My Roommate is a Non-Human | Chapter 7 | A Heart for Eternity | Novela.app

Chapter 8 - A Heart for Eternity I pressed my finger against my lower left rib, the tip digging into the yielding flesh. With a slow, deliberate motion, I began to tear the skin apart. This was not the first time I had felt the bite of a blade or the sting of a wound, but because I was the one guiding the destruction, the agony was exquisite, blooming like a dark flower across my chest. Every nerve ending screamed in protest, a cacophony of fire that threatened to drown out my very thoughts. "Is love... nothing more than pain?" I whispered to the void, my voice trembling. I reached deeper, my hand plunging into the wet heat of bone and blood. I pushed upward, past the jagged edges of my own ribs, until my fingers brushed against something rhythmic and vital. There it was—my heart, still pulsing with a frantic, desperate life. I curled my fingers around it, feeling the wet thrum of it against my palm. It was a fragile thing, a small engine of muscle and blood that had carried the weight of a soul for far too long. "Is love the sound of two hearts beating in unison?" With a guttural cry, I tightened my grip and wrenched it free. The world fractured. A torrent of crimson spilled over my hands, hot and slick, and for a moment, the sheer force of the trauma caused time itself to stutter. The Damocles sword that had been suspended above my head, poised to sever my thread of existence, seemed to freeze mid-fall. In that suspended second, the void in my chest—now empty and cold—was suddenly flooded. It wasn't blood that filled me, but a tide of memories spanning billions of years. They rushed in with the force of a breaking dam, vivid and overwhelming. I saw us clearly now. We were sitting within the sun-drenched colonnades of the palace at Abydos, watching the sunrise ignite the surface of the Nile into a ribbon of molten gold. I could smell the silt and the lotus blossoms on the breeze. Then, the scene shifted; we were travelers under the bruised skies of the Fertile Crescent, the haunting melody of a flute guiding us through a season of relentless, tyrannical rains. I felt the biting chill of forty-nine nights spent in the depths of a Nordic black forest, where the only light came from the pale moon and the steady, focused movement of your hands as you carved a tiny wooden doll. There were so many lives, so many moments of quiet tenderness and shared silence. We had been everything to each other across the eons, and yet, as I stood on the precipice of death, I realized with a pang of sorrow that I didn't have enough time to relive them all. I couldn't go back. Struggling against the encroaching numbness in my limbs, I pressed the still-warm heart into the stone recess of the altar. "Is love sacrifice?" I asked him, though I knew he could not answer. He remained silent, a shadow in the periphery of my fading vision. "It’s too much..." I gasped, my strength failing. "I haven't even begun to understand it, and yet the pain is already more than I can bear." I gripped the edges of the altar, my senses beginning to drift. Through the haze, I saw Liu Wukong lying at my feet. A strange, transparent barrier seemed to exist between us, a thin veil separating the dying from the eternal. I reached out, my trembling fingers yearning to touch his face one last time, but my body was already beginning to dissolve. A blinding, magnificent gold light erupted from the altar, growing more brilliant and majestic by the second. It was a light that promised restoration, a light that heralded the return of a god, but it blurred his features until he was nothing more than a silhouette of radiance. "I promise," I whispered into the light, "it won't hurt like this anymore." With the last of my will, I gathered the burden of our shared trauma and the weight of those agonizing centuries. I would take them with me. I would return the gift of forgetting to him, leaving him whole and unburdened. Thank you, I thought as the darkness finally claimed me, for holding onto that gentleness for ten million centuries. ***