THE FEAR "[English]"

Chapter nine

The chapter begins precisely where the last left off. Gabriel, bound in iron shackles, was being led forth by the cultists, their faces alight with the grim satisfaction of hunters who had ensnared a most precious prey.

"This offering shall appease the gods for years to come," one of them murmured, his voice thick with reverence.

The driver of the truck, a man with a voice like gravel, chuckled darkly. "Whether he serves as a sacrifice or chooses to join us, it matters little. He is the key to opening the gateway to the entities—so the bishop, Martin, has foreseen."

Gabriel, his body bruised and bloodied, spat a mouthful of crimson upon the ground. He was dragged forward, barely able to keep his footing, yet defiance still burned within him.

"Oh, you wretched bastards… sons of harlots… I have seen your accursed gateway to your false gods. It lies beneath the wretched hovel in the woods—a mural, vast and ancient, not painted but grown into the very stone itself. Nine beings… no, not beings, but nightmares, hewn into the wall in dreadful relief."

"Specifically, from the drawings above them, there were the creatures of the wall. The first was beneath a massive snake, as if it were slithering out of the stone, looking like a black mamba. The second was an octopus, its tentacles extending as if trying to reach them. The third was an angel, but not fully human... The fourth was a skeleton curled around itself, like an eternal prisoner... The fifth was a wolf with empty eyes... The sixth was a ram with twisted horns... The seventh was a bat with torn wings... The eighth was a stone spider, its eyes following you wherever you looked... And the ninth, they weren't sure, but it seemed like the shadow of an orca whale, massive, with deep black eyes."

He coughed, more blood staining his lips.

"There was a crack in the mural," he continued hoarsely, "but I could not pry it open. You waste your time dragging me along."

One of the cultists sneered. "That is because you know not how to wield yourself as the key. Now, cease your prattling and walk."

Gabriel barked a bitter laugh. "Cowards, the lot of you. Even after I surrendered without a fight, you resorted to beating and binding me! What more could one expect from spineless wretches who kneel before gods of illusion? Cowards! Cowards!"

One of them struck him then, the iron cudgel cracking against his ribs.

"Silence, you damned lunatic," the man growled.

Gabriel staggered, but he did not fall.

He moved forward, his feet sinking into the cold mire. His mind reeled, the world tilting precariously—but then, something changed.

At first, it was subtle—a weight in the air, a suffocating density pressing down upon him. Is the dizziness worsening? he thought.

Then the trees began to dissolve.

They did not wither, nor did they burn—they simply ceased to be, as though an unseen force erased them from existence. The snow… the snow did not melt… it was being drawn away as if the very earth was rejecting it.

And then, silence.

The cultists were gone. Their voices, their footsteps—vanished into the void.

Gabriel was falling.

Down, down, down…

There was no ground beneath him, no sky above—only shifting darkness, swallowing him whole. And then, suddenly, he struck something solid—though it was not earth.

He raised his head… and saw the throne.

It was white—pale as ancient bone, its surface adorned with symbols that seemed to slither beneath the marble like living veins. Behind it loomed a colossal Masonic pyramid, at its apex an unblinking eye, its gaze piercing his very essence.

And upon the throne, It sat.

A faceless entity, its elongated neck concealing a void of utter blackness beneath a priestly shroud of alabaster. In one hand, it cradled an ornate box, adorned with a crimson cross. In the other, it held a whip, the leather frayed and stained with filth.

At Its feet knelt two figures—a scarred demon, crimson and wretched, and a pale-skinned imp, unclothed, upon whose back was branded the symbol of the crescent moon. They knelt, heads bowed low, awaiting their judgment.

The entity upon the throne did not acknowledge Gabriel.

Yet when It spoke, Its voice did not come from Its form, nor did It deign to address him directly. Instead, the words seeped into the void, into the very fabric of reality itself:

"Get off. Get even. Get off me, you killer."

Then, silence.

A silence so thick, so crushing, it was as though the universe itself had been smothered beneath a shroud of ice, waiting for the first crack to break it.

Gabriel could not move.

He could not even draw breath.

---

After a grueling two-day march, the cultists finally reached their destination—a cathedral, long forgotten, nestled within the accursed mountains known to those few who dared whisper their name as the Madness Peaks.

