Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 143: The White Cradle

Chapter 143: The White Cradle

Then I returned. Slowly. Without having decided to. As if drawn. As if pulled in by a memory I hadn’t chosen, a memory that, despite everything I had tried to abandon, refused to die. It wasn’t a return guided by will, nor even by nostalgia. It was a call. A silent call, rooted in another plane. Something in me — or around — was bringing me back to that specific place, that islet among the others, but different, denser, wider, heavier in the air as in the soul.

I returned to an islet that seemed to possess its own gravity. It didn’t wait — it weighed. It slowed my steps before I even set foot on it, as if space itself were contracting around me there, as if the air became thicker, more saturated, loaded with old and unspoken things. Its shape, seen from above or afar, wasn’t a perfect circle. It was an irregular contour, a fractured loop, imperfect, like a poorly closed scar on a world that had never healed.

The ground it was made of wasn’t mineral, nor vegetal, nor mental — it was made of a black matter, deep, porous, almost spongy, that seemed to breathe with each step, to emit a muffled heat, a murmur of mourning. Striations ran across its surface, white, bony, like mineral veins, but they were roots. Calcified roots, knotted, twisted upward, as if they had desperately tried to escape the earth, to pierce the surface, to reach a light they had never found.

And the more I looked at them, the more I understood.

They didn’t look like branches.

They looked like fingers.

Dead children’s fingers.

Frozen in a silent prayer. Tiny hands raised into the void, reaching toward a sky that never answered, frozen in the exact instant of their last call — a gesture no one had come to receive.

And me... I was there.

Standing on that petrified lament.

And at the center... it was there. A cradle. Another one. But this one... no, this one wasn’t like the others. It didn’t belong to the same texture, the same memory. It didn’t seem made of memory, nor of faded dream, nor of that blurry, porous matter that usually composes the remnants of this ruined world. It wasn’t a trace. It wasn’t an illusion.

It was intact.

Present.

Of a striking whiteness, almost unbearable, a white too perfect to be natural, stretched like freshly drawn skin over a wound one refuses to open. It was smooth, of an unreal smoothness, without grain, without knot, without flaw — like a drop of milk frozen in time, suspended at the exact second it should have fallen but never did. It emitted no light, and yet it illuminated. It didn’t breathe, but everything around it vibrated slightly, as if its very existence were enough to alter the air itself.

Its surface was neither wood nor stone. Neither metal nor flesh. It was a substance soft to the touch — I could feel it without laying a hand on it — a warm texture, almost alive, that seemed to want to welcome, hold, envelop without ever revealing what it protected. A material made to keep. To preserve. To shelter.

And beneath that apparent peace, beneath that almost painful purity... something slept. A remnant of life maybe. Or a heartbeat. Buried. Distant. So faint it couldn’t be heard, but could be felt in the bones. Something lived there. Hidden.

And me... I was alone in front of it.

And when my fingers, still hesitant, still trembling despite the exhaustion, approached the cradle, I thought — for a moment, barely a breath’s fraction — I perceived a pulse. It wasn’t a shock, not a clear vibration, nothing measurable. It was something else. Something deeply anchored. A sensation more than a signal. A breathless respiration. Like an invisible heartbeat, buried beneath the silent layers of that white, smooth, sacred shell. Something perhaps lived there. Or persisted.

And then... the world seemed to stop.

The void halted its march.

Silence changed density.

And sound returned.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

But it was no longer just perceived. It was there. Not louder. Not faster. But more present. As if the sound had found a body. A source. An origin. It no longer came from everywhere. It no longer came from me.

It came from there.

From the cradle.

Or rather... the cradle was not just an object.

It breathed.

It lived. Not with sighs, not with movements, not with flesh, but with that slow inner undulation that only bodies still capable of hoping for life give off. That infinitesimal flux, almost imperceptible, which belongs only to beings still waiting. Still connected. Still in gestation.

The cradle was full.

Or perhaps... it was waiting to be.

