Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 162: The Last Flame

Chapter 162: The Last Flame

The voice returned.

Not in front. Not in the air. Not in the tangible space.

It returned where I no longer wanted to feel — in my nape, precisely at the place where shiver becomes memory, where the spine remembers ancient terrors, unwanted caresses, breaths we never chose.

It wasn’t the Guardian’s voice. No. It was the other. The one that had haunted me long before the fall, long before the abyss, long before the world decided to hold me back. The one I had always carried, like a too-familiar whisper, a thought fossilized in my flesh, stuck to the skeleton of my nights.

— You know very well which one, she whispered.

And that breath... that ancient, unnamable breath, slipped between two heartbeats, and I shuddered. All at once. As if a cold hand, invisible but perfectly exact, had just slid between my shoulder blades, tracing with a precise finger the path of a memory I had never dared to erase.

I wanted to reply, to reject, to expel — but it was a weak refusal, tired, almost tender in its despair.

— Shut up... I murmured.

My voice faded on its own, as if silence were safer, as if speaking risked opening a breach I would never be able to close again.

I would have liked to scream. But I whispered.

And she, this voiceless voice, this bodiless presence, did not fall silent. She didn’t get angry. She didn’t become insistent.

She spoke. Simply. With that poisoned calm that only ghosts know how to keep.

— You’ve kept it all this time. Even when you were bleeding. Even when you fell. You protected it.

And that sentence, placed in the silence, needed nothing more to pierce me. No violence. No irony. Just a truth. A fucking truth I knew too well.

Because yes... she was right.

I could feel it. There, still. Nestled somewhere between my ribs, in that fold of myself I no longer visited, that I refused to name. A soft, warm zone, still beating — an enclave of light that even my own darkness hadn’t managed to extinguish.

I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to know.

But I had kept it.

And that was the most terrible thing.

The Guardian was still staring at me.

She said nothing. She didn’t blink. She didn’t even move, not really — but she waited. With a strange, peaceful, unshakable patience, as if nothing in the universe had ever been able to rush her.

She wasn’t pressuring me. She existed. There. Present.

And in her suspended, mute posture, there was less mystery than recognition. She wasn’t judging me. She knew. And she waited.

Like all the others. Like her.

So I stepped back.

A single step. Tiny. But it trembled. As if the ground itself hesitated to support it. As if the world wasn’t sure it had the right to allow that retreat.

— No... I whispered.

Not a cry. Not a defense. Just a frayed word, uttered through clenched teeth in a breath that no longer believed in its own strength.

— No.

And then the voice, the other one, the voice that came from nowhere but always found its place in the silence, simply asked:

— Why?

Not to accuse. Not to condemn. To understand.

Like a child who, faced with injustice, keeps asking: why?

And that softness, in the question, that softness without pressure, crushed my throat.

I wanted to speak. To explain. But nothing came.

My throat shut abruptly, like a door slammed by panic. My words choked themselves, drowned in the flow of something older than language, more intimate than pain.

— Because it’s mine... I finally said, in a rasp.

— This memory is mine.

I didn’t even know which memory I was talking about, not really. But I knew it was mine. Mine in that way: visceral. Inalienable. Irrational.

— It’s mine, and I...

My voice faltered.

It didn’t go silent willingly. It broke, like a string pulled too tight, too fragile, at the exact moment it could have sung.

As if uttering one more word, just one, would be enough to dissolve it. As if speaking too loudly might make the thing itself disappear.

So I lowered my head.

Not out of shame. Not out of submission.

But because it was all I could still do without collapsing.

The voice... returned.

But this time, it was no longer a breath suspended in the nape, nor a distant murmur in the fabric of the world — it was there. Closer. Deeper. More intimate.

Like a confession slipped under the skin, like a truth too well known to be foreign.

A voice without tone, but saturated with certainty, almost whispered inside me, in the hollow of that soft and fragile place we no longer dare to touch.

— You don’t want to give it... because you’re afraid.

