Tales
THE WAREHOUSE
Two years.
Or maybe more.
He was no longer sure.
The warehouse stretched before him like a dead world. A room that wasn’t a room: an infinite expanse of metallic floor and eroded walls, tall as mountains, showing no sign of any boundary. The ceiling vanished into a gray mist, illuminated by gigantic lamps that neither turned on nor off—they simply remained, like blind eyes watching. The ground was uneven, littered with debris: remnants of corroded machines, fossilized skeletons of creatures that perhaps had never been human, cables dragging like dried entrails.
He walked. Always walked. His feet ached, his muscles burned, but he stopped only to sleep among the wreckage, eating whatever he could tear from parasitic organisms growing in the metal’s cracks. Each step was the same step, repeated endlessly. And still, he never reached the end.
The warehouse did not end.
It never ended.
At first, he believed a week would be enough to cross that space. Then months. Now years. And the sensation remained the same: the horizon never grew closer, as if he were condemned to an eternity of walking inside a single corridor.
He was not alone.
Not really.
Sometimes, in the shadows cast by the cyclopean beams, something moved. A figure that never fully revealed itself, but was always there, following him. He heard footsteps beyond his own, as if the echo had a will of its own. He felt the breath of something near, brushing against his neck, even when nothing was there.
And, from time to time, the voice.
— You are such a silly spirit.
The sentence echoed inside his mind, as if it didn’t come from outside but from within his own consciousness. A scream without a throat—mocking, childish, and cruel.
He didn’t answer. He never answered. He only quickened his pace, knowing that even if he ran until his lungs burst, the end of the warehouse would not come.
The creatures appeared like detours within the nightmare.
Elongated bodies fused to the walls’ metal, writhing when they sensed his scent. Mouthless faces emitting high-pitched sounds, like blades scraping glass. Some tried to crawl toward him, slow and too heavy to move quickly; others emerged suddenly from cracks in the floor, attacking with claws made of broken bones. He learned to kill them, to flee, to endure. But he never learned to get used to the screams that echoed after each encounter, as if the corridors themselves retained the memory of violence.
Sometimes, the space changed.
The ground collapsed into massive blocks, revealing lower levels of the same warehouse—perfect copies of what lay above, stretching once again out of sight. Colossal stairways descended to platforms suspended over the void. Side corridors appeared only to end in dead ends, as if mocking him.
And always, the shadow followed.
Always, the voice screamed, slicing through his skull like a blade:
— Silly spirit!
Sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t true. If that entire journey was nothing but some absurd punishment for a lost soul, condemned to wander endlessly, stumbling over deformed creatures and pursued by a mocking reflection of himself.
The warehouse was not merely physical space.
It was a prison of time.
An architecture that did not end, did not begin, and had no meaning at all.
And still, he walked.
One step.
Then another.
Always another.
With his eyes fixed on the horizon that never came, knowing that at any moment, the shadow would laugh again at his misery.
And he would hear it.
And he would not answer.
And he would continue.
Because stopping was impossible.
LOST IN THE CORE
They were twelve. Twelve consciousnesses torn from the simulation, stripped of the illusion of streets, houses, and artificial skies. They awoke amid absolute silence, still dazed by the sensation of dismantling: memories dissolved into fragments, like shattered glass in millions of pieces that could never be reassembled.
There was no guide.
No Ethereans, no Triquetosferians.
The crossing happened abruptly—and when they realized it, they were already standing on a platform suspended over the void.
The chamber they emerged into had no ceiling. Nor a floor, at least not in the human sense of the word. Below them, endless abysses of colossal gears turned slowly, like the organs of a living machine. Walls rose until they disappeared into darkness, made of corroded metal that looked damp, pulsating, as if breathing.
The silence weighed so heavily that some nearly went mad immediately. It was a silence that vibrated inside the mind, muffling thoughts, crushing any attempt at reasoning.
During the first days, they wandered aimlessly. Each corridor opened into ramps of impossible length, each door hurled them into halls so vast it took weeks to cross them. Time lost meaning; there was no night or day, only the dim light emanating from the walls like intestinal glow.
Terror came quickly.
In the second week, the noises began: metallic snaps running through the corridors, like bones breaking. Distorted voices echoing between columns, calling them by names none of them remembered having. Sometimes, when they glanced back, they saw translucent bodies following them, imitating their movements with grotesque delay, like reflections in a deformed mirror.
The first creature found them while they rested beneath a tilted beam.
It was a humanoid mass, but distorted: gray flesh sewn to rusted blades, arms multiplying at absurd angles, each hand replaced by mouths instead of fingers. From its open abdomen protruded black tubes that sucked and expelled a thick liquid spreading across the ground like contaminated blood.
