The scream didn't stop at sound.
It went in.
Not like a blade slicing flesh or bone, but more like an invisible scalpel separating thoughts from one another, smashing ideas together until everything collapsed into a distorted echo that filled me from the inside — like someone had struck the core of my mind hard enough to crack who I was into fragments that no longer fit.
The ground didn't give way.I did.
It wasn't just my legs or the weight of my body tipping over — it was something deeper. A forced surrender, an internal defeat, as if my pride had been drained out of me without warning. The pain was secondary. The weakness, inevitable. But the worst part was the silence right after — that suspended moment where I realized he was inside. The Whisperer. And he could feel.
He felt what I wanted to hide.He felt what I denied.He felt that, behind the bravado, the sharp words, the curated sarcasm, there was something terribly fragile and unresolved: a man desperate to prove he was stronger than the things slowly dismantling him from within.
I couldn't fight back — not physically, not emotionally — and what hurt the most was realizing that, in that moment, I wasn't resisting for survival. I was resisting for pride. For vanity.
Because I needed to be the guy who endures.The one who never lets anyone in.Who shows nothing.Who knows when to pull back and how to control every variable.
But there, on that broken stairwell, surrounded by ruins that whispered ancient memories, facing a creature warping reality without even raising its voice, I found myself stripped of the one thing that ever made me feel in control: my narrative.
It wasn't just fear.
It was humiliation.
My fingers trembled, useless. My jaw was locked, my breath reduced to shallow spasms. I tried to recall a spell, a plan, anything — but everything came up shredded, disjointed, like someone had scrambled my thoughts for fun and thrown them back into my head.
No logic.No clarity.Just weight.
The weight of being seen from the inside out.Unprepared.Undefended.Without consent.
Maybe that's why I've always hated people who were too smart. Not out of envy — but because they could slice through the mask with a single glance. They could see the mechanism behind what I was. Map out intentions. Cut through my pretexts. Reduce all my finely tuned persona to a boring, predictable system.
So I avoided them all.
Therapists.Mentors.Anyone who refused to buy my "official version."
But the Whisperer?He didn't need dialogue.He just understood.
And in that silent understanding — in that unauthorized access to what I hid even from myself — he won.
Because no shield survives when the thing attacking you is the inverted reflection of what you've buried deepest.
And in that moment, as every muscle in my body betrayed me, as my breath carved the air like I was drowning in liquid cement, I realized that the real battle wasn't for life.
It was for control of the internal narrative.
And I was losing.
Still couldn't stand.
My body was a pile of unread messages. Muscles on strike. My throat scraped with every attempt to breathe deeper. And my mind… it still spun in tight, painful circles, desperately trying to draw a straight line out of the chaos.
But then, from somewhere deep within — not a sentence, not some profound revelation — just a single pulse surfaced.
No one touches this.
Like something inside me had been sitting in the dark, arms crossed, waiting for the storm to pass just to whisper that. Something that didn't give in, no matter how hard the rest of me collapsed.
And with that impulse, others followed.
The memory of why I was always alone.
Of why I've always stayed that way.
I never needed a group. Or hugs. Or confession.
People only complicate things.They want in.They want to touch what's private.Interpret it.Label it.Rearrange it.
But me? I've spent my whole life stopping that.
My stories were mine.My traumas — veiled.My weaknesses — wrapped in jokes, sarcasm, and silence.And my pride? That was the fortress I locked myself in whenever everything else fell apart.
Maybe that's the mistake everyone makes, trying to live as part of a web.
Leaving their heads open.
Not me.
I kept the doors bolted.The walls high.And the keys — coded so tightly even I could barely decode them.
And now, that thing — that whispering abomination made of flesh, bone, and scattered eyes — was trying to force its way in.
But no matter how hard it pushed, the thing at my center still resisted.
Even shattered.Even torn inside.Even drooling at the corner of my mouth, with shame burning hotter than the cut on my arm...
I was Dante.
And I'd spent way too long turning my loneliness into armor to let it all crumble now.
I felt the toes twitch.Slow. Painful.But mine.
My heart was beating somewhere deeper now.Like an old drum.Ancestral rhythm.Muted rage mixed with survival.
I will not be broken.Not now.Not by this.
You can snap my bones, I thought.You can twist my body, cut off my breath.But my mind?My mind is hostile territory.
And in the middle of the mess that was my scattered thoughts, a spark flickered.Not magic.Me.
The shattered ego began to rise.
And if the Whisperer could feel that...Then he was going to feel what came next.
The world still spun, but something had shifted.
The pain was there. The weakness, too.But deep inside my head, a light came on in a dark room.
The Whisperer was still watching. Probing. Trying to read.
But he couldn't understand anymore.
Because slowly, I was coming back.Not with steel defenses.But with the one thing he clearly didn't know how to handle:
Raw emotional contradiction.
I let him in.
But I chose what he'd find.
Memories tangled in irony.Trauma wrapped in jokes.A childhood flickering between coldness and rebellion.An ego — yes, cracked — but shining through the fissures.
He saw it all.And the more he saw, the more he faltered.
Because I wasn't a neat emotional blueprint.
I was chaos with a functional spreadsheet.
And when he reached for the core — the precise breaking point —I gave him exactly what he wanted.
I flung the doors wide open.Let him see behind the curtains.And showed everything. No filter.
The lies I'd told myself just to keep getting out of bed.The people I left behind and pretended didn't matter — but who still lived in me.The defeats I disguised as strategy.The emptiness I learned to manage like a volatile asset.
I showed it all.
And I smiled.
Because that was my trump card:I didn't need to protect myself from myself.
He expected to find repression. Fragility. Conflict.Instead, he found a guy who had lunch with his own demons.Who could name every part of his madness — and used it to negotiate advantages.
That's when he cracked.
Not completely — but enough.
The eyes began blinking out of sync.Some shut.Others... cried.
Yes. They cried.
The creature stumbled back two steps, like it had swallowed a memory that wasn't his and couldn't digest it.
A sound escaped its throat — not the shriek from before, but something thin.A broken whisper.Like it was asking to leave my mind.
And at that moment, I stood.
Slowly.
With a new kind of smile — not mockery.But higher understanding.
"You wanted to play the mind invasion game," I said, coughing blood. "So tell me... did you like what you saw?"
The creature took another step back.
And I turned to whoever might've been listening — the readers, the gods, the world.
"You see this?" I said loudly. "Emotional intelligence.That's what keeps you standing when everything else collapses.You don't have to be sane.You just have to know yourself well enough not to fold."
I smiled — face battered, eyes sunken, thoughts still ringing.
"Seek emotional intelligence.Even if you're a complete lunatic."
It was in that moment the Whisperer stopped retreating.
Its structure was no longer the same.Flesh sagged.Limbs trembled.Its aura — once suffocating — had lost its grip.
It had lost the mental battle.
But it was still an ancient abomination made of sinew, claws, adaptable bones, and a bruised ego.
And now it wanted to compensate.
With force.
Its chest opened again — not to unleash another whisper.This time, it raised its arms.Three of them.Each one ending in a different jagged bone blade.And its eyes began to glow again.
Not with power.
With rage.
"Aw, you mad now, ugly?" I muttered, grabbing the fallen pickaxe. "Good. The fun part's just started."