Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 163: A Gentle Hell

Chapter 163: A Gentle Hell

I walked. Not really out of will, nor out of faith, nor even out of need. I walked because my legs seemed to remember in my place, because my body, emptied of meaning, kept imitating the motion, chaining steps like a worn-out mechanism incapable of admitting it was broken.

I no longer knew if it was me moving forward... or if it was the world, slowly, sluggishly, dragging me ahead, pushing me from beneath, as if it refused to let me collapse completely. My feet didn’t really touch the ground — they brushed it, slid over it, barely grazed it, carried by a troubled, foreign inertia, almost clammy.

And in this movement without purpose, without direction, without name, I vaguely felt that something was moving me — not a force, not an order — but a gentle and sinister will, as if this very world had decided to take me elsewhere, in my place.

I drifted. Slowly. Silently. Like a memory too old to be named, too heavy to fade. I floated in this world without edge, without center, without rhythm — a matrix suspended outside of time, saturated with a sweetness so constant it became suffocating, like a clammy cocoon one can no longer leave.

Everything seemed frozen here, not by absence, but by a presence too full — a formless, relentless warmth, a tenderness that didn’t bite, but held, that clung, that refused to let go. It wasn’t a hell of flames. Nor of chains.

It was worse.

A hell of love. A hell of calm gestures, of compassionate silences, of embraces that aren’t pushed away but can no longer be endured. A hell without violence, but with arms always open. Always ready. Always there.

And this trap... it was mine. My own hell. Woven from my lacks, my memories, my regrets. A gentle hell. And thus, indestructible.

But... was it really hell? I was no longer certain. Maybe not. Maybe so. Maybe that word too had ended up losing its meaning, eroded by too much use, too many prayers, too many broken promises.

I no longer knew. I didn’t even know what "knowing" meant.

I wasn’t sure I understood what the word "hell" still referred to — a place? a punishment? a state of mind? a memory too precise? I didn’t know.

I no longer knew anything that really mattered. Not where I was. Not what I was fleeing. Not even what I was looking for, if there was still anything left to look for.

The void had eaten away my bearings one by one, and now, I drifted in the midst of a soft certainty, like an animal that no longer knows what it’s doing, but keeps moving forward because stopping would be worse.

All that remained to me was this doubt... and one detail. Tiny. Obscure. An almost ridiculous attempt: I had tried to summon my bag.

That instinctive link, that learned reflex, automatic — that object which, in any world, in any dimension, should have answered me, appeared by my side, pressed against my hip, reassured me in the midst of chaos.

But it did not come. Nothing. The void. No reaction. Not even resistance. As if the world itself didn’t know what that call was, or simply refused to answer it.

And then, at least, I knew one thing. Just one. But one certain thing: I wasn’t in a normal world.

And in that inner fog, dense, opaque, saturated with clammy silences and vague thoughts, something returned. Insisted. A thought. No... a memory. A shard of memory older than logic, deeper than consciousness.

The very one I had refused to give up, to name, to betray. The one I had kept to myself like a shameful treasure, like a fragment too fragile to be exposed, like a lukewarm ember hidden in the hollow of a still-oozing wound, in the mute fear that one more breath might be enough to extinguish it. Or to ignite it.

It was there. Present. Stretched in my bones. Rooted beneath the sternum. But I could no longer see it. Name it. Find it again.

All I could feel from it was a bare, primitive, almost animal sensation — a warmth in the chest, a barely distinct pulse, a buried scent, like that of a cloth too long held against oneself. A shiver from before the fall. A vertigo of presence.

And this question, nagging, disarming, impossible to repel: why did this unrest have such a... maternal scent? Why, in this blurred absence, this saturated void, did I feel such a fierce impression that something was missing?

Not an object. Not a place. No. Something else. Once.

Something, yes... but not a thing. Not a detachable element, not a recoverable fragment. Something greater. More intimate. Older. Something that perhaps preceded me. That inhabited me even before I knew I was me.

A buried presence, a bond woven in the night of another time.