In my gut, something tightened. It wasn’t fear yet, not a clear panic nor even an identified threat — but rather that ancient, visceral shiver, that mute premonition that can’t be explained, that troubled and compact sensation one cannot deny, when one feels that something, very close, right there, is about to look at us. Not touch us. Not attack. Just... see us. With a lucidity that will let nothing slip by.

My fingers trembled. Slowly. Barely. But with that disturbing precision of true trembling. A crawling shiver rose under the skin, disobedient, insidious, as if my hand already knew what I had not yet decided, as if it, in its primitive wisdom, in its bodily memory older than thought, anticipated the exact weight of what it was about to touch, of the bond it was about to awaken.

And then, a warmth rose. First soft. Then thicker. It was born in my palm, that slow, sticky, lazy heat, which had nothing of fire, nothing of alarm — no, it melted. It slid into my fibers with an almost affectionate regularity, climbing up my arm, reaching my elbow, then my shoulder, never pressing, never striking.

But it didn’t soothe.

It gnawed.

It didn’t burn — it dissolved. It penetrated, silent, without violence, but with implacable determination, like a slow acid, disguised as a caress, determined to reach the center.

I didn’t want to look. My gaze clung to everything it could around me, avoided the cradle like one avoids a memory too clear. I didn’t want to. I mustn’t.

But I knew.

I knew I was going to do it.

I leaned in. Slowly. With that strange slowness that doesn’t come from caution, but from a deep, instinctive respect for what one is about to discover — as if moving faster would have been desecration. And then, everything around me contracted. Silence grew denser. Not that empty, ordinary silence, but a charged, living, almost painful silence. As if the world itself, in a rare impulse of modesty, held its breath so as not to disturb the moment. As if everything that existed suspended its judgment. Just for a second. Just to let me see.

And I saw.

Me.

But not me today. Not that collapsed silhouette, not that carcass eaten away by rage, by blood, by screams and shame. No. Something else. Something older. Purer. A piece of me that hadn’t yet been contaminated. Not yet tainted. A baby.

He was there.

Laid in the cradle. Curled up. Perfect in his incompleteness. A sketch of flesh, my flesh, my blood, my face still shapeless but already familiar — an embryo of me, like one draws inside a dream what one has never managed to keep awake.

His brow was slightly furrowed, as if he were listening to an inaudible voice, a melody I, as a devastated adult, could no longer hear. His eyelids closed, his lips barely parted. His breath, imperceptible, yet there, so calm, so peaceful that it barely stirred the white fabric covering him — that simple shiver, that fragile ripple of a blanket, alive, rhythmic, insufficient.

And that little movement, so tiny, so light, nearly broke me more surely than everything else.

More than blood. More than screams. More than the arena and the deaths and the void.

Because there was nothing to say in the face of that.

Nothing to scream.

Only... look.

And fall.

Then a sound was born. Almost nothing. A thread, a trace, a barely perceptible vibration, so tenuous it could have been mistaken for an auditory illusion, a spasm of memory. But no. It was there. A sound presence so discreet it didn’t even seem to want to impose itself. A murmur. Or rather... a humming.

Not an articulated song. Not a full voice. Something older, blurrier, oscillating between vibration and caress. A voice, yes — but without mouth, without identifiable source. It was too distant to be named, too close to be ignored. It didn’t cross the air. It crossed everything. And everything at once seemed to be its origin: the cradle, the space, me... or her. That absent, unspeakable figure, and yet everywhere.

I no longer knew.

But she was there.

It was her.

Not a song. Not words. A song without language, without story. A pure presence, vibrant, enveloping, excessively gentle. An ancient love, almost sacred, held in the air like warm vapor, a breath of tenderness never spoken, but that continues to float, to persist, to settle in the tiniest cracks of the world. A condensed tenderness. Too silent. Too pure. Unbearable.

And my throat tightened.

Not slowly.

All at once.

As if that sound had found a fault in me, an unhealed line, a knot I had desperately tried to ignore. My heart raced. But it wasn’t fear. Nor rage. Nothing familiar. It was vertigo. But a calm vertigo. Sober. Deep.

And more devastating than everything else.

Because it didn’t scream.

Because it didn’t judge.

It loved.

And I no longer knew how to handle that.

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