{"id":16274,"date":"2026-05-15T21:23:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T19:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=16274"},"modified":"2026-05-15T21:23:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T19:23:28","slug":"2-stories-by-rudy-von-k","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=16274","title":{"rendered":"2 stories by Rudy Von K"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Lecturi potrivite\/recomandate de Alexandra)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The Blight<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018There are dreams that do not die upon awaking, dreams that rot within like fruit left in the sun.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Necrom\u00e3ghion \u2013 Sarcophagus 3:2<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

As he wandered deep in a hideous dream, the man found himself running wildly along the shadow-choked lane of an ancient, sprawling mansion precinct. He ran as though pursued by all the furies of damnation \u2013 wild-eyed, breathless, his heart hammering against his ribs like a maniacal drum. Sweat poured down his face in hot, saline rivulets that stung his wide blue eyes. He knew not how long he had fled; his memory had withered into the eternal present of terror, knowing only darkness, and the dread of being overtaken.<\/p>\n

The flanking houses loomed in dreadful symmetry \u2013 their facades bearing that decadent, glacial grandeur of posthumous masks, funereal and deserted, like the ghastly scenery of a nightmarish theatre of shadows.<\/p>\n

He struck upon a tall, black door, pounding with bruised and bleeding fists until the pain became unreal. Yet the door absorbed every sound, as though it were cast from lead. In despair, he fled again. Then came a noise \u2013 a guttural gurgle, an obscene bubbling, from the darkened void. He halted, heart tolling like a bell of doom. Once more, that blasphemous growl echoed, nearer and fuller, like the laughter of a corpse-filled abyss. A chill of absolute despair swept through him. Thoughts \u2013 hideous, serrated \u2013 invaded his mind; tenebrous meditations that only death could silence. It was as though all the cavernous horrors of creation had found lodging in his skull, feeding upon his fragmented sanity. It was not the fear of death that gnawed at him, but the terror of the unholy, the unclean, the madness that walks with form \u2013 festering and miasmic \u2013 an abomination that pursued him through the lightless lanes. As the last tatters of his reason unraveled, he turned his gaze, stretching several hundred feet before ending abruptly at a wall of cyclopean stone.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, he thought better of it, and no longer wished to remain in that nightmare-haunted landscape. A single urge seized him: to flee, to break whatever unholy boundary separated this domain from the world he knew, and to escape. Then he saw it \u2013 a pedestal: tall, solemn, improbably well-wrought. A monolithic monument, wholly out of joint with its blighted surroundings. From its marble flanks jutted several withered branches, as though the stone itself had sprouted dead limbs.<\/p>\n

How strange, he thought. He could not connect the monument to anything familiar. No memory. No dream. Not that he dreamed often\u2026 and that fact, too, told him something. He could not remember this place. Perhaps he had not walked here for many years \u2013 or never at all \u2013 and yet, in some dreadful way, it felt as though he could no longer leave it.<\/p>\n

He stepped nearer the monolith. It had grown \u2013 or so it seemed. Towering now, as if piercing the storm-laden heavens massing at the horizon. Something compelled him to lay a hand upon the finely carved surface, where intricate images unfurled like filigree. Tall men and humanoid fish ascended together the steep, zig-zagging ramp of a temple. They bore in their hands strange offerings, vaguely reminiscent of wheat stalks, yet unnervingly other. There was something profoundly disquieting about those unknown objects. Above the temple hung a great sun whose rays ended in tiny hands, fanning downward in benediction. The scene was triumphant. Imperial, even.<\/p>\n

The rest of the monolith displayed shifting tableaux from the entwined history of that hybrid people. In one panel, fish-kings commanded the raising of ziggurats, throngs of slaves labouring beneath the lash. In another, the monarchs rose from the sea in long, solemn processions, gliding along stone avenues \u2013 as though some unimaginable city slumbered in the abyss. Higher still, human kings prostrated themselves before strange vessels drifting above the clouds, the scene continuing with the descent of beings from those hovering craft, who came bearing gifts and blessings for mankind.<\/p>\n

