Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 191: Moss Memory

Chapter 191: Moss Memory

I had been climbing for what felt like hours... or perhaps the same moment repeated too many times.

The landscape, the smell, the steps — everything repeated. Tirelessly. In an infinity of slow, silent loops, without beginning or end. Each detail returned with the same worn precision, like a memory that wears out from coming back too often.

Time no longer passed: it stretched. Like a damp fiber, trembling, stretched between two breaths that had never managed to meet.

Me, I was there, suspended in this in-between, both outside and inside, without knowing if I was ascending something... or simply losing myself a little more with each step.

But ahead of me... something. An anomaly. A soft fault in the repetition.

Something new, which seemed to emerge from the loop without breaking it, like a different silence within continuous silence. A landing. Simple. Bare. Unexpected. Neither step nor turn. Just a space laid there, almost shyly, as if it apologized for breaking the order.

Immediately, my whole body tensed. Because in this borderless infinity... the slightest interruption became a call. Or a trap.

A platform floated there, suspended in the milk of the sky. Narrow, but stable. Bordered by pale mosses that pulsed slowly, like sleeping velvet hearts.

They weren’t decorative. They vibrated. They lived. One might say they were waiting for me. Or maybe they already knew I was going to fall here, exactly here, as planned.

I then felt, with mute clarity, that I wasn’t choosing this path. Not really. In this world, I was following a line. A trajectory inscribed under my skin. A fate that no longer asked for my opinion.

Since my encounter with that damned god... something had shifted. A silent fracture in my will. I was moving forward, yes. But it was no longer me who was tracing the road. I no longer controlled anything. And the worst part is, I could feel it with every step.

I chased those thoughts away, or at least I tried. Then I sat down. Not out of physical exhaustion. My body still held. It was elsewhere that it faltered. Deeper.

A mental fatigue, thick, slow, that didn’t scream but settled in, like a fog between nerves. This landscape too soft, too slow, that persistent smell, repeated to the point of obsession — it all clung to my skin.

Despite myself, it drained me. More than I wanted to admit. More than I wanted to feel.

The moss adjusted beneath me, silently. Naturally. As if it had been waiting for me. Like an ancient palm, soft and warm, shaped by memories I had never offered, yet it seemed to know.

It welcomed my shape, my weight, my silence. It even embraced my absence, with that strange tenderness that only forgotten places can still offer.

In that hollow it formed for me, I realized how much I had never truly been present, here... in this world. As if my body had walked through it without ever engraving itself in it.

Then... my vision shifted. Not abruptly. But as if something, silently, had pulled me backward.

It caved gently inward, like a wall deforming under the pressure of a memory too old. A vertigo without movement. A slow pull.

In that slide, I felt a light calling me — a light I hadn’t lit, hadn’t even looked for.

Yet it was there, lodged somewhere between my eyes and my nape, and it was pulling me, without violence, but with the certainty that you don’t come back from that kind of clarity.

I saw. Or rather... I felt something take form, like a sensation becoming image. A dark hallway appeared, indistinct, blurred like a badly digested, poorly closed dream.

The walls were wooden, tired, cracked with silences too long. Old wallpaper peeled in places, eaten away by time and moisture.

And that smell... heavy, stagnant, blending wet laundry, sticky dust, the familiar mold of places where one has never truly breathed.

At the end of the hallway, a door ajar. Barely. Just enough to hear what shouldn’t be heard. Not a scream. Not a call. A muffled cry. As if pain hadn’t had the right to be born. A cry of resistance. Broken.

BOOM

A dull sound. Brutal. Distant and yet too close. A fall. A gasp. Something — or someone — collapsed.

And me... I wasn’t in the room. I wasn’t the one falling. I was elsewhere. On the edge. Invisible. Crouched in a corner, a space too small for a body to fit without folding, without twisting.

But I was there. Piled into myself. Back against a wall I couldn’t see. Chin on my knees. Arms across my stomach. I was breathing. Too loudly. Or not at all. It was hard to tell. Each breath felt both suffocated and too wide, as if I were occupying a space I wasn’t allowed to take.

I didn’t see myself in the vision. No reflection. No outline. But I knew I was there. Anchored. Dissolved. A formless presence, trembling, melted into the shadow of an erased memory.

I was the echo of a curled-up body, the shiver of a silence lodged in a corner no one looks at. It wasn’t a dream. Not a reconstructed scene. It was a leftover. A fragment of me... that I had deliberately forgotten. Or that the world had refused to return to me.

Yet it still vibrated. Just enough to remind me I had been there.

But what struck me most... what pierced me, hollowed me, was not the room, nor the shadow, nor even the fall.

It was that voice. Distant. Broken. A voice that did not carry. That did not shout. A cracked voice, restrained, muffled by something greater than it.

It wasn’t the voice of the woman I sometimes heard in my visions — not the one who guided, who whispered, who held. It was another voice.

A higher voice. More trembling. That of a frightened child. Mine. The one I had forgotten. The one I had left there.

A murmur. Barely a breath. A word I had erased from my memory too long, which she had rejected, washed, buried under years of denial, silence, escape. And yet, even now... I struggled to hear it.

It vibrated, faint, as if it didn’t quite dare to exist. As if it still feared awakening something too vast, too painful.

— Mom...?

The word floated. Naked. Broken. Torn from a fold of the heart I thought dead. And for a moment... I thought it no longer belonged to me.

I came back. Brutally. With a sharp jolt, as if my consciousness had been pulled backward by an invisible force, forcibly brought back into matter. My body was waiting for me. Too narrow. Too heavy.

Every muscle vibrated with a memory it hadn’t chosen. I had returned to my skin... but something in me had stayed back there.

Around me, the moss pulsed stronger. Faster. Like a heart touched too abruptly, surprised in its regularity, unbalanced by a contact too human.

It vibrated under my legs, against my palms, in my back, as if it had felt the shock, as if it reacted to the memory that had just emerged.

A living memory, vegetal, almost animal, now beating in echo with mine.

I stood up in a jolt. Not by will. By reflex.

As if my body, saturated with memory and foreign heartbeats, could no longer bear the contact. As if the moss beneath me had become too alive, too in tune with what I had just relived.

My legs trembled slightly, tense between flight and grounding. But I remained standing.

— It’s nothing, I murmured. I have to move forward, Anthony.

I no longer even knew if I was speaking to myself or to the shadow I had become.

My voice was low, almost foreign, as if it slipped between the cracks of my consciousness without really settling.

My mouth was dry. Not a drop of saliva. No hatred either. Nothing to fuel anger, nothing to spit.

Just a hard absence, stuck in the throat, like a core of silence no scream could dislodge.

I resumed my walk. In slow steps. Without momentum. Without particular courage. Just because I had to continue.

The steps were the same — same textures, same blurry contours, same silent ripples in the material. But my legs, they were no longer quite the same. They had lost something. An anchor, maybe. A certainty.

As if each step now slipped slightly, inwardly, as if my balance no longer obeyed the same laws. I moved forward... but less to climb than not to collapse.

Behind me, the moss cushions still pulsed. Slowly.

Like living beings left in the dark. As if they regretted my departure.

Not out of attachment. But because they knew.

They knew I was now moving away from refuges, from illusions, that I was approaching the truth — the one that doesn’t speak, the one that still sleeps, buried somewhere in the bowels of this world.

And me, I felt it. This world... it was going to make it bloom. Make me bear it. It had never guided me to save me. It had prepared me. Sculpted me. Slowly. For this. For this moment. To rebuild me perhaps, in its own way.

At least... I supposed so.