Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 161: The Guardian of Memories

Chapter 161: The Guardian of Memories

In front of me, without a sound, without a call, without even resistance, the path opened again — or maybe it had never stopped existing, simply masked by my panic, hidden by my escape, swallowed by that too-human pain that blinded me to the point of collapse. It was there now, wide, curved, tracing an uncertain trajectory through the void like a silent invitation, like a thread stretched between two points of forgetting.

A long islet, suspended in the void, stretched beneath my hesitant steps. Its narrow body floated above an infinite abyss, where star corpses drifted endlessly — not burning stars, not extinguished suns, but ghosts of light, embers frozen in the void, suspended like celestial memories left to drift, slowly swallowed by a silence that nothing — not cry, not breath, not prayer — seemed able to cross.

The ground beneath me was not solid. It was not made of rock, wood, earth, or even dream. It was... translucent. Almost diaphanous. A glass surface, yes — but not smooth glass, not clear glass. A clouded glass, milky, streaked with opaque veins, as if the memory of a fog had been frozen in its very texture. And deep in this glass, deeply embedded in its core, shone filaments — thin, fragile, phosphorescent — resembling living nerves, nerves of a world still beating, glowing in slow, steady pulses, as if this path held its own memory, an underground consciousness, a breath.

And I, without understanding why, placed my foot.

And with each step — each tiny advance, each shift of my weight forward, each hesitant contact between the sole of my foot and this material too soft, too aware — something vibrated. Not around me. Not in the air. Not in this void suspended between things.

But in me.

A sound without vibration, a resonance without wave. A deep, dark inner echo, like a muffled wave that traveled through the marrow of my bones, rose along my spine, ricocheted against my ribcage, faded in the hollow of my temples before returning, tirelessly. Each step didn’t strike a surface: it entered me. Each step awakened something knotted, ancient, forgotten — as if I wasn’t walking on an external path, but on a secret, inverted map, drawn into my own memory.

I wasn’t walking on a road.

I was walking on the nerves of the world.

And then, I saw her.

There, at the center of the void, at the heart of that suspended orbit where nothing seemed to have been placed, she was there — motionless, curled up, set on the world like a thought too old to still be thought, like a memory that had taken form without ever being spoken. She didn’t move. She didn’t need to. Her stillness alone was enough to bend the air around her.

Small. Calm. Unalterable.

Her body, or at least what passed for one, seemed made not of flesh or matter, but of fluid, unreal silk, a silk born from the mist itself — as if the fabric of her presence had been woven directly in the vapor of dreams. Each fiber rippled slowly, fused with the atmosphere, dissolved into the ever-moving silence that surrounded her. She wasn’t placed there. She was there. She was part of the place. Like a piece of the setting too essential to be noticed at first glance.

There was no face, no expression, no gaze to meet.

Nothing but this gentle form, feminine in her curves, floating in her being. Draped in white — but a white that held nothing pure, nothing innocent, nothing salvific. A white faded by eternity, slowly stirred by a wind that didn’t exist. A movement without cause. A motion born of nothing.

And her hair...

It fell around her, cascade of pale shadow, infinitely long, infinitely heavy, infinitely slow — not like hair, but like roots. Inverted roots. Filaments of memory planted in the very heart of the dead sky, suspended downward as if this figure had been sown there, upside down, against the world. As if she had been born from the reverse side of the sky, to watch over those who fall.

Her breath...

It wasn’t simply exhaled — it took shape. It detached slowly from her invisible lips like warm mist, fluid, almost alive, a maternal breath that didn’t warm but enveloped, caressed the frozen air of this suspended world. It escaped her like an ancient sigh, forming slow, ample arabesques, drawing aimless curves in space, lost letters, symbols no one could read, but that everything in me recognized. Forgotten words, perhaps. Prayers. Remnants of language cast there like fallen leaves.

And this vapor, soft, silent, sagged onto the ground without a sound, as if it already knew no answer would come, as if it had always known its role was not to be heard — only to exist.

I approached.

Measured steps, slow, almost disembodied, as if the ground itself dared not support my steps. And when I came within reach of breath...

She lifted her head.

Not abruptly. Not with surprise.

But with the peaceful slowness of those who already knew. As if she had been waiting for me forever. As if she had seen me coming since the first fracture, the first cry, the first dream — and had never moved since.

The world stopped.

Not the world around. Not that one. Not this suspended, frozen, tepid expanse, familiar in its strangeness. No. It was my world that stopped. The one inside. The one no root had yet truly reached, the one that, despite the falls, the voices, the calls, kept beating in secret, disconnected, apart, like a wounded beast refusing to collapse until it has chosen its end. A world built on the edge, on tension, on that unstable line between the refusal to die and the impossibility of living.

And when she spoke...

— You came.

...it wasn’t a sentence.

