Chapter 192
For two years, from the age of fourteen to sixteen, Apathy lived the same routine every single day. He went to school, sat in the very last row, spoke only when a teacher asked him a question, and returned to a place he never called home. There was no one waiting for him there, only damp walls, a leaking ceiling, and the reflection of his own triangular head in a cracked mirror every morning before he left. He often wondered whether that strange shape would remain with him for the rest of his life, whether there was not a single place in this bleak world that could accept something so unusual.
Then, one day at the beginning of a new school year, when Apathy had just turned sixteen and had accepted that his life would forever be spent in the corners of classrooms and along the forgotten edges of schoolyards untouched by laughter and companionship, a new girl entered his class.
She did not walk with hesitation, but with confidence, her head held high and her eyes unwavering, as though she were not stepping into a room filled with Satanist children eager to mock her, but onto a stage whose audience was unworthy of watching.
Her hair was black, straight, and long enough to fall past her shoulders. On her forehead was something unusual, not a tattoo, but something more like a scar shaped like a broken wing, a wing that would never fly again.
"My name is Saelindra," she said when the teacher invited her to introduce herself.
Her voice did not sound like that of an ordinary girl her age. It was neither shrill nor timid, but deep, as deep as a bottomless well, as deep as a secret she would never reveal to anyone.
"I am a Xajuriosta, a Fallen Angel. Or a Holy Being, if that's what you prefer to call me. I was cast out because I refused to obey the command of the One Cursed to bring rebellion into the world of the Satanists. Now, I'm no different from any of you. I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to study and doesn't want to die."
Silence filled the classroom for three seconds, three seconds that felt like three years to Apathy, who watched her from the back corner with eyes that suddenly no longer felt empty.
Then, like a dam collapsing, laughter erupted from every direction, loud and merciless, accompanied by words sharper than rusted nails.
"A fallen angel? In our class? Seriously? Aren't you ashamed?"
"What a pathetic excuse for a holy being!"
"Go back to your miserable Heaven!"
Even the teacher standing at the front of the room merely smiled faintly instead of stopping them, because in the world of the Satanists, mocking Angels or Holy Beings was considered perfectly acceptable entertainment, forbidden by no rule so long as it did not interrupt the lesson.
The days that followed were no kinder to the Xajuriosta.
She sat alone by the window. No one approached her. No one spoke to her. No one even dared touch her notebook, fearing they might somehow be tainted by the disgrace of a "traitor" whom even the greatest enemy of the Satanists, the One Cursed, no longer wanted.
From another corner of the classroom, Apathy, who for the past two years had never been spoken to by anyone and had grown accustomed to the suffocating silence, quietly observed the girl from behind a pile of history books about exorcism that he had never truly bothered to read.
There was something in her eyes. It was not despair.
It was not anger.
It was something calmer, colder, something that said she had already accepted her fate as someone cast aside, that she would never beg to be accepted, that she would continue standing on her own feet no matter how violently the ground beneath them continued to shake.
Then one afternoon, when the lunch break arrived and the classroom was empty because everyone had gone either to the cafeteria or outside to continue their mockery in a more open space, Apathy found himself standing beside Saelindra's desk without remembering how he had gotten there.
His mouth opened before his mind had even decided what he wanted to say.
"Y... you're not alone, you know," he said.
His voice came out hoarse, unused to speaking with someone who would not mock him.
Saelindra raised her head.
Her expression was not surprised, only calm, as still as the surface of water untouched by ripples.
She looked at Apathy, at his triangular head, the serrated edges surrounding it, his thin and awkward frame, and for several long seconds she said nothing.
She simply looked at him with eyes that seemed to read something invisible to everyone else.
"I don't need comforting," she finally replied.
Her tone was cold, but not with the kind of coldness that cuts.
It was the coldness of someone protecting herself, the kind that quietly admitted she no longer had the strength to hope.
Apathy drew a breath.
It felt as though he were pulling barbed wire from inside his chest.
Yet he did not step back.
He did not retreat to the safe corner where he had spent most of his life.
For the first time, he had met someone stranger than himself, someone rejected by her own world, someone who had nowhere left to call home.
"I'm not trying to comfort you," he answered.
This time, his voice was steadier, more complete, like a stone that had finally found its place after rolling aimlessly for far too long.
"I'm only saying that you're not alone. Because I... I've always been alone too. I know what it feels like. But I endured. Not because I'm strong, but because I believe that one day, all of this will mean something. That this loneliness will teach us things that crowds never could."
He paused, swallowing against the bitterness that clung to his dry throat.
Then the words came, words he had never planned to say, words that rose from the deepest place within his heart, a place he had kept locked away for years.
"Sometimes, Saelindra, we have to stand firm in what we believe. Not because we want to, but because if we don't, no one will believe in anything anymore."
Four years passed after that meeting in the empty classroom, four years that transformed Apathy from a boy with a triangular head who could only remain silent in the corner into someone who slowly began to believe that being different was not a curse, but simply another form of courage, the courage to continue existing.
Together with Saelindra, he learned that the loneliness he had carried for so many years was not a wall separating him from the world, but a space that allowed him to hear voices no one else could hear.
They sat side by side in the back corner of the classroom, sharing notebooks that no one else's hands had ever touched, talking about the smallest things.
They talked about the rain that never seemed to end during the rainy season, about the mist covering the narrow paths leading to their homes, and about what it felt like to be something unwanted by every world, she as a Fallen Angel, and Apathy as a creature with an unnatural head.
"You know, Apathy," Saelindra said one afternoon as she gazed at the same gray sky she saw every day.
"Back in the Heavenly Realm, I was taught that light was everything. But here, in this dark world of the Satanists, I've learned that even shadows have stories just as beautiful."
To be continued...