Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 194: I Climb, Therefore I Disappear

Chapter 194: I Climb, Therefore I Disappear

I was climbing. Still. Relentlessly. Caught in that silent, hypnotic loop, where each step resembled the previous one without ever being quite the same, as if the path itself stretched as I tried to cross it. There was no end, no visible summit. Just this stubborn ascent, like a mute prayer thrown at a sky that no longer answered.

The child rested against my chest, light as a breath, like a shadow held barely by the thread of my breathing. But his weight was growing. Slowly. Insidiously. Not like a brutal load dropped all at once, but like a glass being filled, drop by drop, with implacable patience. A silent, invisible, yet real accumulation.

Nothing overflowed, nothing screamed. And yet, I felt the surface rise within me, slowly, inexorably, as if what he was — or what he held — was seeping into me without my being able to stop it.

Each step seemed to suck a bit more from me. Not just my strength, but something deeper, more structural. As if, with every step, it gnawed at me from the inside, siphoned my vertebrae one by one, patiently, like dismantling a framework too fragile to bear any longer.

It wasn’t a sharp pain, but a slow, intimate erosion, a disintegration that didn’t scream but persisted — and I continued nonetheless, carried by that nothingness that looked like willpower.

My shoulders twisted slowly, barely, but with that deep, organic torsion that no longer belongs to movement, but to transformation. As if they no longer knew how to hold. As if they searched, silently, for a new shape, a new way to exist under the weight.

They bent, adjusted, reshaped themselves, not to ease the burden, but to try to integrate it, to make it their own. As if the body, tired of struggling, simply tried to become what it carried.

I wanted to adjust my hold. Relieve the tension a little, redistribute the weight, just for a moment. But his arms, wrapped around my neck with an almost unreal gentleness, stopped me. It wasn’t force that held me — it was tenderness. A silent, light tenderness, but so deeply anchored that to touch it would have been betrayal.

To move him, even by the smallest gesture, would have broken something. A silent trust. A fragile certainty. So I didn’t touch him. I left him there, just like that, clinging to me like a pardon granted too soon.

So I didn’t move. Not a single gesture more than necessary. I walked. Again. Again. And again.

Not from momentum, not from strength, but from necessity. From refusal to stop. From lack of alternatives. Each step became a repetition, a dull throb in a body too tense, too loaded to allow the slightest release.

There was no direction anymore. Just the act of walking. Like a mantra. Like a confession. Like survival.

The fog grew thicker. It no longer merely floated around me — it clung. To my skin. To my eyelashes. To my nerves. A tepid, clammy, almost living wadding that slipped into the folds of my breath, into the silences between two heartbeats.

It was no longer a veil, it was a membrane. A soft but insistent boundary, placed against me like a promise of forgetfulness.

It didn’t blind me completely, but it erased contours, landmarks, time. And gradually, I no longer knew whether I was walking toward something... or disappearing into it.

And in that white... something stirred. Not images, or not yet. More like impressions. Shapeless shivers. Echoes of memory I hadn’t summoned, but that came back in spite of me.

A smell, first — acrid, persistent, familiar — a mix of burnt oil, dried sweat, old wood soaked in silence. And with it, the sensation of a place, of a threshold. A door. Ajar. Always the same. Always.

Open just enough to let voices, footsteps, muffled breaths pass through. But never enough to see. Never enough to cross. Just that thin slit that said: you know. But you’re not allowed to look.

I blinked... and the vision disappeared. Or rather, pretended to. It didn’t really fade. It folded back, like a beast returning to shadow, patient, crouched. It never left. It waited. It watched.

And I felt it, in the hollow of my closed eyelids, in that thin membrane between the inside and the world: it was watching me. Silent. Present. Behind my own eyes. As if it had made its home there, just behind the beat of my lashes, where no one could go but me.

My legs trembled a little more than before, now. Not from fatigue. Not from physical weakness. But from an internal misalignment, deeper, more insidious — as if something in me no longer walked quite straight.

It wasn’t the climb I was fighting. It was what it revealed. What it forced to surface, to be exposed, to exist.

Each time, that vision — or what remained of it — touched me. Not like a memory one finds again, but like a wound one recognizes. A dull, irresistible emotional wave that passed through me without my being able to stop or explain it.

