Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 198: Why Didn’t You Open the Door?

Chapter 198: Why Didn’t You Open the Door?

So I started walking again. Once more. Without heroism, without illusion, simply because there was no other choice. But this time... everything was worse. Everything was doubled. The fatigue. The weight. The burn in my muscles. The breath ripped away with each step. The world itself seemed to have thickened, become unlivable, as if it wanted to prove I had learned nothing, accepted nothing. Every movement was a negotiation with collapse. Every second, a fall narrowly avoided. But I moved forward anyway. Because falling... would have been worse.

With each step, I felt like I was moving through a hostile world, a world that didn’t want me. As if the earth itself rejected me, forcing me to press down every foothold, every breath, to beg for my place on a path I hadn’t chosen. I walked... like an intruder.

The worst part, maybe, was this: nothing was straight anymore. Neither the steps, nor my back, nor my bones, which seemed to slowly twist under this damp, insidious heaviness, clammy like a living mold.

Even my thoughts lost their axis. They spun, scattered, panicked since the encounter with the statue — as if something in me had been unbalanced, shifted from its center, and could no longer find its equilibrium. Everything became slanted. Slippery. Unsettling. And I, in the middle of it, still tried to stand... though nothing held anymore.

Even the light seemed false. Too pale. Too flat. As if my eyes no longer knew how to look, as if the world had lost its depth. Everything was blurry without being so. Too sharp, too off-kilter.

And I had lost my bearings. I wandered through a sick geometry.

I stumbled every three steps. My balance was nothing more than a memory, a distant reflex lost in the drunkenness of effort. My legs no longer held me — they swayed, bent, barely resisted.

And my breath... scattered in my temples, beat against my skull like a chaotic tide, unable to feed anything but vertigo. I wasn’t walking anymore. I was slipping, jolting, fragmented, supported by nothing but an obstinate refusal to collapse.

I was cold. And hot. Both at once. My body didn’t know how to respond anymore. Every muscle vibrated off-beat, as if I were caught in a tremor only I could feel.

It wasn’t just the effort. It was a loss. A slow dissolution of everything still keeping me upright.

The child, meanwhile, wasn’t asleep anymore. He was awake. Silent, motionless, but entirely there. Not agitated. Not demanding. Just present. Pressed against me, against my chest, like a foreign heartbeat syncing with mine.

Too present. With a warmth that was calm, quiet, but relentless. A truth I could no longer ignore. A soft awareness that refused to fade, to blend into the background. He didn’t speak, but he weighed. Not through his weight... but through what he represented. Through what he reawakened.

He embodied something I didn’t want to see. Something older than my mistakes. More intimate.

He didn’t weigh. He judged. And that was worse. Not with words, not even with a look. Just by the simple fact of being there, calm, constant, unchanging. Like a living memory.

Then, without warning... he spoke.

Not loudly. Not like a child. His voice had nothing juvenile, nothing timid. It was a timeless tone, detached from the body, suspended somewhere between breath and absence. A crumpled grain of silence, barely audible, but which slipped into me like a wave.

It asked for nothing. It reassured nothing. It was simply there, laid against the world, like a truth one doesn’t dare refuse.

— Why didn’t you open the door?

His whisper lasted only a second, but that second was enough to crack everything. A line opened in me, sharp, cold, as if his voice had pierced something I had forgotten to protect. He had touched... the exact point.

I stopped dead. The world froze around me, but it was my body that had stopped first. My heart turned to stone, heavy, frozen in my chest as if it refused to beat for that memory.

My skin tightened around my bones, rigid, too tight, like a garment no longer deserved.

— What?

My voice was almost foreign. But he didn’t answer. He didn’t repeat. He didn’t even move. He had spoken. Once. And it was enough.

Because what he said... kept vibrating silently inside me.

I would have preferred he scream. That he hit me. That he insist. But no. He had gone quiet. And that silence... condemned me more surely than any word. Because it left me alone. Alone with what I already knew.

The world around me seemed to lean. Slowly. Subtly. Like a breath held in anticipation. As if every stone, every step, every thread of fog leaned in imperceptibly, listened, paused just to hear.

My answer.

But I had none. Nothing came. Nothing but that tight, beating, shameful void at the bottom of my throat.

Only silence. Mine. Too late. Too bare. Too true.

My throat was full of glass. Every breath sliced. Every attempt to speak shattered against invisible shards.

And then, I felt my knee give... then the other... without appeal. My arms followed. No strength. No will. I gave in. I let him go.

The child slipped from me, slowly, like an abandoned breath. He rolled gently on the step, without jolt, without cry, without panic. And he stayed there. Sitting. Upright. Silent.

As if nothing had happened. As if he had always known I would eventually fall.

Like the last time, he cried. Not loudly. Not to be heard. Just that stream of pure sorrow, irrepressible, that escaped him effortlessly, without resistance.

But his tears... they were real. With a naked truth, undeniable, silent. And they pierced me more deeply than I had imagined.

Not violently. Not like a slap or a reproach. No. More like a warm blade slowly sliding into a ripe fruit — with that soft and cruel precision, the one that doesn’t seek to hurt, but to open what must be opened.

He cried like one breathes. Naturally. Without will.

And I listened to those sobs like one hears a music one doesn’t understand, but which grips the chest.

I wanted to flee. Run anywhere, even without legs, even without escape. I wanted to scream, tear the air, howl everything I had never dared to say. I wanted to collapse for real, let go of the mask, the burden, the climb, the world — everything.

