Chapter 206: The Pedestal and the Void
I no longer knew how many steps I had climbed. How long my feet had been slipping, hesitating, recovering.
Time had dissolved into effort, into repetition. There was no more count, no more up or down, just this perpetual, absurd, almost ritual movement.
An endless ascent, where each step resembled the previous one but weighed a little more. As if the staircase itself lengthened with the rhythm of my fatigue.
The rain, it did not stop. It still fell, regular, inflexible, like a celestial metronome beating the measure of my slow climb.
It did not vary, did not weaken, as if it ignored my presence or, worse, adapted to it. Each drop seemed to know my skin, to strike it with a cruel, chosen precision.
It infiltrated everywhere — into my clothes, under my nape, even into the seams of my thoughts. It did not want me to forget. Anything. Not the pain. Not the cold. Not what I carried with me.
The child was sleeping. Or pretending. I no longer really knew how to tell the difference.
His breathing was slow, steady, almost too regular, as if his body had found shelter that his mind still refused.
He no longer moved. His forehead against my collarbone, his arms relaxed around me, he seemed peaceful — but that peace had something strange about it, perhaps artificial.
Like a survival learned too early. A way of absenting oneself from the world without really leaving it.
And I, I still carried him, without knowing if he was sleeping... or fleeing differently.