The hall was impossible.
The hero stood at the threshold, trying to comprehend what he saw. The walls rose into the darkness—maybe a hundred meters, maybe to infinity. And every centimeter of those walls was covered with doors.
Thousands of doors.
Wood and metal, glass and stone, bone and something pulsating, living. Enormous gates ten meters high and tiny doors the size of a palm. Some glowed from within—red, blue, green, black. Others were covered in ice, still others exuded smoke.
The floor was also strewn with doors—hatchways, manholes, chasms. Even the ceiling, lost somewhere above, was covered with doors hanging upside down.
Each door had a sign. A small, metal one. But the inscriptions were erased or written in symbols the hero had never seen. Some were in ancient languages, others were just a jumble of lines and dots.
"What the hell," Medusa breathed, following him inside. The snakes on her head hissed restlessly, pressing themselves against her scalp.
Dolor silently glanced around the room. His face was expressionless, but his fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword.
"One of these doors is the exit," the hero said. "There has to be."
"But which one?" Medusa approached the nearest door. Wooden, old, with rusty hinges. The plaque was covered in symbols that resembled tongues of flame.
She reached for the handle.
"Stop!" the hero shouted.
But Medusa had already touched the metal.
The door swung open.
Heat hit in a wave. Unbearable, metal-melting heat.
Beyond the door was fire. A sea of fire—raging, roaring, alive. Tongues of flame licked the doorway, reaching for Medusa. She recoiled, but too late—the fire had caught her arm.
Her skin turned black instantly. The hero heard a sizzling sound—flesh burning to the bone. The smell of scorched meat filled the air, sweet and nauseating. Medusa screamed—not with words, but simply an animal howl of pain. The fire crept higher, up her forearm. The skin blistered, melted, revealing the red flesh beneath. The flesh blackened, cracked, and beneath it, the bone gleamed white.
Dolor grabbed her and dragged her away from the door. The hero lunged forward, throwing all his weight against the door. The hinges creaked. The door slammed shut.
The fire vanished as if it had never been there.
Medusa collapsed to the floor. Her right arm, from wrist to elbow, was charred to the bone. Her radius protruded from the blackened flesh, fragments of carpal bones were visible where her fingers had once been. Her entire body was shaking, her teeth chattering so loudly the hero feared they would break.
"Damn," she hissed through a spasm. "Damn, damn, DAMN."
The hero tore a piece of cloth from his shirt. His hands were shaking. He tried to wrap Medusa's arm, but at the slightest touch she twitched, howling in pain. The charred skin cracked beneath the cloth, clinging to it.
Dolor pulled out a flask of water. The last drops. He slowly poured it onto the wound. Medusa arched, groaning so loudly that the echo reverberated off a thousand doors. The water hissed on her charred flesh, steam rising.
A minute stretched like an hour. Two minutes. Five. Medusa lay on the floor, shaking, breathing heavily. The pain slowly dulled—it didn't disappear, never completely, but it became bearable. Her hand was crippled, useless. But she could move her remaining fingers—the ones that hadn't burned away completely.
"It was hell," she croaked. "A veritable hell of fire."
The hero looked at the thousands of other doors. Each one promised something similar. Or worse.
"Behind each is its own hell," he said quietly.
"And how will we find the right one?"
"We'll try."
The hero stood and walked to another door. It was metal, covered in frost as thick as a finger. The frost slid down the wall, leaving icy trails. The sign was frozen into the ice, but symbols were visible through it—something like snowflakes.
"I have immortality," he said without turning around. "If I die, I'll be resurrected."
"But the pain will remain," Medusa's voice was weak. She still held her hand, trying not to look at the charred bone.
"I know."
He grabbed the handle. The metal burned his fingers with cold—so cold it felt hot. His skin stuck to the handle. He tugged—and the skin remained on the metal, scraped off. The door swung open.
The cold rushed out like a living thing. Not wind—a tsunami of arctic air, the temperature of which was far beyond anything that could exist in nature. The hero tried to retreat, but the cold had already grabbed him, pulling him in.
He tripped on the threshold and fell through it.
Beyond the door was emptiness. Endless emptiness, covered in ice. Blue, almost black ice, which glowed from within with a dull, dead light. The sky was black. There were no stars. Only cold. The hero tried to stand, but the ice was slippery under his hands. His hands slipped. He fell face-first onto the surface.