Let my body scatter in silence, never rise again. Because in that gaze, in those tears, there was no room left for lies. And I had nothing left to stand on.

But... I knew. Everything in me already knew.

Running wouldn’t help. Screaming would only echo into emptiness. Collapsing wouldn’t erase anything.

So, slowly, almost on my knees, I knelt before him. I extended my arms. Without strength. Without words. Without the slightest certainty.

Just with what was left of me. That chipped, trembling fragment, but still standing. A silent offering. A simple gesture. Bare. That maybe said: I don’t know if I can... but I’m here.

It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was an attempt. A hand reaching from the abyss. A silent effort to say: I don’t know how... but I want to.

He looked at me. And this time, his eyes were no longer empty. They were full. Saturated with something heavy, deep, suffocating.

It wasn’t anger. No. It was worse.

It was waiting. An old waiting, motionless, patient like an endless night. A waiting that didn’t shout, that asked nothing, but that weighed. That placed on me the weight of a silence I no longer knew how to carry.

He didn’t judge me. He waited for me to judge myself.

And that was worse. Because that lack of anger left me face to face with my own cowardice, bare, irrefutable, incurable.

Then, slowly... he let himself be picked up. Without a word. Without resistance. As if something in him had broken, or maybe simply accepted.

His body slid against mine with the gentleness of a gesture long awaited.

He didn’t hug me. He didn’t cling. He let it happen. And that letting happen... weighed more than anything.

And that gesture — that simple slide against me — silently cracked something. As if an old wall gave way without a sound, where I still believed I held strong.

His weight, to my great surprise, hadn’t increased. He wasn’t heavier than before. Nor denser. Nor hotter.

He was there, exactly like the first time — light, warm, contained. And yet... something in me had changed.

It wasn’t he who weighed differently. It was me who carried him differently.

I was. Not physically — my body still followed, out of reflex, out of habit. But mentally... I was heavier. Laden with a new burden, a mute tension, a vertigo I could no longer ignore.

A question had slipped inside me, insidious, sticky, impossible to silence: had I been running all this time... without even realizing?

Had I backed away, not by choice, but by willful forgetting? And if that were true... then how long had I been wearing that escape like a coat I refused to look at?

And if I had stayed there, frozen in that refusal? And if I was nothing but that... an escape with a human face? An articulated shell, built to walk, but incapable of inhabiting what it carries?

Was I supposed to open that door myself? Was it truly the right thing to do... or just another illusion of courage overlaid on an old wound?

I didn’t know anymore. I knew nothing. I was completely lost, drowned in the meanders of my past — a past that was no longer a line, but a labyrinth.

Every memory folded in on itself, every choice led to another, every certainty crumbled as soon as I touched it. And that door... it waited.

Silent. Heavy. Too real to ignore. Too ancient to be opened without trembling.

Until now, I wanted only one thing: to hold on. Hold on to atone. Hold on to repent for what I had done. Hold on to protect, no matter what, Lysara and Cassandre in this world I understood less and less, but in which I refused to abandon them.

I had promised myself — no, carved into myself — never to run again. Never again to rest on my laurels, nor hide behind empty gestures.

But for that... did I truly have to open that door? Was it the path of courage, or just one more trap, disguised as a choice?

I didn’t know. And that uncertainty gnawed at me almost as much as the guilt I carried.

Did I really have to open up to what haunted me? To that thing lurking under the skin, those visions that came back unannounced, always at the worst moment, as if they waited for my weaknesses to slip in?

And that woman... that silhouette, that voice, that presence following me in the shadow of every breakdown — who was she, really? What did she want from me?

Was she an echo of my memories, a repressed fragment of my own story? Or a foreign entity, planted there by the gods to mock me, to drive the knife deeper every time I doubted?

I no longer knew. I was lost. Internally fragmented. Full of doubts, suspicions, questions that spun endlessly, unanswered, like shadows circling a dying flame.

Maybe the child and she... were one and the same. Two reflections of the same forgotten core.

Maybe I had never wanted to know who they really were, because I sensed... that what I would find there would destroy me.

But for now, what really mattered — what had to take precedence over everything else — was to keep going. Move through this hell. Endure this trial, even on my knees, even on the edge.

Get out of here, as soon as possible. Tear myself away from this loop of pain and vertigo, not to flee... but to return stronger.

To catch my breath. To grow stronger. To become stronger than all those damned beings who had crushed me, manipulated me, humiliated me.

Stronger than them. Stronger than myself.

So, without waiting any longer, without trying to understand what I still couldn’t face, I started walking again.

Not because I believed. But because I could no longer turn back.

Because the only thing more unbearable than moving forward... was abandoning that gaze behind me.

One step. Then another. Then another again. Again. Again. Again.

Each stride beat the ground like a deformed prayer, a desperate pulse torn from silence. Again. Again. Again.

Words were no longer words. They became heartbeats, pain, fragments.

A raw, animal rhythm, screamed into flesh. AGAIN. AGAIN. AGAIIIIN.

Until there was nothing but that. Nothing but the obsession to go on. Because stopping... was dying.

As if I were carrying... not just a weight anymore, but questions.

Questions that, for the first time, had taken shape. A real form. Compact. Alive.

They were no longer scattered thoughts, whispers in the mist — they had a body, a warmth, a silence of their own.

And I carried them. Against me. In me. Like one carries a child one doesn’t yet understand... but can no longer abandon.

And in each step, there was a voice. Muffled. Cold. Repeating endlessly, like a broken litany:

open it.

Open it.

Open it.