It didn’t run. It only watched them, tilting its head in violent spasms, until one of the twelve—desperate—attacked with a metal bar ripped from the floor.
The battle lasted hours. Each strike tore both flesh and machine, yet the creature reformed before their eyes, as if made from the very space around it. When it finally dissolved into a dark foam, they understood:
Nothing died in Ordiman.
Everything only transformed.
Then came others.
Transparent metal arachnids with visible, pulsing viscera, beating like multiple hearts.
Serpentine entities sliding along the walls, opening vertical mouths that stretched down to the abdomen, spitting human voices that were not their own.
Shapeless masses crawling across the ceiling, dripping hot fluid that burned on contact.
But the worst was not seeing them.
The worst was when nothing happened.
The silence between encounters was filled with hallucinations.
False memories projected before their eyes: cities that had never existed, families that weren’t theirs, languages they had never learned yet somehow understood. Familiar voices called to them from within the walls—and sometimes came with laughter.
In the fourth season, they lost the first. Corridors closed like jaws behind two members of the group, swallowing them with no trace. No screams—only the echo of metal compressing.
The survivors realized, with growing horror, that Ordiman was not merely a prison. It was a mind.
Every step, every fear, every reaction was absorbed by the walls. The space shaped itself according to their terror, responding to it, creating creatures increasingly intimate, closer to their personal memories.
One of them—Charn—swore that his mother followed him, walking behind the group. She had been dead for decades, but her soft, dragging voice repeated endlessly:
“You haven’t woken up yet, my son.
This is not the end.
This is the beginning.”
No one dared to turn around.
Because deep down, they all knew that seeing would mean going insane.
Months passed.
Twelve became eight. Then five.
What remained of them was no longer human. Their bodies did not need food, yet they felt hunger. They didn’t need water, yet thirst consumed them. Their spirits were pulled, molded, bent with every new room.
Ordiman was devouring them slowly—not their flesh, but their minds.
And so they continued.
Walking through living corridors, fighting impossible forms, crossing the belly of a consciousness that knew no mercy.
In the silence between steps, they all knew:
There were no Ethereans, no Triquetosferians.
Salvation would never come.
There was only them.
And Ordiman.
And Ordiman continued.
Always continued.
THE PRAGUE LIBRARY
In the old city of Prague, surrounded by Gothic towers and stone streets, lived Marek Kovár, a man in his fifties, a retired philosophy professor. He was a methodical man, known for drinking his coffee at the same time every day and for his long walks on the Charles Bridge.
But since his wife’s death, Marek had withdrawn from the world. He spent almost every day inside his narrow house near the Jewish Quarter, surrounded by books.
Neighbors said the house was silent, but on certain nights, they saw flickering lights in the high windows, as if candles were burning everywhere.
One rainy afternoon, Marek found a strange book at an antique market. Its cover was worn leather, with no title. The pages were filled with symbols, lines, and words in languages he partially recognized: Latin, Greek, but also something that seemed invented.
The vendor, an old man with an empty gaze, said only:
— This book has found you.
Marek took it home.
With time, he became obsessed.
The pages spoke of Cosma, of an energy sustaining every layer of existence; of the Triquetosphere, a realm above material reality; and of the Psychosphere, a collective mental zone where all consciousness intersected.
Marek began copying passages into notebooks, trying to decipher the symbols. He scribbled diagrams on loose sheets, taping them to the office walls. Every dawn, he wrote feverishly, as if something dictated the words through him.
— There is hereditary knowledge hidden in every mind, he whispered to himself. And these books are the key.
As months passed, he ate little, slept little. His face thinned, and his eyes acquired a feverish glow.
Neighbors heard strange sounds from inside the house. Not music or voices, but deep vibrations, like iron columns resonating beneath the floor.
Once, a neighbor swore she saw Marek sitting rigidly in the middle of the living room, surrounded by piles of open books. His eyes were half-open, but glowing, reflecting a light that came from nowhere.
On a cold November morning, Marek was not seen. The front door was unlocked.
Inside, the scene looked prepared for an ending.
Every bookshelf had been emptied, the books arranged in a circle across the floor. At the center, a massive diagram was painted directly onto the wooden boards, with three words written in thick letters:
“COSMA – TRIQUETOSPHERE – PSYCHOSPHERE.”
On the table, a single notebook lay open. Inside, the last entry:
“Tonight, the Egiosphere dissolves.
They are waiting.
I’m going through.”
Marek was gone.
No clothes, no body, no footprints in the snow around the house.
The police were called. They turned the entire library upside down, catalogued the books. Nothing explained how a man could simply vanish inside his own home.
Days later, one of the investigators, alone in the office, decided to read one of the seized books. He spent hours hypnotized by the words. Until, in a deep silence, he heard something.
A whisper—not from the air, but from within himself:
“We are here.”