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Eternal Hell Layer Eighteen: The Bone Orchard
Kaiser woke to misery long before he opened his eyes.
It was in the airthe heat pressing into his skin, the weight of every breath dragging in like drowning.
The moment he moved, bones shifted beneath him with a dry crunch, and the smell of dust and old marrow filled his nose. This was not a place for the living, yet here he was.
The Measured Prison
The 18th Layer of Eternal Hell was not chaosit was perfectly measured.
A circle exactly eighty-two kilometers in diameter, caged by a wall of pale, seamless bone that rose three hundred meters high. It curved inward, as if the entire layer were inside the skull of something that had died before time began.
Every step was taken on bones. Not scattered remains, but a single endless mosaic of skeletonsfused together, ribs and spines and skulls locked in a silent scream. The ground was warm, as if it remembered the blood that once ran through it.
The air was heavy1.9 kilograms per cubic meterand it made each breath an effort. It smelled faintly of iron, but there was a sweetness in it too, the sweetness of decay that had gone on for far too long.
It was always 38 degrees Celsius, never higher, never lower. It was a temperature that did not burn but made every heartbeat feel slow, every thought sluggish. Sleep brought no comfortonly fevered dreams where the walls closed in, and you woke just as exhausted as when you lay down.
Light existed without a source, bleeding from the air itself. It was always the same dull, oppressive redfixed at 611 nanometersturning the entire world the color of dried blood. Shadows never shifted. There was no dawn. There was no night.
The Collectors
Misery had shape here.
It stood three meters tall, with limbs of smooth bone, jointless and wrong. These were the collectors.
Every four hours and seventeen minutes, they came. Always at the same pace. Always without sound.
They did not chase. They did not hunt. They simply arrived.
When they reached you, their long, flat fingers pressed into your skull, ribs, and spinemeasuring you. You could feel the cold seep into your marrow as if your body was being rewritten. Then they knelt, scratching symbols into the bone floor.
And when the last mark was drawn, you were gone.
Kaiser had seen it happen to twelve others. No screams. No fight. Just acceptance, as if the misery of this place had convinced them it was better to vanish than remain.
Three Years in the Orchard
Kaiser had been here for three yearsor so his bone carvings claimed.
He no longer knew if the numbers were real, or if he kept marking time to pretend that time still mattered.
He lived in narrow tunnels beneath the bone ridges, places too tight for the collectors to reach. The marrow of old bones was his only fooda grey sludge that left him hungrier with every swallow. Water was worse. The only source came from thin condensation that formed on the walls during the dimming, when the red light faded for exactly forty-two seconds.
The dimming was the only break in the layer's endless sameness. In that short darkness, the collectors froze. That was when Kaiser scavenged. That was when he breathed faster—not from hope, but from the terror that when the glow returned, they might be closer than before.
Misery here was not pain—it was certainty. The certainty that nothing would change unless you made it worse.
The Stairs
One day, he saw them.
Far in the east, past the plains of femur and jaw, there stood a staircase of black stone, sinking into the ground. It did not belong here. It was older than the bones, older than the wall, older perhaps than the layer itself.
Around it, three collectors walked in a perfect circle. They never paused. They never dimmed. The red light clung to them like blood on wet porcelain.
Kaiser watched them for hours, then days. The stairs were a way out—he was certain of it. But whether they led to freedom or to the 19th Layer, he did not know.
All he knew was that his misery would end one way or another if he stepped onto those stairs.
And some days, that was almost reason enough.