Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 144: The White Fracture

Chapter 144: The White Fracture

I jumped back, brutal, almost animal, my fangs bared by a fear that had no name. A fear of ancient origin, reptilian, which obeyed not logic but instinct. And my voice — that voice I thought extinguished — burst into the silence, unfiltered, unrestrained, a dry, rough cry, without detour.

— NO.

A word. A blow. A detonation. A bullet fired into a world without walls, a shot without a target, without recoil, but which vibrated through everything, as if all had tensed inside to absorb it.

The cradle wavered. Barely shivered under the impact. As if my voice had struck something invisible, sacred, but fragile. And the baby... that embryonic reflection, that part of me so gentle it became unbearable...

Disappeared.

And I understood.

It had never been there. It was not born of this world. Not born of the real. It was a projection. A trap. A trembling mirror. A twisted memory, deformed, vomited up by my sick conscience. An illusion wrapped in tenderness. A poisoned lure.

I suffocated.

My breath cut off abruptly, as if swallowed by an inner abyss. My hands pressed against my temples in a reflex gesture, pathetic, as if I could stop what was rumbling, what was pounding, what was crawling inside. But already, my skull was pounding. From within. A monstrous rhythm. A beast’s cadence.

Something was scratching my bones.

As if an entity had slid its claws into my skull, and was slowly scraping, with regularity, with precision. Not to tear. To inscribe. To carve. A song, maybe. A voice. A silhouette. A fucking lullaby hammered into my thoughts, branded red-hot into my memories.

I wanted to rip out my brain with my bare hands. Extract that parasite from inside, silence it, make it stop, even if I had to smash my head against the ground until I felt nothing anymore.

But I knew.

I knew better than anything.

This world would not let me.

It would not let me run this time.

So I did what I knew how to do. What I had never stopped doing, even while pretending otherwise. What this world had cultivated in me as a certainty. I destroyed. I killed. I corrupted. Not out of need. Not even out of vengeance. But because it was there, in me, too deeply rooted to be ignored. Because in doubt, in helplessness, in pain... that was all I had left.

My hands, without trembling, clutched the smooth edges of the cradle. They seized it like one seizes a truth too perfect to be tolerated. And I lifted it. Slowly. Like a burden. Like a reversed offering. Then, with a single movement — dry, brutal, total — I threw it to the ground. With all my strength. With the sacred violence of those who have nothing left to lose. Like throwing a lie in the face of a god. Like renouncing even the idea of forgiveness.

And then... it emitted a cry.

Not a shock. Not a crack.

A cry.

An organic sound. Wet. Disturbing. A strangled, muffled breath, like the rattle of a child just crushed under a hand. It wasn’t wood. It wasn’t dream. It was something else. Something that bled without blood.

So I struck.

Again.

And again.

Each impact made the material groan, as if it resisted without ever defending itself. It did not break with a clean snap. It bent. It yielded. It split with soft, intolerable, almost tender noises. Sounds of skin. Of throat. Of breath. As if the cradle hadn’t been built... but born. As if I were killing something alive. Something that still loved me.

White fragments flew under my blows. Light. Silent. Graceful. Fragments of purity I reduced to nothing. And in their fall, there was a perverse, unbearable beauty. Like the feathers of an angel. An angel one had killed without sound. Without hate. Just because it was still there.

A vapor slowly escaped from the broken carcass, like the last breath of a beast long asleep. It rose into the air without a sound, in thick, soft swirls, almost caressing — a warm, living exhalation, saturated with an insidious scent.

It was sweet.

But a troubled, toxic sweetness, too full of unspoken things. A sickening scent, heavy, that stuck to the throat like a forbidden memory. It bore the traces of warm milk too long forgotten, of soft skin too often brushed, of tenderness fermented in pain.

It was the smell of a love one had tried to preserve... but had let rot.

A scent of decomposed childhood.

A poisoned balm.

I struck. Again. And again. Until my arms locked up, until my joints screamed, until my muscles refused the slightest movement, as if even they were ashamed to prolong the act. And while striking, I roared. I roared without words, without precise anger, without form — a roar of a mute beast, expelled from a place where screams no longer know how to speak. I cried without tears, emptied even of my internal waters. And I laughed. Yes. But without mouth, without throat, without joy. A laugh that was just a spasm. A reflux. A sick echo in the cavities of my skull.

Then I fell.

I collapsed.

Heavily. Brutally. Like a body no longer held. Like a being whose structure finally gives way, not out of abandonment, but out of saturation. Amid the debris. On my knees. Arms limp. Breath jolted. Lungs raw. Eyes blank. Exhausted. Broken.

And there... something in me detached.

But not like one frees oneself. Not like a chain one breaks. No.

Like something dislocates.

A nerve, maybe. A lock. An inner dam, ancient, mineral, I didn’t even know I bore. Something that cannot be named, because it lives beneath. Beneath the words. Beneath the fears. Beneath even memory. Something buried at the root of the marrow, twisted around the spine, fused into the density of the "I." A certainty. A primal wound. A memory so old we simply call it self.

And now that it was gone... I no longer knew what remained.

And there... in that breath still beating against my ribs, in that white dust slowly falling around me like ash from a forgotten childhood, like snowflakes from a winter never truly lived — there, something gave way.

But it wasn’t a collapse. Not a cry. Not a clean break.

It had snapped.

Inside.

Without sound. Without drama. Like a nerve brushed after being stretched too long. Like a silk thread pulled until it splits on its own, in absolute fatigue.

A fault line had just drawn itself. Fine. Discreet. Insistent.

Not an earthquake.

A furrow.

A mute fracture, drawn at the very heart of the labyrinth I carried in my skull — that twisted network of memories, of excuses, of stacked shames. A white line, maybe. Or black. A line without color but not without weight. A crack I had not seen coming. And which, from now on, would remain.

A release. But not one you choose. Not a sigh of relief, nor a pause. No. A total release. Complete. Visceral. So deep that for a second — one single, yet infinite — I thought I would empty out. Literally. Pour out through the mouth, the eyes, through every pore of my skin. As if my internal structure, that thing we call identity, coherence, integrity, had just eroded all at once. Without violence. Just... given way.

All that I was.

All that I had compressed, contained, chained, locked inside for years — all the angers, the fears, the swallowed excuses, the stifled cries, the evasive glances, the unanswered questions — all that magma had simply... flowed. Like a dam too tired to hold. Like a dike no one even tries to patch anymore.

And I stayed there.

Empty. Or maybe more than empty.

Drained.

And in that emptiness, that strange hollow left behind by the collapse of all I thought I held, there was no light. Nothing salvific. Nothing coming to fill or repair. Just... silence. A dense, saturated, compact silence, like a black liquid in which one drowns without moving. It did not soothe. It enveloped.

And with it, a vertigo.

Not panic. Not a sharp fear. Rather a slow, creeping disorientation, as if my own identity — that voice, that form, that continuity I called "me" — had shifted a notch. Like a piece of furniture accidentally pushed and no longer returns to its place. A misaligned piece in the puzzle of being. An infinitesimal, but irreversible offset.

I wasn’t dead.

But I wasn’t really there anymore either.

There was only a shell left. A reflection. A ghost of myself, trapped in the breath of a world that no longer even needed to name me.