Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 121: The Monster She Was Waiting For

Chapter 121: The Monster She Was Waiting For

In this world... how many times had I known this?

Flesh tearing. Blood spurting in burning jets. Then reforming, painfully, slowly, as if ashamed to have to begin again. And once more... the tearing. Again. And again. An endless cycle. An intimate theatre of pain and regeneration. An eternal restart etched into my fibers, into my bones, into what remains of me.

I no longer knew if it was a curse... or a function.

Pain had become mechanical. Resilience, an automatic reflex. Fear, an outdated abstraction. And in this succession of deaths never completed, something in me was crumbling — a shape, a name, maybe a memory. I survived like one recites a faded prayer, no longer believing in it, but unable to stop.

Then a voice reached me.

Soft. Feminine. Sadly familiar. Like an echo from another time. Like a memory that still dares to speak to me when I no longer have the means to answer it.

— This is the third time.

I didn’t turn around. I recognized that voice — or rather, my body did. Something inside me shivered, deep beneath the surface. But I refused to face her. I was too tired for that. Too worn. Too unstrung.

— Ah... yes. That’s true, I whispered, half-conscious, half-absent, eyes fixed on nothing.

My voice had no weight anymore. It slid out of me like everything else. It fell, without anchor, without will.

I stayed there, knees sunk into a scentless, colorless, directionless ground. The soil was lukewarm, like a dead belly, and I think I no longer had a real form. My body no longer reacted to anything — not to cold, not to blood, not to breath. It had forgotten me. Maybe that was for the best.

— You say that every time.

Her voice hadn’t changed. It carried a calm that wasn’t truly peaceful — a calm of abandonment, or perhaps of tired lucidity. There was in her words that strange softness that only ghosts know how to keep. A tenderness that doesn’t try to comfort.

I felt movement near me. A body sitting. Slowly. With care. Not too close. But close enough that I felt her presence, like warmth held on a leash. I didn’t look. My mind refused it. Out of fear. Out of refusal. Out of instinct.

— She won’t come, you know.

A shiver ran through me. Not because of her words, but because a part of me had been waiting for them. I realized I already knew it wasn’t Cassandre, nor Lysara, nor Anarael. That voice... it came from even further. From a layer of memory I had walled off, willingly, until I forgot its shape.

And suddenly, an image forced itself in. A silhouette. Sitting. Straight. Thin. Too thin. Her hands resting on her knees with a clumsy, almost unreal delicacy. I looked away, instantly. I wasn’t allowed to see her. I didn’t have the courage. I wasn’t in the right state to recognize her.

I smelled a light, indefinable scent. Neither flower, nor ash, nor skin. A trace of vanished intimacy. And despite myself, an inner voice whispered: it’s her.

But the memory slipped away immediately. Like fog on glass. I didn’t want to know. I especially didn’t want to know what she looked like.

I breathed, barely hearing myself:

— She’ll come.

It was a weak defense. An escape.

— You mean... Cassandre? Or someone else?

I shrugged, without answering. Even that simple gesture triggered a spasm in my shoulder blade. Blood surged up my throat in a thick, acidic reflux. But it didn’t come out. My body now held everything back, even the screams.

— You’re still standing in your head, Anthony. But not in your heart. You’re slipping, and pretending not to notice.

I wanted to reply. But I found nothing. No argument. Not even denial. Only an old, intangible exhaustion that dissolved my thoughts like fever dissolves memories.

I turned, finally.

Very slowly.

With that slowness we adopt when we know the next instant won’t come back. And what I saw... I couldn’t bear it. Not really.

Her face was there — blurry, displaced, incomplete. A sketch. A betrayal of my memory. A silhouette my mind refused to draw, erasing it as soon as it formed. Too painful. Too old. Too real.

I whispered:

— You don’t exist.

She replied, without flinching:

— And you... no longer exist.

And the ground quivered.

Something, somewhere, shifted. The air creased, very slightly. As if an invisible membrane had just stretched around us. I raised my head, slowly. The light, so pale until then, vibrated.

A voice, distant, strangled by a reality too different, sliced through the space.

— Do you know how many times you’ve had this conversation?

And then...

Everything tore again.

When my mind returned — after I don’t know how long, minutes maybe, or deaths? — I wasn’t sure I had ever left the ground. My body hadn’t moved. Or maybe it had, but without me. My breath came back in irregular, abrasive waves, as if each inhale was being lent to me, monitored, measured. The air had changed texture: it was heavier, denser, like a damp cloth pressed over my face.

And her voice returned.

— Three times this world has reduced you to an object.

She spoke without anger, without sharpness. Almost with tenderness. An ancient, worn tenderness, that no longer tried to comfort, only to name. And every word fell with the gravity of an over-sharpened blade. It didn’t scream. It cut.

— Are you going to let it happen again? Are you going to run, like you always have?

I stayed there, gaze fleeing, muscles paralyzed, unable even to shrug. My lips parted in a bitter, nearly silent sigh, and my voice escaped, dry, disembodied.

— I have no choice. I’m not strong enough.

A pause.

Then she answered, without waiting, offering me no escape.

— It’s true. This time... there’s nothing to be done. You are destined to die again... and again. Without ever truly dying.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It vibrated. It carried within it an accumulation of resignation-days, a fatigue I had never managed to articulate. And beneath my skin, I felt my teeth clench slowly, as if that one act could still give purpose to my jaw. But I didn’t reply. I had nothing left to say that hadn’t already curdled inside me.

