The candles' soft flame periodically flickered in the dark of the cold damp cellar. Another matchstick brightened with life illuminating the small runes etched into the concrete floor. I lit the nearby candle, and returned to the decrepit desk in the corner. Damp papers and old leather bound books strewed across its surface. Notes and torn papers lined the wall in front of me, lines of indiscernible words of languages known and unknown. My head was pounding and blood began dripping from my eyes; it was time. 

I scrambled to grab my notes, my tools, everything I needed. The blood now spilling down my face, I managed to funnel it into the jar. The final step. I began painting the ancient runes on my skin with the blood: arms, chest, legs, head. Soon after my skin began to smolder, the blood seared into my flesh, my being, and began glowing with the light of a newly formed ember. Papers and books alike were thrown aside and off the desk as I thrashed in pain knocking the desk over along with a small lantern who’s thin glass shattered on the hard concrete floor, and the room was plunged into a deep darkness. I slumped over on the cold wet floor in agony until the pain slowly subsided. I turned to notice the dimly lit candles in the center of the room. Gazing at my mard flesh now holding a dull glow from the symbols carved into it, I shuttered as doubt filled my mind. I shouldn’t continue.

Grasping the paper in my hand I forced my body to crawl to the candle light, and upon reaching it I mustered all the strength I had left to lift my body onto its knees. My mind was racing, unable to focus as I tried to decipher the words on the paper, eventually they came, each word dearly familiar to me now. Each one slipping off my tongue as if I had said it everyday of my life. At the second verse of the incantation I realized those words were no longer my own, my mouth moved indiscriminately as the words passed through it. Fear, its icy grip paralyzed me as I realized I was no longer in control, hands, body, eyes, none responded to my will. I could hear voices, whispers in between the incoherent chanting. They plucked my mind, picking at my thoughts, and changing them. I started seeing visions, paths to false realities and distant futures. My mind flooded with these visions, an overwhelming wave of knowledge, but when I thought it was coming to a halt, I felt; IT. Its gaze wrecked me, my body quivering as shock, fear, and ecstasy surged through my being, and one after the other I felt every organ, every nerve, every cell in my body fail me. This was no demon, no monster that lurked in the night, no, this…THING… it wasn't any of the creations of our God, or any god that I knew of. It was not part of this world or maybe any world for that matter. Not of reality or comprehension itself. Its presence filled me, became me as the world around me melted away. I felt lifted, as if I was being pulled away, far away. The visions, words of truth, and glimpses of new realities continued to bombard my mind, my psyche. 

Suddenly as quickly as it glimpsed me, it left. Everything stopped the visions, feeling, emotion, it all stopped. I escaped reality, the knowledge, the truth now rooted into my being. There was nothing, but I saw everything, witnessed everything. I ascended. I sought for infinite knowledge and now I held it, but…it was useless, all useless. I had been purged from reality, my mind the only thing to ascend. I was trapped, imprisoned in my own mind. This was my punishment for seeking forbidden knowledge. 

This is my infinite purgatory.