Anthesis of Sadness

My mind was floating. Not like a feather. Not like a light thought. But like a corpse held beneath the surface, trapped under a sheet of dirty, opaque glass, impossible to break — I could see the world, yes, but it was on the other side. Distant. Unreachable. A misty veil enveloped me, not soft, not comforting, but sticky, suffocating, oozing around me like a second skin made of silence and oblivion. Reality was nothing more than background noise, a dull vibration behind my skull, a drum beating too slowly for alarm, too quickly for forgetting.

And then my eyes settled.

And I saw.

Hell.

Not a word. Not a metaphor. Hell. Real. Brutal. Irrefutable. A carnage that no longer resembled a battlefield, but everything of a sacrilegious slaughterhouse, erected beneath the heavens to bleed humanity itself. The ground was littered with pieces. Torn limbs. Shattered torsos. Skulls split open like overripe fruit. And everywhere, flesh. Fluids. Veins that no longer knew where to go. Silence reigned, yes, but it was a saturated silence. A silence that reeked of blood, of ash... and of shame.

The air was hot. Too hot. It still carried the trace of screams. The smell of iron. The bite of fire. I felt that dull heat, that slow, creeping pain, that burn climbing up my back like a flow of molten lead. Every nerve screamed inside me like an overtightened string, every heartbeat made my body resonate like a fractured drum. I no longer knew where I was. I no longer knew who I was. I only knew... that all of this, was me.

I was the cause.

I was the end.

And I was still alive.

I slowly lowered my head, as if my very vertebrae cracked under the weight of what I didn’t want to see — and I saw her.

Lysara.