The cold bit into his skin, penetrating deeper. He felt—he could physically feel—the blood in the capillaries of his face crystallizing. Tiny needles of ice pierced the cells from within, rupturing them. His nose turned black in a second. His eyelids froze to his eyeballs. When he tried to open his mouth to scream, his lips cracked, and the blood froze in red flakes.
Hands. Fingers. They were turning black, becoming brittle. He wiggled a finger – it snapped off with a dry snap, like an icicle. Then a second. A third.
The cold crept deeper. Into his lungs. Every breath was agony – the air was so cold that the lining of his respiratory tract froze, peeled off, and clogged his throat. He was suffocating in the frozen air. His lungs were coated with frost from the inside.
His heart. It was slowing. The blood was becoming thick, viscous. His veins were clogged with an icy slush. Another beat. More. Weaker. Slower.
Stop.
Darkness.
Three seconds.
The hero came to on the floor of the hall. Dolor stood over him, closing the door. The icy hell disappeared beyond the wooden threshold.
The hero was gasping for breath. His body was whole – his fingers were intact, his face unfrozen. But the cold. A phantom chill pierced his very bones. He trembled so violently his teeth chattered. He couldn't stop. His muscles were convulsing with the tremors.
"Two hells," Medusa croaked. She sat leaning against the wall, clutching her mangled arm. "A thousand remain."
The hero struggled to his feet. His legs buckled. He looked at the doors. Thousands of doors stretching into the darkness. Each a separate nightmare.
"There must be a clue," he said, forcing the words to form through his trembling. "A way to find the right one."
They began to circle the hall. Reading the tablets. Most were in dead languages, unreadable. But some were decipherable. The hero recognized Latin, ancient Greek, something resembling Sanskrit.
"Dolor"—pain. "Fame"—hunger. "Sitis"—thirst. "Proditio"—betrayal.
Dozens of names. Hundreds. Every door signed.
They walked for an hour. Maybe two. There was no time in the hall—only thousands of doors and the dim light filtering through some of them.
And suddenly one door swung open.
A loud creak shattered the silence. The hero turned. The door was dark wood, carved, beautiful. Beyond it lay a room—cozy, with a fireplace, soft chairs, and a table set with food. The smell of bread and roasting meat permeated the hall.
A figure emerged from the room.
A woman. Young, with dark hair, in a simple dress. She smiled and extended her hand.
"Come in," the voice was warm as honey. "You're probably tired. Wounded. I have food, bedding, medicine. I'll help."
The hero didn't move.
"Who are you?" The smile widened.
"Mistress. This house is for travelers. For those who are tired. For those who need shelter."
Medusa clutched the trident in her left hand—her right hung uselessly.
"What hell is this?"
The woman laughed. The sound was pleasant, but something else lurked beneath it. Something hungry.
"The hell of trust," she said, her smile fading. Her eyes flashed red. "You will enter because you are tired. Because you are wounded. Because you want to believe there is a place of rest. And when you enter, I will devour your souls for eternity. Piece by piece. Slowly. As long as you trust me, smile at me, thank me."
The woman's form trembled and blurred. Beneath her was something else—eyeless, with a mouth full of needles, with a dozen arms ending in hooks.
A demon.
He rushed to the threshold. The hero jumped back, but the demon hit an invisible barrier. It howled, clawing at the air, but couldn't escape.
"Locked in," Dolor said. "It can't escape until we enter."
The demon howled one last time, then disappeared back into the room. The door slammed shut.
A second of silence.
Then dozens of doors swung open simultaneously.
Demons emerged from the doorways. Different ones. One was made of burning flesh, smoking, leaving traces of fire on the floor. Another was made of ice shards, every movement accompanied by the sound of broken glass. A third was simply a shadow with a hundred eyes that opened and closed asynchronously. A fourth was a mountain of rotting flesh, crawling on stumps of limbs, leaving a slimy trail.
None of them could escape. But they growled, beckoned, promised anything—food, rest, power, love. "Ignore it," the hero said. "Let's move on."
They continued around the hall. Past open doors, past demons. They grinned and howled, but remained outside the threshold.
The hero approached a new door. A bone door, made of human bones connected by sinews. The plaque was made from a skull. Scratched into the frontal bone was the inscription "Suffocatio"—suffocation.
He looked at Medusa and Dolor.
"I'll try."
Medusa opened her mouth to protest, but he had already pushed the door open.
