Chapter 193
THE FORGOTTEN FIELDS (NOVEL) – CHAPTER 193
Talia gazed at him with a look filled with expectation and anticipation.
“What do you think?”
“… It is passable, in a way.”
A faint disappointment crossed her face upon hearing that lukewarm response.
“Is that all?”
Varkas furrowed his brow; he did not have the slightest idea what this woman truly wanted.
Was he supposed to exaggerate in praising the flavor of the wine? Strange suspicions assailed him given her unusual and out-of-context actions, but he did not wish to ruin the mood for her, who had prepared all of this for him.
He opened his mouth to speak more, but at that precise instant, a burning sensation struck his throat.
Varkas gripped the table by reflex; he felt the liquid going down his esophagus as if it were a sharp blade tearing through his entrails.
“… What did you put in the wine?”
“I didn’t put anything.”
She denied it with a trembling voice.
Varkas looked at her with clouded eyes and then stood up slowly; he felt he would fall humiliatingly if he did not lie down somewhere immediately.
He staggered toward the bed and threw his body onto the sheets.
As the blood rushed back to his head, his swaying vision began to stabilize a bit, but the feeling of helplessness grew stronger.
“Did she make me drink an incredibly strong liquor?”
He tried with difficulty to move his fingers, which had gone numb as if they were paralyzed, at which moment Talia approached his side and scrutinized his face thoroughly.
“What do you feel?”
He narrowed his eyes, not understanding the intent behind her question.
What exactly did this woman want to know? In any case, he felt he had to answer.
He opened his mouth to explain what he felt, but at that moment, something burning surged from the deepest depths of his boiling entrails.
Varkas instinctively leaned his body to one side, and a foul-smelling liquid erupted from his throat to spill onto the sheets.
It took him a few seconds to process that what had come out of his body was nothing other than blood.
The vision began to darken around him, so he started to gasp violently.
He heard a distant voice calling his name, and he wanted to answer that call, but his frozen tongue did not move.
His collapsed body was sinking somewhere: the river of blood he had seen thousands of times in his dreams. And in the midst of those viscous waves of death, he let go of that which he was desperately clinging to.
And finally, there was absolute silence.
It was a world of pure nothingness, where he felt absolutely nothing.
The boy dreams.
In his dream, he seats a girl with dark wheat-colored blonde hair on his knees and kisses her pink lips.
The kiss, which began as a game, like a bird caressing with its beak, gradually transformed into a deep and intense kiss.
Despite knowing that the girl had not grown enough for such matters, the boy did not care.
Shortly after, the boy’s body ignited like an ember.
Despite falling prisoner to that painful heat, an overflowing feeling of happiness filled a corner of his heart.
The girl who had plunged him into that fever chattered endlessly.
The boy looked at her innocent face, oblivious to the magnitude of his longing for her, and felt a pain both sweet and sharp at the same time.
Finally, the boy lost control and kissed her with greater passion, while the girl’s fingers tangled deeply into his hair as if responding to him.
He opened his eyes with a feeling of desolation and emptiness, and soon sank into deep self-loathing.
The boy did not understand why this dream repeated itself with him; in reality, the girl was nothing more than an impurity disrupting the peace of his life.
Seeing the image of himself smiling with happiness while holding her felt like a scene foreign to him.
Soon, the boy considered those illusions his mind wove as a simple, inevitable deviation, a product of his body’s growth.
“Perhaps it is natural for the body to respond to the nearest female.”
The boy reached a logical conclusion and got out of bed.
The morning dawn burned coldly behind the window.
Swiftly, the sun’s rays, pouring down like waves, shattered and washed away the remnants of the dream trapped in his retinas.
And his world returned to its stable state.
An orderly world refined with extreme precision; that was the life he was meant to live.
The boy told himself:
“This rejected disturbance will end soon. I will continue with my fixed life within the framework established for me since birth, and that girl will remain a passing bad memory.”
The boy stepped out of his safe haven after cleansing his heart of the remnants of unnecessary feelings.
But in the next instant, blood and darkness invaded his world.
The young man was stepping on something in the back alleys, dirty and foul-smelling.
He raised his eyes toward the crescent moon shining with a faint light between the clouds, and then lowered them slowly.
The young man’s vision was filled with the face of a man who had bled out completely and turned gray.
The man rolled his eyes, his veins burst, revealing gums soaked in blood after his teeth had been completely ripped out.
And in his mouth, unnaturally agape, there was no tongue, but a mass of black and reddish blood. He suddenly remembered that what he was stepping on with his foot was that man’s tongue. The young man moved his eyes to look at the man’s empty wrists. The man’s two severed hands were buried in the middle of a pile of fish that fishermen had discarded. He shifted his gaze toward those fingers protruding from among the corpses of rotten fish and wondered:
“What am I doing here?”
The gaze of the iron cleric watching him through the crack in the door came to mind, and the gazes of his father, who contemplated him as if looking at something repulsive, flashed through his memory.
“Did they perhaps sense this scene of me beforehand?”
The young man contemplated for a while the face of the corpse, which seemed to be a witness to hell, and then left the secluded alley.
At that moment, the moonlight filtered through the clouds to clearly illuminate his blood-stained body.
“Perhaps I look now with an appearance unimaginable for a knight of the Empire. And perhaps I do not even look like a human being at all.”
The young man walked without haste in the midst of the darkness while thinking about it in a daze. The river wind blew constantly in the midst of the viscous silence, but the smell of blood surrounding him did not disappear.
A sudden question assailed the young man:
“It is not the first time I have killed someone, and it probably will not be the last. But why am I experiencing this feeling?”
The echo of the girl’s scream resonated behind the churning current of the Silviska River.
He understood once again that this voice was what had pushed him here, what caused a chill to run down his spine.
“Danger.”
This word drove itself like a nail into his mind.
Only then did he realize that he stood before a boundary line he must not cross.
“What will happen to me if I cross this line?”
He suddenly remembered a scene from the dream that had repeated for months; the dream that made him boil with fever and long for what he did not want.
But that scene was tinted with the image of Bernadette withering away, and with the face of the Emperor, who had become a slave to a woman despite possessing the world. He also remembered the image of the girl screaming beneath the man who would transform into a rotting corpse.
He felt that the destruction awaiting him resided in those eyes filled with tears, fear, and despair.
“But it is not too late yet.”
“If I have taken a wrong path, I have only to return.”
And as he always did, he ruthlessly excised all the impurities that disturbed the peace of his fortified world.
With that, the young man’s world sank once again into a silence akin to death.
And he could not emerge from those deep, dark waters for a long time.
He regained consciousness when the intense light of the sunset flooded the room.
Varkas raised his eyelids, which were stiff like untanned hide, and slowly examined the red-tinted room with clouded eyes.
For a moment, he could not even process where he was.
After several minutes passed, the gears of his halted thoughts began to move with difficulty.
“… How long have I been unconscious?”
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