The world has always seemed to me a miserable stage, where dust obscured the spotlights, and the actors were nothing more than soulless shadows. The words exchanged were mere replicas of a worn-out script, devoid of any authenticity. Laughter, anger, love — everything sounded false, echoing a falseness that suffocated me. But the library was different. There, lies lost their echo. Not because of the stories printed on the pages, but because books, in their stillness, offered something the world could not: true silence. I did not love them, nor did I hate them. I simply respected them because, unlike people, they didn't pretend to be what they weren't.
From a young age, I understood that the truth was a burden too heavy to carry without falling. I preferred lies — flexible, malleable, perfect tools for shaping reality to my liking. It wasn't a quest for power or recognition. I did not long for justice or redemption. I wanted control, absolute dominion over a world that insisted on deceiving me. Lying was my art, my weapon, and my shield.
My day always began the same way, a meticulously calculated routine where every gesture was another piece of the theater I directed for myself. I woke up at the exact moment when the morning light began to sneak through the cracks in the curtain, not out of necessity or desire, but out of habit. Waking was not marked by dreams or musings; it was dry, like a purposeless page being turned.
In the bathroom, the mirror reflected an image I never cared to observe closely. The face, tired but not worn, bore marks of sleepless nights and incessant thoughts. I brushed my teeth slowly, staring into the void, as water ran down the sink like a river with no destination. The shower came next, not to purify the body but to temporarily anesthetize it, muffling the internal noise with the sound of falling water.
Breakfast was a joyless ritual. There was neither haste nor indulgence, only the functionality of keeping the body in motion. Bread, black coffee, an occasional piece of fruit — all chewed mechanically, tasteless and irrelevant. It was like fueling a machine so it could keep running, indifferent to the type of fuel.
Then I dressed with the same monotony. The clothes were always neutral, without color or style that might betray personality. The world could be a stage, but I preferred to be an invisible extra. However, before leaving the room, there was a moment of hesitation. A brief instant when I looked around, noticing the unmade bed, the books piled on the floor, and the empty glass left on the nightstand. The sensation was one of perpetually standing on the brink of something, but never knowing what.
At the library, the world finally silenced its noisy farce. There, I could breathe, even if only shallowly. My table was a private fortress: dark wood, scarred by time, narrating stories I would never hear. Upon it, there was a carefully chosen stack of books, a notebook I rarely used, and a glass of wine almost always by my side. For years, the wine had been a constant, a small indulgence that made reading smoother. But that day, while reading Ego and Archetype, I realized it gave me nothing anymore. The glass, with its crimson liquid, seemed like an empty prop, a symbol of a pleasure I no longer recognized.
I took a sip, trying to summon a memory of the flavor, but it was merely acidic and purposeless. I pushed the glass away and, with an almost irritated gesture, grabbed the glass of water beside it. The simplicity of water seemed more honest. It didn't pretend to be something it wasn't, unlike the wine, which promised a pleasure that never came.
I returned to the book. Jung's words danced on the page, and for a moment, I lost myself in them. The concept of the "Self" as something greater than the ego was an idea that provoked me. Was it possible for something to exist beyond the masks we wear? The answer seemed to elude me, as all truths did. But I wasn't there to find it. I was there because the silence of books reminded me that as long as I read, the world outside would remain trapped in its grotesque performance, without me. And that was enough.
One night, like so many others, the library was empty. There was nothing but the constant hum of fluorescent lights illuminating rows of shelves that seemed to stretch into infinity. My footsteps echoed in a space I knew so well it had become tedious. Cataloging books was almost an automatic task, a repetitive dance without music or purpose, but it was my routine. Until it appeared.
The book had no presence, yet it was impossible to ignore. It was there, in the center of a forgotten table, as if it had always belonged in that place and yet didn't. Its black leather cover seemed like something pulled from a fever dream, pulsing with a vitality that defied reason. There was no title, no author, no mark of origin. It was an enigma that seemed to observe me, even without eyes.
Approaching it wasn't a choice. It was a necessity. A magnet pulling me, not out of curiosity, but something deeper, almost visceral. My fingers hesitated for a brief second before touching its warm, almost living surface. And the moment I did, the world around me collapsed.
