Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 157: They Were Reading Me

Chapter 157: They Were Reading Me

I approached. Slowly. One step after the other, like one slides toward a truth one does not want to hear, but that imposes itself nonetheless, soft and icy, implacable.

And they... they did not move. Not a gesture. Not a shiver. Not a breath in their chalky matter. Not even that faint tension that the living sometimes produce when they watch the intruder. No. They remained there, suspended in their calm muteness, as if frozen in a waiting that asked for nothing.

But I could feel them.

I felt their eyeless gazes, their unconscious vigils, their sockets full of a light too ancient to be seen, too soft to be feared, too heavy to be ignored. They weren’t looking at me. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t a vision. Not an assessment. Not a judgment.

They were reading me.

And that was perhaps the worst. Because I felt — through my skin, through my flesh, through my very memories — their lights sinking into me like fine, warm roots, like fingers full of silence turning the pages of what I was, gently, methodically, without violence but without modesty. They didn’t want to know. They already knew. They were verifying. They were observing.

And I... I felt exposed. Not undressed. Dissected. Spread open from the inside. As if every part of me I had wanted to forget — every scream, every betrayal, every sob forced back in — was slowly rising to the surface. Not to be forgiven. Just to be seen.

They saw me.

Not the appearance. Not the posture. Not the mask.

They saw what I had suffocated so deeply that even my memory had given up trying to contain it.

And they did not look away.

Because they didn’t need to.

Because they never had.

Because they were that gaze.

The ground beneath my feet was changing, imperceptibly at first, then with a dull certainty, as if it too was adapting to the truth of my approach, to the growing nakedness that these silhouettes imposed without ever naming it. With every step, something shifted — a texture, a density, a vibration. It wasn’t abrupt. It wasn’t even tangible at first. But it was there.

As I sank into their mute circle — as their presence, still immobile, pressed me from all sides like a tide of thick silence — the ground began to transform. It didn’t crack. It didn’t tremble. It became. Denser. More present. More real than me.

The whitish rock, dry, hard, almost dead under my first steps, now seemed to breathe. At each contact with my sole, it softened. Warmed. It became a tepid matter, strange, stretched between the organic and the mineral. Not flesh. Not exactly. More like solidified memory. Skin of an ancient world. A belly of recollection.

And it didn’t welcome me. It swallowed me.

Gently. Without noise. Without force.

Like a too-soft blanket one cannot push away. Like a sheet that covers you though you never asked for it. As if the ground had ceased to be a surface and had become a being.

I was no longer walking.

I was sliding.

I was sinking.

I was melting slowly into that white matter, as one sinks into a sea that does not drown, but absorbs, digests, without ever spitting out.

And that sensation...

It wasn’t a fall.

It was a reintegration.

And then, slowly, in the saturated silence of that frozen circle, a movement occurred — imperceptible at first, almost a wavering in the matter, a sigh in the fabric of reality — and one of them moved.

Just one.

One step.

Not a human step. Not a paced, embodied, voluntary advance. It was something else. An almost dreamlike translation, a glide that didn’t ruffle the air, that didn’t displace shadow or light, as if that body didn’t cross space but merely remembered it. Its motion had the slowness of an ancient caress, of a rediscovered memory, of a nightmare too often dreamed to still frighten.

The rest of the circle remained frozen, turned to stone in a tensionless waiting, a breathless vigil — but he, that one, was drifting gently out of the collective stillness, drawn not by his own will, but by something external, or perhaps even more intimate: a breach I had left open, a call I had never voiced aloud but that my body carried, perhaps despite me.

He wasn’t walking.

He was being carried.

Lifted, almost, by a windless current, by a nameless force, by an impalpable link that made me the center of a forgotten gravity. And that gravity — I could feel it vibrating in my bones, in my vertebrae, in that burning tension between my shoulder blades, as if my back itself were becoming a magnet, as if my guilt, my memory, my pain were drawing him in.

He wasn’t coming toward me.

He was approaching what I had always refused to be.

I stiffened — not with a simple startle, but as a whole, as if my spine had locked all at once, seized by an instinct older than me, more animal, more intimate. My back tensed like a bow left strung for too long, and all my breath cut off, strangled somewhere between my ribs and my throat, as if the very air no longer dared to circulate in this body it knew was threatened.

My hand, though, reacted on its own. By reflex. By habit. It slid, swift, to my hip, to that familiar point, that hollow on my left flank where — thousands of times — the promise of a response had nestled. Of a blade. Of an edge. Of power.

But there was nothing left.

Nothing but a naked absence, an empty skin, without weapon, without guard, without hope of a strike. And in that bareness — brutal, immediate, raw — I felt a vertigo rise greater than fear: the vertigo of having nothing left to hold the world at bay. No steel. No defense. No illusion of control.

