Beyond the Tales of Uris
Far beyond the twisted voids of unknown realms, in those spaces that reject speech and recoil from the shackles of language, lie countless worlds. Not merely adjacent, but entities entangled like the bowels of a sick cosmos worlds within worlds, their borders melting like wax under an unseen flame; worlds atop worlds, crushing one another under inverted laws of gravity; worlds beside worlds breathing in terrifying unison. It is a grand web, a fevered tapestry of existence, stretching beyond the very concept of infinity like a Mandelbrot set coursing through the veins of a mad god. Each world has its own story, its branches bleeding like blood across the parchment of time.
In one such world… stands a house.
A Cracked Window
Behind dust-filmed glass, in a room steeped in the scent of ancient wood, a tall man crouches. His eyes move independently of his will—wide, gaping, like abandoned wells—focusing on nothing, yet chasing the shadows clinging to the ceiling, catching the hidden sparks that flicker in the corners like microscopic creatures.
A Fountain Pen in a Right Hand
Upon the wooden table, carved with the scars of time, his hand rests. Slender fingers, knuckles pronounced, clutch the pen until his nails turn a sickly blue. A small scar on his left thumb—a relic of some long-ago accident—flushes crimson with every tremor. His palm, slick with sweat, slides against the wooden grip, producing a faint, sticky friction. Thick black ink pools at the nib, then falls… drop by drop… onto the coarse, porous paper.
A Tap on the Windowpane
A white dove—one he used to feed, one he had forged a bond with—taps the glass. He smiles at the sight of her but does not open the window. Dinner time has not yet come.
An Electric Hum Ascends from 20 Hz to 10,000 Hz
Bzzzzzzzzzzzz…
A hum. Not a single sound, but a swarm of demonic frequencies. It begins as the droning of ancient engines in the basement of the universe, then rises… and rises… splitting into layers: one pierces the eardrum like a white-hot needle, another rattles the molars until one can almost hear the jawbone crack, a third slithers into the ribcage, making the bones tremble like the strings of a broken violin.
"August 7, 1925"
He writes it at the top of the page. The letters slant to the right like trees bent by a hurricane. Ink floods the ghayn, turning it into a throbbing black blot. He swallows. A sharp metallic taste fills his mouth, as if he's been sucking on an old coin.
"Three years have passed…"
He writes with a hand trembling like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. His entire arm shakes—from shoulder to fingertips. The script warps, fractures, bleeds. The first meem resembles a collapsing mountain, the second a gaping pit.
[Low-angle shot – The ceiling]
"...since the second floor of my house appeared."
His head jerks up suddenly. His eyes fixate on the wooden ceiling. There… something is forming. Not a solid object, but a disturbance in the fabric of reality. The ceiling ripples like a viscous black liquid. Shadows gather and disperse, dancing a silent waltz to the hum that has now become a living entity drilling into his skull.
[Flickering jump cut – Ghostly limbs phasing in and out of the wood]
Those things. Not creatures. Not specters. They are tears in the veil of space. They emerge in the upper part of the room, where the ceiling meets the wall. Indistinct appendages—like broken stalks of light, or frozen tendrils of smoke. They move to the rhythm of the electric music humming…
They dance to it.
The hum is not just sound. It is music. Music forged from the screech of rusted cosmic gears, the roar of dying galaxies, the whistle of winds scouring forgotten wastelands in abandoned dimensions.
"One of them is angry."
He scribbles the sentence in a frenzy. The pen scrapes violently against the paper, nearly tearing through. A stray ink droplet splatters onto the back of his hand.
"Something was stolen from it. It calls it 'Grimfeast.'"
The letters of Grimfeast are carved with immense pressure. The pen bends. Ink pools in the creases of the paper like clotted blood.
[Sudden sound – A composite howl]
A wail. I can hear it wailing.
Wailing for Grimfeast.
Not a Single Sound, But a Monstrous Composite
A wretched orchestra played on demonic strings, a shriek splitting the eardrum like a scalpel, thunder rising from the belly of an alien earth and that electric whine… that maddening whine… curdling into bitterness at the back of the tongue.
The howl pierces the body layer by layer: fluttering the eyelids, parching the throat, twisting the intestines, freezing the blood in its veins.
An Entity of Pure Fire
The wail fractures the air like thin glass, its shockwaves shoving the walls outward before yanking them back in, as if the ground itself were breathing beneath his feet.
The shadow of black smoke grows dense, writhing, its tendrils coiling into themselves something inside it straining toward flesh. Features congeal: a stunted torso, stiffened legs, spindly arms stretching without mercy, and a small, tilted head—carved from burnt dust and stagnant electricity—twisted in demonic fury.
The light pulses rapidly, searing the edges of vision before plunging it into abrupt darkness. The entire scene lurches, as if standing on the heaving chest of a gasping giant each heartbeat hurling him half a step upward before dropping him back into the earth's grasp.
The Entity Howls, Choking on Dry Sobs
The stench of burning fills the air. Then it raises its elongated hands to its face, fingers plunging deep into its chalky skin, clawing, shattering its own features. Dark fragments scatter like hot ash.
And in one sharp moment of void it dissolves again into nothing. Just smoke and black fog threaded with indigo tendrils…
A silence. One second only.
I felt myself dissolving in still, absolute waters—like a sugar cube in the Atlantic—then returning.
