The Unraveling of Lucian Crowe: As Below, So Within
The Threshold
The air wasn’t just still—it was spent, like the breath of a dying man left to rot in his own lungs. Lucian Crowe adjusted the cuffs of his Jason Arasheben dress shirt, the silk sticking to his wrists with old sweat. Five thousand dollars of tailoring, wasted in this place that stank of mildew and something sharper beneath it—ozone, maybe, or the metallic tang of dried blood.
He’d been here before. Not here, exactly, but places like it: the back rooms of courthouses where deals went sour, the hushed corridors of hospitals where the rich paid to have their mistakes disappear. This was worse. This was the kind of place that didn’t bother hiding its indifference.
Ahead of him, a man hunched like a question mark, his suit hanging off him like a shroud. Behind, a woman sobbed into her hands—not the messy, snot-filled kind, but the quiet, exhausted weeping of someone who’d run out of tears hours ago.
Lucian rolled his shoulders. “Christ. If this is the VIP line, I’d hate to see the peasant queue.”
No one laughed. No one even looked up.
A desk materialized in front of him, oak so dark it looked black, its surface carved with names—some fresh, some worn smooth by time. Behind it, a man who wasn’t quite a man. Too polished. Too aware. Silver hair combed back like a 1940s radio host, vest buttoned tight over a frame that didn’t seem to need bones.
“Ah. Number eleven.” The man smiled. His teeth were perfect. “You’re late, Mr. Crowe.”
“For what?”
“Your reckoning.”
A golden rectangle slid across the desk. Lucian reached for it—
—and the second his fingers touched metal, he remembered.
Eleanor, standing in the doorway of their penthouse, her suitcase already packed. “You don’t get to apologize this time.”
Michael at twelve, flinching when Lucian raised a hand to adjust his tie.
Sarah at eight, hiding a bruise under her school blazer.
The memories came like a punch to the throat. He dropped the rectangle. It hit the desk with a sound like a gavel.
“Through there,” the man said, nodding to a door Lucian hadn’t noticed before.
No handle. No keyhole. Just steel, pockmarked with rust that looked too much like old blood.
Lucian pressed his palm to it.
The door opened.
And the dark swallowed him whole.
The Descent
This wasn’t darkness. This was unmaking.
Lucian tried to scream. No sound. No air. No body. Just the raw, animal understanding that he was being taken apart, piece by piece.
Then—
A sound like a rib cracking. Light speared through the black, too bright, too hungry.
Figures emerged. Not men. Not monsters. Things in armor, their faces smooth and blank as mannequins. They grabbed him.
“Get off—” He swung. His fist connected with a helmet. Pain exploded up his arm—his knuckles split, bones grinding like gravel.
Didn’t matter.
Chains clamped around his wrists, his ankles, cold as a coroner’s slab. They hauled him up, suspended like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse.
Then it appeared.
No footsteps. No warning. Just there—a shape in a coat that might’ve been velvet once, before time and neglect had eaten the richness out of it.
“Lucian Crowe.” Its voice wasn’t deep. Wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. “Welcome to the Consequence.”
The air reeked of scorched metal and spoiled meat. Above him, stone arches curved into nothing. Torches burned with no flame. Shadows twitched without bodies to cast them.
“We go down from here,” it said. “Each step earned.”
Lucian bared his teeth. “I want a lawyer.”
“You wrote the law.” The thing’s smile was a slit in clay. “We’re just enforcing it.”
The chains yanked.
And down he went.
Level One: The Avarice Abyss
The sludge wasn’t mud. It was greed—thick, clotting, alive. It sucked at his knees, his hands, his mouth, tasting of pennies and bile.
Figures writhed around him, their skin gray, their eyes hollow. They clutched at coins that turned to dust in their fingers, only to reform just out of reach.
“You called it ambition,” the voice said. “We call it theft.”
A guard shoved him face-first into the muck. It filled his nose, his throat—
And then the coins came.
Not dropped. Born.
They pushed up through his skin, erupting from his palms, his chest, his eyelids. Gold dollars. Platinum rings. Stocks folded into origami birds that fluttered in his ribcage.
He screamed. The sludge drank the sound.
A woman clawed at his leg, her fingers skeletal. “You took my pension,” she hissed. “You took my life.”
Lucian kicked her away. Another took her place. And another.
The coins kept coming.
Level Two: The Crucible of Contempt
Glass. Everywhere. Shattered.
The rain wasn’t water. It was words—every slur, every sneer, every you’re less than he’d ever spat. It ate his skin like acid.
Figures emerged from the shards. The evicted. The fired. The ones he’d called worthless.
A man with a face like crumpled paper reached for him. “You had me deported over a parking ticket,” he whispered.
His touch was gentle.
That was the worst part.
Where his fingers brushed Lucian’s arm, the flesh dissolved, peeling away like wet tissue.
Level Three: The Echo Chamber of Betrayal
Mirrors. Cracked. Smeared with fingerprints.
In each one—
Eleanor. Michael. Sarah. The others.
Not screaming. Just looking.
Their whispers:
“You promised.”
“You said it was real.”
Then they stepped out.
Eleanor’s nails dug into his cheeks. “You loved me,” she said, soft as a knife between ribs. “Remember?”
Michael gripped his broken hand and squeezed. Bones ground like teeth.
Sarah just watched. “Daddy,” she said, and the word was a verdict.
The women came next. The ones from the hotels, the offices, the backseats of town cars. They touched him with his own lies. Their hands burned like truth.
Level Four: The Frostbite of Malice
Cold. Not winter. Absence.
Ice split under his feet. Ahead—
Eleanor, by a fire. Michael, laughing. Sarah, speaking like someone listened.
Warm. Alive.
Gone.
He ran. The ice broke. The water beneath was black.
They turned away.
Not in hate.
In peace.
Level Five: The Mire of Self-Loathing
Just him. And the voices.
His own.
“You were never enough.”
“They stayed out of fear.”
“No one will miss you.”
The fog laughed.
He clawed at his ears.
The laughter didn’t stop.
The Bottomless Edge
No fire. No devil.
Just the fall.
And the door—
A silhouette. Not wrathful.
Grieving.
“I would have taken you home.”
But home was closed.
The last chain snapped.
Lucian fell.
He didn’t scream from the pain.
He screamed because he understood.
And no one was left to hear it.
Not even God.
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The creativity !!
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Ha, gives you a hot minute to take a step back, and question yourself.
Very creative. Well done.
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The Unraveling of Lucian Crowe: As Below, So Within is a visceral descent into moral reckoning, blending psychological horror with mythic punishment. Lucian Crowe, a wealthy and morally bankrupt corporate predator, finds himself dragged into a hell of his own making—a labyrinth of surreal torments mirroring the lives he ruined. Each level of his descent peels back another layer of his sins: greed, cruelty, betrayal, and the hollow self-loathing that festered beneath. The story strips away his defenses with escalating brutality, forcing him to confront not just his victims, but the chilling truth that his damnation isn’t fueled by divine wrath—it’s the inevitable echo of choices he never regretted until it was too late. Written in lean, brutal prose, this tale asks what remains of a soul when every sin is laid bare, and the only witness left is the man who refused to change.
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