All this struck him as impossibly out of joint with the world. Something deep within whispered that he had stumbled upon a relic sacred to a past so ancient that modern civilization \u2013 blind and deaf \u2013 knew nothing of its shadow. He realized he could no longer recall how he had come here, nor whence he had set out, nor when. A wave of sickness washed over him. The monolith seemed to drain him, to leech the marrow of his thoughts into that archaic totem crowded with inscrutable visions. All he knew was that he must run, must find a door, must emerge somewhere \u2013 anywhere \u2013 other than this forsaken place. And he felt something more.<\/p>\n

A fear \u2013 paralytic, ungovernable, desolating \u2013 a terror so total it made his entire body tremble and shiver with a deathly cold.<\/p>\n

He screamed, a sound torn from the primal marrow, and hurled himself toward the final row of houses. There he saw that their doors were no doors at all, but sepulchral slabs, their centres burdened with grand handles of lead. Then he understood. These were not houses; they were tombs. The lane itself had become a necropolis, illumined faintly by the violet pallor of a morbid night star climbing a bleak, ashen sky, casting its necrotic iridescence upon the desecrated world. Weeds, gravestones, and mausoleums flanked the cobbled path, ending at the wall, the barrier of his doom.<\/p>\n

There, he knew he must face the blasphemy, whose choking, rhythmic bellow crept through the darkness to claim its due. He ran toward the wall, desperate to see only the immensity of it, its architectural impossibility, a monolith of extinction built by the imagination of some merciless freak.<\/p>\n

Then he saw himself from above, his consciousness unmoored, fluttering like a dying moth above this forgotten eternity of nightmare. He saw his own form below: small, trembling, clad in rags. But the most mind-rending revelation was his own face, from which every trace of humanity had fled. With a cry that sundered the silence, he clawed at his visage, finding no mouth, no eyes, no nose, only the blank graft of living meat.<\/p>\n

Then, in a spasm of blind horror, he heard the swine-like grunt of the thing. It was there, above him, snorting, drooling ropes of pestilential saliva upon his trembling body. As the beast\u2019s cold, howling blizzard breath froze his veins, the last ember of consciousness guttered out before his body gradually started to be absorbed by the shadowy abomination, dissolving into thin air, like candle smoke after the flame had been extinguished.<\/p>\n

Sated, the beast howled with a deep, growling intensity before shifting into a massive black hound, its eyes glowing like embers from a demon\u2019s hearth, searching hungrily for its next victim\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Deep<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Deep\u2026 deep is the black night of the soul\u2026 I wake up in this horrid dream. Monstrous creatures\u2026 the dark\u2026 resurfacing\u2026 It hurts! It\u2019s the memory that has to be dealt with, not the reality. But still\u2026 The past is my worst enemy and I don\u2019t want to go back there\u2026 As the Crucible spilled its dark residue, we had to go back there. Has my memory dimmed, striving to forget what happened there? The crew, or what remained of it after the blot, scattered across the lands, and now I have to find them again, to reassemble what\u2019s been called: the remnants!<\/p>\n

All I do is resist, but the Voice grows stronger and stronger each day\u2026 I am at my resistance\u2019s end, and as the dunes pass, I feel I shall let it all go. It\u2019s too powerful\u2026 I\u2019d better commit suicide before turning back there\u2026<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Days and nights without rest, haunted by dread and feverish deluges, have brought me to the brink of madness. As I write these lines, flashes of the unspeakable pass before my eyes \u2013 fragments of horror that no waking state of mind can piece together. I cannot reconcile with what I\u2019ve done, nor with what I\u2019ve seen. In the long dunes between dusk and dawn, my thoughts thrash in a storm of blood-soaked memories, each one tearing at the fabric of my sanity. I can no longer trace the path of recollection, nor set down the horrors on paper without feeling the mind slip like sand through my fingers.<\/p>\n

I have come to see memory as a thing of the flesh, for the body now bears the weight of what my mind can no longer hold. Deep within me \u2013 the very entrails \u2013 know the truth that no tongue could ever tell, the truth that rises, in its unspeakable atrocity, beyond all evil. It is the moment when consciousness, torn from the body, unravels, decays, and poisons the flesh \u2013 like the venom of a cobra seeping into the blood until it becomes the very poison of the soul \u2013 and madness takes its throne for good.<\/p>\n

