Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 93: The Weight of Calm

Chapter 93: The Weight of Calm

In that suspended silence, still as time itself, I understood.

Not in a sudden flash, not in a revelation from the heavens — no.

Rather like a quiet truth, already there, already present, that my restless thoughts had never been able to see.

We were perhaps the intruders here.

Not just travelers.

Not just outsiders.

But intruders in the most intimate sense of the word.

Beings forged by a world of fire and iron, shaped by wars and traumas, polished by blood, tempered in hatred, in fear, in the instinct to survive.

Noisy, greedy creatures, dissonant in this ancient song of balance.

And yet...

This place did not reject us.

It raised no walls, no cries, no invisible barriers against us.

It summoned no beasts to face us, no curses.

It welcomed us.

Calmly.

Without words, without promise, without excessive generosity — but without hostility.

It opened its arms to us without offering forgetfulness, without erasing what we had been.

As if that didn’t matter as much as what we might become.

As if, despite everything...

We might deserve a second chance.

Not forgiveness.

Not absolution.

But a possibility.

And in a world like ours...

That was everything.

A deeper breath — not driven by the need for oxygen, but by a kind of calm so rare it seemed from another world — passed through my chest, and for the first time in a long while, it was not a sigh of weariness or pain, but a true breath — full, whole, free.

A slower beat followed that breath, steady, muffled, as if even my heart, sensing the still nature around it, had chosen to slow down so as not to disturb the harmony, not to break the silence that reigned here like an ancient pact.

Even my blood, so quick to boil in combat, to roar in my veins like a fevered river, seemed to flow more slowly, more docilely, as if it too bowed before the peace offered by this land.

And then, little by little, war faded.

Death, fear, screams, bodies — everything I had faced, everything I had inflicted, everything I had carried to this point — lost its weight, as though even the memories, approaching that soft light, dissolved, stripped of their violence.

For in laying my eyes upon Terra Neutralis, upon this stretch of slow, fertile, sovereign life, I glimpsed what our world could have become — what it perhaps should have been, if it had been guided by something other than conquest, something other than the need to impose, to dominate, to survive at any cost.

And it was then, in that vision as beautiful as it was painful, that something gave way inside me — not broke, but opened, like a dam held too long — and a tear fell.

Just one.

Silent, straight, warm down my cheek.

Not a tear of weakness.

Not of pain. Not of anger.

But a tear of relief, of release, as though my body itself were thanking this place for letting me in, as though it understood that, for once, it didn’t have to defend itself.

A tear of gratitude.

Because we were still here.

Against all logic.

Against all odds.

Alive.

And together.

And in that precise moment, that was enough.

Farther ahead, in the shaded clearings, where the dappled light pierced through the leaves in long translucent columns, falling like pillars of shattered glass upon the warm moss, I saw them — the Torun’ha.

They were massive, with a mass that was not threatening, but undeniable.

Peaceful giants, ancient, as if born from a forgotten vegetal age.

Gigantic quadruped sloths, nearly three meters tall at the shoulder, whose movements were so slow, so perfectly measured, they could have been mistaken for statues if the light didn’t shift on their fur with each breath.

Their bodies seemed sculpted from the earth itself, forged in the deep roots of a world that does not run, that never raises its voice, that prefers to endure rather than dominate.

Their backs, broad, supple, like living hills, were entirely covered in dense foliage, in living branches braided by time, in thick mosses pulsing faintly in the breeze, like a second heart beating under the open sky.

They were not creatures carrying nature on their backs like a sacred burden.

Nor were they beasts adorned by accident.

No.

They were nature.

They extended it.

They were its continuation — slow, vegetal, thoughtful — as if the earth, tired of silence, had one day decided to rise, to walk gently, and to observe the world at the level of breath.

At dusk, as the final rays of the day stretched in golden streaks over the foliage, a quiet miracle occurred — so subtle, so silent, it could have gone unnoticed by anyone not truly looking.

On the backs of the Torun’ha, between the branches and mosses, small buds emerged slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if the light itself hesitated to reveal them too soon.

Then, with a barely audible breath, with a rustling as fragile as the flutter of wings, they bloomed.

Flowers opened, one by one, as if the bodies of the vegetal giants were breathing through them.

Phosphorescent corollas, in soft and unreal colors: a milky white like mist, a blue so pale it seemed laced with stars, a tender pink, almost shy, like the memory of a child’s dream.

A light escaped them.

Not a light to see by.

A light to feel.

Diffuse, shifting, subtly vibrant, it slid around the Torun’ha like a living veil, a halo of pure calm that did not chase the shadow — but embraced it gently.

It was not clarity made to illuminate.

It was presence.

A soothing glow, almost dreamlike, like a song without voice, a balm laid upon the nerves of the world.

And when they moved — for they did move, slowly, inevitably, with that infinite patience no predator can mimic — the world seemed to slow around them.

The wind held its breath.

The leaves stopped rustling.

Even our hearts, perhaps, beat a little more slowly.

Each motion, each turn, each step, was an ancient word, a silent language inherited from a time that had forgotten violence.

A world older than ours.

A world that had never known haste, and had never needed it.

A world that did not seek to impose, but to understand — and only then, perhaps... to exist.

The Torun’ha did not look with eyes.

They sensed.

They perceived the invisible thread of beings and places, without ever judging, without ever fleeing.

They knew.

And we, poor agitated, violent, fickle creatures — we were nothing but a passing breath in their slow eternity.

Witnesses.

Grains of sand before walking forests.

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