So I whispered, not even knowing if she was still listening. My voice was so low it trembled just to exist.

— I wish I were an illusion, like you.

— I wish I didn’t exist.

I lowered my eyes. The ground at my feet seemed to fade. It was nothing more than a surface for bodies that don’t rise again. And I was one of them.

She waited a moment. Or maybe it was immediate. I don’t know. But when she spoke again, it was with the softness of a final breath — that broken voice that no longer tries to convince, just to state what is.

— But Anthony... you already don’t exist anymore.

And everything stopped.

A silence fell. A saturated silence. Neither tense nor peaceful. A burning silence — the kind that doesn’t come to soothe, but to bury.

I stayed there.

And in that overfull emptiness, I understood that something had just ended.

Not a scene.

Not a hallucination.

Something buried.

Something that still had my name... and had just dissolved without ceremony.

— Look around you.

Her voice, this time, didn’t caress. It exposed. It flayed.

— This world tore you apart, bit by bit. It emptied you. It rebuilt you. It renamed you.

I didn’t respond. The words hit me like stones heated too long — they didn’t hurt on impact, but over time. They entered, embedded, burned.

— You are nothing but a monster named Lukaris.

She didn’t insist. She let the sentence fall like a truth already known, already accepted.

— And deep down... you know it.

I closed my eyes, halfway. Not to escape, but because something inside me was slipping, gently. A part of myself — the oldest, perhaps — had just come undone, like a memory letting go.

I wanted to cry. Truly. Some scrap of childhood still standing in a corner of my chest clung to that wish — to cry like a scream, like a call, like an admission that I no longer knew what I was doing.

But I was no longer capable.

She continued. Still calm. Still slow. As if none of this surprised her.

— You gave so much.

— Suffered so much for others.

Her words didn’t shake. They accused no one. They simply spoke exhaustion, offering. They named what I hadn’t dared say aloud for years.

— But no one is ready to do it for you.

She stepped closer. One step. Maybe two. I felt something brush my face — a hand that wasn’t a hand, a breath taking form, a gesture no flesh truly bore.

— No one loves you, Anthony.

— No one sees your pain.

I wavered without moving. My body stayed upright, frozen, like a pillar eaten from within. But my mind... it bent. Just a little. Just enough.

— The only person you can count on... is me.

Her hand, or what passed for it, rested on my cheek. I don’t know if it was warmth or the absence of cold. But I felt it. There. Present. Final.

— Let go.

— Erase yourself.

— I will be here to bear your pain.

There was no more setting. No up or down. Just that voice, that presence, that promise. And what I still carried inside me — the name, the hope, the struggle — wavered like a flame about to go out.

A long silence stretched. It had a color — something between grey and purple. It had a temperature too, very low, almost gentle. The silence of a breath held... just before it’s not taken again.

Then I whispered.

— Alright.

It wasn’t an answer. It was a surrender. A letting go. Not tragic. Not heartbreaking. Just... inevitable.

And at that exact moment, something fractured, silently.

Anthony disappeared.

Not in a scream. Not in a flash. He simply withdrew. Like a dream forgotten upon waking. Like a name no longer spoken without trembling.

Only Lukaris remained.

The Beast of Lust.

The eternal abomination.

There was no more humanity.

No more tears.

Only a slow breath.

And a vast hunger.

Weeks passed that way.Or perhaps they weren’t weeks.I no longer knew how to count.

Time, there, was not a thread. It was a loop. A chasm. A sealed chamber where pain repeated with the clinical regularity that eventually strips the mind to the bone. There was no light. Not really night. Only sequences. Phases. Beats. And me... I was stuck between each of them.

In pain.

But not the spectacular kind, not the kind you scream, not the kind that tears in one go then stops. No. It was soft pain. Infiltrating. Sinister. Pain that takes its time. That settles in the tendons, in the fibers, in the corners of the soul we thought unreachable. Pain of rewriting.

Then in silence.

Thick silence. Taut. Saturated. A silence she never broke, except to say what had to be said. A silence that became a second body, a cloak, a prison. And me, I learned to move within it. To breathe in it. To survive with it, against it, despite it.

Then into transformation.

I didn’t feel it coming. Not at first. It was gradual. A slow desensitization. A stripping down. My own name became blurred. My memories, faded. There was still Cassandre, somewhere. And Lysara, sometimes. But they floated like stolen images from a damaged book. I knew they had existed. I knew I had loved them.

But I no longer remembered how.

I evolved.

Not toward something. But according to something. A shape. An expectation. A model engraved in her eyes — Anarael. She gave no orders. She demanded me. And that was worse. Because everything I became... I did it myself.

I became what she wanted me to be.

A rewritten being. Polished. Absolute in discipline. Stripped of screams. Capable of dying without a sound. Capable of rebuilding without even flinching. Capable of striking... without ever trembling again.

And yet.

Deep within me — far beneath the reflections of blood, beneath the scarred muscles, beneath the armor of obedience I had ended up wearing like second skin — one thing remained.

Small. Ugly. Stubborn.

The desire for it all to stop.

Not death. Not rest. Not even peace.

Just... for it to stop.

For the world to stop taking me back.

For my own flesh to stop demanding me.

For my memory to let me breathe.

Just... a moment without survival.

A moment without her.

A moment without me.