It reappears from the corner of the room, as if walking a closed loop of time, its eyes tracking something—a crumb of unclear features.
It circles slowly, steps short but frantic, orbiting like a starving predator. The space around it constricts to a thread.
"It wants something I don't understand."
He stops, flips to a fresh page, and continues with a shaking hand:
"I don't know what it is… this thing it calls the ' 'Grimfeast.'"
His hand trembles now like a man being electrocuted. A fat drop of ink falls onto the word "what," swallowing it like a tiny black hole.
"But it keeps howling. A violent howl… and I think I pity it...."
An unfinished sentence. He stops. His breath comes in short, ragged bursts like drowning.
Those things speak to me sometimes…
He doesn't write it yet. He hears it in his skull. Voices slipping in with the hum.
The First: The Red-Haired Man
[Hazy shot – A crimson shadow swaying]
"He has no fixed form. He oscillates between a man in a classic suit, something I cannot comprehend, and mere fire in the shape of a man."
His glowing strands of hair flow like overheated copper wires, twisting like liquid crimson flame. "I always find him upstairs, lounging on his leather divan. The smell of fire clings to him more than the others. His voice is warm, slick, like rancid oil dripping into your ears."
He speaks of "a world like paradise" where he came from. "A world where nothing is different. Where there is no 'him' or 'me.' Where everything is fire, and to fire it returns."
The Blue-Haired Man
[Over-the-shoulder shot – A dark corner]
"He vanishes into the darkest recess, where the flickering lamplight cannot reach. His hair is a deep, static blue like steel wires dipped in eternal ice. His face resembles the red-haired man's. They are close friends, as far as I can tell."
They speak of many things: a man named Robert who tells terrible jokes (they plan to kill him for it and blame the color yellow "Yellow and Robert were never friends anyway"), or an entire kingdom made of popcorn.
"His pale hands, scarred with patterns like electrical burns, move through the air. Touching… shaping… twisting something invisible above his knees. Each motion releases a sharp scent of ozone and ammonia. A cold heat radiates from him, defying the warmth of the room."
He glances around, then continues:
"And then there's the little girl the prime suspect in the theft of the so-called Grimfeast. She shifts forms: a dark-haired child, then a blonde… any age between three and nineteen."
The Girl
"She just stands there. In the center of the empty space. Her faded white clothes remain still, untouched by the currents stirred by the hum. Her long black hair hangs like a dead curtain over her face. No eyes. No movement. No sound. She is just… there. A passive presence, like a hole in the wall. But when you pass by, you feel a cold gust—a razor's edge against your neck—and a subsonic whisper that triggers sudden nausea."
He flips the page again, his hand unsteady.
The Strangest One
"The most bizarre is a man in a long coat. He appears sometimes in the middle of the room, holding a lamp that flickers endlessly. Sometimes he's solving a puzzle. Sometimes he's writing. An eccentric. I don't know much about him."
A final line, ink bleeding:
"This is all I've learned today."
[The words sprawl toward the bottom edge of the page like a collapsing man.]
His pupils reflect a burst of blue electric fire erupting in the ceiling's corner. The irises—dull brown—are swallowed whole as his pupils dilate. His gaze isn't following the spark. It's being dragged toward it, like a needle yanked by some terrible magnet. An incomprehensible grandeur presses against his chest: the force that births and annihilates worlds in the same breath, that conjures the second floor from nothingness, that wields electricity like blood in its veins. A cosmic terror beyond understanding.
[Clicking at the window the white dove has returned.]
He staggers to his feet, swaying, then opens the window with a smile. The dove hops inside, perching on the sill. From an old metal dish, he offers a handful of grain. She pecks at it delicately.
He returns to the table and picks up the pen again.
"I don't know how much longer I can last…"
The pen hesitates. His index finger bleeds where the metal edge has bitten into it. A thin trickle of blood mingles with the ink.
[The hum swells into a roar. The ceiling convulses.]
The shadows of the red-haired man and the blue-haired man stretch, spilling beyond the walls. The girl's head tilts slightly is she watching him? The scent of aged wood chokes beneath burning ozone and sulfur. The paper under his hand feels like the skin of a dead animal. A biting cold creeps under the door, even as the air hangs thick as lava.
"...before the electricity takes me where the fire lives."
The final line is no longer handwriting. The letters are mangled, fractured, overlapping—a scream given ink and shape. The word "fire" is so thick with black it threatens to scorch the page.
[The lone bulb in the room begins to flicker madly.]
Light and darkness alternate like a panicked heartbeat. With each flash, the figures crystallize in horrifying clarity:
The red-haired man smiles.
The blue-haired man lifts a dark, twisted object to his face.
The girl… is gone.
In the corner where she stood, a small wooden door now looms one that wasn't there before. From its crack bleeds an orange glow, like smoldering coal. The electric whine merges with the red-haired man's laughter, the blue-haired man's teeth-grinding, and the wooden door's whisper.
His hand goes slack at last.
The pen slips from his cramped fingers, hitting the floor with a sound like a death rattle. A damp handprint stains the corner of the page. At the bottom, beneath the convulsive line about fire, between smears of ink and blood, the nightmare is signed in spidery, crumbling letters—the corpse of a name:
Nikola Tesla
A thick silence drowns the room.
A silence more terrible than the hum.