He walks.
Each step Kaelis takes is heavier than the last, not because of his body — but because of what the floor does to the soul. This place doesn't just evoke emotions. It feeds on them. Twists them. Weaponizes them.
Each room he crosses is a new emotional crucible, a theater of inner horror where pain is no longer metaphorical — it is matter, flesh, heat, scent, sound.
Men and women stripped of all sense of self — hunched and twitching, giggling until their lips tear open like rotten fruit, until shattered teeth clatter to the floor like bone dice.
Others, kneeling, trembling before bleeding statues. Icons with faces carved from sorrow and open veins. They murmur confessions, love declarations, pleas for mercy in voices so broken they barely sound human. Every word drips with raw despair, as if the act of speaking flays them alive from the inside.
One man thrusts his face against the idol's bleeding hands, whispering, "Thank you, thank you, I'm sorry, please love me," over and over, lips shredded, tongue raw.
Farther in — people in ecstasy. Smiling wide, eyes dilated with madness, writhing in the grip of illusions that embrace them like lovers. These hallucinations kiss their faces, leaving sticky, corrosive imprints, melting skin away with tenderness. Some people cry out in pleasure, unaware they're being devoured.
Elders crawl on the ground like children, begging forgiveness from no one. Their voices rise and fall like sobbing prayers, as if haunted by the ghosts of choices they can no longer remember.
On this floor, emotions are alive.
They sweat through the walls.
They squirm under the skin.
They slice, sting, and burn.
They are fever.
They are flesh.
They are blades.
At the heart of this emotional hellscape, in the center of a grand chamber, rises a stage — not made of stone, but of arched ribs, as if ripped from the ribcage of some titanic beast. Upon it rests the Crystal Altar, translucent and luminous, pulsing slowly like a wounded heart.
Within the crystal, scenes drift, suspended like memories caught in amber. But these are not fragments from the Dream Realm. They are far more intimate.
They are his.
Kaelis's memories.
Moments from the outside world — real, mundane, and yet sacred in their ordinariness. Each image is a knife, beautiful and cruel.
Before Kaelis can comprehend it fully, the chamber darkens.
The walls pulse once — like a dying breath — and then swallow him whole.
--------------------------------------------------
When he opens his eyes again—
Kaelis is…
…walking down the hallway of his childhood school. The tiles are gray and cheap, the smell of chalk and sweat familiar but suffocating. The hall is filled with echoes — footsteps, slamming lockers, distant laughter. But the laughter is wrong. It doesn't comfort.
It cuts.
It slices through his mind like a razor. Each chuckle is a blade across the skin of his soul.
A sudden shove from behind. He stumbles. Falls.
More laughter.
Mocking. Cruel. Sharp.
He feels warmth on his lips.
Blood.
He lifts his fingers to his face and sees the crimson smear — too real.
And then — he's alone, locked in his room. No more lights. No voices. Just the silence of isolation. The heavy silence that thickens the air like smoke. The rejection of classmates. The weight of their words, their judgment, their scorn. Every look they gave him like a nail driven into his chest.
He remembers wishing it were someone else. Some other boy. Someone with new shoes, someone whose father didn't cry at night, whose mother didn't serve dinner with bruises under her eyes.
He didn't want to be poor.
Didn't want to be a joke.
Didn't want to be himself.
He felt hatred. Deep and ancient — like an old god buried in his chest, awakening.
The rage was so pure it felt divine. A hatred so heavy it nearly tore his sanity apart. It filled every bone. Every breath. A scream building behind his teeth.
And just as it reached the edge of madness—
He was somewhere else.
The dining table.
His mother placing down a cracked plate, hands trembling from exhaustion, but still smiling. Always smiling. Always pretending it was enough.
Then—
The sidewalk. His knee scraped open, gravel embedded in the wound. His father kneeling beside him, hands shaking as he cleaned it with a rag and a whisper of a lullaby Kaelis can no longer remember.
Then—
The silence at dinner, the day before he was taken to the First Nightmare. A silence so suffocating it felt like grief.
His parents' eyes — heavy with unspoken truths. Zoe and Michael crying. Their sadness cutting his soul like a cold knife.
Kaelis felt it all.
Not remembered it.
Felt it.
Every memory not like a flashback, but like possession. Like he was there again, trapped in his own skin, but unable to control his body.
The sorrow.
The helplessness.
The love.
The guilt.
They pressed down on him like gravity, like water filling his lungs.
He felt the weight of smiling when it hurt.
The weight of crying when no one could hear.
The weight of hatred, quiet and unspoken.
It wasn't memory.
It was re-living.
As if an angel had peeled open his mind and let him see and feel himself from above. As if he could hear the soul of every person around him — and it screamed.
Then — darkness.
A shift.
Kaelis opened his eyes again.
He was lying on the floor before the Crystal Altar. Its light flickered erratically now. The floor beneath him — not stone, but flesh, pulsing and veined, wet with blood and bile.
He was covered in it.
His hands, his face, his back — slick with the filth of others' pain. The altar seemed to beat in sync with his heart — too loud, too fast, as if trying to consume him from within.
Kaelis felt something moving inside his chest. Not physically — but emotionally, spiritually. A seed of madness, planted deep in his soul, now sprouting and blooming.
His breath hitched. His vision swam.
And then…
A small smile.
Crooked. Lost. Wrong.
And just like the others in this accursed floor—
Kaelis began to scream.
He screamed until his throat tore.
He laughed, broken and high-pitched, like glass shattering in his mind.
He wept. Not tears — blood. So much blood from his eyes he felt the veins burst. His body convulsed with hatred and grief. The insanity was not a presence now — it was his skin, his breath, his identity.
The Crystal showed him who he was.
And he hated it.
With all that hatred, Kaelis rose.
He saw the dagger — his dagger — lying in the filth.
He grabbed it.
Didn't hesitate.
Stabbed.
Again.
Again.
Mad, furious strikes at the crystal's anchor points, where the delicate transparency met the grotesque altar of flesh. Each stab felt like vengeance. Like he was cutting through the throat of the past.
Blood erupted, warm and thick. It painted his face, his arms, his chest. The floor quaked with every stab. The crystal cracked — shrieked — shattered.
And then…
Like the last breath of a dying god—
Silence.
The screaming stopped.
The faces, the mouths, the voices — all of it gone.
Everything — dead.
The flesh beneath him turned black. Lifeless. Drained. Like it had never been alive at all.
The people?
Dead.
Not just in body — but in spirit.
Kaelis stood still in the aftermath.
Time passed in fragments.
When his mind finally clawed back to awareness, Kaelis looked around.
And walked.
Toward the door at the back of the hall.
His body was a ruin. His clothes soaked in sweat, blood, and tears. His skin marked by cuts, bruises, and burns from the altar's bile. His eyes…
Empty.
But beneath that emptiness, something bled.
His soul.
Something had died here.
Just as surely as something else had awakened.
And in the silence…
A whisper — delicate and cruel — in his ear:
"Now you feel… But do you accept?"
The Heart God.
Its voice coiled through his mind, thick with divine amusement.
But Kaelis didn't stop.
Didn't answer.
He walked.
He ascended, step by step, into the next floor.
His gaze was steel. And his soul…
Was unraveling.
Being destroyed.
Piece by piece.
Floor by floor.
Until whatever was left… would no longer be called "Kaelis" at all.