Beyond was a room. Small, with a low ceiling. The walls were soft, covered in something resembling flesh. The hero stepped inside.
The door slammed shut.
The walls began to move. To compress. The ceiling was lowering. The room was getting smaller. Smaller. The hero braced his hands against the walls, trying to stop them, but the flesh was slippery, and his hands slipped.
The ceiling touched his head. Pressed down. He bent his knees, but the floor was rising too. The room was shrinking from all sides.
Air. It was getting smaller. The hero tried to breathe, but his lungs wouldn't expand—his chest was crushed by the walls. He gasped for air like a fish on dry land. There wasn't enough oxygen. His vision was darkening at the edges.
The walls pressed harder. Ribs cracked. One. Two. Three. The sharp ends of broken bones pierced his lungs from the inside. Blood gushed into his throat. He coughed, choking.
He couldn't scream. He couldn't breathe. Only the pressure, ever stronger, bones breaking one after another, internal organs crushed, torn.
Skull. The last to break was his skull. He felt the bone crack, his brain compressed, like...
Darkness.
The hero came to outside the door. He was choking, gasping for air greedily, convulsively. His ribs were intact, but a phantom pain—breaking bones, rupturing organs—pulsed in every cell.
Medusa helped him stand.
"How much longer?" Her voice trembled.
"I don't know," he looked at the doors. So many doors. "But let's continue."
The next door was made of something rotting, exuding the smell of decay. A sign read: "Putredo"—rot.
The hero opened it. Behind the door was a mirror. He saw his reflection—and how it began to change. His skin was turning green, covered in spots. His hair was falling out in clumps. Flesh peeled from his bones, dripping onto the floor in greasy chunks.
He felt it. On his body. The skin peeled away, revealing muscle. Muscles rotted, turning into a slimy mass. Fingers fell off. His nose caved in. His eyeballs burst, running down his cheeks like a purulent liquid.
He collapsed. His body was falling apart. Bones were exposed, darkened, and began to crumble. He was a living skeleton, falling apart. Consciousness remained until the very last moment—until the last vertebra crumbled to dust.
Darkness.
Resurrection.
The hero lay on the floor, curled into a ball. His entire body burned with the phantom pain of decay. He could smell it—his own decaying smell. He vomited. Nothing came out—his stomach was empty. Only bile and dry spasms.
Dolor closed the door.
"Rest." "No," the hero stood up, staggering. "Let's continue. Otherwise, we'll never finish."
The next door. And the next. And the next.
Behind one was a hell of hunger. The hero found himself in an empty room. Nothing. Only hunger. It was growing—not gradually, but suddenly. An all-consuming, maddening hunger. His stomach twisted into a cramp. He doubled over in pain. His stomach was digesting itself. Acid ate away the walls, burning holes. Blood filled his stomach, his intestines. He vomited blood, writhing on the floor. His body began to devour itself—muscle, fat, then organs. He felt his liver dissolve, his kidneys fail. He was so exhausted that his skin stretched across his skeleton like parchment. His heart, deprived of nourishment, stopped.
Darkness. Resurrection.
Behind the other door was a hell of thirst. A desert under a black sun. The hero fell to his knees on the scorching sand. Thirst tormented him from the very first second. His throat instantly went dry, his tongue swollen and cracked. He clawed at the sand, searching for water, but there was only sand. Dry, moisture-sucking. His skin wrinkled and cracked. His eyes dried in their sockets, turning into raisins. The blood became thick, viscous, unable to flow through his veins. His lips fell back, revealing his teeth in a mummified grin. He died, desiccated to a mummy under the merciless sun.
Darkness. Resurrection.
Behind the third door was a crowd. An endless crowd of people. Faceless, silent. They filled the space tightly, body to body. The hero found himself in the center. He couldn't move. The crowd pressed in from all sides. Arms, legs, torsos—everything was compressed. There was no air. People weren't breathing, weren't moving, just crushing. His chest couldn't expand. His arms were pinned to his sides. His legs buckled, but there was nowhere to fall—the crowd held him upright. The pressure grew. His ribs broke again. His spine crunched. His pelvis cracked. His skull was crushed from the sides, his brain was squeezed out through his ears. Death by crushing.
Darkness. Resurrection.