No metaphor can capture what happened. It was like being torn into fragments, each piece of me traversing a whirlwind of darkness and fire. Memories I had buried were ripped from their graves. Secrets I barely knew existed surfaced, like monsters emerging from a black lake. The book didn't transport me; it devoured me.
When I finally opened my eyes, the ground was no longer solid. I was in Hell. Not a figurative or psychological hell, but the real one. Flames danced around me, and the air carried the weight of a thousand condemnations. I wasn't afraid; I was eager for what was about to unfold — resolution for a monotonous life comes in surprises.
The ground was an exposed graveyard, covered in dry bones that cracked under my feet. On the horizon, rivers of blood and lava flowed between black mountains whose peaks disappeared into a sky of pulsating fire and storms of ash. The air was thick, laden with a heat that burned the lungs, mingled with the stench of rotten flesh and sulfur.
Souls were everywhere, twisted, screaming, fighting each other in endless cycles of violence. Men and women—or what was left of them—attacked each other with a brutality beyond anything I could conceive as human. Every action seemed driven by something deeper than despair—it was as if the very essence of these people had been corrupted, reduced to pure predatory instinct.
I saw a man—or what once resembled a man—tear another's eyes out with his bare hands. Beside him, a woman with disheveled hair devoured a piece of raw, bleeding human flesh, while in the distance, a group gathered in ritualistic frenzy, dancing around a pyre where something screamed as it was consumed by flames.
And in the midst of it all, I was disturbingly calm. I had grown accustomed to pain and to the grotesque cruelty of humanity. I was not a normal person—I was amoral, indifferent to common norms. People usually saw me as a monster.
"Welcome," a voice said.
I turned and saw a figure emerging from the shadows. Its body was a grotesque amalgamation of shapes, shifting constantly, but its eyes remained steady: two fiery pits that seemed to pierce my soul.
"You know where you are," it continued, a smile forming on its ever-changing face.
"Yes," I replied without hesitation.
"God chose you," it said, its voice echoing like thunder. "You've been chosen by Him. You bear the honor—or the curse—of being here. But the question that matters is not why you were chosen. It's what you'll do now. The First Circle of the Seven is Gluttony."
I looked at the gates towering in the distance, colossal and terrifying. Carved with scenes of pain and sin, they pulsed as if alive.
"Those gates lead to the heart of Hell," the figure said. "There, every sin that ever dwelled in a human heart takes form. They are your task. Free the souls they imprison, if you can. But remember: here, every choice has a price. And you are no less vulnerable than the souls you seek to save."
A chill ran down my spine. "And if I don't want to save anyone?"
The creature's smile widened. "Then you'll just be another piece on this board, destined for the same fate as the others. Death, pain, eternity—it makes no difference to us. But to you..." It pointed to the gates, which began to creak open slowly.
The sound from within was a cacophony of screams and laughter, so intense it threatened my sanity. The heat emanating from there was suffocating, and yet, my feet began to move.
I didn't hesitate. Not because I was brave, but because I knew hesitation meant weakness, and weakness was never an option.
As the gates fully opened, I swallowed hard and murmured to myself:
"If Hell wants to consume me, let it try. But I won't be a pawn in this place."
And with that, I took my first step into Hell.
Crossing the Circle of Gluttony felt like descending into the abyss of human self-sabotage, where sin is reflected not just in punishment but in the flesh and spirit of the damned. Each step brought me closer to a painful realization: gluttony is not merely an act of overconsumption but of being consumed to the point of total annihilation.
The first soul I encountered was Esau, a man who traded his spiritual birthright for a bowl of lentils. He sat on the ground, surrounded by a massive pile of lentils boiling in an infernal cauldron. The lentils writhed like worms, but the most grotesque sight was that each time Esau tried to grab a handful, they bubbled and burst into flames. His skin, already covered in burns, split open to raw flesh whenever he touched the lentils. His insatiable hunger, which in mortal life had led him to scorn his blessing, now consumed him from within. "I desired momentary satisfaction," he said, his voice torn by pain. "Now, I am a prisoner of my own need, and still, I never sate my hunger." Every lentil he tried to eat disintegrated into ashes, only to regenerate in an endless repetition of torment. Gluttony, once a fleeting desire, had become an unending cycle of self-destruction, reflecting the choice to scorn what truly mattered.
