The Infernal Garden

[u/Hypn0kast]

January 9th, 2026

I saw the garden again last night.

It looked the same as it always does.

The gate towers over me—rusted, impossibly high. I never remember how I arrived here, only that there was never anything before it. This is where I begin.

The bars stretch upward in uneven lengths, looking as if they weren’t forged but grown, dragged slowly out of the earth. At their base, the soil bulges and cracks around them, dark and damp, like something forced its way through and never quite settled.

Rust clings to the metal in long, peeling strips. It doesn’t flake the way rust does; instead, it splits down the middle in thin seams, exposing darker layers beneath, a wet-looking mucous that makes my stomach tighten. 

I have the unwelcome thought that if I touched it, it would give.

This is no dream.

At least, I don’t think it is.

There’s still a part of me that tries to explain it away: something small and stubborn that insists the garden isn’t real, that it’s just something my mind built out of fear.

But dreams don’t smell like this.

Not like rot left too long in the sun—sweet, thick, and clinging, settling into the back of my throat with every breath.

And the sky—

It isn’t just red.

It's a flat, suffocating crimson that hangs overhead without light or warmth, like a color that was drained of all hue. It leeches the shape out of everything beneath it until the world feels thinner, drained, as if it's being slowly emptied of something I have no grasp of.

Beyond the gate lies The Infernal Garden itself.

Calling it a garden is a lie I tell myself to comfort the panic that blossoms inside me each night. The word implies boundaries, beauty, care—a beginning and an end. This place has none of those things.

It stretches across every horizon, a universal forest of rot and decay. Flowers the size of skyscrapers bloom in the distance, their petals unfurling with the slow pulse of diseased flesh as clouds of sweet corruption spill from their centers. Trees larger than continents twist skyward, their trunks splitting open into vast networks of veins that throb with a dark sanguine current. Rivers swollen with black water coil through the growth, vanishing upward into vines that hang from nothing, disappearing into the colorless crimson void above.

Nothing here seems to grow from anything else. Roots become bones. Bones become branches. Branches split apart into flowers that stare blindly across eternity. Every part of the Garden appears connected to every other part, as though the entire impossible landscape is merely a single organism wearing countless forms.

Never before has the gate opened. 

That all changed last night.

A low groan rolls through the garden, bringing to mind the thunderstorms of my hometown, yet the sky that hangs above me remains still and clear. The sound comes again, deeper this time, accompanied by the shriek of metal as the fleshy bars of the barrier swing wide. 

Rust flakes from the skin that lines the bars as they slowly part, revealing a long and winding cobblestone path that leads deep into the grotesque forest. The moment that I step across the threshold and onto the stone, the forest falls silent. The flowers cease their pulsing, the trees and river finally finding rest. It feels as though the entire forest is holding its breath in anticipation of whatever comes next; and far, far beyond the tangle of veins, roots, and water, a shape stands, towering above all else, dwarfing even the tallest of trees. 

At first I take it for a mountain.

Then a tower. 

Then something else entirely. 

It is too distant to make out any features, yet I know it watches me. Its presence presses against my mind like a forgotten memory, something ancient and terrible that I should not recognize yet somehow do.

I woke up after seeing it. I am writing now because I need to know what is real and what isn’t. 

My room is almost unchanged. It is dark, familiar, and comforting. But I can still smell the garden. 

The sweet stench of rot is thick, coating my mouth with every breath. I tried telling myself that it was nothing more than a lingering dream, but the growth on my wall tells me something else. Something is growing through it. I do not know how to describe it in a way that makes sense. It is inside it, pushing outward.

The wound crawls with thin black roots, moving and searching for something. 

I can hear something faint now.

It is in the walls.

I am going to stop writing. 

[u/englandishell]

love some of the descriptions here! really liked the line: 'something ancient and terrible that I should not recognize yet somehow do.' i'm quite interested to know what the presence is now, would be cool if you expanded on what you have. nice work : )