The fourth door—the hell of falling. Emptiness. The hero took a step and fell. Falling. Nothing around him, only the wind. He fell for a minute, ten, an hour. The fear grew with every second. He knew there would be a blow at the end. He fell, waiting, but the bottom never came. The waiting was worse than the fall itself. Then, finally, the impact. An invisible surface. His bones shattered all at once. His skeleton crumbled. His organs were torn apart by the impact. He was left a puddle of flesh and bone fragments.
Darkness. Resurrection.
The fifth door—the hell of drowning. Black water. The hero fell into it, began to drown. The water was thick as oil, pulling him down. He tried to swim, but his arms and legs sank. His lungs screamed for air. He held on for ten seconds. Twenty. His mouth opened on its own—instinct. Water gushed in. Cold, oily. Filled his lungs. He choked, trying to cough, but only sucked in more water. His chest burned. Panic. The darkness was creeping. He drowned, and drowned, and drowned. Death came slowly, painfully.
Darkness. Resurrection.
The hero lay on the hall floor. He couldn't rise. The phantom pains of all deaths throbbed simultaneously. Burning, freezing, suffocation, rotting, hunger, thirst, crushing, falling, drowning. A collection of agonies.
Medusa sat down next to him. Her face was pale. She, too, was opening doors. She, too, was dying.
Behind one door, snakes attacked her. Thousands of snakes—replicas of her own hair, but huge, vicious. They coiled around her, constricted, bit. Venom filled her veins. Her own snakes on her head tried to protect her, but they were small. The larger snakes devoured them, then began to devour her. Alive. Crawling into her mouth, her nose, gnawing through her skin. She died, devoured by the snakes.
Behind another door, her eyes dissolved. A hell of blindness. Her gaze—the petrifying gaze of a gorgon—turned against her. She looked in the mirror and saw herself. Their eyes met. The petrification began with her eyes—they hardened, cracked, crumbled into dust. Then the blindness spread inward, into her brain, into her soul. She died, turning into an empty statue from within.
Dolor opened one door. Beyond it lay a hell of suffering. All his torments—centuries on the altar, the torment of demons, the pain of every creature he had ever wounded—came back at once. They washed over him like an avalanche. The God of Suffering could not bear his own suffering, multiplied by eternity. His mind broke, torn apart. He died, crushed by the weight of his own pain.
The three of them sat together. Exhausted. Traumatized. The hero trembled from the residual cold and hunger and thirst and all the other agonies. Dolor stared into the void, still seeing the abyss of his suffering.
"How many doors have we opened?" Medusa asked.
"I don't know," the hero replied. "Hundreds?" — And none of them are a solution.
Silence. Thousands of doors stood around them. Untouched. Waiting.
The hero forced himself to stand. His legs wobbled, but he held on.
"There's a pattern," he said. "There must be. All these doors... they're labeled."
"But we can't read most of them," Medusa stood up as well.
"It doesn't matter. What matters is that they're labeled at all." The hero approached the nearest door and looked at the plaque. The symbols were unreadable, but they were there. "A name. Every hell has a name."
Dolor nodded slowly, understanding.
"Hell must be named. It's part of its nature."
"Exactly," the hero began to circle the hall again. Without opening the doors, simply looking at the plaques. "Fire, ice, pain, hunger—everything is named. Even if the language is dead, there's a name."
He walked faster. He checked plaque after plaque. Each one had symbols. A name.
Medusa joined him. Dolor, too. They circled the hall, checking every door.
An hour. Two. His legs ached, his eyes watered from the strain. But the hero continued.
And he found it.
In the corner, behind a column, almost hidden in shadow. A door. Gray, wooden, nondescript. Ugly to the point of simplicity.
And where the sign should have been, a smooth wooden surface. No symbols. No names. Emptiness.
"Here," the hero called.
Medusa and Dolor approached. They looked at the door.
"There's no sign," Medusa said.
"Exactly," the hero touched the door. The wood was warm under his fingers. Alive. "All hells have been named. But the exit..."
"Nameless," Dolor finished. "Freedom cannot be defined. Cannot be named. It simply is."
The hero took hold of the handle. His heart beat rapidly. What if this was a trap? A hell of namelessness? A hell of loss of identity?
But there was no choice. They couldn't keep the doors open forever.
He pushed.
The door opened.
There was light behind it. Soft, warm. A corridor of gray stone. Torches on the walls. A typical dungeon corridor.
Not hell.
