Chapter 162: The Last Flame
The voice returned.
Not in front. Not in the air. Not in the tangible space.
It returned where I no longer wanted to feel — in my nape, precisely at the place where shiver becomes memory, where the spine remembers ancient terrors, unwanted caresses, breaths we never chose.
It wasn’t the Guardian’s voice. No. It was the other. The one that had haunted me long before the fall, long before the abyss, long before the world decided to hold me back. The one I had always carried, like a too-familiar whisper, a thought fossilized in my flesh, stuck to the skeleton of my nights.
— You know very well which one, she whispered.
And that breath... that ancient, unnamable breath, slipped between two heartbeats, and I shuddered. All at once. As if a cold hand, invisible but perfectly exact, had just slid between my shoulder blades, tracing with a precise finger the path of a memory I had never dared to erase.
I wanted to reply, to reject, to expel — but it was a weak refusal, tired, almost tender in its despair.
— Shut up... I murmured.
My voice faded on its own, as if silence were safer, as if speaking risked opening a breach I would never be able to close again.
I would have liked to scream. But I whispered.
And she, this voiceless voice, this bodiless presence, did not fall silent. She didn’t get angry. She didn’t become insistent.