Asdras Awakening (X)

Asdras stood motionless, his vow pressing upon him like a leaden shroud, suffocating yet inescapable. A vow — to whom, to what? A rather theatrical thing, if one thought about it — one of those peculiar acts in which a person willingly binds themselves to an abstract obligation, as if entering a contract with their own conscience. Asdras had done precisely this. And now, in the harsh light of the present moment, he found himself in the rather absurd position of actually having to act upon it.

And yet, faced with the expectant eyes of the others, he wavered. Those eyes — so empty, so filled with terrible hope — cut into him like knives. A grotesque spectacle, this silent plea, this reliance upon a boy whose hands still shook at the weight of a blade. He felt as if he had been flayed open, stripped of all pretense, left naked before the tribunal of their desperation.

'I… promised it, I…' he thought.

The words echoed in his mind, but what were promises when uttered in the solitude of one's own mind? The crow's tale returned to him, the three choices, the illusion of control. He had chosen differently then, had shaped his own path with defiance, believing himself above fate. But what had it amounted to? Had he truly defied the tale, or simply prolonged the inevitable?

The others watched, waiting, their silence a force more unbearable than any spoken demand. First's smirk, a shield for his own anxieties. Sixth's quiet plucking of the lute, a melody that trembled with the unspoken. Eighth's gaze was fixated on her sword, as if searching within the cold steel for some answer, some reprieve from the weight of uncertainty.

His fingers curled around the hilt of his sword, his body urging him to flee. To run — to escape this absurdity, this suffocating expectation! And yet, something held him. A defiance, a refusal to be crushed under the weight of his own fear. The vow was his, the decision his own. There would be no escape from it.

The villagers, too, moved, though one could hardly call it movement — more like a sluggish lurching forward, the bodies of people who had long forgotten what it meant to move toward something rather than simply away from pain. Their exhaustion was not only physical but metaphysical. They were tired of everything — of history, of curses, of monsters both real and imagined. But what choice did they have?

And so, with great effort, they stepped forward.

Not with the determination of heroes, nor the certainty of the righteous, but simply because the alternative — standing still — had become unbearable.

Their souls wavered, trembling with the uncertainty of their path ahead, questioning whether it was a noble commitment or a fool's attempt to hide behind their scars and let a boy free them while bearing their burdens and making new ones.

It drained them, but just as Asdras felt the weight yet didn't step back, they also firmed their will for the task. They were tired of years of suffering and not knowing what it was to truly live and dream.

They missed their families, friends, and once-beautiful village, all taken from them by the curse and the monster. The remnants of their community were forced to watch, week by week, as their blood transformed into cursed trees after the promises and hopes of awakening their bloodline power to fight the beast.

With a near-Herculean effort, Asdras stepped forward first, his sword trembling in his hands as if catching fire. He moved to honor his vow, though his body attempted, with every passing second, to betray his resolve.

The villagers followed, determined to honor their willingness and not burden the boy before them. Their bones, once thought to be the framework of their strength, now felt as if they had turned to jelly.

As they lifted their feet to advance, overwhelming fatigue gripped them. It felt as though they had walked for years, every sinew and muscle crying out with the weariness of a lifetime.

Grandpa First, whether it was due to his age or his nickname, kissed the cold steel while wearing his everyday grin. He looked ahead at Asdras standing at the village entrance. Memories of his past surfaced like specters, haunting his final view of the living world.

And in that moment, First's mind, loosened from the rigid grip of the present, fell backward into the corridors of his past. He saw with startling clarity the day his mother's death collapsed the sky upon their home. His father, once the kind of man who whistled while working, was hollowed out overnight, his eyes reduced to dull, indifferent stones. His sister, that little storm of chatter, dwindled into a hushed specter, her voice thinning to the barest whisper, like someone speaking from behind a locked door.

First had borne it all in silence, his grief a raw, unshaped mass inside him. There were nights when the void pressed so near he could feel it brush his skin like an invisible hand. And then, inexplicably, the joke — some foolish thing about a chicken and a shoe, ridiculous in its very existence — escaped his lips. The sound that followed was not his own laughter but a giggle, faint and fragile, from his sister. It was then he understood: absurdity, wielded correctly, could be a shield. So he took up his post as the family fool, wearing a smirk like a knight wears armor, flinging jokes like arrows at the dark. And it worked. His sister laughed more often, and even his father, that monument of grief, seemed at times to thaw at the edges.

But here, at the moment of departure, standing on the razor's edge between life and whatever came after, First felt no armor, no shield, no joke left to tell. And yet — wasn't this the last, great absurdity? That he should smile even now, as if this, too, were some cosmic jest? His lips curled upward, not in mockery but in something that could almost be called peace.

"Thanks, lad." The words dropped into the air like a stone into deep water, barely reaching Asdras, who did not know if they were meant for him at all.

