Chapter 183
"You know, Absyumura," she said as she placed the rotten snake onto the cutting board—the very same cutting board she had used to chop vegetables, the very same board that had silently witnessed every tear she had never allowed herself to shed in this kitchen for years—and reached for a meat cleaver larger than the knife she had been holding before.
"Maybe it's just a neighbor. Or perhaps a beggar. Or maybe—"
She raised the cleaver high, inspecting its sharpness beneath the dim kitchen light that flickered like a pair of aching eyes.
"Maybe it's someone who's lost and doesn't know that this house doesn't welcome visitors."
Her voice sounded calm—far too calm, calm in a way that felt forced, calm in a way that revealed she was trying to ignore the knocking at the door because she had no idea how to respond, because she was not ready to face whoever stood outside while her heart was still stained with anger and grief she had yet to process.
Crack.
The cleaver came down onto the rotten snake, splitting it into two uneven halves, and from the severed flesh, maggots that had been slowly wriggling inside began spilling across the cutting board like a tiny rain of creatures too small to understand that the home they inhabited was being destroyed.
"My husband."
Miara turned toward the man who still stood frozen between the living room and the kitchen. The anger had vanished from his face, as had the sarcasm. Only emptiness remained, flat as the cutting board that had endured thousands of cuts without ever complaining.
"Do you have an appointment today? Could it be one of your friends knocking at the door?"
Absyumura shook his head—a slow, heavy shake, as though his skull had suddenly become a stone submerged underwater for thousands of years. Even so, he forced himself to move because he knew his wife was waiting for an answer, because in the kitchen stood a woman gripping a knife still smeared with snake blood and black seasoning, staring at him with eyes that were no longer angry but no longer gentle either, eyes searching desperately for certainty amidst suffocating uncertainty.
"My friends," he murmured.
His voice was hoarse, still thick with the remnants of tears that had not fully subsided.
"They're not coming until tonight, Miara. No one is scheduled to come at a time like this. No one..."
He fell silent for a moment, swallowing with difficulty as though shards of glass were scraping down his throat.
"... No one was supposed to come now."
The hand that had been suspended in the air only moments earlier slowly lowered to his side, his fingers curling tightly into a fist.
It held no weapon, no tool of any kind—only an empty fist struggling to keep itself from collapsing beneath questions it could not answer, beneath the relentless knocking that continued with the steady rhythm of someone's heartbeat as they waited outside with inhuman patience.
In the kitchen, Miara, still standing before the cutting board with the snake split in two, raised an eyebrow—not out of surprise, but because she was carefully processing what her husband had just told her, weighing it with the caution of someone checking food for poison before taking a bite.
"Then," she said softly, almost in a whisper, and her eyes shifted from Absyumura to the door—the old wooden door whose faded color could no longer be identified, the door behind which someone continued to knock, knock, and knock, "who is knocking on our door? Who wants so badly to enter a house that doesn't even have a proper address?"
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The knocking came again—this time not three times, but four, faster than before, louder, more urgent, like someone who was no longer asking but demanding, like someone who had grown tired of waiting and was beginning to lose the courtesy they had held onto until now.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Before Absyumura could answer, while his mouth remained half-open with confusion, exhaustion, and anger that had nowhere to go, the knocking came again.
Not for the fourth time as Miara had expected, but for the fifth time within only a few seconds, far too quickly to be considered a natural pause between one series of knocks and the next.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Six times, and this time the rhythm was different—no longer steady like the heartbeat of someone at peace, but chaotic and frantic, as though someone were panicking, as though someone were desperately trying to convey that beyond this two-centimeter-thick wooden door was something that could not wait, something that would be too late if the door was not opened immediately, something that threatened to leave—or explode—if no one answered within the next three seconds.
"That isn't an ordinary knock," Miara said.
Without realizing it, the hand still gripping the meat cleaver—the blade still stained with snake blood and tiny scraps of flesh wedged along its edge—began to tremble, trembling in the same rhythm as the knocking at the door, trembling like a leaf caught in the wind before the storm arrived.
"Whoever is knocking like that... they're not going to leave. They won't stop. They'll keep knocking until this door is opened or until their hands are shattered."
Amid the smoke still rising from the frying pan and the stench of rotten rats seeping into every pore of the room, the knocking continued—knock, knock, knock—like something that had never learned the meaning of exhaustion, like something that had walked for thousands of years just to arrive at the door of this little house on the outskirts of a nameless town.
Miara, who only moments ago had been clutching the trembling knife, now felt her chest tighten, suffocated by countless possibilities scattering through her mind like the maggots falling from the rotten snake on the cutting board.
The Angels whose wings never flapped yet always carried the winds of death, the Holy Beings whose forms could not be seen by ordinary eyes but could be felt through the hairs rising on the back of one's neck, the servants of the One Accursed who, according to legend, never left a single witness alive after they knocked on a door.
"My husband... Absyumura," she whispered.
Her voice emerged like shards of glass scraping against one another—no longer angry, no longer cynical, but soaked in something older than fear, something called the realization that this house had no fortress, that its moss-covered walls and weathered wooden door would never be enough to keep out whatever stood beyond them, knocking with that inhuman rhythm.
"If they truly are... if they are the messengers of—"
She never finished the sentence—not completely, not before the final word of the One Accursed's name could leave her lips, which had already begun to pale—because at the edge of her vision, blurred by smoke and fear, something moved.
Not toward the door, but toward her—or more precisely, toward the empty air between them.
Absyumura's right hand, which only moments before had hung loosely at his side, slowly rose, lifting itself like the sun uncertain whether it still had the right to rise today, climbing past his chest that still rose and fell with restrained breaths, past his chin still damp with tears that had yet to dry.
At last, when the hand reached high enough for its open palm to hover above his head like a white flag that did not signify surrender but offered something else, something more precious than resignation, the raised hand came to a stop.
In the room where the light flickered like the dying heartbeat of a fading soul, Absyumura stood not with an unshakable posture, but with a body that continued to tremble, still drenched in mud and blood.
Yet his eyes—the same eyes that only moments ago had been swollen and red—now looked at Miara with a gaze that neither pleaded nor commanded, but reassured, reassuring her in such a way that Miara, who had known this man for twenty years, suddenly realized she had never truly witnessed such unwavering resolve in him before.
To be continued…