Chapter 182
He did not wait for an answer because he knew Miara would not answer—or if she did, her reply would be sharper than he could bear—and inside his still-throbbing head, he pieced together the next words, the words he wanted to say about how Shaqar had never complained, never spoken of his wounds, never revealed how heavy the burden he carried truly was because he did not want his daughter to worry, because he wanted Miara to grow up with happiness, with laughter, with smiles—the very smiles he had not seen from her in years because Miara had long since decided she would never smile for her father again.
"And you're talking about malnutrition—"
His voice rose once more, but before those words could fully leave his throat, before he could even finish forty percent of what he wanted to say, something happened.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The sound came from the front door—the old wooden door that had long been eaten away by termites and dampness, a door whose original color could no longer be recognized beneath countless layers of dirt and moss, a door that had spent years opening only for the occasional neighbor and couriers who never actually came—and inside a room that only a second ago had still been burning with argument, weighed down by anger, bitterness, and tears that refused to fall, the knocking sliced through everything like a knife cutting through unfinished fabric, rough, sudden, and leaving behind torn, uneven edges.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three knocks, no more and no less, with a steady yet unhurried rhythm, the rhythm of someone who was in no rush but also had no intention of waiting forever—a rhythm that somehow sounded unfamiliar to Absyumura because no one had ever knocked on the door like that ever since he had lived in this house, ever since he married Miara, ever since he became part of a family living on the outskirts of a nameless town.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The knocking did not stop—not after three knocks, not after five—but continued with the same steady rhythm, as regular as the heartbeat of someone standing at the doorstep whose patience was beginning to wear thin yet who remained polite enough not to pound on the door.
And in the room that suddenly felt smaller because of the presence of that uninvited sound, two pairs of eyes—one belonging to Absyumura, still standing with his hand suspended in the air, and the other to Miara, still holding the wooden spoon over the sizzling pan—turned toward the same direction, toward the faded wooden door, moving together like two birds startled by the same sound, like two people who had argued so fiercely that they had forgotten the world beyond their house still existed, still turned, still brought unexpected visitors to a doorstep that rarely ever opened.
"Who is it?" Miara whispered, her voice no longer filled with anger. Her anger had temporarily faded before the unknown presence, replaced by something more neutral, more cautious, like calm water on the surface while hidden currents beneath it waited to drag away anyone careless enough to step in.
Her eyes, which only moments ago had burned with tears that refused to fall, now narrowed toward the door with an expression that was difficult to read.
It was not fear, nor surprise, but caution—the caution of someone living on the outskirts of a nameless town, in a world ruled by Satanists who were not always kind even to their own kind, inside a house that had never possessed a doorbell because no one had ever been close enough to press one.
And in her hand—the same hand that only moments earlier had been tossing rotten rats into the pan—she now held something else: a blade, not an ordinary kitchen knife but a longer, sharper one, a knife that had always been hidden between the clay containers and the kitchen wall, a knife she had never used for cooking but had always kept ready for something she had never spoken about with her husband.
Absyumura, still standing at the threshold between the living room and the kitchen, his legs trembling from the mud and the dried blood upon his forehead, slowly shook his head.
Not because he did not want to answer, but because he truly did not know, because a mind that had been consumed by anger, sorrow, and unanswered questions now had to race through its memories, trying to recall whether he had ever invited anyone, whether he had ever given someone the address of a house that did not even have a street name, whether he had ever—in twenty years of marriage—brought a friend home simply to sit in a muddy living room with moss-covered walls that smelled of stir-fried rotten rats.
"No," he said, his voice hoarse, still damp with the remnants of tears that had yet to dry.
"I didn't invite anyone—"
He stopped, swallowing hard as though he were swallowing gravel.
"Except... except your father. But your father already..."
The sentence never reached its end because he did not know how to finish it—because he did not know whether the word "dead" was appropriate for someone whose body had been reduced to ashes and whose surrounding reality had been rewritten by an explosion, because he did not know whether his father-in-law, who had died a hero, still retained enough form to be called dead, or whether he had been destroyed too completely to be called anything at all.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The knocking came again, louder than before, more urgent, like someone whose patience was finally running out, or perhaps someone who knew that something important was happening inside this house, something they could not afford to miss simply because a two-centimeter-thick wooden door stood between them.
And in the kitchen, Miara, who only a moment ago had been gripping the long knife with a hand ready to strike, let out a sigh.
It was neither a sigh of relief nor one of anger, but the sigh of someone who had decided to shift her attention away from the door and toward something else, something more familiar, something that required no answers to questions she did not possess.
"Forget it," Miara said as she turned around.
Not toward the door, but toward the kitchen table stained with black seasoning and scattered with pieces of things no ordinary human senses would ever wish to identify, and from the corner of that table, from behind the large clay container filled with rotten rats, she pulled out something else.
A snake—not a small one that could coil around a wrist, but a massive one as long as an adult's arm, its skin already peeling away while inside its flesh were filth and maggots writhing lazily as though savoring the last remnants of life still clinging to a carcass that had died centuries ago—or at least that was what Miara had told Absyumura when he first saw the snake years earlier, back when he was still new enough to this marriage to be shocked by the cooking ingredients used by Satanist families, back when he still believed that some things simply should never be cooked because they had already rotted far beyond the point of being edible.
To be continued...