Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 178: The world turned over… and so did I

Chapter 178: The world turned over... and so did I

She spoke again.

Not loudly.

Not with the authority of those who impose, nor the solemnity of those who teach.

Just... with that tone that no longer tries to convince, because it already knows it struck true. A low voice, bare, suspended somewhere between intimacy and inevitability. A voice you can’t push away, because it demands nothing.

— You want to punish yourself, she murmured, like someone gently touching a wound they know too well.

— But you also want... to be loved.

— In spite of everything.

And I fell.

Not from injury.

Not from muscular exhaustion.

But because those words, carried without weapons, had split something in me that even blades had never reached. Because they said exactly what I had never dared to put into words. That contradictory, indefensible need I had carried in silence: to annihilate myself... but be saved. To be hated... and be loved all the same.

I fell on my back, slowly, like a body being laid down rather than dropped. My arms opened, my legs grew heavier, and my breath unraveled — not from pain, but from an older collapse — the collapse of clarity.

Because it wasn’t the fight that had emptied me.

It was the truth.

I said nothing.

Not because I had nothing to answer.

But because every thought in me had ceased to struggle. There was only the dull beating in my temples, the warmth of the ground beneath my shoulder blades, and that voice, still suspended somewhere in the air, resonating within me like a soft... and rightful sentence.

Because in that precise moment, lying on that warm ground, in that light too gentle to be honest, I knew.

I didn’t understand it.

I didn’t think it.

I felt it — deeply, viscerally, like a silent wave rising from the gut before it can even be named. Something in me tensed without moving. Like a beast sensing a storm long before the sky breaks. Like a child who knows, without explanation, that the warmth of a place is too perfect to last.

And it was there.

A creeping certainty. A formless presence. A faceless truth.

The worst... wasn’t behind me.

It wasn’t even in what I had just lived, not in the screams, not in the blows, not in that violence unleashed until extinction.

The worst... was still to come.

And it was approaching slowly.

Calmly.

Like all things that no longer need to run to reach their target.

I had no voice left. No breath. Not because they had been taken from me, not even because they had left — but because they had dissolved somewhere between the fall and the silence, as if my own body no longer believed in its ability to speak, to breathe, to assert its presence in the world. My throat was empty, my chest hollow, and even the act of inhaling seemed to belong to someone else, as if it were no longer up to me to inhabit this body, to circulate the air, to produce sound. All that remained was this: a tense silence, heavy with fatigue, lucidity and surrender, where even the slightest breath would have felt like betrayal.

I gathered, slowly, painfully, all that remained of my strength — those crumbs scattered in the dark corners of my will, those shreds of momentum still able to rise one last time — and, in an effort that was nothing heroic but entirely human, I stood back up.

Standing.

Swaying, staggering, but standing.

At the center of that unmoving, foreign room, saturated with a silence so dense it seemed to contain me.

Short of breath, lungs crumpled from the inside. Trembling hands, unable to close without shivering. A body marked, tainted, splattered with shards of blood... a blood that wasn’t real, and yet so tangible in its presence, so intimate in its weight upon my skin.

My blood.

His.

Ours.

There was no distinction anymore, no separation, no mirror left to shatter. No double to confront. No image to hate or push away.

There was nothing left.

Nothing but a being standing in the void. A breath still held. A survivor without victory.

And yet...

In the middle of that void.

At the very heart of that collapse.

I felt... full.

For an instant.

Just one.

But an absolute instant. A breath suspended between two beats — not of the heart, but of something vaster, older, more raw. It was that precise moment, infinitely brief and yet immeasurable, that comes just after the end of the gesture. Just after the final blow. Just after extinction.

When his eyes had closed without resistance.

When his arms had fallen like dead leaves.

When he had stopped breathing, without a whimper, without a complaint, without a word.

And I felt it.

Not an emotion.

A force.

A vertigo.

The sharp, burning bite of absolute domination. The black, silent, imperious fire of the accomplished act. Of the irreversible. The chilling thrill of pure power — the kind that destroys, that doesn’t look back, that no longer asks forgiveness.

The act of killing.

Not in defense. Not out of necessity.

By choice.

Aaaaah...

It had been so long since that roar had coursed through my veins.

A dark flow. A dense wave. An icy fire, precise, structuring. Like a scream that doesn’t come out, but redraws your bones from within. A low, contained, but infinite rumble.

I had killed him.

That part of me.

The one still whispering words of love in the storm, even when everything burned. The one that, amidst the violence, still searched for meaning. The one that reached out, still, in spite of everything. The one that looked at me with tenderness — like a brother, like a son, like a reflection too soft, too human, too fragile to survive in what I had become.