I shall attempt, however feebly, to commit to paper the fleeting fragments of my experience in those woods… those unforgiving, bloated places where nothing human has ever walked, where man himself would be the least likely evil, and where history dares not cast its light. Today, as I try to sit before pen and page, the thought of suicide has whispered to me like a lullaby. It is the only comfort left, the one soothing promise that holds me to this world \u2013 the thought that with rope or poison I might end this endless torment, and that beyond oblivion, perhaps, lies absolution.<\/p>\n

But that path is still before me. The Voice grows louder, more commanding with each passing day. The other night, during one of its attacks, when it ordered me to return to the territory, I seized the kitchen knife and cut off both my ears, hoping to silence it for a while. But apart from the fainting and the blood loss, I gained no peace. Nightfall comes with visions and broken shards of imagery \u2013 brimstone, drowning, a vast terror spreading through all things, and that mortal stab in my chest which I now accept as normality.<\/p>\n

Even so, these lines shall be my last. At dusk, I shall end this wretched farce. The rope is ready \u2013 tied firm to the strongest beam in the attic. It alone is my final glimmer of light.<\/p>\n

To those who come after, once these morbid events have run their course, I leave this journal. I pray that, overlooking my madness and the shattered nature of these thoughts, they may piece together the abominations that have taken place and draw their own conclusions. The Voice gives me no rest\u2026 I must prepare\u2026<\/p>\n

1093 A.N. \u2013 Amphion \u2013 Oct of Departure<\/strong><\/p>\n

I commit myself to the road toward Darksilvania. This day marks the eighth Dune upon the way. The other three are as I am \u2013 bare of recollection of what had transpired. And yet here we are. It rained without cease \u2013 that kind of rain which brings forth a dense and unearthly smog transgressing every twilight into a macabre visage… The days are but brief intervals of dim, reluctant light. We walk along the rutted roads, halting in small clearings or beneath the heavy boughs of ancient trees.<\/p>\n

If the rain would be a creature, it must be an ice-blooded venomous serpent, slithering beneath our garments in the small dunes only to envenom us. All are silent. There is nothing to say. With every hamlet we\u2019ve abandoned, every hilltop and woodland pass left behind, we feel the Territory\u2019s magnetic call. It lures us, seduces us, binds us beyond any power of resistance. No thought can I break the dread murmur of the Voice which, though not always commanding, whispering behind the mind \u2013 hissing like a poisonous spring of pitch, grinning demonically in the deep chambers of the ear where once the soul had made its nest of memories. But no\u2026 such solace is forbidden.<\/p>\n

The wagon creaks and groans at every joint, and the coachman is the vilest of men. Ever do I hear him curse and lash the poor mare with a thick whip wrought from a macker\u2019s tail. The beast panted, half-mad with pain, yet he didn\u2019t cease. Again and again, he struck her with beastly fervor. At times, he laughs to himself, as if conversing with some unseen companion. And when he\u2019s not laughing, he enters in sudden fits where some dark malice seizes his voice \u2013 he mutters strange words and short, whistling phrases that chill the marrow.<\/p>\n

Yet most harrowing of all is the mare\u2019s tortured neighing, a sound to mutilate the soul itself. Last eve, at supper, I beheld the wretched creature \u2013 nothing but flesh and bone, a four-legged cadaver like some wendigo of the wilds, her spine and ribs a mangled relic of living flesh, scourged raw by the whip. As she fed from a pail of moldy hay, I saw her blood mingling with the thin rain, pooling beneath her into a crimson mire. I turned away in horror, yet the coachman, perceiving my revulsion, seized once more his instrument of torment and scourged her until she fell upon her knees in that ghastly pool of blood and filth. Then, as if nothing had happened, he ordered the departure. We followed \u2013 mindless, hollow, obedient, only to find in the back of the wagon that one of the remnants had cut his own throat with a rusty blade \u2013 another grim reminder of the moving terror between us \u2013 a pack of trapped rats in a rolling cage. Nobody said a word before we tossed his cadaver into a ravine deep as an open wound beneath the bleak sky.<\/p>\n

In the night, I managed to sleep a little. For but a fleeting moment, I drifted into a dream and found myself again in the clearing of my childhood, gathering apples beside my father. He smiled at me telling me that everything is going to be alright \u2013 but, at that very instant, the dream was shattered by the most horrid of sounds. I started up, burning with terror. It was not the Voice \u2013 no, it was a shrill keening, like the cry of a harpy, prolonged and piercing, drawing nearer and nearer until it consumed all other sound.<\/p>\n

