Chapter 179
"The heroic team led directly by Commander Zhulumat Katamtum..."
He stopped there, drawing a breath that sounded like someone trying to pull a rope far too heavy to lift alone.
"... Successfully prevented the ritual to awaken the One Accursed, a ritual that, had it not been stopped, would have drowned the glory of the Satanist people and transformed the world we now inhabit into one ruled once again by the faithful, a world where we..."
His voice broke, not because of a technical issue, not because of a mistake in the script, but because he, too, had a father.
"... We would no longer have a place to stand."
In the living room, where the floor was covered in black mud and the walls were blanketed with moss that moved slowly as though it were breathing, Absyumura, who had been sitting casually in a chair—a chair whose legs had already been eaten away by maggots, a chair that would leave slime on anyone's palm if touched—was suddenly no longer sitting.
He collapsed, not because he wanted to, but because his knees decided they would no longer function, and his tall, sturdy body—the same body he had once been proud of when he married Miara, the same body he had always promised would protect his in-laws from anything—fell onto the revolting, waterlogged mud that looked so much like a grave after heavy rain. From his mouth came not words, but sounds, sounds that could not be identified as sobs, laughter, or a prayer directed to the wrong place.
"NO—NO—THAT CAN'T BE—" His voice rose, echoing off the damp walls, and then he began smashing his head against the floor. Once, twice, three times, in an uneven yet relentless rhythm, like someone trying to punish himself for still being alive while others had died.
"WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE HIM? WHY MY FATHER? WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN ME INSTEAD?" For inside his head, now ringing from the blows, the mud, and the tears, Absyumura remembered with perfect clarity—far too clearly, clearer than he ever wanted—that Zhulumat Katamtum was the very name Shaqar had mentioned during the only phone call he had witnessed two weeks earlier, the call in which his father-in-law had spoken in a voice he had never heard before.
It was not the firm voice of a captain, nor the gentle voice of a father, but the voice of a man who had already made a decision he could never take back.
"I'll be leaving with Zhulumat. Maybe for a long time, maybe not. Please take care of Miara."
And Absyumura had not been quick enough to ask, not brave enough to stop him, and now all that remained was his name on the television screen as a hero who had died before Absyumura had even managed to thank him once.
The presenter's voice continued to echo through the damp living room, still speaking of courage, sacrifice, and names that would never be read one by one because the news broadcast was simply not long enough to contain so much grief. But Miara no longer heard the words, only their vibration, a vibration that traveled from the television speakers into the already suffocating air, from the air into her ears, and from her ears into a place deep within her chest that she had always believed was empty, only to discover it had been filled with something ready to shatter at any moment.
"Absyumura," she said, her voice emerging not like a question, but like someone holding a cracked pane of glass, speaking as softly as possible in the hope that it would not crack any further.
"Did they... did the report say that Team Xirkushkartum..."
She stopped. Her tongue felt as though it had been made from soaking wet cloth, refusing to cooperate with her mind, and in the kitchen, where smoke still rose from oil that had turned black after being left on the stove for too long, she stood frozen, still clutching a wooden spoon whose tip was stained with black seasoning.
"That they died? Almost all of them?"
Her eyes—which only a second earlier had still been fixed on the television from afar, desperately searching among the tiny portraits of uniformed soldiers displayed in the corner of the screen for her father's face—now began to burn in a way she had never experienced before.
It was not the heat of a fever, nor the heat of anger, but the heat of tears gathering behind her eyes like an army waiting for the command to charge.
"Ninety percent, they said? Ninety percent?"
She blinked once, twice, three times in succession, like someone trying to brush dust from her eyes when there was no dust at all, only a grief far too immense to be contained by eyelids that had never been made to bear such a burden.
Absyumura opened his mouth. His dry, cracked lips, weathered by the damp air filling the room, moved to form the words he wanted to say, six simple words that should have become an answer for his wife, who still stood frozen at the entrance to the kitchen with the wooden spoon hanging from her hand and her eyes blinking endlessly to hold back something that could never be restrained forever.
"Miara, calm down. Let's find out first..."
But those six words never escaped his throat. They never touched the air, already made unbearably heavy by the smell of burnt oil, spices, and unspoken sorrow, because before the vibration of his voice could reach Miara's ears, before his tongue could finish shaping the final syllable of her name, something happened inside that cramped room, something that silenced Absyumura.
Not because he obeyed, but because he was stunned, stunned to see how his wife's face, which only a second ago had been pleading, damp with tears that had never truly fallen, fragile like cracked glass waiting only for one final touch before shattering, had changed.
Not gradually, not little by little like the rising sun or the setting moon, but instantly, like the turning of a hand, like a page torn from the binding of a book, like a mask falling away to reveal not another face, but the same face made different, the same shape with different substance, the same lines with different colors.
"DON'T—"
Miara's voice burst forth like shattered glass hurled against a stone wall, harsh, razor-sharp, slicing the air into fragments that could never be joined together again. And in the living room with its mud-covered floor, Absyumura, still sitting there with blood running down his forehead and knees that had not yet recovered from the earlier shock, felt something cold crawl along his spine.
It was not the cold of temperature, but the cold of seeing a face he had never seen before: the face of a wife who no longer wished to be comforted, the face of a daughter who no longer wished to be reassured, the face of someone who had decided that grief was no longer an appropriate response to the news of her father's death.
"You don't need to finish your sentence, Absyumura," Miara said, and this time her voice was no longer hurried, no longer gentle, no longer fragile.
To be continued…