It was a resonance.

Her voice didn’t slice the air. It didn’t rest on my eardrums. It slid, like a soft certainty in the flesh, like a thought one would guess before even formulating it, as if it had never needed to be spoken aloud to be heard.

— I was waiting for you.

It was there, in every fiber of her presence, in every oscillation of the air around her. A waiting. Not impatient. Not demanding. Not painful.

A waiting... constant.

I didn’t answer.

Not out of defiance. Not out of refusal.

But because everything in me closed inside. My throat, dry as a desert. My tongue, stuck, heavy, glued with silence. And above all... the fear.

Not fear of her.

Not fear of what she was.

Fear of sound. Of my own voice. Of what it would awaken. Of what it might break — something invisible, essential, suspended in that precise moment like a glass thread stretched between two truths.

I was afraid of myself. Afraid of existing, there, before her, with a naked voice.

She inclined her head, slowly, with that strange grace belonging neither to the living nor the dead, that suspended movement that seemed not to bend the air but to curve it, as if space itself bowed with her.

— You are seeking an answer, she murmured.

It wasn’t a question. Not even a supposition. It was a certainty placed, laid in the atmosphere like a truth not to be questioned, because it had always been there, lurking beneath the others, beneath the screams, the escapes, the silences. I squinted. Not to see better. But because something in me, behind my eyelids, still refused to let light pass.

Her voice...

It wasn’t a deep voice. It wasn’t a soft voice either. It wasn’t a human voice. It vibrated in another register. It seemed to belong to no mouth, no body, no era. It wasn’t transmitted. It was... felt. Like a sound in the bone, a frequency so ancient you recognize it before even hearing it.

She spoke as one whispers to a memory older than birth. As if she had already spoken to me long before I was formed. Before the world dreamed me. Before I became shape, name, flesh or cry.

— There is always a price, she continued.

The words barely stretched. Not pressed. Not solemn. Spoken like a fundamental law that no being, even broken, can ignore.

— Nothing comes for free.

— Not even here.

And this here, she hadn’t pointed it out. She hadn’t surrounded it with a gesture. This here wasn’t a place. It was a condition. An invisible border between what I had fled and what I didn’t want to receive. A here that bore the contours of a choice — but with no escape.

She extended her hand. Slowly. Not as a solemn gesture, not as an offering, not even a threat. No. As a call. As an echo returned from the depths of ages, a gesture already repeated a thousand times in another time, in another body. A gesture whose shape I knew... but not yet the end.

Her fingers opened in the air like a white flower in slow motion. Thin. Diaphanous. With a troubling, almost unreal transparency. It wasn’t flesh. It wasn’t light. It was something between the two. A living, vibrant matter, as if shaped in the very memory of light. And they trembled. Barely. An infinitesimal, restrained shiver, almost modest. Not from fear. Not from weakness. Just enough... for me to feel the effort. Just enough... for me to understand that this gesture wasn’t neutral.

— Give me a memory, she said.

Simply. Without insistence. Without threat. A voice that brushed against my thoughts without forcing them, like a caress placed on the nape of the neck. I remained still. As if petrified in my own breath, which suddenly got stuck in my throat, refusing to pass. Not because of fear. Because of the word.

A memory?

— In exchange... I will tell you what you seek.

She hadn’t changed her tone. She hadn’t added anything. No drama. No pressure. Just that sentence, placed there, between us two, like a bridge of mist I had to cross... or destroy.

A memory.

Not an object.Not a vague thought or a lost dream.

No.

A living fragment.

A beating piece.

A living stone in the already cracked, already trembling structure of what I still pretended to be. Of what I refused to abandon... even if I no longer knew why.

And suddenly... everything became denser, more compact, more saturated with absence. The silence, already heavy, became something else. It was no longer simply a world without sound, but a space where even the beat of my heart seemed forbidden, where the slightest breath became a blasphemy against the fragile balance of the moment.

Not a sound.

Not a vibration.

Nothing, except this suspended request, this sentence still present in the air like a thread stretched between two abysses, both too fine to hold and too sharp to ignore.

What was I willing to forget... to know?

What memory was I willing to sacrifice — not as one gives up, but as one amputates, as one cuts off a part of oneself with the hesitation of a surgeon without anesthesia?

And I remained there, motionless, pierced by the tension of that simple question, more terrible than a blow, more precise than a blade:Which memory?

Not the one you want to give.

The one you don’t even dare imagine losing.

I searched within myself. I rummaged, looking for a fragment, a shard, a name... but everything was too interwoven. Too alive. Too trembling.

I had nothing to give.

Nothing I could detach without breaking.

Nothing I could let die in oblivion without something, in me, collapsing for good.

And maybe that was the real trap.

Not the exchange.

The realization that no loss, even voluntary, comes without a scar.

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