Chapter 177
Not as a soldier bearing news of death, but as a friend carrying memories, memories of a father who never had the chance to return home, of a husband who never had the chance to say goodbye.
"Miara's small family," Apathy whispered to himself, and the name felt unfamiliar upon the tongue of his soul because he had never before been asked to protect anyone, never been asked to become a replacement, never been asked to fill the space left behind by the dead who were still far too alive in memory.
Then another name emerged within that promise.
Absyumura, Miara's husband, a name Apathy had never heard before, yet it was now carved into his chest like a tattoo that no new skin, no passage of time, nor even death itself could ever erase, the name of a man who would lose his wife if Apathy failed. Or perhaps not, because this promise was never about Absyumura. It was about Miara, about Shaqar's daughter whom he had never met, yet who had now become a burden he willingly carried, fully aware that it would never become lighter, not even after decades had passed.
And within that same heart, in a place even deeper, where Apathy hid all the words he had never dared to speak aloud, he began weaving together the sentences he would one day say to Miara, not as an official messenger, not as a soldier delivering tragic news, but as an intermediary, as a bridge between a father who had already become ashes and a daughter who was still smiling because she had yet to realize that her smile had been the only reason her father found the courage to die.
"Your father loved you more than anything," would be the very first sentence, and Apathy could already imagine how those words would taste upon his tongue, bitter, as bitter as the coffee one drinks in the morning after spending an entire sleepless night remembering the face of someone they would never see again.
Then would come the apology, an apology that could never be enough to fill the emptiness left behind by a father's absence during the most important moments of his child's life.
"Your father was sorry he couldn't come home in time when your mother... when your mother returned to Ishikarakarta."
Apathy did not know exactly what Ishikarakarta meant. Whether it was heaven, hell, or merely another name for nothingness, he did know that the word had escaped Shaqar's lips without sound, carrying a sorrow so profound that even without hearing it, Apathy could feel it, just as one can feel the rain before the very first drop touches the earth.
Within his heart, Apathy vowed that he would not hide that apology behind comforting words or false hope. He would deliver it exactly as it was, the final fragment of a father who had never been able to say goodbye because he had been too busy saving a world that would never even remember his name. And if Miara cried, Apathy would let her cry, because tears were the only gift still worthy of those who never came home.
The ritual raged like an ocean giving birth to a storm, wave after wave of agonizing golden energy erupting from every crack in the marble, from every forced opening in the air itself, from every pulse surging out of the vortex at the center of the chamber where Shaqar knelt with a body that was no longer whole.
His left arm had become nothing more than a fragment of bone, endlessly branching like roots desperately searching for soil. His right leg was nothing but a bleeding memory, while his chest lay open, exposing a heart that continued to beat despite no longer having lungs to accompany it.
"ENDURE! YOU MUST ENDURE!" shouted the first Angelic head of Nebetu'u, weeping tears of blood. Its voice trembled with sobs that no longer knew whom they mourned, Shaqar, who was slowly falling apart; itself, for having witnessed too much for far too long; or the world, which had never learned to be grateful to those who died protecting it. Meanwhile, the Prophet's Bone Staff in Nebetu'u's right hand shook so violently that the carvings of betrayal etched across its surface began to crack, releasing ancient energies never meant to be touched by any living being. Those energies now poured into the ritual circle, pressing back against the silhouette of light that continued trying to tear Shaqar apart from within.
Shaqar did not answer.
He could not answer, because his mouth no longer functioned as a means of communication. It had become nothing more than an opening through which his final breaths passed, producing the sound of two stones grinding together deep within the darkest cave imaginable.
Yet his eyes still burned, still fixed upon the ritual vortex with such intensity that even the silhouette of light hesitated to draw closer. The eyes of someone on the verge of death never lied, and Shaqar's eyes declared that he would not leave alone, that he would drag this ritual with him into the darkness, into oblivion, into the place where no resurrection could ever occur because the dead were never permitted to return home.
"Apathy," Zhulumat whispered from afar, his voice emerging like a prayer that did not know to whom it was directed.
"Prepare yourself. Whatever happens..."
But before the sentence could be completed, before Zhulumat could finish an order that even he himself did not know how to carry out, the explosion finally came.
It was not an explosion born from outside, but one that erupted from within Shaqar's own body, from his still-beating heart despite the shattered walls surrounding it, from his blood that had transformed into cold fire that did not burn but detonated, from his bones that had become brittle husks waiting only for the final spark.
And when the explosion erupted, it was unlike any explosion before it. It did not surge outward from the center to the edges. It did not burn, destroy, or melt. Instead, it reread reality. It rewrote the world around it with letters forged from ashes, flesh, and tears. It forced the resurrection ritual of the One Accursed to remember that it had not yet been completed, that it had never been allowed to be completed, that every colossal heartbeat echoing from the golden vortex was the last, because there would never be another.
"INITIATION SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED—" screamed the silhouette of light, its voice stripped of authority, stripped of menace, leaving behind nothing but pure panic, the panic of something dying while knowing that no one was coming to save it.
Beside it, Nebetu'u stood with nine heads, each one beginning to be torn apart by the shockwaves of the explosion. The first Demonic head, with its yellow fangs, crumbled into dust that drifted through the air like sand across a desert that had never known rain. The second Angelic head, the one chanting its twisted liturgy, shattered like glass struck by a hammer, and from those fragments emerged broken hymns like ghosts unaware that they had already died.
"The ritual... the ritual has stopped," Agatha whispered, unable to believe her own words. When she turned to confirm that Zhulumat had witnessed the same impossible sight, she realized that her commander no longer had a face.
To be continued...