Chapter 187
Miara smiled faintly—a smile that never reached her eyes.
"It won't bring anything back," she said before rising to her feet.
She picked up a piece of rotten snake meat from the tray and chewed it slowly. The sound of cartilage crunching between her teeth echoed with unsettling clarity.
"And don't put too much faith in the kindness of the dead, Apathy. Even the living lie all the time."
Fhuuh!!
"Don't call him my father," Miara said suddenly, her voice no longer a whisper or a murmur, but a verdict she had kept locked away for years inside a coffin she had never buried. Now, before Apathy, who still sat on the woven chair with the serrated edges of his triangular head trembling faintly in the cold air he had carried from the castle that had become nothing but ashes, she opened that coffin and finally revealed what had been sealed inside.
"Shaqar is not my father. Shaqar is simply a man who happened to marry my mother and happened to live under the same roof as me for a few years before deciding that missions, his squad, and the title of commander were worth more than hearing his own daughter learn how to speak."
Absyumura let out a long sigh.
Not an ordinary sigh, but one that escaped his chest like someone struggling to keep himself from exploding. His fingers, which had been gripping his knees, slowly reached toward his wife's hand, wanting to comfort her, wanting to reassure her.
But before his fingertips could touch Miara's skin, cold from either Apathy's presence or her own fury, he withdrew them. He knew that touching Miara now would be like throwing a spark into a fire that had already grown too large to extinguish with bare hands.
"Miara, please—" he began.
But Miara cut him off before he could finish, faster than the flash of the serrated edges on Apathy's head, sharper than the knife still stained with snake blood back in the kitchen.
"Please do what, Absyumura? Be quiet? Pretend that I'm grieving? Smile politely and nod while listening to one of my father's subordinates tell beautiful stories about how much my father loved me?"
Miara stepped away from her husband's side, and her slender frame suddenly seemed larger than it really was, enlarged by an anger she could no longer conceal, enlarged by every word she had buried deep within herself for years, words now pouring out like vomit she could no longer suppress.
"Courtesy? You expect me to be courteous in my own home? In the house he never stayed in for more than two days a month? In the house where my mother—"
Her voice broke there, but she forced herself to continue, refusing to let the tears she had long sworn would never fall betray her before this uninvited guest.
"My mother died alone in that room, Absyumura, while Shaqar was fighting somewhere whose name he probably didn't even know. And you're telling me I should be polite?"
Apathy, who had remained silent until now, finally opened his mouth.
Not to defend Shaqar, not to calm Miara, but to say something he had perhaps prepared ever since he knocked on the door of that small house.
"Miara, your mother understood Shaqar's choice. She gave him her blessing—"
But before the sentence had fully left whatever his throat was made of, Miara burst into laughter, the same laughter she had let out while standing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand and blackened oil simmering in the pan, laughter born from something already dead but incapable of burying itself.
"Her blessing? You're talking about her blessing, Apathy? You, who never once saw my mother cry herself to sleep every night after Shaqar left? You, who never heard her whisper into the pillow that had already gone cold because he'd abandoned it?"
"Miara, enough!"
Absyumura's voice came out far louder than he had intended, louder than he had ever spoken to his wife throughout their twenty years of marriage. For one second—a second that felt like an endless winter freezing the entire room—he saw his wife stand perfectly still.
Not because she was afraid, but because she was stunned. Perhaps she had never heard her gentle husband raise his voice like this. Perhaps she had forgotten that Absyumura also had limits, that he, too, could break, that he, too, had grown weary of standing between a wife who hated her father and a father who was already dead and could no longer defend himself.
"I know you're hurting. I know you're angry. But you can't—you can't change the fact that Shaqar is your father. Even if you never acknowledge him, even if you hate his name until the day you die, his blood still runs through your veins. And he—"
He pointed toward Apathy, who remained seated in silence, his expression unchanged—flat, empty, like someone who had witnessed so many family disputes that he no longer had the energy to be surprised or offended.
"He didn't come here to listen to you curse your father. He came here to deliver something. At least hear him out before you decide to hate everything."
Miara looked at her husband.
The anger had vanished from her eyes. So had the bitterness.
What remained was emptiness—empty like Apathy's gaze, empty like the kitchen wall that had witnessed too many tears without ever being able to wipe them away.
Then, from her dry lips, came words that sounded like small stones being dropped into an impossibly deep well.
"You know, Absyumura... I was born from the womb of a mother who was far too kind for a father as savage as Shaqar."
Her voice was no longer loud or sharp, but low, low like the trembling of the earth before an earthquake, low like the hiss of a snake before it strikes.
"After she married him, my mother was the one who taught me how to cook rotten rats so they were still edible. She was also the one who taught me how to split open a snake without rupturing its gallbladder. She was always there beside me every night when my thoughts fell into chaos, every morning when I was afraid of making mistakes while caring for our toddler, every time our child cried while I had no idea what I was supposed to do."
"As for Shaqar? From the day he was sworn in as a member, all that remained of him was the old photograph hanging on that wall—"
Her hand slowly rose, pointing toward the damp wall of the living room.
There hung a faded photograph, tilted slightly to one side, showing a man proudly wearing the uniform of Team Xirkushkartum with a broad smile that felt utterly unfamiliar to her.
It was a smile she had never truly known, because every morning when she opened her eyes, her father had already left, and every night when she closed them again, he still had not come home.
To be continued...