Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 136: Condemned to Breathe

Chapter 136: Condemned to Breathe

Something changed.

Almost imperceptibly. A crack in the void. A shiver that came neither from outside nor inside—just from an in-between. And that was when I felt it.

The light.

It wrapped around me. Gently. Slowly. But not like an embrace. Not like a greeting. No. None of those soft touches allowed in fairy tales, none of that warmth that reconciles. It wasn’t a light for the living. Nor for the dead.

It was a lukewarm shroud.

An invisible sheet laid over my existence, not to soothe it, but to cover it. To designate it. To close it. It wasn’t a saving light. NOT A FUCKING LIGHT OF DEATH. Not that damn halo they pretend to see at the end of the tunnel. Not that blissful crap they sell to martyrs and fallen soldiers.

It was something else.

A light without heat. Without origin. Without logic. It came neither from above nor from below. It didn’t flow. It didn’t burst. It... was. It existed like an infection exists. Present. Insistent. Irreversible. It lit up nothing. It guided no one. It promised no way out.

But it revealed.

Everything.

Every nerve. Every memory. Every forgotten fragment. Every horror carefully buried beneath layers of denial. It traced the exact silhouette of what I had become—not in light, but in truth. A nightmare clarity. A radiography of the soul.

And facing it...

I could only stand there.

Naked.

Seen.

Condemned.

And then...

I heard it.

Not a sound.

Not a voice.

A rhythm.

A dull, ancestral thump, older than any language. It vibrated. It soaked into every particle of that non-space, every breath of that twisted void. It was a deep pulsation, coming from below—not from the earth, no. From an older beneath. A bottomless beneath. As if the void itself had a heart, and it was finally beating.

A heart.

Immense. Crushing. Buried somewhere in the directionless infinite of that nothingness. And yet... there. Implacably there.

It beat.

— BOOM.

I jolted. A shock in the chest. An echo in the bones.

— BOOM.

My skull rang, as if struck from within by an invisible hand.

— BOOM.

— SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! I screamed.

But it went on.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

A slow beat. Deep. Unstoppable. Like a funeral march played by the void itself. It didn’t quicken. It didn’t react. It beat. As if it had never stopped. As if it had always been there, lurking in my silences, waiting for its time to come back and bang against my eardrums.

And I understood.

It wasn’t external.

It wasn’t there to threaten me.

It was connected. To me. To my own heart. To my flesh. To my blood. It beat with me. Through me. It reminded me of what I had wanted to forget: that I too had a heart. That despite everything... despite everything... something was still beating.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

— SHUT UP!!!

— SHUT UP, DAMN IT!!

— I TOLD YOU TO SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

I screamed like you hit. Like you slam a door you want to close from the inside. But the sound didn’t fade. The rhythm didn’t break. It was there. Present. Insistent. Intimate.

As if it was the real heart.

And I... was just an echo.

I grabbed my chest as if to rip something alive out of me. My fingers scraped at bare skin, slid in the blood, carved red grooves that wouldn’t heal. I punched myself. Again. And again. Heavy, desperate blows, not aimed at a body, but at an idea. A presence.

But the sound didn’t weaken.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

A drum in my bones. A hammer in my ribcage. An echo in my throat. An unbearable reminder. An inner whisper that repeated, with that cruel patience only the living can have: You’re still breathing.

I was still alive.

And that was the torture.

So I struck.

I struck the void like you hit a mute god. I struck my belly, my chest, my broken face. Bloody fists, slippery, powerless but full of raw rage. Blows to erase. To shatter. To silence.

— I TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP!!!

The scream split the space, but split nothing. No wall. No border. It vanished into the void like a stone thrown into a bottomless sea. And the beating went on.

Unchanging.

Mocking.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

— BOOM.

A voiceless laugh. A faceless certainty. A reversed clock counting not time, but sins.

So I screamed.

Not words.

Not insults.

Just a scream. A pure scream. Visceral. Vomited. A scream that wanted to tear out everything: the heart, the memory, the fucking soul if there was one left. A scream that didn’t wait for an answer, just a collapse.

And deep down... I knew.

I knew what that heartbeat meant. What it repeated, tirelessly, in its wordless tongue, in its stubborn pulse-language.

It said: You don’t have the right to forget.

You don’t have the right to run.

You don’t have the right to die.

It said: You’re still here.

And maybe that was the worst part.

Then I landed.

Not violently. Not with a crash. Just... the end of a fall. A transition. As if the void had decided I’d gone far enough. And my knees met a surface.

But not a real one.

A ground that wasn’t a ground. A mass of astral dust, of suspended particles, of motionless sand in the air—white, grey, almost translucent. A floor made of unreal, and yet firm under my open, bloodied, exhausted legs. A texture of frozen ash. Of fossilized memory.

