Chapter 143: The White Cradle
Then I returned. Slowly. Without having decided to. As if drawn. As if pulled in by a memory I hadn’t chosen, a memory that, despite everything I had tried to abandon, refused to die. It wasn’t a return guided by will, nor even by nostalgia. It was a call. A silent call, rooted in another plane. Something in me — or around — was bringing me back to that specific place, that islet among the others, but different, denser, wider, heavier in the air as in the soul.
I returned to an islet that seemed to possess its own gravity. It didn’t wait — it weighed. It slowed my steps before I even set foot on it, as if space itself were contracting around me there, as if the air became thicker, more saturated, loaded with old and unspoken things. Its shape, seen from above or afar, wasn’t a perfect circle. It was an irregular contour, a fractured loop, imperfect, like a poorly closed scar on a world that had never healed.
The ground it was made of wasn’t mineral, nor vegetal, nor mental — it was made of a black matter, deep, porous, almost spongy, that seemed to breathe with each step, to emit a muffled heat, a murmur of mourning. Striations ran across its surface, white, bony, like mineral veins, but they were roots. Calcified roots, knotted, twisted upward, as if they had desperately tried to escape the earth, to pierce the surface, to reach a light they had never found.
And the more I looked at them, the more I understood.
They didn’t look like branches.
They looked like fingers.
Dead children’s fingers.
Frozen in a silent prayer. Tiny hands raised into the void, reaching toward a sky that never answered, frozen in the exact instant of their last call — a gesture no one had come to receive.
And me... I was there.
Standing on that petrified lament.
And at the center... it was there. A cradle. Another one. But this one... no, this one wasn’t like the others. It didn’t belong to the same texture, the same memory. It didn’t seem made of memory, nor of faded dream, nor of that blurry, porous matter that usually composes the remnants of this ruined world. It wasn’t a trace. It wasn’t an illusion.