I walked. Not really out of will, nor out of faith, nor even out of need. I walked because my legs seed to rember in my place, because my body, emptied of aning, kept imitating the motion, chaining steps like a worn-out chanism incapable of admitting it was broken.
I no longer knew if it was moving forward... or if it was the world, slowly, sluggishly, dragging ahead, pushing from beneath, as if it refused to let collapse completely. My feet didn’t really touch the ground — they brushed it, slid over it, barely grazed it, carried by a troubled, foreign inertia, almost clammy.
And in this movent without purpose, without direction, without na, I vaguely felt that sothing was moving — not a force, not an order — but a gentle and sinister will, as if this very world had decided to take elsewhere, in my place.
I drifted. Slowly. Silently. Like a mory too old to be nad, too heavy to fade. I floated in this world without edge, without center, without rhythm — a matrix suspended outside of ti, saturated with a sweetness so constant it beca suffocating, like a clammy cocoon one can no longer leave.
Everything seed frozen here, not by absence, but by a presence too full — a formless, relentless warmth, a tenderness that didn’t bite, but held, that clung, that refused to let go. It wasn’t a hell of flas. Nor of chains.
It was worse.
A hell of love. A hell of calm gestures, of compassionate silences, of embraces that aren’t pushed away but can no longer be endured. A hell without violence, but with arms always open. Always ready. Always there.
And this trap... it was mine. My own hell. Woven from my lacks, my mories, my regrets. A gentle hell. And thus, indestructible.
But... was it really hell? I was no longer certain. Maybe not. Maybe so. Maybe that word too had ended up losing its aning, eroded by too much use, too many prayers, too many broken promises.
I no longer knew. I didn’t even know what "knowing" ant.
I wasn’t sure I understood what the word "hell" still referred to — a place? a punishnt? a state of mind? a mory too precise? I didn’t know.
I no longer knew anything that really mattered. Not where I was. Not what I was fleeing. Not even what I was looking for, if there was still anything left to look for.
The void had eaten away my bearings one by one, and now, I drifted in the midst of a soft certainty, like an animal that no longer knows what it’s doing, but keeps moving forward because stopping would be worse.
All that remained to was this doubt... and one detail. Tiny. Obscure. An almost ridiculous attempt: I had tried to summon my bag.
That instinctive link, that learned reflex, automatic — that object which, in any world, in any dinsion, should have answered , appeared by my side, pressed against my hip, reassured in the midst of chaos.
But it did not co. Nothing. The void. No reaction. Not even resistance. As if the world itself didn’t know what that call was, or simply refused to answer it.
And then, at least, I knew one thing. Just one. But one certain thing: I wasn’t in a normal world.
And in that inner fog, dense, opaque, saturated with clammy silences and vague thoughts, sothing returned. Insisted. A thought. No... a mory. A shard of mory older than logic, deeper than consciousness.
The very one I had refused to give up, to na, to betray. The one I had kept to myself like a shaful treasure, like a fragnt too fragile to be exposed, like a lukewarm ember hidden in the hollow of a still-oozing wound, in the mute fear that one more breath might be enough to extinguish it. Or to ignite it.
It was there. Present. Stretched in my bones. Rooted beneath the sternum. But I could no longer see it. Na it. Find it again.
All I could feel from it was a bare, primitive, almost animal sensation — a warmth in the chest, a barely distinct pulse, a buried scent, like that of a cloth too long held against oneself. A shiver from before the fall. A vertigo of presence.
And this question, nagging, disarming, impossible to repel: why did this unrest have such a... maternal scent? Why, in this blurred absence, this saturated void, did I feel such a fierce impression that sothing was missing?
Not an object. Not a place. No. Sothing else. Once.
Sothing, yes... but not a thing. Not a detachable elent, not a recoverable fragnt. Sothing greater. More intimate. Older. Sothing that perhaps preceded . That inhabited even before I knew I was .
A buried presence, a bond woven in the night of another ti.
