Punishment Halls

Not seeing, but feeling, Miles followed the subtle ripples and tremors carried across his conscience, the signals made by the intruders as they continued breaching further into his domain.

Echo by echo, whisper by whisper, their essence seeped into his understanding, determination and fear alike becoming a palpable matter that roused him from his limbonic slumber. Mirage Asylum, ever-vigilant, reacted by coiling tight around his psyche, hissing silent, venomous reminders of a fate already consigned.

His spectral jailer, turned out, hungered for strife.

To trust strangers was to invite sorrow, it said. For all souls betook to drift astray in the very end, it said. He understood it well, the futility of rebellion against this dimensional enslavement, that resistance held little meaning in this cruel entrapment where time and space ran void.

Yet Miles still fought. His will, battered and frayed as it was, clung to those defiant sparks of humanity. His heart, corroded and withered as it was, compelled him to seek out for any sign of light being chased away by the devouring shadows.

The paint monster, tormentor and symbiote, writhed in protest against every strain. Its primordial evil found no rest inside him, seeking to consume and corrupt anyone its tendrils could ensnare. With dwindling strength, Miles struggled to keep the presence in check, to halt its attempt to interfere as the intruders ventured into Asylum’s core.

An excruciating war it was, raging within the confines of his skull. Each mental command issued to restrain Mirage Asylum was met with searing agony, as if molten lead were being poured directly into his synapses.

Painful or not, he had to persevere. This hell was his burden alone —and anyone caught in it deserved his effort and protection, meager as it might be.

Sever this chain to soil, it said. You can’t help anybody, it said. Even in this meager role of a warden, the shame of failure pursued him relentlessly. The taunts ruthlessly impaled his ego, as his best attempts at containment failed to prevent Cole Benoit from treading grounds Miles would’ve preferred concealed.

Though he had no method to know for certain, the dark feeling of awareness seeped inside him like a spreading infection. Shelley… He was unable to at least spare her the indignity of being exposed in her current state —for Miles was now terribly aware that her corruption had advanced so far that she couldn’t be named human anymore.

The rest of the intruding group wouldn’t fare much better, confronted by the other inhabitants of his personal purgatorio. He forced Mirage Asylum’s avatar to obey his will and help when possible through the labyrinth of corridors, but its monstrous will was always two steps ahead, scheming ever so insatiably.

Such were the methods employed by Mirage Asylum, operating in manners that escaped even its host’s comprehension. The rules of reality stretched or compressed, memories blurred or were suddenly reshaped —and his very sense of self frayed at the seams.

Against these overwhelming odds, Miles still wished for their survival, be they thieves or invaders. No matter how many times this insidious parasite branded them as harbingers of harm, he had to remain steadfast.

Otherwise, who would save them?

This is no grandiose sacrifice, you hypocritical farce, it said. Such folly, to cling this pathetically to a null salvation, it said. Miles tried desperately to resist, to shore up the crumbling walls of his resolve —but his efforts were feeble, like attempting to hold back a tsunami with bare hands.

Doubt gnawed at him, the clawing fingers of self-loathing worming their way into his fortress of flesh, lonely and possessed. Was he truly acting out of altruism? Such a pitiful being like him? Or was this merely a desperate attempt to paint a self-portrait of a tragic hero?

But one of the truths repeated by the voices stood above all the others. Whatever challenge his guests were about to face, he no longer had the ability to prevent them. Ultimately, their fates rested in their own hands. In darkness, one either floated or fell.

Of course, the mockeries, the taunts, the noxious whispers… As much as he yearned to lay the blame elsewhere, reality was more bitter. Mirage Asylum wasn’t capable of verbal communication, after all.

That’s how it always had been, ever since its genesis. Even back then, when its hold on reality was a pale candle compared to its current inferno, it had been enough to immolate the remnants of his former life.

It happened in the aftermath of his encounter with the man in glasses, short after retreating behind the false security of his mansion’s walls. Abandoned by his muse, left adrift in a yawning chasm where inspiration once dwelled, that monster appeared instead —undoubtedly the culprit of his creative desolation.

Mirage, as his soul had christened it in those early months, acted like some sort of spiritual umbrella. It shielded him not from rain, but from the deluge of cosmic horrors that raged above the barriers of human perception. It stood as a bulwark against the maelstrom of ghosts and energies, of grudges and torments lost to time, corrupted and reformed beyond the confines of earthly graves —in the ruins of what naive mortals dared to call paradise, defiled by forces too terrible to grasp.

