Dr. Malcolm Greaves awoke to find himself spiraling downward, sinking through a dark so thick it felt like liquid, its weight pressing into his skin, squeezing him into a shape he didn’t recognize. He reached out, but his hands met nothing, only the endless weight of shadow as he plunged deeper into the pitch.
Then, light — a single, blinding point, far below. It was strange, a shimmer of spectral color that fractured as he fell toward it, splitting into shades and shapes, revealing itself as a thousand glistening surfaces, mirrors within mirrors, prisms cut at impossible angles. Greaves felt his vision splitting, his mind stretched thin across layers of images — a cascade of faces, landscapes, eyes, countless eyes — all peering back at him with a terrible, unblinking clarity.
And he knew, somehow, that this was Hell.
But Hell was unlike any he’d ever imagined, a place less of fire than of sight. He found himself on a vast, reflective plain, the ground like polished glass that twisted and bent beneath his feet, forming warped reflections of himself and other figures — shadowy forms, eyeless men who walked with unnatural confidence, seeing without seeing. These figures loomed everywhere, slipping between mirrors, leaving no ripples as they moved, their heads cocked as if observing some hidden horizon.
Ahead, enormous kilns bubbled with thick, viscous tar, optical black that rippled like oil but gleamed with flashes of spectral light. Greaves peered into one of the tar pits and saw his own face staring back, split and refracted, endlessly multiplied, each expression etched with terror, confusion, fury, grief.
“Aye, ye lookin’ for the lost ones?” came a voice behind him, thin and reedy, as though spoken from the other side of a wall. Greaves turned to see a figure draped in ragged robes, its face obscured by shadow, one hand stretched forward. “Them ye left to burn, to writhe, aye?”
“I didn’t… I couldn’t save them,” Greaves stammered, feeling the weight of his failure. “They were damned already…”
“Aren’t we all?” The figure chuckled, its mouth stretching into a grin that revealed teeth like broken glass. “Down here, souls are shattered — every last bit, seen and unseen, stretched across mirrors till all ye are is a ghost in glass.”
Greaves looked down and saw the reflection of his own eyes in the mirrored ground, though the face staring back was not his own. It was that of the blind man, his grin wide, mocking, an echo from the living world twisted now into something eternal.
“Go,” the figure rasped, gesturing toward a distant horizon, where an obsidian tower loomed, its edges blurred and shimmering. “Forge what ye can. Down here, even salvation needs a sharp edge.”
He walked, trudging through optical fog, his steps echoing in the vast emptiness. Around him, the eyeless figures glided with ease, some holding strange objects — a polished lens, a cracked mirror, a splinter of glass they clutched as if it held all their memories. The air was thick with the acrid scent of burning film, like old celluloid catching fire.
Greaves came to a pit where half-molten glass oozed from a fractured lens embedded in the ground, casting fractured shadows that twisted in impossible angles. With trembling hands, he reached down, shaping the glass, the heat scalding his palms. He forged it slowly, feeling his own thoughts bend as he worked, the glass hardening into a crude, jagged blade that shimmered with a pale, unholy light.
But as he gripped the blade, a dizziness overtook him, the mirrors around him warping, revealing endless corridors of lives he’d never lived, people he’d never met, each face flickering in and out of focus. The figures, the eyeless men, turned toward him, mouths stretching wide, though no sound emerged. His own face was reflected in their empty eyes, twisted and distorted, hollowed out by the endless reflections.
“Ye think ye can save them?” came the reedy voice again, though this time it was sharper, crueler, cutting through the haze. “Save ‘em from what? We are all reflections down here, all mere echoes of who we once were.”
Greaves staggered, clutching his blade, his vision splitting again, and he saw a decrepit figure hobbling toward him, a skeleton draped in tattered robes, its face a ruin of bone and shadow. In one skeletal hand, it held a blunt, rusted pencil, its end worn down to a jagged nub.
“Come here, Greaves,” the figure rasped, its voice like gravel grinding against glass. “Hold still.”
Greaves tried to pull away, but the figure grabbed his arm with a strength that defied its fragile frame, dragging the pencil across his flesh, carving a cross into his skin with slow, deliberate strokes. Each line burned, the pain intense, as though his very soul were being marked, branded.
“Only way out,” the skeleton muttered, its hollow eyes fixed on the mark it had made. “This cross — it’s the tether, the link. Without it, ye’d be lost here forever, like the others.”
Greaves gasped, feeling the pain radiate through him, but the mark gave him a clarity he hadn’t known before. The mirrors around him shimmered, the images twisting, shifting, until the reflective plain dissolved, morphing into something new.
He found himself in a vast, sprawling field, but it was not empty. Rows upon rows of graves stretched as far as he could see, each headstone carved from glass, each one glistening in the dim, spectral light. As he moved closer, he saw that each grave held a projector, its lens pointed skyward, casting faint, ghostly images into the air.
In every image, lives unfolded — fractured scenes, glimpses of strangers’ lives, laughter, grief, fury, all tangled together in a chaotic tapestry of existence. Each projector fed into the next, overlapping in endless grids, casting shadows that shifted and merged, like echoes rebounding across eternity.
Greaves felt a deep, unnamable sorrow well up within him. This was a place where memory was eternal, yet fractured, scattered across lives, across souls, like pieces of a puzzle that could never be whole.
In his hand, he felt the weight of a pair of scissors, small and sharp, their silver blades glinting in the dim light. And there, on a cracked reel, he saw his own life, played out in fragments, overlapping with others, twisting into something unrecognizable. He lifted the scissors, feeling the weight of the choice, the temptation to cut through the reel, to sever the endless web of memory and reflection.
If he could cut it, destroy it, then maybe he could escape, maybe he could end it all.
The scissors hovered above the film, trembling in his grip. He could see his own reflection in the blade, fractured, haunted, the face of a man who had seen too much, who had become lost in the endless maze of mirrors and memories.
And as he stood there, poised to sever the threads, he felt a tooth loosen, sliding from his gums. He spat it out, staring at the blood-streaked shard in his palm, feeling a strange terror grip him. Another tooth loosened, then another, each one falling, clattering to the ground as he tried to steady himself.
Through the haze, he saw a mirror standing alone among the graves, a single phrase scrawled upon it in trembling, jagged letters:
Ye can never leave.
His vision blurred, the words twisting, and he felt his teeth fall faster, his mouth an empty hollow, his body fading, slipping into the endless grid of lives, of memories, until he was nothing but another reflection, another shadow lost in the endless web of Hell.