It was a vast structure, eerily grand for so desolate a place. As Gabriel was dragged inside, his senses reeled at the infernal spectacle before him.

Colossal paintings adorned the walls, eldritch and terrible. Among them were entities he recognized—such as the Whisperer in the Darkness, depicted as a gargantuan, winged ghoul with the horns of a devil and the writhing appendages of an octopus protruding from its chin. Upon its abdomen was inscribed a pentagram, pulsing as though alive.

Another depicted a being of shadow, a draconic form wrought from darkness itself, crowned with a sun held aloft in his hand . Despite its bestial appearance, it stood unnaturally tall upon two legs, its posture eerily human. Its eyes were voids—empty, endless—and its maw, agape in a silent scream, bore teeth, unlike any beast of the earth. They were swords—long, cruel, as though forged for slaughter, and His mouth, which was a void of darkness, contained numerous stars, black holes, and more than one moon.

And in the corner, another painting caught his eye.

A woman—exquisite in her beauty, yet terrible in her presence. She was clad in a flowing black dress and a Victorian-style hat, her visage painted in ghostly white. Black kohl smudged her eyes, beneath which two inverted crosses had been drawn. Her lips, adorned with dark grey lipstick, stretched into a bat-like shape that extended to her cheeks. A crimson skull pendant hung at her throat, and from beneath the shadows of her hat, her eyes glowed—a piercing, scarlet red.

Beneath the painting, a single inscription:

"The Fairest in the Cosmos—Mistress of Witches, Erkantha."

Before these dreadful effigies, throngs of slaves knelt in ceaseless devotion. What manner of existence is this? Gabriel thought. To live in perpetual terror, to surrender one's soul to a false hope in exchange for the mere illusion of safety…

Yet the horrors did not cease.

As he was turned, his gaze fell upon a scene of unspeakable carnage—children, crucified upon inverted crosses, their small bodies mutilated, their heads severed. Others, still alive, were caged in golden prisons, awaiting their turn. They wept, their cries lost amidst the madness.

Gabriel, his voice raw with fury, spat at the cultists.

"You monstrous cowards! Where is your humanity, you vile whoresons?"

They gagged him with a cloth and bound him to a golden cross, driving rusted nails through his hands and feet. Agony surged through him, his screams muffled as his blood mingled with the filth-strewn floor.

Then, they doused him in a bucket of blood—thick, clotted, the lifeblood of the innocent.

Gabriel's mind reeled.

And then—again—the world crumbled.

The church, the children, the cultists, the blood—all vanished.

Reality itself was being erased.

And once more, he was falling.

Suddenly, there was nothing.

No light, no sound, not even darkness—only an abyssal void, infinite and unyielding, as though existence itself had been cast beyond the outermost borders of reality.

Then… there was the fall.

It was not a mere descent, but a plummet into the unknown, an unholy spiral into a place where reason held no dominion. His stomach twisted, yet no wind rushed against his form—there was no air, no resistance, only the dreadful certainty that his very essence was being drawn toward some eldritch and unfathomable fate.

Then, he struck the ground.

Opening his eyes, he found himself sprawled upon an ancient wooden staircase—dust-laden, fractured with time's relentless decay, its very presence anathema to logic. It neither ascended nor descended but stretched into infinity, coiling upon itself in impossible configurations, as though the very laws of geometry had been discarded in this accursed place.

Beneath his feet, skulls lay in grotesque profusion.

Not dozens, nor hundreds, but thousands—nay, an innumerable multitude, a grotesque ossuary amassed into a mountain of shattered humanity. Hollow sockets gazed at him with an accusatory stillness, as though bearing witness to his intrusion. Some yet bore the remnants of desiccated flesh, a morbid testament to a death unfinished, a lingering ruin of lives long forsaken.

Something stirred within the darkness.

Lifting his gaze, he beheld the motion of skeletal forms.

They were not wholly bereft of animation. Some stood, eerily motionless, their empty sockets fixed upon him in a silent and unnerving vigilance. Others meandered along the stairway without apparent purpose, their trajectories unknown, their destinations unknowable. Some knelt, heads bowed, whispering in voices too faint to hear, as though engaged in supplication to an ineffable and unspeakable deity.

But the most terrifying of them all stood at the summit.

It was different.