I had broken it.

Crushed it.

And in that crack, in that rupture, in the silence that followed, I felt...

I had become stronger.

And I laughed.

Yes.

I laughed.

Not a light laugh. Not relief. Not liberation.

A raw laugh. Brutal. Irremediable. A throat burst torn from the gut, that didn’t try to be contained, that asked no permission. A laugh that sliced the air like a blade too sharp, like an inverted scream. I laughed... madly. Long. Unchecked.

— AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

A filthy laugh. Animal. Total. A laugh that burst from a well I thought had run dry. The first in far too long. The first with no excuse. The first that didn’t want to stop.

A hollow laugh.

A chasm’s laugh.

A laugh without bottom, without shape, without return. A laugh that echoed against the walls of that living room, and answered not an event... but a birth.

Mine.

Or maybe... my true nature.

LUXURIA.

The word imposed itself.

Not as an insult.

But as a title.

A crest.

A crown.

That was it.

Yes.

That was what defined me.

Not love. I had torn it apart.

Not redemption. I had refused it.

What remained... was pleasure.

Raw pleasure. Black. Unspeakable. The pleasure of making what resists bend. The luxury of killing without justification. The luxury of crushing without regret. The luxury of walking, alone, among my own ruins, and ruling there like a king without kingdom, but with fire in my veins.

But then...

Something...

First a shiver, imperceptible, a slight imbalance inside the chest, like a vibration that shouldn’t have been felt there, between two ribs — then a hissing sound.

Not outside.

Inside.

A faint, precise, almost intimate sound. A pull of air that came neither from the room, nor the walls, nor the surrounding silence, but from me. From something that retracted, that hollowed out inside my ribcage as if the inner space had suddenly been emptied of a weight, a breath, a force I had never been able to name.

A breath.

Yes.

But not a breath of life.

A sigh. Slow expiration of a buried whisper. An exhalation too ancient to have been conscious, too deep to be voluntary. As if something... had escaped. Fled. Detached. An unspoken farewell, but etched in the lungs.

And in that precise moment, I felt it.

The world...

Tilted.

Literally.

Without noise. Without warning. Without scream. As if reality itself had turned over with the slowness of a giant hourglass, inverting the laws with the calm cruelty of a god too weary.

The ceiling became floor.

The floor became sky.

And everything pivoted.

Not in a whirlwind. Not in a fall.

In a soft twist. Absolute. Inexplicable.

An inner shift... made cosmic.

I fell.

But upward.

Without violence. Without acceleration. My body lifted gently, without my will, without my consent. As if gravity had changed its mind without consulting me, as if my feet no longer knew what "standing" meant.

I wasn’t falling.

I was drifting.

Upward.

Upside down.

The floor, already distant, moved away without a sound, and I no longer had weight, support, or axis. I was nothing more than a breath suspended in a room that no longer belonged to me.

And the walls...

They began to melt.

Not abruptly. Not like a collapsing structure.

But like a too-tight skin loosening. A living material that, suddenly, no longer tries to contain. They folded. Twisted. Stretched in slow, blurry, organic ripples, like pulsing membranes ready to burst. The room itself was becoming something else. A uterine chamber. A conscious illusion. A setting inhabited by something that, slowly, was deciding no longer to exist.

It dissolved.

But not around me.

Within me.

As if I were the one absorbing it. As if that room — its walls, its light, its silence, its breath — had always been a fragment of my mind, a dream sculpted in the deepest fold of my memory. And now, finally, I was spitting it out.

Like a truth that can no longer be digested.

Like a memory one refuses to keep.

I floated.

Again.

Without anchor point, without landmark, without direction.

Suspended in a new void — but not the neutral, cold, sterile void one associates with nothingness or cosmic silence. No. It was something else. An inverted void. A space turned in on itself, too full to be simply absent. It wasn’t a lack. It wasn’t deprivation.

It was an overflow.

An overflow of absence.

As if absence, by spreading too much, had ended up becoming a material, a density. A weight. A volume of air that didn’t exist, yet weighed all the same. An invisible mass made of all that would never be again. Of all that had been erased, refused, dissolved.

It was a density of nothing.

A saturation of the void.

A space swollen with non-being, so dense it became almost tangible, almost viscous, almost suffocating.

And me... I gasped.

Not because I lacked oxygen.

But because my body, lost in that inverted geometry, no longer knew how to breathe. My chest contracted in irregular spasms. My breath was short, jagged, almost torn with every inhale like a scream held back by reflex. An animal breath, brutal, alien — as if my body too had forgotten the memory of calm.