Chapter 192: A Refused Softness
My steps were no longer mine.
I could feel it with every movement. Every step. They had changed in nature. They still obeyed, yes, but without flexibility, without warmth.
As if they belonged to someone else. Someone stiffer. Drier. Emptier. A being on standby, on automatic, whose body moved more out of habit than will.
I was still there, somewhere beneath the skin, but it was as if my gestures no longer had a center, no true momentum. Just a line to follow. A weight to drag.
Someone who no longer wanted to sit. Not because he was doing well. But precisely because he couldn’t anymore. Because he knew that sitting meant risking collapse.
It meant accepting the dizziness, letting rise what burned beneath the surface. So he stayed standing. He moved forward. Out of refusal more than strength. Out of fear of what stillness might have revealed.
Far ahead of me, something was changing. Subtly. But enough to break the silent rhythm of this looping staircase. A variation in the light, a quiver in the air, an almost imperceptible shift in the texture of the steps.
It wasn’t yet a shape. Not yet an apparition. Just a slippage. As if the world, tired of repeating, finally allowed itself an inflection.
A shadow, first. Floating. Undefined. Barely distinguishable from the rest, like a fold in the light. But it began to take shape. Slowly. Inexorably.
As I approached, its outlines took form, hesitant but persistent, as if my walking revealed it, as if it only existed because I kept moving forward. It didn’t move. It waited for me. Or maybe... it was emerging from me.
It was a creature. Suspended on the side of the staircase, between two spirals of mist, like a shard of shadow torn from an unfinished dream.