Chapter 41

  The Raven

  The raven, from my perspective, is the most beautiful creature on the planet. The raven, ladies and gentlemen, is the embodiment of every genius in this world. The raven is the inevitable fate, the wretched life, the omen, the beauty. The raven is a solitary, psychopathic creature that adores black things—a being born of darkness and to darkness it belongs. It thirsts to witness evil and blood.

  The raven is so intelligent that it comprehends things it shouldn’t. Just an animal like any other, yet it exists in a world teeming with foolish creatures and marginalized, impoverished beings the world cares nothing about. The First World claims: The raven should not understand this. It should not grasp this. It should not be this intelligent. It cannot possibly write something like this. Of course, an aristocratic creature beloved by the First World helped craft its legacy.

  The raven was born to be foolish, condemned to symbolize misfortune and fear, destined for loneliness. But they do not know that the raven possesses an incomprehensible intelligence. It carries the universe within its skull—science, beliefs, ideas, psychopathic philosophies, a thirst for blood, a love for horror and death, the scent of graves, and vast knowledge of space and Earth that makes humans act as if it were an Outsider.

  Let’s be realistic, ladies and gentlemen. The raven is just a bird. Why all this hatred toward it? Why do you forbid it from flying? I believe you know what the raven represents in our world. Perhaps you’ve been told what the Gunslinger and the Witch symbolize—but the raven is unique. The raven is Edgar Allan Poe. It is also every brilliant mind marginalized by racism.

  And the raven in our horrifying tale is Gabriel Sunderland. He has been the true Outsider since childhood. From the beginning of his story until now, Gabriel could not bear the world he lived in—and still cannot, even after learning the truth, after knowing everything, after becoming the most intelligent of humans. Yet, he remains the saddest of them all.

  No one could ever love him—not his brother, not his father, not the teachers at his cursed school, not the aunt who cast him aside, not even his mother. They could not love him, or perhaps they could not even see him.

  He was always rolling the dice, hoping for something other than the number one—but he always got the number one. Perhaps the number one did not signify his failure, but rather that he was the only one—the rejected Outsider. Perhaps the number one indicated something, a truth Gabriel had not yet grasped: that he exists as the only one in the oceans, the continents, the planet, the galaxy, the galaxies. There is no other living being like him in this vast universe—if he is even alive at all. This is what Gabriel has not yet realized, though he has come very close to understanding it.

  ---

  The chapter begins with Gabriel wearing a silver cloak covering his face, walking across frozen lakes and through snow-laden trees trembling in the fierce wind. Fog shrouded the scene before him as he walked, unsure of where he was going, filled with doubt, fear, suspicion, sorrow, and thoughts of the future. *Will what comes next be the depths of darkness, or will this darkness become paradise?* he wondered as he continued onward, heading toward the place where all his suffering began—where he reached the peak of sorrow, psychopathy, introversion, mental exhaustion, and loneliness. He was moving toward his cursed fate, toward the place that called to him, toward the unerasable curse.

  He walked through the heart of the snowstorm, the wind nearly tearing his cloak away as two ravens circled above him and a white owl hooted from the trees. Gabriel was heading toward the Witches' House.

  Bats perched on the doorway as Gabriel entered. The door creaked open with a horrifying screech, revealing a scene that would chill the bones. There sat the Undead—or the God of Fear, Zolish—on the bed, his cloak and mouth drenched in blood. He was devouring two little girls.

  Their skin was pale, drained of blood, their long hair tied in ponytails. Their color was a faint yellow, their eyes red. One of them was four years old—he was gnawing on her head with his sharp teeth, slowly tearing through her skull to feast on her brain. The other girl lay discarded in a cage, hugging a red serpent as if it were her only friend. Her eyes were cold, devoid of passion, waiting her turn in the cosmic entity’s stomach.

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  Gabriel, furious as he took in the gruesome sight before him, demanded:

  "What are you doing here? How did you bring humans here? You are the cause of everything! You are the one shrouded in all the mystery and questions. You are the monster! How do you alter your size as you please—sometimes standing millions of kilometers tall, yet now you’re the same height as me? And why do you keep lying to me? Where is my wish—the one you promised me?"

  ---

  Zolish smiled a strange smile, blood dripping from his mouth, and placed his bony finger on Gabriel’s lips, whispering:

  "Shhhhhhh... Am I not you? Did I not tell you that you would become my personal servant, Sebastian? I only choose creatures who resemble my essence to transform into... this."

  Gabriel was struck with shock, staggering back slightly as he began to sweat profusely, his eyes trembling.

  Gabriel responded nervously, sweating, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly agape—his ears unable to comprehend or process what he had just heard.

  "Huh...??"

