Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 206: The Pedestal and the Void

Chapter 206: The Pedestal and the Void

I no longer knew how many steps I had climbed. How long my feet had been slipping, hesitating, recovering.

Time had dissolved into effort, into repetition. There was no more count, no more up or down, just this perpetual, absurd, almost ritual movement.

An endless ascent, where each step resembled the previous one but weighed a little more. As if the staircase itself lengthened with the rhythm of my fatigue.

The rain, it did not stop. It still fell, regular, inflexible, like a celestial metronome beating the measure of my slow climb.

It did not vary, did not weaken, as if it ignored my presence or, worse, adapted to it. Each drop seemed to know my skin, to strike it with a cruel, chosen precision.

It infiltrated everywhere — into my clothes, under my nape, even into the seams of my thoughts. It did not want me to forget. Anything. Not the pain. Not the cold. Not what I carried with me.

The child was sleeping. Or pretending. I no longer really knew how to tell the difference.

His breathing was slow, steady, almost too regular, as if his body had found shelter that his mind still refused.

He no longer moved. His forehead against my collarbone, his arms relaxed around me, he seemed peaceful — but that peace had something strange about it, perhaps artificial.

Like a survival learned too early. A way of absenting oneself from the world without really leaving it.

And I, I still carried him, without knowing if he was sleeping... or fleeing differently.

In any case, it was just as well. Because I no longer wanted to speak.

No longer wanted to exist through words. No longer wanted to think either — too many knots, too many voices, too many images returning uninvited.

I no longer wanted to reflect, nor to understand, nor to fight against memories. I just wanted a moment. A single one. Suspended. Silent.

A moment to lay something down — anything. My mind. My soul. My heart. My brain. Everything that still beat inside me without my consent.

Everything that weighed. Everything that bled without a wound. Just... place it somewhere. Leave it there. Even for a few seconds. To breathe. To no longer be at war.

Empty. Completely.

This time, there was nothing. No cocoon-room, no uterine warmth. No statue frozen in an ancient gaze, no filament of light floating like a gentle presence in the air.

Nothing to soothe. Nothing to trouble. Just a bare space, vast and mute, where even the echo seemed to have deserted.

A total void, assumed, almost honest in its nudity. As if the world had finally stopped playing.

As if it were telling me: this time, there will be no symbol. No hidden message. You are alone. And it is here that it must be said.

Slowly... a shape was born. Barely. A quiver at first, a delicate swelling in the air still heavy with mist and silence.

It was not big. It was not complex. Nothing impressive, nothing spectacular. Just a presence taking form. Simple. Hesitant.

Like a sketch that had waited years before daring to appear.

It did not burst forth. It extracted itself gently from the invisible, as if each millimeter torn from the void cost a little of me.

And yet... I continued. Because this shape, tiny and fragile, was perhaps the only thing I still had to offer.

Just... a little boy. Huddled. Behind a half-open door.

A frail silhouette, curled up as if to disappear, to melt into the shadows without a sound.

His knees pressed against his chest, his arms wrapped around himself like a final, pitiful barrier, his hands pressed against his ears — too loud, too loud, as if the world could be silenced if he stopped listening.

And his eyes... wide open. Frozen. Wet. No screams. No words. Not even a breath.

Just that mute, suffocating terror, the kind that doesn’t explode but poisons, slowly, the kind of simply being there, just there, an invisible witness, absolute helplessness, incapable of moving, incapable of doing anything — except surviving.

I stopped. My hands fell slowly, emptied, trembling.

And I remained there, motionless, facing this statue that I had shaped without really understanding how.

As if another will had guided my gestures. As if the world itself had passed through me.

Or maybe... it wasn’t the world. Maybe it was my memories. My ghosts.

My past come to take me by the fingers to finally speak itself.

I was still in a trance, numb, thoughts diffused, soul stretched between vertigo and evidence.

And before me, there was this boy. Frozen. Silent. Offered to the gaze like a cry sculpted into silence.