Not an accusation. A statement.

A hand placed on a wound one no longer had the strength to hide.

— Afraid it’ll be soiled. Afraid it’s false. Afraid to see it was... gentle.

And that word — gentle — echoed like a reversed slap, not violent, but unbearable.

A tenderness we didn’t ask for. A hand on the cheek when we were hoping for a punch. A softness we no longer know how to receive.

I growled. Half-voiced. Between anger and refusal.

— Shut up.

But she didn’t fall silent. She had never really waited for my permission.

— ... and that you no longer deserve it.

And there, everything in me tensed.

I raised my hand — not with the intent to strike, not to threaten. By reflex. A survival gesture. A spasm against the invisible. Toward nothing. Toward her. Toward that void saturated with presence.

But there was nothing to strike. Nothing solid. Nothing to silence.

Nothing... but me.

The Guardian said nothing. She didn’t raise her hand, didn’t seek my eyes, didn’t hold my breath.

She simply closed her fingers, slowly, with that irrevocable slowness of gestures that do not condemn, but simply acknowledge.

No violence, no break, just that soft resignation of a hand closing over emptiness like one closes a jewelry box left open too long, like one protects a space that won’t be offered again, not yet, not now.

— Then... you’re not ready, she murmured.

And it wasn’t a sentence. It wasn’t even a farewell.

It was an old certainty, soft and neutral, a sentence that neither sought to wound nor to comfort, just to be said, like a fact already etched into the matter.

Her voice hadn’t faltered. It hadn’t trembled.

It had slid through the air like a leaf too heavy falling from a tree without wind.

And yet... she cried.

Not like the living cry. No sobs. No spasms. No cry for help.

Her tears, slow, pure, slipped from her eyes without her face changing, without her mouth twisting, without anything disturbing that strange frozen peace.

Drops so fine, so clear they seemed not to belong to this world, nor even to a body.

They didn’t shine. They didn’t warm anything. They existed. Just that.

Like fragments of an old regret that no word could ever name.

And when they touched the ground... they vanished.

Not by crashing. Not by evaporating. But by forgetting themselves.

As if this world refused to keep a trace of that sorrow. As if it had no right to bear its memory.

I stepped back. Not to protect myself. Not to flee. But because there was nothing else left to do.

It wasn’t a choice. It was an almost natural movement, a flight without urgency, a withdrawal that looked more like a drift than a decision.

My feet didn’t want to leave.

But my body, it knew it could no longer stay.

And she let me go.

Without another word. Without an extra glance.

No shadow to follow me.

No guardian to block my path.

Not even the voice.

Even it... even it... fell silent.

And maybe that was it, yes, the most unbearable thing: that they let me go. That they accepted my flight. That they understood my betrayal. That they didn’t try to catch me. That they gave me, without even a sigh, the freedom to fall again.

So I left the platform, slowly, without brilliance, like one leaves a room one never truly inhabited, but whose air, nonetheless, continues to weigh in the lungs.

My heart beat — not with force, not with rage, but with that exhausted heaviness one feels when they’ve held back too much, carried too much, kept too much inside without ever speaking, without ever laying it down.

My chest was hollow, not empty, but hollowed out, carved from within by absences too dense, by memories one dares neither expel nor name, for fear they might return even more real.

And my fists, they remained closed — not to strike, not to defend, but to contain.

To contain that thing, that thing that was no longer a mere memory, not a mere fragment of the past, but an ember.

A warm ember, almost gentle, almost beautiful. Fragile, unspeakable, buried so deeply within me it became almost shameful, almost sacred.

I felt it there, in the hollow of my being, between two beats of shame, between two sighs of refusal.

I felt it pulsing against my ribs, like a little warmth we wish we could deny, but fear to extinguish, because, despite everything... despite everything I screamed, rejected, shattered...

I was afraid.

Afraid it was the last.

The last flame.

The last trace.

The last part of me still capable of loving what I had lost.