  Now, this was exactly the same way—

  Then Zolish began to cackle, laughing sinisterly—*"Hahahahahaha!"*—as he stepped back, spreading both arms wide, green fire erupting from his skeletal body. His laughter grew more horrifying—"HAHAHAHAHA!"*—as the flames intensified, his grin widening further. He stretched his arms out even wider, stepping back and laughing like a true psychopath.

  Then, the surroundings began to transform into utter darkness. Colors vanished—the witches' house dissolved, the ground beneath them faded, everything plunged into blackness. Zolish himself began to disappear gradually into the shadows, engulfed by a creeping green mist, the sound of ocean waves whispering before he vanished completely. His final word echoed:

  _"FALL."

  And then, Gabriel began to fall.

  ---

  Into the void.

  Into the abyss.

  Falling toward eternal damnation, toward the truth, toward his fate, toward the revelation of meaning.

  This was not a fall—it was a collapse into nothingness. Gabriel’s body was no longer tangible, yet he felt everything around him, as if the void itself was trying to devour his soul. Indistinct voices, overlapping whispers, muffled screams reverberated through unseen spaces, as if erupting from the depths of his own being, gnawing at his mind like worms feasting on his very thoughts.

  And then... the vision appeared before him.

  A monstrous entity, so horrifying that its mere existence drained all color from reality, turning everything into a fixed nightmare. Its eyes were hollow, yet they pulsed with a hellish glow—like black holes simultaneously devouring hope and sanity. Its face was a grotesque fusion of god and demon, its beard not made of hair but of tangled corpses, dead heads staring with upside-down eyes, their mouths muttering words from lost, dead languages.

  The beast clenched the head of a frail man in its grip, toying with its prey before consumption. Its fingers were not fingers—but twisting, serpentine claws, slithering into the man’s skull, embedding themselves in his flesh, slowly burrowing inward.

  Then... the monster opened its maw.

  ---

  It was wider than it should have been—as if its head had reconfigured itself to accommodate this monstrous maw. Its tongue slithered out like a ravenous worm, writhing in the air, dripping thick saliva that smoked with toxicity. Its teeth were not teeth, but shattered bone fragments, and the depths of its throat stretched into nothingness—into something never meant to be seen.

  The man’s face was a mirror of agony. His eyes were not staring—they were being *pulled inward*, his eyelids torn, his mouth gaping in a soundless scream. His skin melted slowly, turning to green ash, dissolving into the void as if he had never existed at all.

  The sky behind them was no sky.

  It was a shredded tapestry of overlapping realms devouring one another, of collapsing galaxies made of floating skulls, their eyes burning with black fire. The moon was a face—distorted, split open, a single eye watching, cracked lips trembling in a voiceless laugh, as if mocking everything—Gabriel, humanity, existence itself.

  Then the beast began to laugh.

  A laugh that was not a laugh.

  A strangled scream, a tremor in the fabric of reality, a vibration that made everything feel on the verge of tearing apart. The laughter came from *everywhere*—from the walls of space, from the air itself, from inside Gabriel’s bones—filling him with an icy shudder, a terror that refused to fade.

  Then the entity spoke, its voice shaking the very marrow of existence, its eyes slowly turning toward him:

  *"You are not human. You are the Hunter of Darkness."*

  And still, Gabriel fell.

  Fell beyond nothingness.

  Fell where no return existed.

  ---

  Then, Gabriel stopped falling.

  He found himself drifting slowly into a dimension of pure white. He stood on his feet, walking through this blank world, only to see Zolish—the God of Fear—hovering in the void. In one hand, he held black fire; in the other, a star the size of our sun, shrunk by his power.

  He turned to Gabriel and commanded:

  "Freeze."

  And Gabriel froze.

  His eyes turned black.

  The white dimension around him began to burn—black flames mixed with crimson, yet they did not consume him.

  Zolish descended, his black cloak billowing, his eyes now a piercing blue. This undead creature was terror incarnate. As he walked, the white dimension quaked, spacetime itself trembling under his footsteps. It seemed Zolish had stopped restraining his power—even slightly.

  He spoke to Gabriel, his voice radiating immense arcane energy, a cosmic mix of all celestial colors:

  Before time existed... before anything existed... there was the Void. And before the Void you endlessly fall through... there were the Old Ones."

  In that moment, Gabriel could see them—all the cosmic entities.

  The Whisperers in the Dark. Irakanta. The Seraphim. The Dreadful Spider. Cthulhu. Beings beyond comprehension. Even Demofsy Tempest was there.

  But one was missing.

  The Shadow Devil—?ě.

  Zolish spoke with chilling certainty:

  "Do you know?"* His voice did not align with any human language.

  "There is one being... whose name none of us dare even think. But it is here... beyond our reach, even in this place, in this time."

  And in that moment—when even the faintest trace of this being faded—the terror eclipsed anything a human mind could fathom.

  ---

  End of the chapter