Klaxon Asylum

In the Klaxon Asylum, a relic of the old town’s forgotten days, Edgar had learned to accept his place among the dark. Each day bled into the next, swirling until all boundaries dissolved.In the dim halls he roamed without purpose familiar with his own madness but never entirely comfortable with it. Here, sanity was an anachronism, a peculiar dream once had but long since lost. He could feel it whispering from behind his own eyes, a faint memory. Klaxon was as much a part of his illness as the fractured thoughts that plagued him. Its walls seemed to pulse, breathing with a life of their own. He drifted through the corridors, his mind was on edge of an unseen principle. And then, one night he met Gabriel. Gabriel was unlike any other patient. He was quiet, disturbingly still in his ragged clothing, a figure of thinness and brittle limbs with a gaze that sliced through the fog of madness with something Edgar could only call clarity. When their eyes met, Edgar felt it, a touch colder than anything in Klaxon. Gabriel’s eyes were deep and hollow. They drew Edgar’s gaze into his eyes. He looked untouched by anything even remotely human.

“What is it you’re seeking, Edgar?” Gabriel’s voice was soft but absolute, filling the hollow silence between them. Edgar couldn’t answer, it was a question he’d never dared ask himself. Seeking? He’d long ago given up on hope, crushed under the weight of the asylum. “I… I don’t know,” he stumbled over his words. Gabriel only watched, head tilted, and he gave him an eerie smile. As the days passed, Edgar was drawn to Gabriel’s presence. There was something almost magnetic about him. Gabriel was always there, a shadow lingering at the edge of his awareness, pulling Edgar even deeper into his own mind. Day by day, Gabriel’s quiet, pervasive presence seeped into Edgar’s thoughts, dredging up memorie he had long buried. Those memories seemed like ghosts now. One night, Edgar found himself in a corner of the asylum he didn’t recognize. The air was thick and the walls had a damp residue. Gabriel stood at the end of the corridor, as if waiting for him. Edgar;s legs carried him forward without thought, propelled by a strange compulsion that felt as though it came from somewhere outside himself. Gabriel spoke, his voice soft, filling the silence around them. “There is something here, Edgar, that you’ve never understood.” He gestured to the walls, to the twisted pipes and the cracked ceiling, to the darkness itself that seemed to coil around them like a living being. “Klaxon is not a place. It’s a state of being. A prison for the mind.”

Edgar stared at Gabriel, his mouth dry, words slipping from his mind as quickly as they came. The walls seemed to close in. He heard Gabriel’s words echo with a terrible truth that Edgar had always felt but never fully grasped. Klaxon was alive, not in the way that people were alive, but as a thought was alive. “What.. what are you saying?” Edgar whispered, but the question felt meaningless, as if spoken only to fill the silence. “I am saying,” Gabriel replied, his voice now a quiet murmur, “that this place, this darkness, Klaxon was built around you Edgar. From your own substance of your thoughts, your fears, and your memories.” He leaned in, his hollow eyes meeting Edgar’s. “Klaxon is you”

The words settled over Edgar like a shroud. He stumbled back, his heart pounding. As he turned he could feel the walls shaft. The hallways twisted as he tried to run but each step pulled him inward. He felt a space that felt like his own mind, his own prison. Then he stopped, panting as his chest got heavy. Then Edgar realized Gabriel was gone.  In the silence that followed, Edgar felt an emptiness so vast it seemed to stretch beyond the asylum. Gabriel’s words echoed endlessly within him, reverberating like the sound of the distant bell tolling in a deserted town. “Klaxon is you.” Each time he heard it, the words burrowed deeper, infecting his thoughts like a spreading sickness. The asylum, once an external torment, now felt like a part of his being. Something he could never escape because he carried it with him. The corridors, once merely eerie, now seemed to respond to his thoughts, bending and reshaping themselves, as though reacting to the realization dawning upon him. The walls creaked and groaned, shifting subtly as if alive. The walls creaked and groaned, shifting subtly as if alive, amplifying his sense of entrapment. 

Edgar’s heart pounded painfully, each beat an affirmation of the prison that his mind had constructed. As he continued to wander, aimlessly, he began to notice changes in his surroundings that he couldn’t explain. Rooms he had never seen before appeared, their doors open, inviting him in. One room contained a broken mirror, its jagged shards scattered across the floor. Edgar cautiously approached it, and staring down he saw his reflection. It was fragmented, splintered, and horrifyingly familiar. Each share seemed to capture a different version himself: faces from his pasts. It was a moment of despair and confusion that was all staring back at him. With every glance, a new memory bubbled up, pieces of a life he’d once led but had long since forgotten. And with each memory, he felt Klaxon tighten his grip onto his soul.

Unable to bear the fractured images any longer, Edgar turned away from the mirror and stumbled back into the hall. The asylum’s twisting corridors now mirrored his own fractured thoughts. The boundaries between himself and Klaxon dissolved further until he could no longer tell where his mind ended and the asylum began. The asylum’s twisting corridors now mirrored his own fractured thoughts. The boundaries between himself and Klaxon were closing. He closed his eyes, letting the darkness seep into his thoughts, allowing Klaxon to consume him entirely. There would be no more resistance, no more struggle. Edgar was Klaxon, and Klaxon was Edgar. A ceaseless and inescapable cycle of despair. A prison without end