Chapter 169
Theo, from behind his hiding place, kept his eyes unblinking, recording every micron of change in Aldraya's posture, every subtle fluctuation in the light of the Avatar.
He saw how Aldraya's tense shoulders eased slightly, as though the fallen Angel drew a deep breath to reorganize her defense, to voice one final argument that all suffering in the mortal world was an ascetic path, a trial of refinement meant to sharpen her devotion back into absoluteness.
Those words had crystallized at the tip of her tongue, ready to be released into the sacred silence.
However, before several syllables could be completed, the unilateral narration was disrupted.
Not by an explosion, but by an interruption of consciousness so sudden and sharp, like a blade of light slicing through the thread of thought.
Quil-Hasa, who had remained silent like a statue of light mid-process, cut off Aldraya's intent without courtesy or anger.
The interruption was not a shout, not a reprimand, but an elegant and absolute forced halt to the flow of thought she intended to express.
Aldraya was jolted.
All preparations, all the narratives of atonement she was weaving in the depths of her being, shattered instantly.
A sense of confusion, then a deep internal stammer, overtook her.
For the first time in her nearly infinite span of existence, she saw the Creator act in such a direct and unpredictable manner, far from the passive or drowsy impression that had always emanated before.
There was a new firmness behind that silence, one that sparked a strange confession within Aldraya's heart.
That this was the most perplexing and beautiful first love she had ever encountered, a form of attention that demanded an answer, not mere acknowledgment.
With divine etiquette still clinging to her being, Aldraya immediately swallowed the words left unspoken.
She adopted a new silence.
Not a silence of shock, but a silence that permitted, bowing her head slightly deeper as a sign that the path of speech was now fully surrendered to the Source.
The space between them felt like a magnetic field whose poles had been reversed.
And then, the question arrived.
Quil-Hasa's voice, still a pure vibration within the soul, felt sharper this time, more focused, like a laser beam drilling into the core of every claim made before.
The question was simple, yet it pierced directly into the foundation of Aldraya's argument.
What is the proof of sincerity?
What tangible form does the loyalty you claim as the sole remedy truly take?
How can an abstraction like loyalty possess the power to shape and command the entire spectrum of emotions, the entire experience of suffering and searching, across many worlds and many lives?
It was not a question of doubt, but a demand for verification.
It stripped Aldraya's claims of rhetorical layers, demanding a truth accountable before cosmic law, not merely a subjective confession from a longing creation.
The frozen air seemed to crack under the sharpness of the question, waiting with held breath to see whether Aldraya possessed a currency valuable enough to redeem her plea.
"There is not a single thing in the mortal world capable of making me feel happy.
Every life I passed through, every experience I lived, always left emptiness within my heart.
Even my birth and childhood, which should have been full of joy, now feel like a script foreign to me."
Fu - haaah!
"Any happiness that might have existed is nothing more than a shadow formed by my own hands, yet never something I could grasp.
I have walked many corridors of life, some taken for atonement, others for self-trial.
But at the end of each road, true fulfillment never arrives."
Piiih!
"The loyalty I feel toward You is the only thing that gives meaning to my existence across endless lives.
In the end, every journey and decision in my life leads to a single point.
You."
Oooooh!
"True wholeness is something I feel only when I surrender myself and devote my being entirely to You, even if only for a moment."
The heart within Aldraya's chest—an organ that should be nothing more than a metaphor for a being like her—beat fiercely like a war drum breaking the silence within her.
The pulse echoed through her ribs, a mortal sensation both thrilling and foreign, as though she were about to be shot by the intensity of this moment, by the first love she herself admitted was greeting her in such a rough and direct manner.
Yet from that swirl of joy and bewilderment, she managed to draw a cold and crystalline clarity.
All the boiling emotions were pressed inward, crystallized into an answer she believed to be the purest truth she possessed.
With a voice more controlled yet carrying the echo of recently restrained turmoil, Aldraya answered.
She declared an absolute sorrow.
Everything she had lived through in the mortal world, she said, was an endless sea of emptiness.
Every breath, every interaction, every experience that should have formed memories—all felt bland, hollow, unable to touch the deepest part of her eternal soul.
She even touched upon her childhood in those lives, a period that should have been filled with innocent joy.
But for Aldraya, now fully self-aware, those childhood memories were like an ancient script written in a dead language.
She did not recognize them.
She could not feel warmth or delight from the small figure in that story, despite that small figure being her own past self whose path she had once designed.
There was a painful dissociation, an unbridgeable gap between the Creator of those past experiences and the being now burdened with remembering them.
That childhood happiness, she claimed, was a falsity she could not claim, a gift wrapped in paper she could never open.
Her answer floated in the air, a confession of existential suffering unhealed by time or experience.
Aldraya essentially stated that the only reality that ever felt genuine to her—the only context in which her emotions pulsed authentically—was within the framework of devotion to Quil-Hasa.
Everything outside of it, including her own childhood joy, was merely a silent shadow of a life she never truly possessed.
She did not ask for pity, but presented a deep wound as proof of her sincerity.
Only in that loyalty did the wound find temporary closure.
And in that devotion she felt most like her true self, not merely a spectator of her own life story.
"There is no connection between everything you mentioned and the loyalty you just claimed.
You are trying to unite fragments that do not belong together and hoping they form a single coherent reason."
Fufu!
"If it is true that your loyalty is the strongest remedy shaping all your emotions—wherever you may travel—will you still insist that when the decree to destroy the universe was proclaimed, and more than half the cosmos was annihilated by the hands of your Twelve Siblings, that betrayal emerged solely from your loyalty to Me, and not from your own will?
Or is there perhaps another factor, greater and far more decisive, one you have overlooked—O creation who worships the Almighty, angel who has fallen into sin in the mortal world, and now seeks to return to Him?"
The vibrations radiating from Quil-Hasa shifted in quality.
From investigative sharpness, they became a dense and undeniable wave of refutation.
This interruption was no longer merely a cutting-off, but a dismantling of logic.
Quil-Hasa, or the fraction of His consciousness present there, subtly yet firmly refuted Aldraya's line of thought.
To be continued…