Chapter 142
She moved in patterns that could not be predicted, with a rhythm that was never the same in two consecutive strikes, as if she were writing sentences across the creature's body, sentences without subject or predicate, sentences made only of verbs that never stopped, sentences that would never end until she herself decided that it was enough.
The ancient trumpet she had blown seconds earlier still hung around her neck, still swaying with every movement of her body, still emitting faint vibrations that could not be heard but were felt by every molecule of air daring to approach her, and Ashita knew she could not blow it too often, that the trumpet was not a tool meant to be used repeatedly, that each time she blew it, something within reality itself shifted in ways she could not control, in ways that might leave marks no one could ever repair.
Yet she also knew that without that trumpet, without the chaos of causality she created, without the confusion of cause and effect that made the creature unable to distinguish between fresh wounds and healed ones, everything she did would amount to nothing more than a futile dance performed before something that could never die.
So she blew it again, this time not as forcefully as before, this time with a softer breath, shorter, more like a whisper than a cry, and the effect was immediate.
One of the creature's heads—the central one, the calmest one, the one that had not moved and had only been staring straight at Nirma—suddenly stopped, halted in the middle of its motion, frozen like a paused frame at the most ill-timed moment, and for a fraction of a second, nothing moved, nothing breathed, no one dared to create a sound that might shatter the tension hanging in the air like a blade suspended by a single strand of hair.
"Now, Arya!" Nirma shouted from above, her voice sounding like something breaking, like something she had been holding back with great effort finally slipping beyond her control.
The air that only a second ago had been screaming with liturgies, with the crashing of maces, the slashing of blades, and the screams of an undying creature, now became air filled only with a silence too heavy to be called peace.
The dust that had been swirling in orderly currents as if following the rhythm created by the five mouths of the creature now fell slowly, like snow that had never known cold, like ash that had never known fire, settling onto the cracked ground of Heraclea Cybistra that pulsed like a wound that had just ceased bleeding.
The sky above them, which had been fractured like glass on the verge of shattering, now began to mend itself, the thin lines stretching in every direction shrinking one by one, closing like the petals of a flower exhausted after blooming too long, and when the last line vanished, the sky of Heraclea Cybistra returned to nothing more than gray, a sky no longer filled with sound, anger, or the hatred the creature had clung to for thousands of years.
Yet Nirma felt something she could not explain, something lodged between her chest and her throat, something like remnants of the three liturgies still echoing in a space without walls, something like the shadow of the light that had emerged from the letter now folded again and returned to her waist, something that made her realize that even though the creature had been drawn into the dimensional prison she had opened from that small, seemingly simple box, nothing had truly ended here, that what had occurred was merely a pause, a pause that might last only as long as those still standing among the ruins of a forgotten ancient city required.
Arya, who had not stopped speaking, not stopped mocking, not stopped cursing with words sharp as nails driven into wet wood, now fell silent, and that silence felt heavier than all the words that had left his mouth throughout the battle.
His right hand still gripped a small wooden cross whose edges had been worn dull from being held so often, rubbed so frequently, used as the only anchor amidst storms that never ceased, and his left hand still held the thick, worn exorcism book, a compilation of exorcisms from all religions and beliefs across time, a book he had never opened during the battle despite clutching it as if it must never fall to the ground.
He looked at Nirma with an unreadable gaze, a gaze no longer containing the laughter, mockery, or bitterness he usually showed whenever he spoke, a gaze holding only emptiness, the same emptiness Nirma had felt when she first heard the third voice from the five-headed creature, an emptiness born from the realization that this battle had not been won by anyone, that what had occurred was only a delay, that the creature was not dead, not destroyed, not erased, only moved to a place he might never reach yet would never be able to forget.
On the other side of the now silent field, Ashita stood with her sword still in her right hand, its tip pointing toward the ground still damp with something that could not be called blood, her breath moving in and out with an uneven rhythm she had never shown to anyone, a rhythm that only appeared when her body stood at the edge between remaining upright and collapsing onto the very ground she had stood upon since the first minute of the battle.
She looked at Nirma—the woman who had killed her parents at sixteen, the woman she had chased across countless timelines, the woman who had become the reason she could never sleep peacefully for decades—and for the first time since she had decided that vengeance was the only path left to her, she felt nothing, no anger, no pain, no urge to raise her blade and sever the woman's neck as she had imagined every night before falling asleep in places she had never called home.
She felt only exhaustion, exhaustion that did not merely spread through her numbed muscles, not only through her bones that felt like they would shatter with every breath, but exhaustion that seeped into something deeper, something that might have been her soul if such a thing truly existed, something she had filled for decades with vengeance, hatred, and vows never spoken aloud yet always whispered within her mind whenever she saw Nirma's face in memories that refused to fade.
To be continued…