Moving forward, I found Balaam, the prophet corrupted by greed and the desire for material rewards. He sat at a table covered with piles of filthy gold and coins. However, each time he tried to grab a handful of gold, the coins melted, oozing through his hands as a viscous, putrid substance that seeped under his skin. He was drenched in a golden liquid that burned him from within, yet he kept trying to grab more. "I sought gold, but now the gold consumes me," he muttered, his eyes almost blinded by his attempts to grasp the void. "The greed I fed now devours me, as if I were merely a reflection of my own avarice." The coins offered no wealth, only destruction. His mouth was filled with a sticky substance, impossible to swallow, forcing him to vomit repeatedly, yet he never stopped trying to ingest the void that had become his sole desire.
As I moved on, an overwhelming sense of discomfort gripped me, until I came face-to-face with Tantalus. He stood in a pool of murky water, surrounded by trees bearing sweet fruits just beyond his reach. Every time Tantalus leaned down to drink, the water receded from his mouth. When he reached for the fruits, they floated upward, mocking him. He thrashed, his body sinking into the swampy ground, the trees' roots digging into his flesh as if each temptation brought a new pain. "Why torment me with desires I can never fulfill?" Tantalus cried, his voice desperate and full of frustration. "I committed a terrible crime—I killed my own son to feed the gods—but now I'm a prisoner of my own hunger, unable to touch, unable to satiate the emptiness that consumes me." He looked like a skeleton, his skin nearly disintegrating, his hunger having devoured even his identity. The eternal gap between what he desired and what he could never have was his punishment, a suffering far deeper than mere deprivation: he longed but would never possess, never be satisfied.
Further on, a more monstrous figure appeared. Cerberus, the three-headed dog, was devouring everything in sight. But the most horrifying part was that, for every piece of flesh he swallowed, Cerberus's own body disintegrated, as if gluttony had become a poison eating away at his flesh. One head snarled as it chewed humans, another swallowed rocks and stones, and the third, with an insatiable appetite, devoured the very flames around it. His eyes burned with a hunger that could never be sated, and his flesh tore apart, never being replenished. "I am hunger," Cerberus growled, his voice echoing from all three mouths. "I devour everything, but I am never fed. The hunger I feel is my eternity, an endless cycle." His mouth seemed like a chasm of hell itself, and every piece of flesh he devoured only heightened his agony, pushing him further into the destruction of his own form. He was a grotesque representation of insatiable appetite, where the more one consumes, the further they drift from their identity, from the essence of who they truly are.
Further ahead, I encountered Nebuchadnezzar II, the king who, in his arrogance and gluttony, was driven to madness and transformed into a beastly being. He was in the field, eating "grass" like a cow, but his body was grotesquely distorted. His skin was covered with thick hair, and his hands, which once held scepters, had now become paws, clawing at the earth made of mortal remains. "I gave myself to vanity, power, and luxury," he said, his deep voice muffled by the "soil" he devoured. "And now, I am reduced to this. What I sought now consumes me, and my hunger will never be sated. I was undone by my own thirst for power." He looked at me with hollow eyes, as if he was no longer a man but merely a shadow of his own guilt. The image of the king turned beast was a warning, the loss of all power when one succumbs to the gluttony of the ego, the insatiable desire for more.
Finally, I came across Henry VIII, the king who indulged in luxurious feasts and endless excesses. He was surrounded by an unending table, laden with decaying meats and dishes dissolving into rot. He tried to eat, but every morsel he placed in his mouth instantly disintegrated into filth and decomposition. "I lived for pleasure, for banquets, for fleeting satisfaction," he said, his voice muffled by the fat clogging his throat. "And now, I am consumed by my own gluttony. What I sought so fervently now devours me." Each piece of food he tried to swallow turned into a mass of decay, poisoning him and making him more repulsive with each passing second. The banquet never ended, yet the pleasure he sought remained perpetually out of reach, consuming him slowly, turning him into a reflection of the very decadence he had pursued in life.