He had developed a phobia, a unique one that no doctor or scholar could name.
Limiphobia.
The fear of limits, the fear of being bound by them.
It began with simple, childish questions.
Why couldn't he jump as high as a plane?
Why couldn't he move the wind?
Why couldn't he command the sun to rise twice or twist the universe in his hands?
Adults had called it imagination. He called it betrayal — the betrayal of possibility.
"Stop— just stop, damn it!"
The voice was shaking, but his hands weren't.
Fingers dug into his own arm, nails carving deep red lines as if trying to peel the weakness away.
His friend, Lucas, stood frozen in the doorway, rain dripping from his hair, voice breaking as he shouted again.
"You're hurting yourself!"
Ashen laughed, not because it was funny, but because it finally made sense.
"Hurting? No. I'm removing what refuses to listen."
Lucas's eyes widened. The figure before him lay sprawled on the floor, bleeding profusely, his legs half-broken.
Droplets of rain slipped through the ceiling cracks, landing on his skin before merging with the dark puddles spreading around him.
A flash of lightning tore through the sky, illuminating the scene like a cruel stage.
He twisted his other leg before tearing it apart and tossing it aside, just to test his resolve.
As a child, he had thought the world was small only because people accepted it that way. And every time he reached his limit, he felt the same thing... his own body holding him hostage.
"Look… we still have time. We can go, maybe see the doctor."
Lucas's voice trembled, the gate behind him rattling with the wind.
His feet slipped slightly in the mix of blood and stormwater pooling on the floor.
Ashen's breathing came ragged, but his smile didn't fade.
"Most people fear death. I fear something smaller." His tone softened, almost curious.
"Do you want me to suffer like this forever, Lucas? To keep pretending this cage is enough?"
The words didn't sound insane. They sounded tired, but almost peaceful.
He lowered his gaze, staring at his trembling hands, then clenched them until his knuckles turned white.
"All my life, every rule, every ache, everything has whispered the same thing...stop. Why should I stop when I've never even begun?"
A body was built to stop you. Pain, exhaustion, hunger, thirst — the body's gentle way of saying enough.
But what if you refused?
The thought began quietly, not as madness but as curiosity.
If every instinct exists to preserve you, then what happens when you reject preservation itself?
Would you die?
Or would you finally become something more than a creature pretending to be free?
As he grew older, those whispers became constant. Each failure, each ache, each breath felt like mockery.
The body demanded limits, but his mind kept stretching toward something it couldn't name. And his mind wasn't limitless either. It could only reach so far.
He knew it but couldn't prove it — not like he could with his body.
He began to test himself.
Weeks without sleep.
Days without food.
Running until his vision turned to static.
He learned the language of pain — the way it shifted, begged, pleaded. It became familiar, almost comforting.
He would wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, staring at the ceiling as though expecting it to collapse into infinity.
When he closed his eyes, he saw shapes — equations of thought, strange geometries spinning just beyond reach, and something he couldn't quite imagine.
"I don't think I can live anymore," Ashen murmured one night, the words barely escaping his throat.
"Not in this world, at least."
Lucas had started visiting more often, hoping to keep him grounded, to remind him of something human.
But each time he entered, the place felt emptier like the Curtains would be drawn, and food untouched.
All mirrors turned toward the wall.
"You need help, Ashen. Real help. This isn't you."
Ashen looked at him, eyes glassy but alive in a way Lucas couldn't describe.
"This is exactly me. I just stopped lying to myself about what I am."
He began to write strange notes — sentences that looped into each other, drawings that resembled organs one moment and constellations the next.
His journals filled with questions like:
How do you contact those beyond limits?
Sometimes, Lucas found him standing before the mirror, unmoving for hours.
When he asked what he was doing, Ashen would reply softly, "Looking for where I end."
Now, under the storm, Lucas watched the culmination of it all — the moment when thought devoured restraint.
"Once you see the edges of yourself," Ashen said faintly, his voice trembling between pain and awe, "you can't unsee them. You start to wonder what lies beyond the wall of skin, beyond the mercy of pain, beyond the body's trembling plea to stop."
He pressed a shaking hand against his chest, and for a heartbeat, Lucas thought he saw relief — not horror, not despair, but peace.
The years of sleeplessness, the endless hunger, the exhaustion — they had all been steps toward this. Toward shedding everything that screamed limit.
That was the true horror.
Not death.
Not pain.
But the realization that his own flesh refused to obey.
He had pushed himself so far that his thoughts no longer feared the consequences.
The body trembled, begged, broke — but the mind kept moving, beyond reason, beyond mercy.
"Asheeeennnn~"
Lucas screamed his name, but the sound barely reached him, as his voice was lost in the storm.
Ashen looked up one last time, as he pressed his hands against his chest — not at Lucas, not at the world, but at the ceiling, as though seeing through it.
His lips moving in silence, forming words Lucas could not hear.
Thud.
A single, hollow sound resounded through the vicinity, swallowed by the rain fortunately.
He didn't destroy himself out of madness, but simply refused to live in a world bound by limits.
Some would call it suicide.
Others might call it ascension.
But when the screaming stopped and the blood cooled, nothing remained for long.
The traces faded, and the body was long since buried.
And in that silence, Lucas finally understood the most terrifying part of Limiphobia: it wasn't the fear of dying.
It was the fear that maybe, just maybe, he had been right all along.
But despite all that, Lucas was sure — if maybe, by any chance, there existed a world not bound by limits… it wouldn't take long before Ashen found it.