Just me.

And this defenseless body I had become.

The specter raised his hand — slowly, as if the movement cost him something forgotten, or as if he still hesitated to break the perfect stillness that had kept him suspended outside the world until now. It trembled, slightly, but that minuscule shiver, almost imperceptible, made the air around us vibrate like a silent wave, a hesitation laid bare in a world where nothing trembles without reason.

And that hand, white, blurry, porous, spectral in all its quiet fragility, approached me... until it rested. There. Right there. On my chest. At that precise spot, that blind point one avoids out of habit or cowardice, that hollow of the chest said to be dead, thought useless, that center one crosses without ever truly inhabiting — and yet, sometimes, barely, still beats. In hiding. In silence.

And I felt.

Not a bite. Not a burn. Not that aggressive pain I had so long awaited, so hoped for, almost desired as a deserved punishment.

No.

It was warmth. A gentle warmth, first imperceptible, then vast, then vast enough to become unbearable through its sheer innocence. It spread beneath my bones, like tepid ink poured into the secret canals of my flesh. It was immense. Unfathomable. Calm. Pure. Harmless.

And that was precisely where the worst lay.

Because it did not invade me like domination. It did not crush me like a forced pardon. It did not subjugate me like a sentence disguised as light.

It... loved me.

Without force. Without expectation. Without justification.

And that simple fact — that bare possibility, offered unconditionally, that tenderness from a world I had tried to destroy — struck me more violently than all the blows, all the hatred, all the pain. Because there was no vengeance, no justice, no revenge. Just a hand. A presence. A warmth. An offering I had never believed I could receive.

I could not bear it — neither the sensation, nor the intention it carried, nor that naked, unbearably gentle truth he had tried to offer me without defense, without threat, without demand.

My body tensed all at once, stiffened by an animal reflex, not out of fear but out of saturation, of absolute refusal to receive what I had never known how to deserve. My muscles vibrated like an overtightened string, as if every nerve preferred to snap rather than let that warm shiver rise under my skin.

My eyes opened too wide — not to see better, but to try to expel the sensation through my gaze, as if light could be a valve, as if staring hard enough could reject what sought to enter.

And then, without reflection, without words, without conscious choice — I pushed him away.

A single gesture, raw, instinctive, epidermal. A refusal. A slap against the world.

My hand struck his pale chest, that living chalky matter, too fragile to be flesh, too solid to be dream. The contact was sharp. Dry. And his body flew. Not flung violently, but carried by a force too intimate to be called anger, too bare to be an attack. He fell back, silent, in a perfect arc, as if the air itself were drawing his disappearance. Then he fell. Or at least, crashed where the ground still seemed to exist, where space still accepted that one thing might touch another.

But he did not cry out.

He did not scream.

He did not protest.

He did not fight.

And he didn’t even break.

He... faded.

Like a flame blown out with the tip of a finger. Without resistance. Without cry. Without tears.

A pure erasure.

Silent.

The others did not move. Not a shiver. Not a step. Not a gesture. Nothing.

They remained there, frozen in their silent circle, statues of ash and light, as if they had been sculpted for this waiting, as if their very stillness was part of the verdict.

Yet... their eyes.

Their hollow eyes, cavities full of a pupil-less glow, of a dull and ancient clarity — those impossible eyes, so hollow they seemed made to devour, but so luminous they almost became gentle — now all stared at me, together, in unison.

No more hesitation. No more distance.

Just this truth: I was at the center. I was the object. I was the target. Or worse still... I was the one they had been waiting for.

And that light, that inner fire each of them bore without flame or gaze, began to intensify. Not brutally. Not like a torch. But like a tide. An inexorable, organic, almost breathing rise.

It did not rush forth — it blossomed.

Like a fire that takes its time. Like a sky swelling before the storm, still trembling with restraint but no longer capable of holding back.

And in my chest...

The warmth.

It had not fled with the specter. It had not gone out with his fading. It had not been carried away. It had not flown off. It had not left behind a void, nor even a trace.

It had seeped in.

It had entered. Without shock, without warning. It had passed through my skin, softly, like a warm breeze that already knows the way. It had slipped between my ribs, nestled there, right in the hollow, at the exact point between my sternum and my throat — that point we never look at, that we never learn to name, but which vibrates when something too ancient, too true, awakens.

And it burned.

Not violently. Not enough to scream. But enough that it could no longer be ignored.

It burned like a whisper long imprisoned.

It pulsed.

It grew.

It lived.

And I stood there, unable to say whether it was a curse... or the beginning of a heart.