I climbed again. One step, then two. Then another. Nothing spectacular. Nothing heroic. Just that simple, stubborn, almost animal rhythm, dictated by a naked will.

Each stride was a compromise between momentum and collapse, a silent negotiation between what I carried and what I refused to put down.

I no longer really counted. But I felt. The ground under my feet. The child against my chest. The world, around me, becoming increasingly blurry. And me... still there. Climbing. Because I could no longer do otherwise. Because it was the only direction left.

My breath came in short, irregular waves, as if the air itself refused to descend all the way. My chest contracted without rhythm, without grace, strangled by a tension I could no longer name.

The child, he still didn’t move. Motionless against me, he seemed to fall asleep — or perhaps... he pretended. He had that strange stillness, too perfect, too smooth, like that of beings who wait for us to collapse before daring to move.

A false peace. A feigned gentleness. As if he were watching me from the very hollow of abandonment.

I gasped, breath broken, torn in fits, unable to become fluid again. My body struggled to keep up. My mind raced.

And my fingers, without even my deciding, clenched around his tiny legs, thin as tender branches, barely real beneath my palms. It wasn’t a gesture of control. It was a reflex. An uncontrolled tension, an internal jolt, as if the mere fact of still feeling him there, still tangible, gave me a reason not to fall.

— I might drop you... I’ll let go before that.

My voice was weak, trembling, almost ashamed. It had nothing of a promise. It was a confession. An admission of helplessness, slipped out between two broken breaths.

He didn’t answer. Not a gesture, not a whisper, not even a tremor. But his closed eyelids, placed like a peaceful veil over the gaze I no longer saw, seemed to say something else. Like a mute word, gentle, terribly calm:

I know.

And I’m still here.

But the voice came back. Sprung from illusion, or maybe from that woman with the still-unknown silhouette, always blurred, but strangely present.

She needed no face to cut deep. She needed only those words, that blade in the breath:

— You’re going to run again? Abandon again at the first difficulty?

My jaw tensed immediately. That voice. That phrase. It awakened something too old, too ingrained. A dull anger. A familiar shame.

I knew. I knew I no longer had the right to run. No longer the luxury of falling. Not even the luxury of hesitation. I had to keep going, no matter what, even if it took what was left of my lucidity, my breath, my mental strength.

I had to move forward. For them. For Cassandre. For Lysara.

Because it was their faces I carried too, somewhere, with the child. Because they were no longer behind me, but within me.

— Good... think of them.

And just like that, the illusion disappeared. Once again. It never lingered. It came, said what it had to say, then withdrew, without noise, without trace, as if it had never really been there.

But I knew it was. Always in the hardest moments. Always when something in me was about to give in.

I couldn’t tell if she came to help me... or to break me a little more. She had neither apparent softness nor cruelty — just that voice, sharp, precise, unsettling.

But deep down... deep down I had an idea. She helped me. In her own way. She came to support me. To confront me. To whisper, often, what I didn’t want to admit but needed to hear.

She was there, maybe, not to save me... but to force me to save myself.

And so... resolute, despite exhaustion, despite dizziness, despite the constant tremble of my breath, I continued. One step after the other.

Not from strength. Not from heroism. But from necessity.

As if I carried more than a child. More than a body too light against my chest.

As if I carried something invisible, but vital. A memory. A promise. A part of myself I no longer had the right to abandon.

Something fragile, but sacred, that had to be protected at all costs — not because I was capable, but because I was responsible.

With every step, I felt as if I was unlearning something about myself. A slow, silent, but irreversible shedding.

My name blurred. My strength dissolved. My very shape changed, not in the mirror, but in sensation. As if I were becoming other.

Not someone else... but other, simply. Less, maybe. Or more. I didn’t know. I no longer knew.

I was fading and being born at the same time, in that simple and dizzying gesture of continuing forward despite what I was losing with each step.

Perhaps that was the price of the climb: to be forgotten by oneself.

Not by others, but by oneself.

To leave behind what one thought they were, what one had carried like an identity, like a skin.

To get lost, step by step, not in space, but in memory. To become a stranger to one’s own contours.

And to accept that to move forward... one must fade, a little.