Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 122: Cassandre

Chapter 122: Cassandre

It was time.

I stood before the entrance to the tunnel that led to the heart of the circle. The place seemed calm, perfectly still in its appearance of stone and silence, but I could already feel, just beneath my feet, the muffled beatings of the world below. The voices. The footsteps. The echoes of things we try not to relive. The moment was approaching. The one I would have liked to delay a bit longer. Just a little. One more minute, maybe two. But it was here now, placed before me like a blade in balance. The time had come to go to the Inter-Species Tournament.

Time to see them again.

The others. Those we called the Chosen Ones. Those who, like me, had been selected to face a prophecy we had not written, to carry a fragment of this world between their ribs, like a blade lodged close to the heart. I had to walk toward them. Look them in the eye. Try to resemble them still. Wear the same body, the same gait — though nothing, absolutely nothing, was the same. And I already knew that nothing ever would be again.

My heart tightened. Not with a cry, but slowly, deeply. As if an invisible hand had been pressing down on it for too long, with that impassive regularity that can no longer be ignored. I dreaded this reunion. Truly. Not because I was afraid of them... but because I knew what they were going to see.

I knew what their gazes would hold.

And above all, I knew what I would have to tell them.

There would be no joy. No sudden laughter, no promises whispered between silences. No surge of relief. No illusion possible.

Not with what I had to tell them.

Not with what I had seen.

I missed Anthony.

Terribly. Painfully. In a dull, continuous, almost unforgivable way.

It wasn’t his power. Not really — even though it had protected me more than once. Not his gaze, nor his gestures, nor even the promises murmured in the dark. What I missed most was that awkward gentleness he hid like a flaw. That heart buried beneath the fangs, that tenderness never directly offered, always held back, always caught in his throat.

As if he had never learned how to love in any way but silence.

I missed him in a way I could no longer express. A constant absence, not brutal, not spectacular. A slow fatigue. A blade placed on the skin, with no pressure, yet still it cut — simply by being there.

Since he had vanished, I hadn’t been fully present.

I walked. I breathed. I followed orders. I even smiled, sometimes — but like an echo of myself, like a version of my body continuing without me. My mind floated in a loop. Images. Gestures. His last look. His hand on my cheek. A sentence he never really spoke... but that I heard all the same.

It had been almost a year.

A year since he sacrificed himself for me.

And that idea, that truth, remained like a stone I couldn’t swallow. It spun in my chest, rough, acidic. For me. Not for a cause. Not for a plan. Not for the world. For me.

And that kind of weight... I didn’t know how to carry it.

I blamed myself.

If I hadn’t touched that wall.

If I hadn’t wanted to know.

If I hadn’t brushed against that being — that Xylorath — who hadn’t even needed to kill me to destroy me.

I blamed him.

Him. Myself. Everything.

But mostly him.

For stealing Anthony from me.

For tearing away the one who, alone, made this world breathable. The one who made this Hell still livable. The one who made it possible, even for a few seconds, to believe we could still dream.

That we could still say, even with trembling lips: I am alive.

And today, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

Not with what I still carried — these images, these sounds, these traces of him, etched too deep to ever heal. What he had become. What he had endured. What he had let me glimpse just before disappearing into... something I still couldn’t name.

I wanted to step back. Just for a second. Breathe another air. Find a space where he wouldn’t be, where his voice wouldn’t echo between my temples. But my legs had already decided. They were moving.

As if my will was no longer part of this body.

So I walked on.

And with every step, I felt the moment drawing closer. The one where I would have to say the only thing I never really knew how to say.

"He’s gone."

Recently, a strange being had started approaching me.

Not directly. Not violently. But with that soft, unsettling insistence that you can neither welcome nor reject without unease. He was there. Too often. Too close. Odd in his ways. Unstable in posture. A bit blurred at the edges, as if he didn’t fully belong to our world.

He sometimes stared at me. For long moments.

With a worry I didn’t understand. A held-back tenderness. A gaze in suspension. As if he were trying to recognize me in a dream whose name he had lost. As if he knew me. Intimately. Gently. Tragically.

And it disturbed me.

Not because he scared me. But because he awakened something I no longer wanted to feel. That shiver under the skin. That lump in the throat. That vibration I thought I had buried with him.

At the tournament... I saw him.

I watched him fight.

And for a few seconds — just a few moves, too precise to be coincidence — I felt an old warmth rise. A muscle memory. A deep, almost absurd intuition. He fought like Anthony.

Same feline agility.

Same irony in his feints.

Same way of seeming vulnerable just long enough to make you believe... before striking with disconcerting precision.

And that smile — thin, restrained, barely sketched. Not to seduce. Not to dominate. Just to say: I know. And I choose not to say anything.

He looked like him...

Not completely. Not in the details. His hair didn’t have the same shade. His eyes seemed worn, washed out from within, as if something had rinsed them too long. And in his features, there was that fatigue... not of the body. Of the soul.

An inner age. A kind of silent exhaustion, like wood creaking under its own density.

But I knew it wasn’t him.

I couldn’t afford to believe it.

Anthony was dead.

Dead in that tutorial no one understood. Dead in that space that should never have existed. Dead in that being — that Xylorath — who drained him, broke him, and spat him out like an empty shell. There was nothing left to salvage.

