Chapter 139: Lullaby of a Beating Abyss
I stood up with a jolt, without thinking, without trying to understand, driven by something deeper than fear, an animal urgency that crushed all my questions in a single heartbeat. My legs obeyed before my mind even had time to give an order, and I turned on my heels with such violence that the air seemed to split around me. I ran. No, I fled. It was pure flight, total, a desertion of everything I believed myself to be, an immediate abdication in the face of something my body had already recognized as unacceptable.
I leapt from island to island, without really watching where I placed my feet, without even perceiving the logic of the distances. My body hurled itself forward, stretched to the extreme, tracing warped arcs in this cosmic void, as if I were clawing at space itself with each movement, desperately trying to tear myself from its texture. The air around me didn’t support me — it resisted, clung to my skin like a warm, sticky membrane, as if fleeing here wasn’t a right, but a blasphemy.
I passed through broken arches, dissolved geometric structures that seemed to float silently in this fallen dimension, witnesses of a world long forgotten. Everywhere, ribbons of fine fabric, crumpled, stained with faded colors, floated slowly between the islets, like trains of vanished children, like ghost serpents undulating endlessly in an invisible current. They brushed my arms, my cheeks, my claws, and each touch reminded me that I was not running alone.
Something, behind me, persisted.
And all around me, filtering through the shattered arches, the hanging veils of shadow, the fragments of a broken world... there was that murmur. Subtle, sinuous, almost gentle in its insistence, like a breath laid against the ear without ever truly entering. It carried no direct threat, no apparent dissonance. And yet, each note seemed to awaken something deeply buried. A smothered memory. A tender-faced anxiety.
It was not a song.
Not really.
There were no words. No chorus. Nothing seeking to be heard or remembered. It was... a lullaby. Yes. A slow, muffled, almost absent lullaby. The kind of melody that slips in without anyone knowing when it began. The kind of melody that does not speak to the adult I am, nor even to the monster I’ve become, but to something far older, more fragile, more vulnerable.
And immediately, a shiver ran through me, colder than anything I had fled from so far. It wasn’t a violent fear, but a diffuse, insidious vertigo that rose from the gut, slowly climbing along the spine like a spectral finger. A sensation of echo. Of return. As if something inside me recognized.