its head pulsed with a black ring, a hole that drew in sight and swallowed perception.
As if what lay inside was not a brain... but a dying star.
And around it, space was tearing apart.
Two dark stars orbited it, like abandoned ships in a whirlpool of death. Each one was a black eclipse, bleeding light instead of obscuring it. They did not rotate, but breathed, contracting and expanding as if they were the lungs of a nightmare.
The being raised its hand toward one of them, and the star stopped.
Then it raised the other hand toward the second star... and it stopped.
Marcus gasped, but once again, there was no air.
The being turned toward him. It did not move its body... the universe moved around it.
And in that moment, Marcus realized one thing:
This being was not created.
This entity was unleashed.
Then the entity looked at Marcus as if it saw him and spoke to him, though its lips did not move. The voice came from within, and it said:
Tell me what do you think is the ultimate fear
I really thought I"ve Already reach the darkest of the dark but then ahead of me I beheld the darkness even Greater still
Marcus began to scream intensely when suddenly his fall stopped, and he woke up from the nightmare. He spat out sandy dunes from his mouth and found himself in front of a corral of horses and donkeys in the middle of the desert. The corral was filled with men wearing large round hats and black coats, carrying rifles. They were speaking Spanish, so he couldn't understand what they were saying, but one of them spoke English fluently. He asked Marcus:
"Are you American?"
Marcus, nervous, replied, "no, but I'm lost here. Do you know the way out?"
"We can take you to our place and give you some food and drink."
He rode with them on the horses, and they traveled for days through Death Valley in the dark desert, where ghostly wolves gathered around them. But the wolves were busy chasing other prey. Marcus asked them, "Why is this desert so strange?"
"Oh, boy, it's because of the wrath of the 7 Kings of the Universe."
Marcus felt that these Mexicans were drunk and talking nonsense, so he didn't pay much attention to them. As they advanced, something began to unfold before them. It looked like a pyramid, but it wasn't a pyramid—it was a pyramid with stairs and a door inside, like a Mayan tomb. Marcus asked them in confusion:
"What is this strange place? Where are we going? I don't understand anything at all!"
The Spanish boy replied while the rest of the group looked at him with bewildered and terrifying stares that froze his body.
The boy said:
"Oh, Mr. Marcus, here we stop to put some dots on the letters. In Mexico in the year 1867, you must have guessed this when you saw the shape of the pyramid and the ancient ruins. The pyramids that appear sloped on one side while there are staircases on the other side. Yes, this is Mexico, and we are heading toward those temples. Those are the temples of the Mayan civilization, but our religion is different from theirs. We worship Rey de Moscas , while the other sects have different gods from the Kings of the Universe. The Maya today are nothing but a legend. We have deciphered the temple carvings and learned about the true rulers. The land we are in is called the Land of the End, and it is one of the places where the Maya left their mark strongly. And to understand something of what is happening before us, we must rely on some history—complex history."
Marcus, in whom time had stopped.
He no longer heard the hooves of the horses, nor the whisper of the sand, nor even the sound of his own breath.
As if the world had turned into a frozen image,
a cursed image, painted on the wall of one of the temples,
in the color of ancient blood that had not dried for a thousand years.
The boy's words were codes opening impossible gates in his mind:
"The year 1867... we are in Mexico... we worship Rey de Moscas ..."
Marcus, the man of law, logic, and rational investigations,
Marcus, who came from a time where devices counted breaths,
now found himself before another universe...
a universe with different gods, different laws, and a history unwritten in human books.
He felt his skin eroding from within.
He felt his eyes sinking backward, as if they wanted to escape the scene.
Everything inside him screamed,
but no sound came out.
The sky above them was black, too black,
as if it were a thin membrane hiding something breathing behind it.
His heart beat slowly, then sped up, then suddenly stopped for a moment,
the moment he realized that this pyramid, this path, these men...
were not part of madness, but of truth.
A truth that humans had been fleeing since the beginning of creation.
He knew something was wrong.
But not a logical error... an error in the very nature of reality itself.
Marcus was no longer sure if he was alive, asleep, or if his heart was still in his body.
He felt something deeper than fear,
something resembling the end.
—
> "I thought I was a cop chasing a killer, but now... I don't even know if I'm human anymore."
Marcus said nervously, "Anyway, hey boy, you know you're on a skin island, right?"
The boy replied, "You're right and wrong. This is the Land of the End, the land blessed by the Seven Princes of the Universe. There's an ice cave here, for sure. The place you entered from to reach the Land of the End was the Devil's Frozen Island. We're here in Mexico in the 18th century, as I told you. In the Land of the End, there is everything and there is nothing. Anyway, we'll stop here. You must come with us into the temple."
He entered the temple and found himself facing numerous statues. Some of them were from the Mayan religion, but the strangest of all was a statue of a giant skeleton with the letter "Z" written beneath it, revered by many Mexicans. It stood in the center of the hall, and beneath it was a platform where many knelt in worship.
It looked like an old, gaunt Mexican man with a stern face, surrounded by insects. They were chanting, "Larga vida al Rey de Moscas" Marcus didn't understand what they were saying. He sat in the corner and began eating cactus-filled burritos and tacos. Then he heard a non-human voice shouting, "Las dos monas fous, Aegyptus, no solans," and the echo repeated this phrase over and over. Marcus, filled with tension, headed toward the sound, only to be shocked. He recognized the face—it was his police colleague, Matthew, with his limbs severed. The Mayan descendants had placed his arms and legs in a large soup pot and frozen his feet with a strange icy energy. Marcus was on the verge of screaming in terror when the Spanish-English man placed his hand on Marcus's shoulder and said:
"Mr. Marcus, did you like the secret recipe for the tacos? We make them from specially selected meat—it's the meat of the relatives of Rey de Moscas. We take the limbs, and the rest is thrown into the cosmic gate behind the temple."
Marcus replied with a nervous smile, "Yes, it's delicious, the best I've ever tasted."
The man responded, "Drink some of the crimson blood wine so you don't choke on the food. Even food can sometimes embody the lurking fear."
End of Chapter