I recognized myself. Not in the face — it was blurred, deliberately abstract, as if even memory had refused to give it features again.

But in the posture... yes. Everything was there.

That desperate withdrawal. That way of making oneself small. That need to cover the ears to no longer hear, to shut out the world without managing to close one’s eyes.

It was not a flight. It was worse.

It was a refusal. A refusal to become guilty, by pretending not to have seen. By forbidding oneself to be a witness.

As if denial were enough. As if silence could wash away helplessness.

But it washed away nothing. And that frozen boy, crouched, smothered by his own terror... that was me.

That was me, defenseless, without escape, without the right to scream.

My hands were trembling. No spectacular emotion, no visible panic — just that diffuse, uncontrollable tremor, born when the body remembers too strongly in place of the mind.

My fingers no longer really responded. They still quivered, as if they wanted to keep sculpting, as if they refused to believe it was over.

And my breath... was short. Choppy. Irregular.

It barely rose to my lips before descending again, raw, heavy, as if each breath had to fight to pass through my throat.

The air no longer entered. It choked somewhere between my heart and my stomach.

Because looking at that form, that boy, was breathing with a rib cage of ashes.

It was too much. But I stayed there. Because it had to be seen. Because it finally had to be seen.

I wanted to destroy what I had made.

A sudden impulse, animal, a raw surge from afar, perhaps from the beast I still carried inside me, crouched beneath the skin.

The instinct to blot out. To refuse. To turn violence against what revealed me too much.

My hands clenched, my fingers stretched, ready to strike, to break, to erase this form that exposed me.

But I did nothing.

I remained frozen. Hands open, trembling, suspended in the void.

Because deep down... I knew. It was not an accusation. It was not a judgment.

It was a confession. A mute truth, sculpted in stone to finally exist somewhere outside of me.

And it had to stay there. To hold. To survive this moment. Visible. Concrete. Real.

Because we don’t always flee by running. Sometimes, we flee by forgetting.

And I... had forgotten too much. Too well. Too long.

The child looked at me. In silence.

He did not speak — he had never needed words.

But in his eyes, something had changed.

It was no longer that raw distress, that anxious void that made him tremble from within.

No. There was something else now. Something calmer. More settled.

A form of presence, gentle and strange, that asked for nothing but remained there, whole.

His eyes no longer tried to flee. They accompanied me.

It was discreet, fragile, almost imperceptible... but it was there.

A tenuous bond, a breath of recognition.

As if he understood. As if he finally saw in me something he no longer expected. And accepted it, unconditionally.

I took him in my arms. Slowly. Without urgency.

With that care we give to things we almost lost.

He did not resist. He let himself be held, light and warm against me, as if he had always belonged there, nestled in the hollow of my arms, where something still beat alive.

Then I climbed again. One step, then another. Indefinitely.

Without visible end, without horizon. The staircase continued, absorbed in the mist, as if it had never really had a summit.

But I continued. Carried by something different.

No longer by flight. Nor by fear. Not even by the will to survive.

I climbed because I had to. Because I was no longer alone.

Because he was there. And this time, I had not let go.

Leaving behind me the frozen statue. Motionless in the mist.

Mute guardian of what I had finally dared to see.

It did not move, did not fade. It remained there, simply, like a memory returned to the world.

A stone witness. A fragment of childhood nailed into matter to never again be denied.

And I did not look back. Not out of denial. But because I no longer needed to.

It was there. It would remain. And I, I had already resumed the climb.

But later... I had the impression of hearing its steps. Behind me.

Light. Rhythmic. Almost unreal. As if they were not quite there, not quite elsewhere either.

They did not chase me. They did not urge me.

They simply existed, in the discreet echo of my ascent.

Like a presence that followed me without haunting me.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was my mind, still raw, still troubled.

But I liked to believe it.

I liked to believe that the statue was no longer alone.

