The void, vast and choking, bore down upon him. The weight of something silent pressed hard against his skull. There was nothing, and yet everything seemed to watch him. Eyes—he couldn't see them, but he felt them, crawling beneath his skin, probing the cracks of his mind, slipping into the spaces between thoughts. The door loomed before him. A door, here? A place of nothingness?
He had no memory of how he came to this place, in fact his mind was devoid of any thoughts at all. He only knew the door, the heavy, silent door. There was only this place—this wretched, maddening liminality, and the sensation that he was not alone. This door... it was calling him. It called him with need. It beckoned not with promise, but with demand. Its surface etched with patterns too intricate to follow. These lines twisted upon themselves, forming shapes that hinted at faces, figures, beings whose names were long forgotten. And above all, two faces—one serene, the other twisted in torment—gazed down upon him from the door's crest, their expressions frozen in eternal watchfulness.
The wood was worn, not by age, but by use. It felt alive in its own way, almost as though it had been... touched. No, more than touched. Handled. Violated. There were no markings, but still, the surface felt strange. Cold and slick, yet splintered and sharp, as though it could cut just by being near it. His fingers softly pressed against the wood, causing his hand to slowly bleed from his palm.
His fingers moved, trembling, drawn by an unseen force. The silver handle gleamed. The unseen force was pushing him to open the door. The door whispered to him in ways that words couldn't, its presence gnawing at his sanity. What was behind this door? Salvation? A death worse than any other? A new chance at life? What was happening? Why was he even here? So many questions, no answers.
Behind him, there was nothing. No air, no floor, no light—nothing but the pressure of being. He tried to remember something—anything—from before. But there was only the door. Always the door. No other option would ever come to him, he would have to open the door sooner or later.
The floor beneath him shifted, a checkerboard of black and white squares that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions. The walls, if they were truly walls, rose from the ground, towering high. They were a deep, unsettling shade of purple, veins of black ran through them like cracks, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm, a heartbeat for a room that had no life of its own. The longer he stood there, the more the walls seemed to close in, their shadows creeping, grasping, like tendrils eager to claim him.
There was no sound when the handle turned, no creak or groan of wood. Only the stillness of the void, and the soft exhale of breath he hadn't known he was holding.