Chapter 157: They Were Reading Me
I approached. Slowly. One step after the other, like one slides toward a truth one does not want to hear, but that imposes itself nonetheless, soft and icy, implacable.
And they... they did not move. Not a gesture. Not a shiver. Not a breath in their chalky matter. Not even that faint tension that the living sometimes produce when they watch the intruder. No. They remained there, suspended in their calm muteness, as if frozen in a waiting that asked for nothing.
But I could feel them.
I felt their eyeless gazes, their unconscious vigils, their sockets full of a light too ancient to be seen, too soft to be feared, too heavy to be ignored. They weren’t looking at me. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t a vision. Not an assessment. Not a judgment.
They were reading me.
And that was perhaps the worst. Because I felt — through my skin, through my flesh, through my very memories — their lights sinking into me like fine, warm roots, like fingers full of silence turning the pages of what I was, gently, methodically, without violence but without modesty. They didn’t want to know. They already knew. They were verifying. They were observing.
And I... I felt exposed. Not undressed. Dissected. Spread open from the inside. As if every part of me I had wanted to forget — every scream, every betrayal, every sob forced back in — was slowly rising to the surface. Not to be forgiven. Just to be seen.
They saw me.
Not the appearance. Not the posture. Not the mask.
They saw what I had suffocated so deeply that even my memory had given up trying to contain it.
And they did not look away.