So that face...

It was only a mask.

A mirage.

A twisted fragment of memory desperately seeking a place to rest.

And yet...

I kept looking at him.

Without meaning to. Without really being able to stop.

Because deep down... a part of me was still trembling.

As I walked toward the tournament, something in me refused to let go.

A blurry, thick, almost sticky matter — like a cloth soaked in too many sensations, too many questions, too many suspended images, never digested. Two weeks had passed. Two weeks during which the world, each day, had retreated further from anything I could comprehend.

Everything had been unstable.

Mad.

Almost unreal.

A whirlwind of pain, orders, training repeated to the point of absurdity. Voices no one dared question anymore, for fear they might truly answer. And at the center, always, a silhouette returned. A figure too calm to be human. A presence my dreams still carried, even when I closed my eyes.

Anarael.

She hadn’t broken me with brilliance, or excess. She had done it methodically. With a cold, almost surgical precision one only acquires after centuries of watching the living collapse. She never shouted. She didn’t hate. She waited.

She waited for me to break.

Every word, every look, every precise movement of her hands seemed designed to strip a layer from myself. To shatter my certainties, one by one, with a dreadful gentleness.

And over time, I no longer knew what I wanted to protect.

Or who I was supposed to be.

And then... there was him.

Lukaris.

I didn’t know him. Not really. He had never spoken more than a few words to me. And yet, a scene had burned itself into my memory like a soft wound.

He had stepped in for me.

Once. Maybe twice. I’m no longer sure. But I remember his body, suddenly between her and me. He didn’t shout. Didn’t command. He just stood there.

And I didn’t understand.

Maybe out of instinct. Maybe because I was his healer. Or maybe because he had seen what I could no longer express.

But there was something strangely precise in the way he acted.

Too precise.

An intonation. A silence. An angle to his movements. A way of standing at the edge of the abyss without ever falling. That posture haunted me. That calm held something else. An ancient vibration.

And sometimes — I hated myself for thinking it — but sometimes, I saw a glimmer.

A glimmer of Anthony.

It was absurd. It was impossible. But that fragment clawed at me.

I knew it wasn’t him.

Anthony was dead.

Dead in that tutorial. Dead in my arms. Dead because of me.

And Lukaris... wasn’t like the others. No. He was something else.

Then there was Fillin.

The only point of reference. The only face I could still look at without needing to turn away. He trained us with a patience we thought extinct. A softness almost unrealistic in this world of fangs and verdicts.

He didn’t forge us. He accompanied us.

He taught us to think as a unit. To feel each other in our breath. To move together. To become something like a group again.

And sometimes, I believed we could start over. That we could still rebuild something, even from ruins.

But what haunted me the most...

Was the Central Arena.

That red circle. Closed. Forbidden. Alive.

Each day, it grew larger. Each night, it vibrated more fiercely beneath our feet. A crimson storm swirled inside it, fed by a source no one could name.

But everyone felt it.

A breath.

A rhythm.

A heart.

Something beat beneath it.

And I was afraid.

I doubted Lukaris enjoyed it. I wanted to believe he wasn’t at the center of that pain. Not fully. Not yet. But he was a vampire. And everyone knew what he had done.

He had defied the Lords.

He had stood against them. Made them bend. Crossed lines that were not meant to be crossed.

And for that... he had been punished.

They gave him that thing. That arena.

That circle.

That place without end.

And I no longer knew if he was surviving it.

Or becoming something else inside it.

But what intrigued me most...

Wasn’t the arena. Nor the rituals. Nor even that so-called "hero" around whom all the whispers circled.

It was her.

Lysara.

That child.

Barely ten. But already shaped like a weapon, sculpted like a sentence. She didn’t move like a child. She didn’t exist like a child. She carried in her small body more silence than a worn-out adult. And in every one of those silences... there was a truth I didn’t want to name.

She almost never spoke. Not even to exist.

And yet, every gesture, every breath she chose to withhold, every lingering glance she left behind seemed to say more than all our words.

A combat genius, they said. A cold-blooded prodigy. A vampire born to strike true, without flinching, without attaching. A prodigy of straight-line death.

But it wasn’t her power that disturbed me.

It was her eyes.

Old.

Burned.

Not from age — she was only ten. But from what she carried. A foreign memory. A millennial fatigue. Something that didn’t belong to her, yet already inhabited her with the firmness of an ancient inheritance.

And then... there was the way she looked at me.

Often.

Long.

Without a word. Without hostility. Without contempt.

Just that gaze that settles and refuses to leave. That holds you like a taut thread between two truths — hers, and the one you’re still refusing to see.

She looked at me as if she wanted to tell me something. But couldn’t. Or didn’t yet have the right. As if the secret she carried wasn’t ripe yet. As if it were... forbidden.

Something enormous. Knotted. Too vast to pass her lips without tearing everything apart.

And sometimes — I kept it quiet, I avoided it — but sometimes, a shiver ran through me. Brutal. Instinctive. Animal.

Because in her eyes, I had the fleeting... ridiculous... impossible impression... that she saw me more than I saw myself. That she read in me what I was still trying to bury. That she knew what I wasn’t yet able to say aloud.

As if she knew.

Truly.

And I... wasn’t ready to hear it.