The chamber emptied after the ritual, but the air still quivered with echoes. Ashen light spilled through fractures in the walls, pale and cold, as if the very architecture bore witness to the violation I had seen. And there, at the heart of the silence, stood Wind.
She did not look triumphant. She looked inevitable.
The Confrontation
I stepped forward, every muscle straining against the weight of what I had witnessed. The boy’s hollow eyes haunted me, his silence echoing louder than any scream.
Wind turned, her gaze meeting mine. There was no malice in her expression—only conviction, a stillness sharpened into resolve.
“You doubt,” she said softly. Her words fell like the hush before a storm. “You saw what liberation means, yet you resist it.”
My voice, roughened by dread, broke the stillness: “That child is no longer himself. You call it freedom, but I saw an erasure. Not of pain—but of being.”
Wind’s Argument
Wind raised a hand, her fingers brushing the air as though sculpting invisible shapes.
“Pain is the root of all chains,” she replied. “It is memory that gives birth to grief, to rage, to endless cycles of violence. Erase it, and the wound is closed. Erase enough, and the world itself can breathe again. Tell me, is that not mercy?”
Her eyes shimmered with the clarity of a prophet. Around us, her followers watched in silence, as if this moment itself were a sacred rite.
“Why should we preserve scars?” Wind continued. “They define nothing but suffering. To cleanse reality is not cruelty. It is love—love great enough to break the wheel of repetition.”
The Father’s Response
I shook my head, though part of me trembled at her logic.
“Scars are not chains. They are marks of survival. A life without memory is not a life—it is emptiness draped in flesh. You promise peace, but peace without self is nothing but oblivion. Without memory, we are shadows. Without history, we are dust on the wind.”
My words echoed into the chamber, and for a fleeting moment I thought I saw hesitation flicker in the eyes of some who listened.
Wind’s lips curved, not in anger but in pity. “You cling to suffering as if it is sacred. You mistake the cage for freedom. Tell me, then—if the loop truly binds us, is not memory the very chain that keeps us bound?”
The Silence Between Words
The chamber fell still. Our voices had collided, but no resolution followed. Between us stretched not victory, but fracture.
I looked at Wind and saw not a tyrant, but a believer—someone who would burn the world to cleanse it, convinced the fire was mercy.
And perhaps that was what unsettled me most: she was not entirely wrong. Pain did come from memory. Grief did root itself in remembrance. But to erase it all? To hollow out identity until nothing remained but a shell?
My silence became my shield. Yet in that silence, seeds of doubt were sown—not only in her followers, but within myself.
The Unfinished Debate
Wind turned away at last, her voice low but unwavering.
“Our dialogue is not ended. In time, even you will see the truth. Liberation is not loss—it is return. The Origin waits.”
Her words lingered in the stillness, a promise and a threat entwined.
And I, standing amid the hollow echoes of erased memory, felt the fracture widening. Between freedom and identity, between mercy and annihilation, between what we were and what she sought to create.
The dialogue in silence had not resolved anything, but it had changed everything.
