NOVGO.NET 7.4 — Every Silhouette That Wasn't Her
There was, in Vesalia's life within the Between, a ritual Eremos was slow to fully discover because she never spoke of it as such. When he asked her where she went, on the days it was her turn to be alone, Vesalia always answered with the same brief, almost administrative phrase: I have to go ask around.
Asking around meant this: walking, sometimes for entire days of that imprecise time the Between imposed on anyone who strayed from everything familiar, until finding a silhouette she hadn't seen before, and stopping in front of it with her voice trained not to shake, and saying, always the same words, because she'd learned that changing them changed nothing:
"Do you remember anything from before you got here? A mother? Someone who gave you up?"
Most of the time the answer was silence. A silence that could mean anything — that the silhouette didn't want to talk to a stranger, that it didn't remember anything from its previous life, that it had decided, as so many did, never to unlock those memories for fear of the pain they carried. Vesalia had no way of knowing which reason was the right one. She could only ask, listen to the silence, and keep walking.
Other times there was an answer, and the answer was no. A dry no, or a kind no, or a no accompanied by a question of its own — why do you ask?, who are you looking for? — that Vesalia never fully answered, because answering it would have meant opening something she already struggled to keep shut with both hands.
Eremos, the first time he went with her on one of these searches, understood immediately why she preferred to do them alone. Not because she didn't want his company — she told him so, later, with an honesty that hurt him more than any reproach — but because watching him witness every rejection, every silence, every silhouette that walked away without being the one she was looking for, made her feel the failure twice: once inside, and once again in the eyes of someone who loved her and couldn't help pitying her a little each time it happened.
"I'd rather you didn't see me like that," she'd told him. "I'd rather tell you what happened afterward, once I've been able to put it in order. Not while it's happening."
And Eremos, who understood better than anyone what it meant to carry the hardest parts of oneself alone, had respected that. But that didn't stop him from imagining, with a precision that sometimes cost him to bear, what those days must have been like for her.
He pictured them like this, because deep down, without fully admitting it even to himself, he knew imagination wasn't far from the truth:
A silhouette, at a crossroads of pale stone, stopping at the question and answering, after too long a silence, that it doesn't remember anything, that it never wanted to unlock those memories, that it would rather not do so now either. Vesalia nodding, offering a courtesy that costs her nothing because she's spent a lifetime training herself to rule, and moving on before the silhouette can see what that no has cost her.
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A silhouette, further on, in a bustling market where for an instant — just an instant, long enough to see a posture, a way of tilting the head that reminds her of something she can barely remember clearly anymore — Vesalia's heart stops completely, and she crosses the distance between them almost running, something unlike her, something she herself would judge in any other circumstance, and arrives breathless in front of the silhouette and asks the question, and the silhouette looks at her without understanding, because that's all it is: some silhouette, with some posture, that by pure chance resembled, for a second, a ghost.
One more silhouette, at the end of an already too-long day, that does remember something — a mother, it says, though it isn't sure, the memories from before death are confused, mixed with things that maybe never happened — and for a moment, a whole moment, something lights up in Vesalia's chest with a force that frightens her, until the silhouette adds one detail, just one, that doesn't fit, that can't fit, and the hope dies as fast as it flared, leaving behind something worse than if it had never appeared at all.
Eremos never witnessed these exact scenes. But he knew them anyway, because he'd reconstructed them, piece by piece, from the little Vesalia did tell him when she came back — not the details, never the details, but the weight she came back carrying, different each time, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She came back quieter. She came back with her shoulders a little more slumped than usual, even though her spine stayed straight through sheer will. She came back, above all, with a particular way of embracing him when she arrived — not like a greeting, but like someone who needs to confirm, with her body before her words, that something good is still waiting for her somewhere in the world.
What Eremos came to understand, over time, and what was hard to explain even now, to Flora, sitting across from him with her full attention on every word, was this: each failed search wasn't neutral. It wasn't simply one more unlucky day. It was, every time, a small echo of the original guilt — the guilt of having given her up, of not having been there, of maybe not deserving to find her at all, because what kind of mother gives up her daughter, even if she did it to save her, even if there was no other option possible in that moment.
"She never put it that way," Eremos explained, his voice a little lower. "She never said I don't deserve to find her. But I saw it in how she talked about the search itself. As if it were less a hope and more a sentence she'd imposed on herself. Searching, for her, wasn't only the path toward something good. It was also, every time, a way of reminding herself of what she'd done."
Flora, listening with her knees drawn to her chest, said then, very quietly:
"That's horrible."
"It is," Eremos confirmed. "And the worst part wasn't any one search. It was the sum of all of them. Every silhouette that wasn't her took a little more of the thread holding her up. And there came a point, though I didn't know it until later, when that thread had almost nothing left to give."