The hero stepped through the threshold. Nothing had changed. No fire, no cold, no pain. Just a corridor. The stone beneath his feet was hard, real. The air smelled of mold and dampness—the normal smell of a dungeon.
Medusa followed. She stopped and looked around. The snakes on her head relaxed and stopped hissing.
"Is this... the exit?"
"Yes," the hero turned to her. "We found it."
Dolor entered last and closed the door. She disappeared—dissolved into the stone wall, as if she had never been there.
Silence. They stood in the corridor, the three of them. Alive.
Medusa suddenly laughed. Hysterically, relieved, unable to stop. The sound echoed off the walls.
"We're out. We're finally out!"
The hero sank to the floor, leaning his back against the wall. His whole body was shaking. The adrenaline was ebbing, leaving emptiness and pain. The phantom pains of all deaths pulsed in unison—freezing, suffocation, rotting, hunger, thirst, crushing, falling, drowning. Eight deaths in a few hours. Maybe less. Time lost its meaning in the hall of a thousand doors.
Medusa sat down next to him. His laughter turned to quiet sobs. Not from grief—from relief. From the fact that the worst was over.
Dolor remained standing. He stared at the wall where the door had been. His face was emotionless, but his hands were shaking. Barely noticeable, but they were shaking.
"Eight times," the hero said into the void. "I've died eight times." "Two," Medusa added.
"One," Dolor didn't take his eyes off the wall.
The hero looked at them. At Medusa, at Dolor, who was reliving all his endless suffering.
"We've been through a thousand hells."
"Not a thousand," Medusa corrected. "A dozen. But that was enough."
The hero nodded. A dozen hells. Each worse than the last. Each left scars—not on the body, but on the soul.
They sat for a long time. Not speaking. Just breathing. Feeling the stone beneath their backs, the cold air on their skin. Vivid sensations. Real.
Medusa stood up first. She swayed, leaning against the wall.
"We need to keep going."
"I know," the hero stood up after her. His legs wobbled, but they held. "Another nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five floors."
"That's quite a lot."
"Yes." Dolor came over and looked at them both.
"Will we get there?"
The question hung in the air. The hero thought. Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred seventy-five floors. If each one was like this—a thousand doors, a dozen deaths, endless torment—would they be able to?
He looked at Medusa. She met his gaze and nodded. Resolutely, despite the pain in her hand.
The hero looked at Dolor. He stood as always—silent, reliable, indestructible.
"Yes," the hero answered. "We'll get there. Because there's no other choice."
"Yes," Medusa said quietly. "We can stay. Find a safe floor. Live there. Don't go any further."
"You want to?"
Medusa looked at her hand. Then at the hero.
"No. I want to get out. See what's up there. Even if I die a hundred more times."
Dolor nodded.
"And I."
The hero smiled. Weakly, tiredly, but sincerely. "Then let's go."
They moved down the corridor. Slowly, because their legs ached, their wounds throbbed, and the phantom pains wouldn't go away. But they moved.
The corridor stretched forward, disappearing into darkness. Somewhere ahead was the next floor. The next test. The next death.
The hero thought about a thousand doors. About how easy it was to open the wrong one. How every mistake cost his life. How the right door was nameless, inconspicuous, almost invisible among a thousand hells.
That's how life works, he thought. A thousand ways to fail. One way to pass. And the right path never shouts about itself, doesn't glow with neon, doesn't promise ease. It simply is. Nameless. Waiting.
"What are you thinking about?" Medusa asked.
"About doors."
"And?"
"And about the fact that we found the right one. Among a thousand. That means something."
"What?" "That we can. We can find a way out, even when the odds are one in a thousand."
Medusa chuckled.
"Optimist."
"Realist." We found it.
"You found it."
"We. Together."
She squeezed his hand.
"Together."
They continued walking. The corridor led them to a staircase. Stone steps leading upward. The hero began to climb. One step. Two. Ten. One hundred.
His legs burned. His lungs screamed for air. But he continued. Medusa was nearby, breathing heavily. Dolor behind him, a silent guardian.
There was a door at the top. Simple, wooden. On it was a number: 999 975.
Next floor.
The hero pushed the door. It opened.
Behind it was a new world. A new trial. A new chance to die.
But they were alive. They've passed through a thousand doors, survived a dozen hells, and found the only way out amid endless traps.
If they can do this, they can do anything.
The hero stepped over the threshold.
Medusa and Dolor followed him.