Asdras's hands moved as if belonging to another. He did not feel them, nor the dull press of his own heartbeat — a muffled, sticky thing lodged against the stone of his ribs. His breath came and went, indifferent, as if life had already departed from him in some way. Then his gaze drifted, hesitant, toward Sixth.

The boy did not scream. That, above all, unsettled him, until he saw his life.

There had been a time when Sixth's screams outlasted the night, raw and ceaseless, until his throat turned to iron and his breath reeked of blood. But now, silence. A cruel joke — fate in its usual, sardonic mode. What had once been unbearable noise was now a stillness more unbearable still.

Once, when he was five, Sixth had seen something. No, not seen — felt. A presence, an incorporeal weight pressed against his back, watching, waiting. It had no shape, yet it filled his senses with a horror he could neither name nor expel. He had screamed then, his terror as real as the cold floor beneath his feet, but terror has no place in the house of God.

The head nun had met his cries with the sharp precision of a wooden cane. "Madness is a thing to be beaten out, not nurtured," she had once said, as if insanity were a stain that could be scrubbed away with discipline. And so the boy learned to bury his fear in silence.

In silence, too, he found his refuge. The lute, an object fragile and finite, gave shape to something vast within him. His fingers, so used to curling against his own ribs in fear, now pressed strings that hummed beneath his touch. And for a time, it was enough.

But fate — fickle, sardonic fate — was never content to leave a fragile thing intact. The shadow that had tormented him for years took form, and it was, of all things, a crow. It was not the thing itself that destroyed him, but the recognition: the universe, in its infinite cruelty, had granted his fears a body.

The lute, which had once held back the dark, could do nothing now. His belief in it shattered. So he did what all doomed men do — he clung to the one thing left within his control.

He silenced himself. A rope across his lips. A wooden box for the lute. And in the end, a single gesture toward Asdras, a wordless plea that seemed, somehow, to say everything.

Asdras understood.

Without the rope and having carefully placed his lute in a wooden box with a makeshift note, Sixth felt himself falling, not into the clutches of the shadow but into the depths of his own terms.

The shadow had not conquered his spirit, but silencing himself was his way of controlling the uncontrollable. His gesture to Asdras, pointing towards the wooden box, was his final act of communication, urging him to understand his meaning.

Third stepped forward, though the motion felt foreign, as if some unseen force propelled her—an impulse not entirely her own, yet one she had long since ceased resisting. It was the weight of inevitability, the kind that gathers over a lifetime, each regret pressing down like a stone upon the chest. Perhaps, she thought, it had always been leading to this moment. Perhaps, without realizing it, she had been walking toward this fate all along.

She could not bear to see her daughter leave before her. It was unnatural. A violation of the order that gave suffering its structure. Had she not already bargained with grief once, when she lost her firstborn? And yet, here it was again, demanding more. The past, with all its ghosts, came unbidden—her husband's laughter in the morning light, the scent of herbs crushed between her fingers, the warm steam of fresh bread rising in the cool air of the market. Such small, inconsequential things, and yet, now, they seemed the whole of her life.

But in the midst of these tender recollections, another memory sharpened itself against her ribs: the distance she had placed between herself and her daughter. How subtly regret worked, not as a sudden wound but as a slow tightening, a constriction around the soul. She had longed for a son, had felt cheated by fate when given a girl, and though she had never spoken her disappointment aloud, it had hung between them like dust in an abandoned room. And yet, her daughter had remained—silent, waiting.

And so, what else was there to do now but step forward? Not for herself, but for the daughter she had failed. A coward's atonement, perhaps, but an atonement nonetheless.

A final breath. A final step.

Asdras nearly doubled over. A flash of warmth spread through his hand, but his mind refused to process it as pain. His gaze, unfocused, caught instead on the child before him.

Eight was smiling.

Not the wary, uncertain smile of those who survive out of necessity, but something radiant, unburdened—an expression so dissonant with the horror of the moment that it left him stunned. Had he ever seen such a thing? Was there, in all the vast cruelty of the world, anything more incomprehensible than purity left intact?

For Eight, it was simple. Music had always been muffled to her ears, the world something distant, as if she were watching it unfold from behind a thick curtain. While others were weighed down by sorrow, by expectation, by loss, she existed in a realm where things made sense in ways they did not for others. She had spent much of her childhood alone, but never lonely. The doll had promised to stay with her forever. And it had.

She had not resented her mother's absence — why should she? Absence was a kind of silence, and silence had always been her companion. She had not cried when she found her father with the neighboring woman; she had simply watched, as one watches leaves move in the wind. The world was a bright camp of fairy tales, and she preferred it that way.

Even when the monster came.

Even when her father and brother were taken.

Her ears refused to hear it, her eyes refused to see it. The world was still as she had always known it—until the wooden stick she had found with Asdras, until the first shift, the first sense that something within her was being called toward something else.

And then, there was the sword.

The sword sang.

It was beautiful, serene, and shimmering with a quiet magic she had never known before. And so, in gratitude, she offered something she had never given anyone but her doll — her hands, warm and open, extended toward Asdras.