Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 141: The Other Side of Me

Chapter 141: The Other Side of Me

I resumed the road, heavy-footed, blank-eyed, breath mechanical, with no true direction, no light to follow, no promise to reach. There was nothing ahead of me. Nothing behind. Just that fractured expanse, that non-world suspended between memory and abandonment. I wasn’t walking to move forward. I was walking to keep going. To not extinguish myself. To not become even more silence than I already was.

And step by step, hour by hour perhaps — or eternities, I no longer really knew — something began to stir within me. Slowly. Almost insidiously. Not a jolt. Not a scream. An older presence. Denser. Like an egg cracking beneath the skin. Like a buried pulse gaining ground.

It wasn’t energy. It wasn’t a calling. It was rage. A bare anger, simple, without brilliance, that didn’t seek to explode but simply to exist. A rage for myself, aimed at what I had become, at what I had allowed, at all those times I had begged, picked myself up, accepted. It wasn’t fire. It was cold. Acid. A slow bite, laid beneath my skin like a sleeping beast, waiting, tucking its claws under my flesh until its hour came.

It didn’t rumble.

It didn’t scream.

It breathed.

And I felt, with every step, that it was taking root a little more.

I knew. With a silent, rooted knowledge, that came neither from thought nor heart, but from that deeper territory — the one we never dare question because it carries all the answers we flee. I knew that what I was living through was nothing. Nothing more than a threshold. An entry point. A brutal initiation, yet still incomplete.

This world — or what was left of it — hadn’t yet begun to break me. It would open me. Tear me apart without apparent violence. Not by claws. Not by iron. But by truth. It would force me to look. To set my eyes, without turning them away, on all I had tried to bury under layers of rage, amnesia, and escape. It would rip me away from my own detours, pin me down before what I had always run from, relentlessly, unforgivingly.

Every nightmare would return. Not in the form of a specter or a chimera, but as a concrete, precise, unassailable memory. Every face. Every scream. Every drop of blood shed. Every gaze I had avoided. Every hand I had failed to hold. This world would give them back to me, one by one, like debts being claimed a hundredfold.

And at the end of it all... it would demand the unthinkable.

It would force me to love myself.

Not to understand myself.

Not to tolerate myself.

To love myself.

And worse still — to forgive myself.

But I hadn’t come here to forgive myself. That wasn’t the goal. That wasn’t the deal. This world could project onto me its lessons, its trials, its reflections of sick conscience — I hadn’t asked for them. I hadn’t come seeking peace. I hadn’t come to be reborn. I had come to suffer. To pay. To cause pain. To kill if I had to, again, until nothing was left standing — not me, not them, not whatever could still be called humanity in me.

Because I was what I was. A killer. Without excuse. Without mask. Without detour. And I knew it. Had known it for a long time. I had killed. Too much. So much that the faces had blurred. So much that the bodies were nothing more than piled silhouettes in a torn memory. I didn’t even know how many. Did the number still matter? Enemies, yes. Targets. But also allies. Companions. People I had called brothers. Perhaps even — surely — innocents.

And that wasn’t all.

I had hurt my daughter. Not a mistake. Not an accident. A real wound. Physical. Mental. A cut time would never close. I had defiled that fragile bond I had pretended to protect. And Lysara... Lysara now bore my mark like a burn.

I had disgusted my wife. Not by my actions alone, but by what I had become from refusing to see myself. I had destroyed the figure she once looked at with love. And now, all that remained was distance. The shadow of a body she no longer dared approach.

I had driven mad those who still believed in me. All of them. Without exception. Their faith had turned to torment, their loyalty to fracture. With every step, every word, I had pushed them to the edge, until they no longer knew what they were defending.

I had disappointed everyone.

And that kind of disappointment — it never dies.

And for that... for that bare truth, for that succession of wounds inflicted with no possible redemption, for that fall I had maintained and deepened until it became a pit, I hated myself. With a deep, slow, rooted hatred, not spectacular, not dramatic — an organic hatred, weary, constant, pulsing in every decision, every gaze, every beat. And I hated this world just as much. Not for what it had taken from me. But for what it still tried to offer me.

If it wanted my redemption... then I would burn it.

If it dared, in a final spasm of divine pity or absurd design, to offer me an escape, a peace, a light, I would reduce it to ashes. Because I didn’t want to be saved. Because I didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Because I couldn’t be cleansed of all that blood. This world that still offered me the illusion of salvation also deserved to be punished.

I would kill anyone who dared believe in me. All those who, despite the evidence, despite the screams, came offering a hand, a look, a word of compassion. I would gut them to the last. Not out of gratuitous cruelty. But to protect their illusion of me from a truth too filthy to be exposed. I would destroy every light, every fragile candle of hope lit in my name.

I would burn everything.

That would be my form of truth.

My way of earning my end.

I no longer knew how long I had been walking. All landmarks had vanished long ago, swallowed by a formless temporality, without edges, without rhythm. My body moved almost mechanically, driven by an inertia that neither fatigue nor doubt could break. My steps dragged, stuck in a sticky slowness, as if each movement cost more than it returned. There was something worn, resigned, profoundly extinguished in my gait.