The others awoke, staring wide-eyed through the ragged holes of the wagon\u2019s cover, seeking meaning in that unholy clamor. Suddenly the whole wagon jolted with an unspeakable violence \u2013 as though being a small boat in a sea tempest \u2013 and one of my comrades fell upon me, screaming from the depths of his bowels. Immediately, all turned over, becoming a chaos of limbs, cries, and splintered wood.<\/p>\n

How long it endured, I have no recollection. Were we dead? I only know that after some void of time, I felt my body as one vast wound, oozing vile and sticky humors. Upon my brow, I felt a foul, oily substance trickling down my neck and chest \u2013 not my own. Later, I beheld the mangled visage of the man who had fallen upon me. Half his skull was smashed to pieces, and the other half impaled upon the twisted iron of the shattered frame \u2013 a grotesque fusion of flesh, blood, and wreckage. I passed out.<\/p>\n

When sense returned, I was no longer in the wagon but lying in a cold, muddy pool. Around me lay the broken bodies of the others \u2013 dismembered, scattered like marionettes cast into a pit of dump. I felt life ebbing swiftly away, yet with the last of my strength I dragged myself onto a patch of blackened grass strewn with conifer fruits. Pines \u2013 I was among the pines. Through the darkness I discerned faint shapes and contours, and there, not far off, the coachman\u2019s lantern still burned, fallen into a hollow. By its dim light I saw that horror which filled me with a grim, almost grateful justice: the coachman\u2019s head was gone. His massive body lay upright against a tree, as though he had merely removed his hat and sat to rest.<\/p>\n

I could not see what had become of the others, for then the horrid sounds rose again \u2013 a hissing, as of great serpents or hydras, cutting the air above the treetops. And then I saw them. Three in number, gliding between the trunks with impossible speed, their long, greasy bodies cloaked in tatters of black cloth \u2013 great, fluttering rags as though torn from the robes of giants. I could not tell if they bore human shape, yet their heads were monstrous, drawing all remaining light unto themselves. Vast hoods concealed their faces, beneath which echoed a continuous howling, while their funeral shrouds billowed as they circled above the ruin of the wagon.<\/p>\n

One descended, seizing a limb from the ground before vanishing again among the crowns of the pines. Another swooped low above my head and struck at the mare, who still breathed, struggling to rise. That was her final act. In an instant, she was lifted as though by an unseen butcher, and her scream was cut short. Her lifeless carcass fell with a dull thud beyond the stones.<\/p>\n

Bereft of hope, I crawled beneath the roots of an ancient tree, awaiting my end \u2013 almost glad that those harpies, or demons of the dark, might finish me and deliver me from the poison of existence. Without a sound, gliding down from the heights of the pines, an abomination crept toward the roots beneath which I hid \u2013 only so that I might behold its face\u2026 or rather, the two whirling orbs, spinning like unholy gyres, that mocked me from the darkness of its hood. While it gazed upon me, I felt my body no more, nor the passage of time; that single, dreadful stare might have lasted but a moment \u2013 or an eternity \u2013 for my memory can no longer make justice. Yet whether by its own will or by some darker judgement, the thing left me to the night and rain, vanishing along with the others into the thickening mist, not before raising a ghastly chime that swallowed the whole reality. And this was just the beginning of my demonic torment I came to call\u2026 the deep, as the Voice began to whisper my name once more\u2026<\/p>\n

Top of Form<\/p>\n

Bottom of Form<\/p>\n

\n

(Stories from the upcoming volume Necrom\u00e3ghion<\/em>)<\/p>\n

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Literary CV<\/p>\n

R von K \/ Negran<\/p>\n

I am a graduate of Visual Arts, working at the intersection of image, narrative, and symbolic expression as a graphic designer and author. My creative practice is rooted in a synthesis of visual storytelling and literary exploration, with a focus on the inner world, archetypal imagery, and the transformative potential of imagination. I live & write in Kronstadt, Transylvania, Romania.<\/p>\n

I am the initiator of two independent editorial initiatives:<\/p>\n