Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 139: Lullaby of a Beating Abyss

Chapter 139: Lullaby of a Beating Abyss

I stood up with a jolt, without thinking, without trying to understand, driven by something deeper than fear, an animal urgency that crushed all my questions in a single heartbeat. My legs obeyed before my mind even had time to give an order, and I turned on my heels with such violence that the air seemed to split around me. I ran. No, I fled. It was pure flight, total, a desertion of everything I believed myself to be, an immediate abdication in the face of something my body had already recognized as unacceptable.

I leapt from island to island, without really watching where I placed my feet, without even perceiving the logic of the distances. My body hurled itself forward, stretched to the extreme, tracing warped arcs in this cosmic void, as if I were clawing at space itself with each movement, desperately trying to tear myself from its texture. The air around me didn’t support me — it resisted, clung to my skin like a warm, sticky membrane, as if fleeing here wasn’t a right, but a blasphemy.

I passed through broken arches, dissolved geometric structures that seemed to float silently in this fallen dimension, witnesses of a world long forgotten. Everywhere, ribbons of fine fabric, crumpled, stained with faded colors, floated slowly between the islets, like trains of vanished children, like ghost serpents undulating endlessly in an invisible current. They brushed my arms, my cheeks, my claws, and each touch reminded me that I was not running alone.

Something, behind me, persisted.

And all around me, filtering through the shattered arches, the hanging veils of shadow, the fragments of a broken world... there was that murmur. Subtle, sinuous, almost gentle in its insistence, like a breath laid against the ear without ever truly entering. It carried no direct threat, no apparent dissonance. And yet, each note seemed to awaken something deeply buried. A smothered memory. A tender-faced anxiety.

It was not a song.

Not really.

There were no words. No chorus. Nothing seeking to be heard or remembered. It was... a lullaby. Yes. A slow, muffled, almost absent lullaby. The kind of melody that slips in without anyone knowing when it began. The kind of melody that does not speak to the adult I am, nor even to the monster I’ve become, but to something far older, more fragile, more vulnerable.

And immediately, a shiver ran through me, colder than anything I had fled from so far. It wasn’t a violent fear, but a diffuse, insidious vertigo that rose from the gut, slowly climbing along the spine like a spectral finger. A sensation of echo. Of return. As if something inside me recognized.

Why... why did this lullaby feel so familiar? Why did its inflections tighten my throat like a truth I dared not speak? Why did I feel as though I knew it... without ever having heard it this way before? Each note vibrated in my memory like a memory too old, too blurry, but too close to ignore.

Why...?

Why now?

Why here?

And above all... why me?

I raised my eyes slowly, my eyelids heavy with a dizziness I could no longer distinguish from dreaming, and I searched for the source of the whispers, guided not by logic but by a kind of troubled evidence, as if my body already knew where to look before my mind could accept it. What I saw resembled nothing known. Nothing classifiable. Nothing one could describe without betrayal.

They floated there, suspended in the air, as if the void’s gravity had no hold on them. Plantlike creatures, slender, tall as children, but with no feet, no roots, no anchoring. Their misty stems undulated with supernatural slowness, drawing spirals of humidity, suspended arabesques that seemed to try to write a forgotten language into the very atmosphere. They moved without moving. They existed without weight.

Their long, tapered leaves, like veils stretched by an inner wind, vibrated at each inflection of the lullaby. They weren’t just plant surfaces, but living membranes, almost conscious, that throbbed to the rhythm of an inaudible frequency, as if they were breathing the music. Each beat of invisible wings made them tremble with a disarming gentleness.

They had no mouths. No eyes. No faces. Nothing to read, to anticipate, to cling to. And yet, they sang. Not with articulated sounds. Not with human emotions. They sang with their whole being. With existence itself. A soft, deep, enveloping vibration, as if the reality around them attuned itself to the timbre of their presence.

It wasn’t a melody in the strict sense. There was neither rhythm, nor chorus, nor musical tension. It was a tender humming, an ancient call brushing against consciousness like a sonic caress, placed directly on the bare skin of my mind. Each silent note made something deep within me vibrate — something forgotten, dismembered, repressed. It wasn’t a song, it was a reminder. An invisible hand, warm and quiet, resting on my forehead, not to force a memory, but to awaken it gently, like one would rouse a child sleeping in pain.

And my eyes moistened without me knowing why. A muffled warmth rose in my throat, anchored under my tongue, rolled slowly through my chest. It wasn’t anger. Not hatred. Not even clear sadness. It was something else. An ancient burn. Something from before words, before consciousness. A forgotten fire, lurking in the foundations of my flesh, too old to be named, too deep to be denied.

I gasped, deeply, painfully, as if each breath scraped something wounded at my core, something still too tender to be exposed. The air entered poorly, as if it were too dense, too thick, or as if my lungs simply refused to keep doing this absurd task in a world where nothing made sense anymore. My body reacted in jerks, desynchronized, disoriented, like a broken mechanism fighting itself.

Then, in a foolish reflex, as vain as it was instinctive, I struck the air in front of me. A limp slap, devoid of strength, of will, of intention. Just a gesture. A negation. The instinctive rejection of what had just passed through me. As if I could drive out the pain, the strangeness, the burning in my throat by hitting the void. As if denial could suffice.

— No...

The word escaped in a barely audible breath, carried by a damaged, nearly extinguished voice. It wasn’t protest. Not anger. Just a lament. Sadly calm. Resigned. Spoken more for myself than for this world around me, which no longer listened, which hadn’t answered in a long time.

And without thinking further, without trying to understand, without even forming the slightest coherent intention, I fled again. My legs, already at their limit, launched once more in a direction that perhaps had none, carrying me with them as if my body understood that it had to keep moving, again, always, because stopping... would mean falling. And falling, this time, I wouldn’t get back up.

I ran without stopping, breath short, legs caught in a feverish fatigue, until I reached a larger, darker islet, resting at the edge of a gaping tear in this world already cracked on all sides. It was no longer just a rift in the matter. It was a chasm. An immense fault, opened like a primordial wound, that ended nowhere, that descended without logic, without bottom, without light.

But this void, far from being silent, pulsed.

It lived.

Like a heart.

A muffled, carnal, visceral beat resounded in the space around me, then within me, as if this thing was breathing through my bones. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The rhythm resumed. Steady. Slow. Inevitable. It wasn’t just a cadence — it was a presence. A waiting.

The rhythm was waiting for me.

I stood there for a few seconds, eyes fixed on the abyss, devouring the darkness as if it could reveal something to me, as if it would eventually open to speak. There was in this void a strange attraction, almost gentle, a call that didn’t scream but insisted, silently, with the patience of eternal things. And I no longer knew if it was an invitation... or a trap. A refuge... or an end.

It was calling me. Or maybe, maybe it was me projecting that call, fabricating it to convince myself there was something there greater than mere falling.

And then, a thought sprouted, insidious, soft as a solution: maybe I should jump.

Maybe this dark gorge was my only way out. Maybe I didn’t have to keep going. Not to keep fleeing. Not to keep fighting against a world that no longer wanted me. Maybe it was enough to let go, to surrender one last time, to let myself be absorbed by this bottomless mass, to stop thinking, feeling, existing. Maybe peace, real peace, was there, in that slow disappearance, that pure dissolution, at the very heart of the void.