Had I forgotten it? Had I abandoned it, willingly, let it go like one sheds a skin too tight to go on?
Or worse still... had I lost it? Definitively? Was this absence I felt there, lurking beneath my ribs, not a forgetting, nor a rejection, but a tearing? An old mutilation, hidden, never truly healed?
I didn’t know. Nothing in knew. And that ignorance, that inner opacity, that hollow area without bearings, slowly gnawed at .
Not with the brutality of a shock, but with the venomous patience of a beast that doesn’t bite to kill... but to let rot.
A discreet bite. But constant. A bite that takes its ti. That settles. That waits.
So I walked.
Not toward sothing. Not against. Just... within. Within absence. Within blur. Within this gaping void without purpose, without direction, without expectation.
I wasn’t searching for anything. I wasn’t even fleeing anymore. I had stopped. I had let go, in the most literal sense. Released. Detached from myself, like a garnt too worn left behind in a hallway.
And I floated. Yes, I floated, slowly, in this soft matrix, almost lukewarm, in this universe without angles or outlines, where each step erased a little more.
and my cries. and my fangs. and that sha I carried in silence, like a tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, like a second skin I could no longer remove.
Everything dissolved. Even my anger. Even my voice. As if the world swallowed ... without judging .
I walked. Not because I still believed. Not because an instinct guided , nor even because a hope still lingered at the bottom of my breath.
I walked because there was nothing else left. Nothing left to do. Nothing left to say. Nothing left to be.
And as my steps continued, the universe around seed to shrink. Not brutally. Not like a slamming door. But slowly. Inexorably. Barely.
Like a throat contracting without warning, like a dream collapsing in on itself, tired of existing. Like a truth too dense, too old, too intimate to still need space.
Each step was a reduction. Each breath, a closing.
This world... was folding in. On . Or within . I no longer knew.
There were no more shattered islets. No more unstable platforms spinning on the horizon. No more skies suspended by invisible threads above the abyss.
All that floated, wavered, swirled in the previous floors had disappeared.
Here, everything seed denser. Heavier. Graver. As if the air itself had been compacted by ti, soaked with sothing ancient, secret, sacred.
I had the strange feeling I had crossed a threshold. Entered a place no one had walked in for centuries — maybe more.
A space forgotten by the living as well as by gods. A fold of the world. A fold in ti. A sanctuary without na, without glaring light, without visible threat.
But charged. Saturated with a mory I didn’t yet understand... but which already recognized .
The ground beneath my feet had changed.
It was no longer the soft, shifting, unstable texture of the previous corridors. Here, each step t a drier, grainier substance.
A carpet of white dust and cold ash, mixed, agglorated in fine layers, almost transparent, as if the ground itself had been woven not from rock or magic, but from an old, fragile paper, saturated with mory.
A surface ready to break at the slightest breath, the slightest weight.
And with each step, it cracked. Softly. Discreetly. A dry, yet tender sound. A whisper of fracture.
As if I were treading... not on ground, but on fossilized mories. Remnants of monts too old to defend themselves, too worn to protest.
And I kept moving forward, in silence, on that dead matter that seed to rember in my place.
And around ... walls.
Not built walls. Not walls conceived, drawn, erected by living hands.
No. Walls that appeared. Slowly. Like a truth never spoken aloud.
Not like decor. Like a revelation. A frozen certainty gradually erging from silence.
The walls took shape without sound, of pale rock, almost lunar, streaked with translucent veins, crossed by arches too perfect to be human, yet sculpted without ostentation.
There were niches — not carved by tools, but by silence itself, worn like the corners of a thought held too long.
Columns lted into the stone, gently, as if ti had waited for them. Nothing was imposed. Everything seed... patient.
And I understood that this place was not a building.
It was a mineral cathedral. Alive. Motionless. Extinct.
A sanctuary without worship, without priest, without god.
Just a space hollowed in the heart of oblivion. A place that no longer waited for anything.
But which still existed. Despite everything.
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