That it too, one day, had risen. That it had begun to walk. And that it moved forward, somewhere, at its own pace. Behind me.

Just a circular slab, suspended in the mist.

Perfect in its simplicity.

A stone circle, pale, veined with ancient cracks, that seemed to float with neither origin nor destination, detached from both sky and ground.

The mist enveloped it gently, without hiding it. It isolated it, like an islet in a silent sea, like a forgotten sanctuary where nothing could exist outside the present.

There was no edge, no railing. Just that bare stone. Stable. Offered. A place without mystery, but filled with a strange calm, almost solemn.

At the center: nothing.

No altar. No throne. No divine or monstrous figure.

Nothing but waiting. A dense, palpable, almost living absence.

As if that void were not a lack, but a hollow presence.

A suspended tension, mute, barely breathing.

The kind of silence that precedes revelations. Or collapses.

It was there, right there, at the heart of the slab — an empty place that the world seemed to hold, reserve, for something... or someone.

And I, motionless before that bare center, already felt that this nothing was going to speak. One way or another.

And at the edge... however, a pedestal.

Nacreous. Unfinished. Barely sculpted.

As if someone, or something, had begun to give it form, then had stopped. Abandoned mid-gesture.

The surface was smooth in places, raw in others, marked by hesitant lines, incomplete striations, like a thought frozen in mid-birth.

It had no clear function. No obvious symbol.

But it was there, the only object in that void, and its mere presence was enough to disturb.

It looked like a pedestal awaiting meaning.

An intention that had not yet dared to be completed.

A broken promise.

I felt that it was waiting for something. That pedestal.

It was not simply placed there, frozen in its incompletion — it was reaching for something. For a shape. A presence.

It called without sound, without light, but its call vibrated in the air, in the ground, in my belly.

I did not know what it was waiting for, not exactly. But I felt it.

Like a mute tension in the space. Like a void ready to receive.

And then, it was there.

A premonition. An inner shiver, from nowhere, but clear.

As often in this world. One of those strange, visceral intuitions that I did not need to question.

I understood. Suddenly. Without explanation.

I understood what I had to do. Instinctively.

As if this world spoke to me without words. As if it guided me in silence.

As if it had waited for this moment, exactly this one, to whisper it to me.

So I approached. Slowly.

Holding my breath, weighing each step as if the ground could collapse at any moment under the weight of what I was about to do.

Reaching the pedestal, I bent down, and I placed the child at my feet.

Gently. With a strange, awkward tenderness, almost sacred.

Like placing something you don’t understand, but respect.

He did not protest. He did not cling to me. He did not cry this time.

Because he knew. Without words. Without explanation. He knew.

And he looked. Steadily. Seriously.

With that silent gravity only children marked by too much know how to carry.

As if he recognized this moment. As if he knew it did not belong only to me.

Reaching the pedestal, I extended my hand.

Hesitant at first. Trembling, as if it itself still doubted its legitimacy.

Then my fingers, without my truly commanding them, began to move.

To trace. To model an invisible matter, tenuous, almost unreal.

The air... reacted.

It quivered under my gestures, as if it remembered. As if it knew, better than I did, what I wanted to do.

What I had always wanted to do.

It was not a sculpture. Not an act of creation.

It was a restitution. A silent memory that my hands awakened, caressed, shaped without a sound.

As if the world had kept a trace of a memory that only I could render tangible.

A completely extraordinary scene, worthy of a fairy tale — but of an old tale, forgotten, woven in shadow rather than whispered in lullabies.

There was in the air a magic that did not shine, that did not sing, but that throbbed gently, like the heart of something very old, very true.

All around me, the world held its breath.

The mist seemed suspended, even the rain slowed, as not to disturb the gesture.

And under my fingers, the invisible took form, delicately, patiently, as if my hands were telling the matter a memory it had always awaited.

An unreal scene, yes, but of perfect rightness.

A moment torn from silence, and that even the sky, for once, respected.

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