Beneath my feet, the ground never really made sense. It was neither hard nor soft, neither stable nor shifting. It was a substance without true consistency, a strange fabric of forgetfulness and disorder, shifting like a sick memory. A blurry, soft expanse that reshaped itself at every contact, adjusting to my strides as if to keep me from falling — but never truly supporting me. It was a mental ground, a dream ground, a fever ground, a ground of delusional thought — and I was sinking into it slowly, step after step, like traversing a bottomless sleep.

And the more I walked, the more I felt that this ground was the exact mirror of my own mind: unstable, changing, unable to hold, collapsing under the weight of the slightest memory, the slightest question. Nothing truly held me up. But I kept walking.

But one thing, in the middle of that sluggish wandering, had etched itself into me with the sharpness of a white-hot nail: here, time did not exist. Or if it still did, it had decomposed. It no longer flowed — it diluted. It slipped outside of itself, stretched infinitely like a torn nerve still vibrating long after being ripped out, like a disorganized, dissociated pain that could no longer be measured because it had surpassed all units. It was an invisible thread, thick and limp, soaked in the lukewarm, toxic saliva of a sick god, a leash I dragged unwillingly, attached to my neck, my guts, my breath, a poisoned leash I had never chosen but could probably never break.

Yes... those gods. Those fucking gods.

Sick.

Degenerate.

Perverted in their sterile omnipotence.

It was them. I knew it. I felt it in every step, in every corner of that absurd dimension: it was they who had torn me from my life, from my world, from that form of humanity I still tried to believe was mine. They who had pulled me out of reality, like a larva from a rotten fruit. They who had thrown me into this theater of flesh and suffering, into this maze of pain tailor-made, this kingdom without sky, without end, without escape.

It was they, always they, who had changed me.

They who had cracked my voice, hollowed my bones, carved claws beneath my skin. They who had made me what I am: not a beast, not a man, not a god. A hybrid monstrosity, a divine mistake. And it was still they who had taken everything from me.

Lucas, torn away in silence, without even a scream, like a punishment without a name.

Cassandre, driven away, slowly, irreversibly, by the fear I inspired as I lost myself.

Lysara, broken, mutilated, not by an enemy, but by my own hands, my own claws, my own blood.

My friends, erased, crushed, screaming, shattered under the weight of my fits, my delusions, my betrayals.

And me, finally. Myself. Stolen. Dissolved. Deboned from within by their hidden will, their filthy design, their need to see how far a man could be twisted before breaking.

I fell to my knees, strengthless, unresisting, as if everything still holding my body aloft had suddenly given up. There was no scream, no moan, just the dull sound of a collapse accepted, consented to, almost organic. My body was heavy — but it wasn’t the fatigue of muscles, nor of bones. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, measurable, identifiable. It was something else. An invisible mass, deeply anchored, an inner gravity no one could weigh.

It was the density of faults. The accumulation of acts that couldn’t be taken back, choices that couldn’t be repaired. It was the lead of remorse, that slow, cold metal settling in the chest and weighing on every breath, every heartbeat. It was the black marble of old regrets, polished by time, smooth like a tomb, frozen in a perfect shape that nothing would ever break again.

So, in a barely conscious gesture, like a spasm of dead will, I struck the ground. Not to defy it. Not to protest. Perhaps to awaken. To trigger a jolt. Or on the contrary... to annihilate what remained. That useless heartbeat. That lingering breath. That consciousness that refuses to go quiet even when it has nothing left to say.

I wanted to silence something. But I no longer knew what.

Then, from lamenting too long, from striking that ground that had no substance, from pleading with a world that heard nothing, I understood. It wasn’t a radiant revelation. Not a light. Not a truth that heals. It was a slow emergence, a drop of acid in the dust, a low wave, almost imperceptible, vibrating just beneath my fists. A truth I had never really ignored, but had spent my life avoiding. Smothering.

All of this... everything I said, everything I built to protect myself, all those inner speeches, those screams directed at the gods, at others, at the world — they were just excuses. Shoddy excuses, sewn with the trembling threads of a bad faith I didn’t even dare admit. Sick illusions, cobbled together in urgency, in pain, to keep me from facing what I truly was.

A thief of responsibility.

A coward dressed as a martyr.

I wasn’t a cursed chosen one, not a tortured pawn, not even a beast transformed against its will. I was like the others. No more, no less. And I should have been better. I knew it. Deep down, I had always known it. No one had forced me to give up. No one had dragged me into the filth. I had fled. Again. Once more. As always.

I had surrendered to carnage. Not because I had no choice. But because it was easier. Because giving in to rage is a comfort, a shortcut, a voluntary oblivion. Because it is easier to become a beast than to fight to remain a man. I had unplugged my conscience. Deliberately. I had set it aside like a garment too tight, too constraining, too demanding. And I had erased myself. From this world, from this story, from this flesh. As if carrying my identity had been too heavy. As if I had preferred to drop the burden rather than bear it.

And that vision — that fucking vision — it didn’t come from the gods. It didn’t come from hell. It came from me. From inside. The exact reflection of what I had become, or perhaps... of what I had never stopped being. That’s what it showed me. That’s what I refused to see.

And now, I could no longer look away.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.