Chapter 188
Apathy let out a long breath—or at least that was what seemed to come from his chest, whatever it was made of, whether flesh or something far older than flesh. The sound did not resemble an ordinary sigh, but rather wind passing through the narrow crevices of a cave that had never known the touch of light.
From beneath his loose ceremonial uniform, his ordinary hand—for there was nothing remarkable about his perfectly normal arms and legs—reached inside and pulled out something. It was not the small object he had held while standing at the doorway earlier, but a bundle of letters, their pages yellowed by time and dampened by a long journey. They were tied together with a hemp cord already fraying in several places. With movements strangely gentle for someone whose triangular head was lined with serrated edges at every corner, he placed the bundle upon the low table before Miara, who still sat with her arms crossed over her chest, still resolute, still shielding herself from everything associated with the name Shaqar.
"These," he said flatly.
Yet beneath that flat tone lay the faintest tremor, as delicate as a strand of hair falling onto the floor, a tremor that most people would never have heard. But Miara heard it. Absyumura heard it. And suddenly, the cramped living room felt even smaller beneath the presence of an inanimate object that seemed alive with memories.
"These are letters from your father. They're all for you. Every single one of them. From the day he joined Team Xirkushkartum until three hours before the explosion at the castle."
Absyumura looked at his wife.
His gaze no longer pleaded, no longer commanded. It simply waited, like someone standing at the edge of a cliff, uncertain whether the person he loved would choose to jump or turn back.
He picked up the bundle of letters from the table, feeling their weight against his palms that still trembled from lingering fear and exhaustion. Then, deliberately slowing every movement so Miara would have enough time to refuse if she wished, he held them out to her.
"Read them," he said softly.
His voice sounded neither like an order nor a plea, but like a prayer—a prayer directed to no one in particular, for perhaps the Most Honorable Grand Sanse was occupied with matters far greater than saving a family destroyed by silence and distance.
"Read them, Miara. At least this once... don't close your eyes before you see what he's been hiding all these years."
Miara did not answer.
Not immediately. Not with words.
Instead, her hands, still cold from a chill whose source she could no longer identify, slowly reached forward and accepted the bundle from her husband.
Her slender fingers carefully untied the worn hemp cord, as cautiously as someone reopening an old wound that had never truly healed.
When the first letter unfolded before her, when her eyes began following line after line of familiar handwriting—her father's hurried yet remarkably neat script, the same handwriting she had often seen in notebooks left behind on the dining table before he departed for what would become his final journey—something inside her chest began to tremble.
It was a small trembling she did not recognize, something others might have called tenderness, but to her it felt more like a knife slowly piercing her from within.
"Miara, my daughter... today you turn thirty-one years old. I'm writing this from an emergency tent on the edge of a nameless forest, while the rain outside is falling so heavily that the tent feels as though it might be carried away by the wind. I want to come home. Most Honorable Grand Sanse, I want to come home more than anything. But if I leave my post now, the attack will begin sooner than expected, and the village near our home will become the first target. Forgive your father for missing yet another milestone in your life... even this one."
Miara could not continue.
Her voice broke halfway through the sentence.
From the eyes that she had sworn would never shed tears for her father, something finally began to fall.
One tear.
Then another.
Then another.
They landed upon the yellowed paper, blurring the ink that had perhaps been written by hands trembling just as much when the words were first penned.
She drew a breath that felt like inhaling countless tiny thorns piercing her from within, then continued reading one letter after another, every word, every sentence, every confession that Shaqar had not slept peacefully for years because whenever he closed his eyes, he did not see battlefields, military strategies, or forbidden rituals that had to be stopped.
He saw only his daughter's face.
A face growing older in the photographs he kept hidden inside his jacket.
A face that matured without him ever witnessing it.
A face that might no longer recognize him if he ever managed to come home for good.
The fifth letter.
The tenth.
The fifteenth.
Every one of them spoke of the same thing.
A longing he could never express directly because every time he tried to call, his voice would tremble, and he could not bear the thought of his daughter hearing that her father—the feared captain of Team Xirkushkartum—was, in truth, nothing more than a man desperately longing to return home, yet unable to find a way back without bringing catastrophe to the doorstep of his own family.
"And this..." Apathy said quietly.
For the first time since sitting down upon the woven chair, his voice no longer sounded flat.
No longer hollow like a bottomless well.
Instead, it sounded damp, saturated with something that might have been called sorrow, if he could still remember what it felt like to possess a heart made of something other than stone and pus.
"...is the letter he wrote after your mother passed away. Three days after her funeral. I found it beneath the pillow in his tent, soaked with tears he never allowed anyone else to see."
Miara accepted the letter with violently trembling hands, trembling like leaves caught in the wind before a storm.
Then her eyes reached the first line.
"Today your mother died, Miara. And your father wasn't by her side. I was standing at the opposite end of the world, killing creatures whose names you will never know, while your mother drew her final breath beside a nurse whose face she herself had never even seen before. I can't sleep, Miara. I can't even walk. All I can do is sit in the corner of this tent and write a letter that I will never send... because your father is too much of a coward to watch you cry and know that he is the reason for those tears."
Miara's sobs burst forth, no longer ordinary crying, but a grief erupting from the deepest part of her soul, tears she had restrained for years, tears she could no longer stop no matter how hard she bit her lip until it bled, no matter how tightly she clenched her fists until her nails dug into her own palms.
"Why..." she sobbed, unable to finish the sentence.
"Why was he so foolish? Why didn't he ever come himself? Why did he choose to write all these letters and hide them somewhere I would never find... instead of standing at this very door and telling me all of this with his own voice?"
To be continued...