Had I forgotten it? Had I abandoned it, willingly, let it go like one sheds a skin too tight to go on?

Or worse still... had I lost it? Definitively? Was this absence I felt there, lurking beneath my ribs, not a forgetting, nor a rejection, but a tearing? An old mutilation, hidden, never truly healed?

I didn’t know. Nothing in me knew. And that ignorance, that inner opacity, that hollow area without bearings, slowly gnawed at me.

Not with the brutality of a shock, but with the venomous patience of a beast that doesn’t bite to kill... but to let rot.

A discreet bite. But constant. A bite that takes its time. That settles. That waits.

So I walked.

Not toward something. Not against. Just... within. Within absence. Within blur. Within this gaping void without purpose, without direction, without expectation.

I wasn’t searching for anything. I wasn’t even fleeing anymore. I had stopped. I had let go, in the most literal sense. Released. Detached from myself, like a garment too worn left behind in a hallway.

And I floated. Yes, I floated, slowly, in this soft matrix, almost lukewarm, in this universe without angles or outlines, where each step erased me a little more.

Me and my cries. Me and my fangs. Me and that shame I carried in silence, like a tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, like a second skin I could no longer remove.

Everything dissolved. Even my anger. Even my voice. As if the world swallowed me... without judging me.

I walked. Not because I still believed. Not because an instinct guided me, nor even because a hope still lingered at the bottom of my breath.

I walked because there was nothing else left. Nothing left to do. Nothing left to say. Nothing left to be.

And as my steps continued, the universe around me seemed to shrink. Not brutally. Not like a slamming door. But slowly. Inexorably. Barely.

Like a throat contracting without warning, like a dream collapsing in on itself, tired of existing. Like a truth too dense, too old, too intimate to still need space.

Each step was a reduction. Each breath, a closing.

This world... was folding in. On me. Or within me. I no longer knew.

There were no more shattered islets. No more unstable platforms spinning on the horizon. No more skies suspended by invisible threads above the abyss.

All that floated, wavered, swirled in the previous floors had disappeared.

Here, everything seemed denser. Heavier. Graver. As if the air itself had been compacted by time, soaked with something ancient, secret, sacred.

I had the strange feeling I had crossed a threshold. Entered a place no one had walked in for centuries — maybe more.

A space forgotten by the living as well as by gods. A fold of the world. A fold in time. A sanctuary without name, without glaring light, without visible threat.

But charged. Saturated with a memory I didn’t yet understand... but which already recognized me.

The ground beneath my feet had changed.

It was no longer the soft, shifting, unstable texture of the previous corridors. Here, each step met a drier, grainier substance.

A carpet of white dust and cold ash, mixed, agglomerated in fine layers, almost transparent, as if the ground itself had been woven not from rock or magic, but from an old, fragile paper, saturated with memory.

A surface ready to break at the slightest breath, the slightest weight.

And with each step, it cracked. Softly. Discreetly. A dry, yet tender sound. A whisper of fracture.

As if I were treading... not on ground, but on fossilized memories. Remnants of moments too old to defend themselves, too worn to protest.

And I kept moving forward, in silence, on that dead matter that seemed to remember in my place.

And around me... walls.

Not built walls. Not walls conceived, drawn, erected by living hands.

No. Walls that appeared. Slowly. Like a truth never spoken aloud.

Not like decor. Like a revelation. A frozen certainty gradually emerging from silence.

The walls took shape without sound, of pale rock, almost lunar, streaked with translucent veins, crossed by arches too perfect to be human, yet sculpted without ostentation.

There were niches — not carved by tools, but by silence itself, worn like the corners of a thought held too long.

Columns melted into the stone, gently, as if time had waited for them. Nothing was imposed. Everything seemed... patient.

And I understood that this place was not a building.

It was a mineral cathedral. Alive. Motionless. Extinct.

A sanctuary without worship, without priest, without god.

Just a space hollowed in the heart of oblivion. A place that no longer waited for anything.

But which still existed. Despite everything.