Chapter 135
Inside his chest, something he had long kept tightly locked began to tremble violently.
That tremor did not come from the letter still clenched in his wrinkled hand, nor from the physical exhaustion he had buried for years beneath his worn uniform, but from a source far deeper, far older, far more painful.
Shaqar felt his jaw stiffen against his will, felt his teeth slowly grind against each other producing a faint creaking sound only he could hear, felt his chest rise and fall in a rhythm that was no longer steady.
He muttered within himself, cursed with a harshness he would never allow to escape as sound, hurled insults with words that could only exist in the most secret chamber of his consciousness.
Zhulumat, with all his absolute authority, with all his unquestionable power, with all his dominance far above the clouds where ordinary humans stood, had spoken as though he were nothing more than a lever on some electronic device—something that could be pressed at any moment as desired.
A tool.
An instrument.
An inanimate object with no right to refuse or even to think.
And the most painful part of it all, the thing that made his chest feel as though it were being crushed by an unseen giant hand, was the fact that Zhulumat was completely unaware of what he had done, utterly oblivious that his words had stripped away the dignity of an old man who had devoted decades of his life with all his body and soul.
Yet that wound—the wound of being treated like an object—was only the outermost layer of the ocean of sorrow that had long pooled at the depths of Shaqar's soul.
As his thoughts began to drift deeper, as his memories pulled him back to times he never wished to revisit, his entire body trembled with an intensity he could only suppress after drawing a long, heavy breath.
He remembered his bloodline, the people who should have been the reason he endured life amidst the world's cruelty, the faces that slowly but surely drifted away like boats carried off by currents he could never chase.
One by one, without a sound, without explanation, without giving him the chance to ask or plead, they vanished from his life in the most subtle yet most painful way.
And the peak of it all—the culmination of a never-ending chain of loss—was when Miara, his only child, his own flesh and blood, the daughter he had protected with everything he had, began to show a distance that grew day by day into a chasm that could never be bridged.
Shaqar could accept it if the world turned against him, could accept if enemies on the battlefield hunted him like an animal, could accept if comrades betrayed him at the most critical moment.
But when his own flesh and blood began to drift away, when the child he had raised with sweat and tears began to see him as a stranger, that was when he realized that perhaps the Blessed Grand Sanse was teaching him something about the true meaning of loneliness.
Amid the vortex of memories dragging him deeper into the abyss of pain, a single memory suddenly emerged—the sharpest, the most piercing, the one that left a wound that never dried no matter how mercilessly time passed.
Shaqar remembered his wife—the woman who had been part of his life for more than three decades, the figure whose departure left a gaping hole at the heart of his existence.
He remembered the final moments, the weakening breaths, the half-closed eyes still trying to look at him with the remnants of an unspoken love, the hand that clutched his as if refusing to truly let go.
And he remembered the one thing that lingered the most, the thing that haunted him every night when he tried to close his eyes, the thing that made him hate himself and every decision he had ever made.
Zhulumat, with a single brief command he could not defy, with a prohibition that gave him no room to beg or persuade, had decided that he was not allowed to bury his wife yet—that he must postpone that final farewell ritual indefinitely, that he must let the body of the one he loved most lie still, waiting for a return that no one knew when would come.
And Shaqar, like an obedient soldier who for decades had never defied orders, could only bow and accept it, even as within his heart he screamed with a voice that shattered every boundary of human endurance.
Seven to eight days.
That was the span of time he had to endure before being allowed to return, before being permitted to go back to a house that now felt more like a cold tomb than a place of shelter, before being allowed to perform his final duty as a husband to the woman who had stood beside him through every storm of life.
Seven to eight days in which he had to smile and act professionally before his comrades, seven to eight days in which he had to bury all of this alone without being able to share it with anyone, seven to eight days in which his wife's body lay waiting with a patience he no longer possessed as an ordinary human.
And now, in this suffocating room, with the letter still in his grasp and a new order to carry out, Shaqar realized that perhaps this was the highest form of the cruelest devotion—perhaps this was the price he had to pay for all the beliefs he had held onto, perhaps this was the fate he could never escape no matter how far he ran.
"I will read it."
That nod was not born from obedience, but from a surrender that had gone through a long process of internal decay.
His old neck moved slowly, lowering his head in the exact same gesture he had performed thousands of times throughout his career, yet this time there was something different beneath the wrinkled skin covering his hardened jaw.
There was a wound spreading from his chest to the tips of his fingers, a wound that made every movement feel like dragging shards of glass across an open, bleeding surface.
Yet he still nodded, still bowed, still surrendered what little courage remained to the decision not to rebel—because deep within the darkest part of his heart, he still believed in one thing that might not make sense: that by remaining obedient, by carrying out orders, by continuing to be a good soldier even as his world shattered into pieces, he was protecting something greater than himself.
Something he could not even name, yet felt its presence like a faint pulse amidst the storm.
When his head rose again, when the nod was complete and nothing remained for him to do but carry out the command, his old fingers began to move with a caution that went beyond mere precision.
He stared at the letter for a moment, at the folds that bore silent witness to the long journey of this information from Apathy's hands into his own, at the seal that was no longer intact because he himself had broken it moments earlier.
Slowly, with movements that almost resembled a sacred ritual, he began to unfold it piece by piece, feeling the rough texture of the paper against fingertips that had lost much of their sensitivity through age and countless battles.
To be continued…