Chapter 225: He Was Waiting for Me, Displaced
I kept walking. Not out of will, not out of desire for movement or conviction that an elsewhere was waiting for me, but simply because there was no reason to remain still. Because stopping no longer had meaning, no longer had footing, no longer had use. My body moved forward with the same docility as breath, like a slow animal fleeing nothing, but finding nowhere to rest.
There was no longer a real direction. No goal. Just this vague, almost mechanical necessity to keep moving in a world that opposed nothing. I walked because staying would have been the same — and in perfect indifference, a step always seems preferable to stillness.
The ground hadn’t changed — still that soft, almost lukewarm texture, neither truly solid nor entirely unstable, like a world that accepts weight without ever resisting it. But my gait, it wavered. Something in the way I inhabited movement had given way.
I no longer moved forward according to a direction, nor even a will. I progressed trying not to fall, not to lean too far, as if my balance had been stolen during sleep. Each step seemed to originate from another part of my body, from a displaced center I couldn’t yet locate.
There was no longer clear verticality, no firm axis between my nape and my heels. My own gravity — intimate, invisible — had been rewritten, silently, without my knowing, and now my muscles were trying to understand this new inner map. I was walking sideways, inside myself.
And it was there, in that intimate offset, in that dull sensation of being slightly askew in my own body, that I saw him. Or rather... that I perceived him. Because it wasn’t a clear appearance, nor a figure emerging to be seen.
It was a shape, at the edge of a fold in the wall, almost merged with the material, half hidden under a layer of hanging fibers — as if the place itself had learned to cover him, to keep him in waiting.
A humanoid silhouette. Motionless. But not dead. Not frozen either. Just... in waiting.
He didn’t move, no. He didn’t breathe. No quiver, no heartbeat passed through him. And yet, he existed. Intensely. Present in a way foreign to all animation. He was there, placed, offered without appeal, like an answer laid down too soon, like a solution before the question.