Chapter 185
Here, he stopped, and the serrated edges at the tip of his triangular head glimmered beneath the pale light still filtering through the open doorway. They gleamed like a smile without lips, like laughter without sound, like something sharp reminding everyone that behind those flat, emotionless words lay a wound he had never shown to anyone—a wound born from being one of the nineteen who had survived while dozens of others, including the commander he deeply respected, including Shaqar, whose name now filled the death reports on television, had been reduced to ashes on the third floor of the castle, a place whose reality would never be the same again.
Absyumura fell silent.
Not the same silence as before, not the silence born from an inability to speak, but the silence of a mind struggling to connect scattered pieces, linking the figure standing before him with the stories Miara had once told him about her father, about the squads Shaqar had commanded, about the subordinates whom her late father had always called his "second family" in a tone that inevitably made Miara slam her bedroom door every time she heard that phrase leave the mouth of the father who rarely came home.
"Nineteen," Absyumura repeated softly, his voice emerging like an echo from the depths of a well, like someone trying to understand why that number felt so small and yet so immense at the same time—small because he imagined how many soldiers had fallen inside that castle, immense because he realized that every number behind the word "nineteen" represented someone still standing, still alive, still knocking on another person's door with hands that might still tremble from the memory of the explosion that had rewritten reality.
"Y-you're still alive. You survived."
The words escaped his lips before he even realized it. They were more a statement of fact than a question, yet hidden within them was something else, something that sounded like relief, like a prayer of gratitude he had never managed to offer to the Most Honorable Grand Sanse, for his earlier prayer had been nothing but a plea for protection, never a word of thanks that the one who had arrived was not a messenger of darkness, but one of his father-in-law's surviving subordinates, still breathing, still possessing an intact body despite the triangular shape of his head with serrated edges at every corner, and the abdomen covered in pus-filled sores that oozed lymph whenever he moved.
"I'm sorry," Absyumura said suddenly, and the face that had been frozen in shock only a moment ago began to change.
Not dramatically, as though removing a mask, but gradually, like a painting being reworked by an artist dissatisfied with the first brushstroke. The blood-streaked wrinkles on his forehead softened, the corners of his lips lifted ever so slightly, and his eyes—eyes that until then had been capable of nothing but an empty stare—began to glow with something warm, something resembling embarrassment yet not quite, something much closer to sincere remorse for having judged someone solely by outward appearance, only to discover that person was part of his own family's circle.
His hands—which had previously hung loosely at his sides or rested upon the doorknob he no longer held now that the door stood open and there was nothing left to restrain—slowly rose and reached forward. They did not touch Apathy, for the distance between them still stretched like a chasm that could not be crossed without permission, yet they came close enough to reveal his intention, to show that what he was about to say was not mere courtesy, but a genuine apology, the apology of a husband trying to become better than the man he had been only moments earlier.
"I—we... didn't know you were one of them, one of Shaqar's subordinates. I... I was afraid. For a moment, I thought you were a messenger bringing terrible news, or worse... someone who had come to take something that should never have been taken."
His raised hands slowly came together before his chest, a posture of apology he had assumed thousands of times throughout his life, yet never with a heart this burdened. He had no idea whether Apathy—with his triangular head, pus-ridden abdomen, and the cold aura that still seeped from his body like mist rising from a swamp—would accept his apology or regard it as yet another insult.
"You don't need to apologize," Apathy replied flatly, and for the first time since standing at the doorway, his empty gaze shifted.
Not toward Absyumura, who remained in his apologetic posture with his palms pressed together, but elsewhere, toward the kitchen still darkened by smoke that had begun to thin yet had not completely disappeared, toward the place where a woman with swollen eyes and trembling hands stood frozen behind the black haze.
"I'm used to looks like that. The kind of look that notices my appearance before it notices my name. The kind of look that sees this triangular head and this abdomen full of pus—"
He gently patted his stomach with a motion strangely tender, like a mother soothing the aching belly of her sick child. Yet from that touch came a sound no human body should ever produce, a sound like rotten flesh being pounded, like pus grinding against dried scabs.
"—And immediately decides that I'm a threat. You're not the only one, Absyumura. Almost everyone does the same thing."
"Ah, so you're one of my father's subordinates."
Miara's voice suddenly cut through the fading kitchen smoke, carrying the very same tone she had used when she declared that her father deserved to die alone, when she mocked death with laughter that sounded like bones scraping together inside a coffin far too small to contain them.
It was no longer soaked with fear as it had been while the knocking still echoed through the house. Now it was sharp, as sharp as the serrated edges on Apathy's head, as sharp as the knife she had dropped onto the kitchen floor and never bothered to pick up again.
"Congratulations. You survived. Meanwhile, my father, that so-called great commander—you know, the father who always said, 'I'll come home,' but could never explain when—he didn't survive. He chose to blow himself up instead of coming back to this house."
Absyumura quickly turned toward the kitchen, his eyes widening with a warning he never managed to voice because his tongue remained stiff from the apology he had just offered. But Miara did not care. She stepped out from the darkness of the kitchen with strides that no longer trembled, approaching the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. At the corner of her dry lips, the shadow of the cynical smile that had vanished when the knocking began had returned once more, returning like an uninvited guest who refused to leave because it already believed the house belonged to it.
"So, Apathy—Apathy Shelton, my father's subordinate who survived—what brings you here? Or did you simply come to show me that you're still alive while my father has already become nothing but ashes?"
To be continued...