To think he had once brushed the surface of a sanctuary so vast, so radiant… Only to find himself deprived of access, sheltered by an astral corpse he asked not for, its price for protection steep on sanity and humanity alike.

And oh, how Mirage hungered in its ghastly silence devouring.

In his invisible addiction to darkness and emptiness, it gorged itself greedily, immortally beloved it was to his anguish.

During six long, grueling years, Miles endured the constant barrage it posed on his psyche. Never relenting, it weaponized every uncertainty, every doubt, plunging him further down the abyss of solitary confinement.

The emotional toll was immense, but the financial devastation proved equally merciless. In his inability to produce new work, and Shelley struggling in her role as his art agent, their resources hemorrhaged away. The opulent mansion where he built his fort transformed into a limestone monument to mounting debt and fractured ambitions.

Being unable of controlling Mirage led Miles into incapacitating paranoia. He wasn’t afraid of the outside world alone anymore, where the man in glasses roamed free, but also of the terrifying potential of the paint amalgam to harm those innocent.

Yet beneath those concerns, one question persisted strong above all others, its persistent haunting chasing him even in his retreat into isolation.

Why had his mother chosen to end her life?

Magda Seagrave had always been a severe, stern presence throughout his childhood memories, her aura of perpetual discontentment permeating every facet of his young existence.

So really… When that letter from his long-estranged father reached his door, its revelations felt less like surprises and more like confirmations of suspicions long-denied.

Employing who knew which method, the old man had somehow managed to locate his reclusive son —perhaps from genuine remorse, though more likely drawn by the fading scent of wealth. His written words spoke of a desire to make amends, to span the chasm carved by years of abuse and neglect.

Merely remembering it now pained him, the writhing ache running across all the segments of his frame like a phantom, causing Miles’ toxicognaths to clasp in discomfort.

Yes, it was that damned letter’s fault… If he had never…

Among the trinkets his father had sent him were photographs —snapshots of a past life Miles had never been granted access to. In them, a foreign aspect of his mother was revealed to him, one that shattered what little preconception helped him cope with her path of finality.

In those faded images, he saw a young woman full of life and joy, smiles radiant and carefree.

So what did that make of the somber, melancholic figure he knew so well?

The truth was undeniable as it was demolishing. His mother had once known happiness, had once embraced life with open arms. And that vibrant, joyful woman had been systematically erased, even before the fingers of death claimed her.

With crushing, sickening clarity, Miles understood what had happened to her.

Not only was he a complete failure while breathing —his life had been a mistake from the very beginning. It was his birth what extinguished the light in his mother’s eyes, what had transformed her from a vivacious young woman into a walking corpse, an empty husk wearing the mask of personhood…

… Just like him.

It was too much to bear, the weight of such awareness. Like a vast and deep sea, Miles felt himself drowning in a despair so profound, that it was impossible to discern where his own anguish ended and Mirage’s influence began.

And for a treacherous instant, with no darker emotions left to find, Miles consecrated himself to the valley of the shadows.

For if this pitiful song was one of sorrow… Then he had no other choice left but to sing it.

His capitulation reverberated through every molecule, each syllable of surrender a death knell for deceits and dreams alike. Something fundamental shifted within, a seismic change that went beyond mere emotion or flesh.

In that moment, in the light of his personal sacrifice, Mirage evolved —transcending its limited form into something far more terrifying and all-encompassing.

Mirage Asylum emerged as its new, fuller name; heightened power bursting forth from the shine of the ruins and the whispered secrets of his soul. His pain, guilt and self-hatred proved insufficient sustenance now. It extended its reach around the mansion’s grounds, ready to devour anything that came too close.

Him? He simply allowed himself to slip away, subsumed by the horror he unleashed, blissfully uninterested in the fading feeling of a dying kin.

Yet even as he wished for erasure to claim him, a stillborn heart refused to cease its beating —shackled as a reluctant warden to an expanding entity beyond comprehension, a vessel whose torment hadn’t been given the permission to end.

And so he waited, trapped within the innards of Mirage Asylum, sleeping as time lost all meaning, taunted with the shortcomings that drove him to such a fate… At least until these new unwary souls stumbled into his domain, rousing him back to full lucidity.

Forever torn between the faltering desire to save them.

And that insatiable hunger that now called his body home.