As if I had just collapsed onto the remains of a dead dream. A dream too old to have a name. A dream extinct for millennia, erased from the world, but whose ashes still moved beneath me.

And then...

A thought.

Only one. Clear. Sharp. It pierced the silence like a venomous whisper, like a scratch in the dark.

— Is this Hell?

The word snapped in my head with absurd coldness. A word we sometimes say in jest. Out of habit. Out of superstition. But now... it seeped in. It settled. It became plausible.

Was this Hell?

Not flames. Not chains. Not the wails of the damned.

Just... this. This place. This non-color. This nothing so perfectly built. Was this where monsters end up? In a waiting room for irredeemable souls, on their knees atop the ruins of a forgotten hope?

I didn’t know.

And my body didn’t want to know anymore.

My limbs were slow. Heavy. Foreign. As if each movement passed through a parallel world before reaching me. I tried to move my fingers. They answered... halfway. Floating. Trembling. Detached.

As if my body had been sewn back together by a sick God.

As if every joint had been patched up at random, reassembled without logic, stitched with someone else’s nerves. There was no coherence anymore. Just a patchwork of parts. A being rebuilt too late, too badly, too falsely.

And yet... I was still there.

On my knees.

In that silence.

Wondering if this was... where the end begins.

My body. I felt it.

It was already starting to regenerate—faster than usual. Too fast. An indecent speed. An obscene rush. Flesh reformed without my consent, wounds closed as if the pain had never been, as if the world refused to inscribe my suffering in its story.

— NO.

Not now. Not like this.

I forced myself to go on. To scratch. To tear. To dissolve myself piece by piece, by nail, by nerve, by throat. But every gesture became useless, absorbed, erased. The regeneration erased my screams like an eraser over a memory.

I wanted to extinguish.

I wanted to cease.

I wanted to disappear.

— NOOOOOON!!

The scream passed through me without scraping. Even it, the world didn’t keep. I was nothing more than a sound parasite, too human an echo in a system too clean.

— FUCK THIS WORLD! FUCK VAMPIRES! FUCK THIS FUCKING POWER!!!

Each word was a spit. An implosion. A refusal to go on.

— LET ME FUCKING DIE!!!

— I WANT TO DIE!!! — I WANT TO DISAPPEAR!!!

But there was nothing to grant me that. Nothing to hear. Nothing to end it. I didn’t have the strength anymore. It left me, drop by drop, like water from a pierced corpse. Even weakness was stolen from me. Even the right to sink.

And I understood.

The world itself was holding me back.

Like an invisible hand, placed on my back, keeping me from the abyss without ever letting go. This world... this fucking structure that sewed me back up despite myself, that glued the pieces back together not to save me, but to doom me to continue.

Even my suffering... no longer belonged to me.

It had become collective property. A monument. An offering. A curse exposed to a world that no longer wanted me to choose.

I was no longer free.

Not even to destroy myself.

And then...

I screamed.

But it wasn’t a call. Not a cry for help. Not a hand reaching out for rescue. It was a scream addressed to the end. A shout cast into the void, not to be heard, but to be finished.

— IF YOU WANT TO HELP ME SO BADLY... THEN LET ME DIE!!!

— KILL ME!! I’M BEGGING YOU!!!

The voice came out of me like a beast’s death-rattle. Split. Burned. Twisted with impotent rage. It crashed against the invisible walls of this world, unable to cause anything but a mute echo.

My hand fell.

Heavy. Trembling. Burning. It slammed against the ground—or what was left of it—like a fragment of myself left there, lifeless. It was soiled. With blood. With spit. With dried tears that no longer meant anything.

And I cried.

Not those discreet, held-back, tragically beautiful tears shown in stories. No. I cried like a wounded animal. A being who no longer understands pain, who no longer knows where it comes from or where it goes. Mucus, blood, drool—it all mixed into a humid, shameful, desperate chaos. There was no dignity left. No face.

I struck the ground.

Weakly. Like a rhythmless drum. A gesture emptied of all strength, but repetitive, stubborn. Again. And again. A plea without violence. A dead caress addressed to indifference.

— Please...

The breath was broken. But the will... immense. Greater than everything.

— Please...

Let me go. Just... kill me.

Please.

Let it all go dark.

An inner voice, somewhere, whispered that nothing would answer. That these kinds of prayers never find ears. That these kinds of pains no longer touch anyone.

But me...

I kept begging.

Again. Again. Like an abandoned child. Thrown to the edge of a world that refuses to end. A world that keeps monsters alive. A world that forces you to stay.

Even when you no longer know how.