Chapter 194: You See The Light of The Dead

With the final words from that unknown presence still lingering around him, Elias could feel that the pressure on his shoulders had not relented, and he wondered how deep into the earth he was being pushed.

He knew that when he was about to receive his Pillar of Sorrow inside the Fragment, he had been pushed deep into the earth, but that time he had been a bit, um, indisposed, most would even call him dead, and could not tell how deeply he had fallen.

This time it was no different, he had awareness, but there was complete darkness around him, and while inside the water, it was difficult for him to tell even the time or the speed of his descent, and his awareness was no longer as sharp due to the fact that he should be long dead by suffocation, but his body was no longer that of a mortal, and Elias thought that suffocating him would take days not minutes.

It was then that he saw a faint light below him, and in this total darkness, such a light was incredibly striking. The moment he saw the light, it was as if the light became aware of him and began coming closer to him because it was getting brighter and more defined.

The light came close to him and slowly dimmed, revealing that it was a woman’s face, her mouth slightly open, and her eyes were blank, and then he later saw the rest of her corpse.

She was naked, and from the mark he saw on her chest, she had been stabbed multiple times, which must have led to her death.

He did not know this woman, but he felt a vague connection to her, as well as a sense of pain and grief, as well as a sort of memory where she was reaching for her child and wishing that he could close his eyes and not see her shameful end.

Elias was confused by this feeling and vague memory, and he reached for her, but his hand passed through her face like smoke, and she was gone.

’What the hell was that?’

He checked his memory repeatedly, but he could not remember seeing a woman like this before. Maybe he had met her on the street, but for him to confirm such a thing, it would take him days, if not weeks, to go through his memories, and he was not sure he had that sort of time.

Elias was still deliberating on this strange experience when another light appeared, and soon it resolved into the face of a boy around seven years old with his mouth open wide in a scream.

This was a face he recognized, as it came from one of Josef’s victims. To confirm his death, Elias had found his shallow grave and dug it out, and the face of this child had always remained with him, just like all the faces of the dead he had seen, including the ones he made himself.

However, at this moment, Elias felt the terror of this child, his loneliness as if at the last moment of his life, he had been calling for his mama and papa, before he was brutally butchered like an animal.

Elias flinched; the feeling that entered his heart was so potent that he knew that he could never have felt such a thing, and what he had felt could only come from the panicking mind of a child.

He had barely come to terms with this feeling when the body of the child faded, and another took its place, a young girl, and then an old woman, and then a dashing youth wearing a black robe, and then…

More bodies were coming faster and faster, and fragments of memories were pouring into his mind. Some of the bodies were recognizable as he had killed those, but most of them were strangers, and usually their faces were always twisted in agony, and their memories… Elias shuddered. So much pain, so much sorrow.

The deep voice that had given him the choice at the beginning appeared around him,

“This is what you carry, little vessel. This is what you have always carried. Every life you have taken, every life you could not save, every life that ended so yours could continue. They are part of you. They will always be part of you.”

Elias closed his eyes, gritting his teeth as the sorrow that he could not feel, the fear and the anger that were not his own, poured into his mind just as the faces of the dead pressed against his own, and they were so cold.

“You cannot silence them,”

the voice said. “You cannot push them away. You cannot kill them or seal them or consume them. They are yours. They will always be yours. The only question is whether you will let them break you.”

’Break me?… Nothing will break me, not unless I forget who I am.’

Elias opened his eyes, and they were glowing with prismatic light as if he were a conduit to all the stars in the sky.

The faces were still there, hundreds of them, thousands, an ocean of the dead surrounding him, pressing against him, waiting for him… to break.

’What sort of trials are these? When my master says this would test my mind to the limit, how could she have known that I could endure something like this? How can anyone endure something like this?’

’She does know everything about me, even things that I do not know about myself. So she must understand the weight of my experience and judge that it is enough.’

With this thought in his head, Elias’s mind grew steady as he drew upon the weight of the dead that he had been carrying for most of his life, as the Passenger’s voice that carried the echoes of the dead had stayed with him.

There was the weight of every life he had taken. He had carried them through the Fragment, through the oasis, through the crystal maze, and the forest of bones. He had carried them through death itself.

He would carry them a little longer, maybe for the rest of his life, whether that be a short or a long one.

There should be no way he should be able to speak, not at this depth, but he did.

“I cannot break, and if you want to be added to the dead in my head, you are welcome, but I have to warn you, my life may be a very short one; however, you are all dead. Do you have a choice? I will carry you all until the day I die. In my heart, there is an infinite hole, and all the sorrows in the world cannot fill it up.”

As if acknowledging his words, the bodies began to fade, and he could feel that something was being added to his body, but he could not detect what they were.

The last body faded, and light appeared below him that was different from the light of the dead, and the pressure on his shoulder suddenly disappeared, and he saw that at the bottom of the lake, resting on a pedestal of bone, was a single tear-shaped gem.

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