No mere skeleton was this, but a thing wreathed in an infernal blaze—its bones aglow with a searing crimson light, as if forged from smoldering embers. Fromsmolderingutted tattered wings, vestiges of a bat-like form, burned and ruined as though they had once spanned the heavens and been cast into oblivion. In its grasp, it bore a rusted axe, its edge dulled by the ravages of time, yet exuding an unmistakable aura of annihilation, as though a single stroke would suffice to rend him asunder.

Then… it began to sing.

"Heeeeey Meysoon s Aliens for yeah aehAliensvoice was neither mere sound nor melody but something far worse—a hideous symphony of laughter and weeping, of whispers and shrieks, of wrath and ecstasy. It did not echo in the air alone but resonated within his very being, embedding itself in the marrow of his bones, a creeping intrusion into the sanctity of thought itself.

The sound reverberated through the stairway, through his mind, through all that was. He willed himself to flee, yet his form remained transfixed, ensnared within the nightmare's embrace.

And then… he fell once more.

Reality convulsed, unraveling at its seams. The skulls crumbled into nothingness; the bones disintegrated; the staircase shattered as if it had never been more than a cruel jest in the mind of some malign architect. Everything collapsed into the void, and he was not spared.

His body plunged into the abyss.

This time, the descent was not silent.

A force unrelenting dragged him downward, the winds howling in a cacophony of madness, his form twisting and tumbling as though robbed of weight, of substance, of being. He screamed, yet the abyss swallowed his cries, as though existence itself had no ear to hear them.

Then… he beheld the light.

It was no earthly illumination.

A spectral argent radiance, colder than the grave and more unyielding than death, shone upon a surface of gleaming metal, reflecting and refracting in a manner both hypnotic and unnatural. Yet there was no time to comprehend, for the fall ceased with cruel abruptness, and he stood before something that defied all expectation.

A woman.

She stood in the gloom, her argent armor catching and distorting the feeble luminescence, as though woven from the very fabric of the cosmos. Her eyes—abysses of frozen oceans, vast and inscrutable—held no warmth, only the quietude of a distant, unknowable depth. Her raven-black tresses cascaded over her shoulders, gleaming faintly, as though absorbing the ambient glow of this forsaken domain.

She bore a sword of monstrous proportions, its grip encased in an armored gauntlet, fingers clenched with the unrelenting resolve of one who has awaited this moment since time immemorial.

Gabriel needed no further revelation to discern her identity.

"Rose?"

His voice wavered—a confluence of astonishment, confusion, and some nameless, lingering hope. She stood there, precisely as he remembered her, precisely as she had haunted his dreams and nightmares alike. A single step forward—an impulse to reach for her, to affirm that she was no mere phantasm, no cruel trick of this unreal domain.

Yet her gaze remained barren, devoid of recognition or warmth.

Then… her sword ignited.

Not with flames of mortal kindling, but with an eerie, glacial conflagration—blue and spectral, as though frost itself had learned to burn. And though the fire was cold, he felt it, felt its impossible heat crawling through the marrow of his bones.

In the blink of an eye, she was upon him.

There was no time to flee.

The azure blaze plunged into his chest, cleaving through his very heart and flooding his veins with a talent beyond mortal comprehension. It was no mere wound—it was an unraveling, a cosmic rift within him, an agony that transcended the physical, as if some ancient force had reached into his soul and set it aflame.

Rose leaned closer, her voice a whisper of glacial dread:

"Is fire… I know he burns inside."

Then, all burns are lost to oblivion.

Gabriel awoke, bound upon the cross, his laughter pealing through the accursed chamber in a fit of maddened hysteria—laughter unhinged, laughter that echoed the howling void itself.

The cultists gathered around, their eyes alight with a fervor most profane.

"What a psychopath," one murmured, as another raised his voice in exaltation.

"We shall offer the Devil himself to our Goddess, brethren!"

As Gabriel was drawn inexorably toward his accursed fate, a sudden breach in the fabric of existence erupted before him—a sorcerous rift, a fracture in the dimensions. And within it, adrift in the void of the infinite, loomed a visage most dreadful, a being whose countenance was known to him.

It was the cosmic entity… Zulish.

The skeletal horror gazed upon him, and with a voice like the grinding of worlds, it spoke:

"What is this laugh, mortal? Have you ever considered becoming truly evil?"

A sudden intervention from his heavenly being

End of the chapter

--- to beee continued