The Keeper of Silence

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I do not choose to take lives, but I carry their silence within me!

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   I have become the blade that knows no mercy… instead, I know the dance of blood and the whispers of death, which fade into a deafening silence—a warm noise as blood flows into a chasm of time. The Knife of Silence… that is what he called me, the one who listens to me every night, who cleanses me of the thoughts of the world and plunges me deeper into the despair of the macabre.

   I was born in flames and struck by the hammer, my steel carrying within it an implacable destiny. I was supposed to be a mere object, a tool meant to bring order to the chaos of daily life. And each night that passed, I lay on a shelf in a forgotten store, a relic of a bygone time, where light barely pierced through, as if the sun refused to touch that old, tired building. Once, the store had white walls, but the imprint of time covered them with a thick layer of mold and dust, and the ceiling, cracked and stained, seemed ready to collapse at any moment. The shelves had become the prey of termites, often empty and sorrowful, creaking at every touch of the air. A flickering bulb barely held off the darkness, swaying gently in an invisible breeze.

   The smell was that of forgotten things, of wet wood and years of neglect. Everything felt as though time itself had retreated from that place, leaving it in a state of slow, painful decay. I was a prisoner, just like the other objects, abandoning any hope of escape.

   The shopkeeper was merely a shadow of a man, old and bowed under the weight of his years. Always behind the counter, on a creaky chair, with a gaze lost somewhere far away in a vanished world. He emanated the loneliness of the place, and his soul was weighed down by the burden of the years that had passed. His face was etched with deep wrinkles, and his eyes were dim, covered by a veil of exhaustion and resignation. It seemed as if he had forgotten how to speak, for he rarely uttered a word, and those who entered the store often looked at him with either pity or disgust.

   His gnarled, trembling hands moved slowly, endlessly rearranging the same useless objects day after day. A ritual that never ended, creating a comforting routine. For both him and me, a knife like any other, lying on a forgotten shelf. When he looked at me, it seemed as though he saw me as just another object, yet in his quiet, sad way, I believe he understood me. We were both prisoners of that forgotten place, condemned to fade away without leaving any trace.

   In that store, time did not pass, there were no dreams, no hopes, only a pressing despair and an endless wait. But one moonless night, everything changed. Heavy footsteps pierced the oppressive silence of the store, interrupting the rhythm of its dead eternity. His silent entrance became a storm, tearing through the stifling air. I felt my blade tremble lightly, anticipating something I could not yet understand.

   His empty gaze found me immediately, as if he knew I was there, waiting to be chosen. I knew he was different from the others who came and went, people who ignored the suffocating silence of the place, rushing after the illusions of life. He moved slowly, with cold determination. An invisible attraction that    I felt like a deepening tension. He reached out, and his cold, long fingers gripped my handle with a terrifying familiarity. He freed me from the cage of the dusty shelf, and as he lifted me, a shiver ran through my blade—not fear, but a shiver of “home” and anticipation. I was no longer a mere object, a victim of a numbed existence. I had become alive, ready to plunge into the fatal dance of fate.

   His gaze, reflected in the mirror of my soul, was devoid of emotion, with a darkness that seemed to swallow everything. He had a face that looked as though it had been pulled from the darkest nightmares, marked by deep shadows. We left into the cold night, he with his heavy steps, and I, silent and motionless, yet more alive than ever. I could have said that I had known my destiny in that instant, but his life thread had already been knotted by Lachesis, and our fates were entwined in a macabre weave.

   The journey to his home felt like a descent into a nightmare, a slow fall into a world where time and space seemed suspended. The night air was dense, oppressive, soaked with whispers that he spoke like a creed, a prayer to the ghosts of the past. The streets were abandoned, weighed down by the exhaustion of a world that no longer cared if it trampled over its own end. Each shadow cast by pale lanterns distorted on the pavement, following us. The wind shook the dried leaves of the trees and brought them into our path, hissing through the corners of old buildings, which seemed to sigh in the night’s silence.

   The sense of unease grew stronger, and the buildings gradually shed the beauty of the sun, their windows covered only by dust and cobwebs, watching us with hollow eyes like mute witnesses. From time to time, the distant barking of a stray dog could be heard, but the sound quickly faded, swallowed by the vast silence surrounding us. The abandoned factory glared at us with disdain from its dead shell.       His house was nothing but a reflection of his soul: a ruin, a place where nothing living remained, only broken memories and a deafening silence that urged any soul towards oblivion.

   In front of his house lay a darkness that snuffed out any trace of life. Cerberus, a lion with hollow eyes and a stone mane, shredded by rust, stood as a guardian of the underworld, foretelling that anyone who entered there would not leave alive. The door creaked open with a strong, sinister sound—like a groan from the bowels of the earth. He did not stop. He kept walking until he reached an almost empty room—a table in the corner and a half-burnt candle. That was all. I sensed his agitation, though not nervousness, and I felt him gently place me on the table. I had become a sacred object. Laughing, he sat on the floor and pulled a chest from beneath the table, from which he took out his trophies: a ring stained with rust, an old brooch, a shawl torn and stained with deep marks of despair and blood. He arranged them before me on the table, with obsessive precision, as if presenting them to an old friend. He remembered every name, every face, every voice. Suddenly, his obsessive laughter turned into screams at the memories that haunted him.

“They're not real, they're not real… or maybe they are?”

Doubt consumed his mind, and I, his trusted blade, was always close by. Sometimes he grasped my handle, but his touch would suddenly become a caress.

“Try again… set yourself free!”

I was seen as the final solution when he lifted me and clenched me, and I could feel the thrill of anticipation. I realized that every murder he committed was just a desperate attempt to sever any ties with those voices, to lock them away in Tartarus forever. But he would always leave me back on the table.

“They know, they see, they are coming for you.”

His screams seemed to strike the walls, scratched with various words, each more confusing than the last:“We are one,” “We all die at some point”were the most common. The voices echoed like distorted reverberations, feeding his paranoia. I saw him caught between fantasy and reality, from which he began to detach more and more.

“Why don't they disappear? Why are they still here?”

He looked at me with despair in moments of lucidity, when he remembered that he had once been an ordinary man, when the voices did not follow him at every step, when he wasn’t a prisoner of his own mind. He remembered fragments—a window open to a warm room, the faces of loved ones: his wife in her floral robe, his child babbling, filling his heart with happiness, friends who shared laughter and stories from the past. These were rare moments of clarity when he recalled what it was like to be whole, without the chaos in his mind. He remembered how the sun used to stream through the window, and warmth would envelop him, bringing a peace he now desperately sought. But suddenly, his world would crumble. The faces full of joy would become stained with blood, and the voices would start gnawing at him, word by word. Before me, crouched on the floor, he whispered, like a prayer to a God who had abandoned him. The cold shadows of the past became more aggressive, and I could hear them more and more clearly. The rusty ring belonged to his wife, whom one of the voices had taken from him with the promise of release. That night, he believed that if he ended her suffering, all the madness would cease.

“You saw her, didn’t you? How the blood trickled down her angelic face? How her voice faded away? But the others continued!”

That night, he fell prey to the worst illusion—that he would find peace. But instead of silence, the voices multiplied. Reality and fantasy intertwined, and I, a knife, was the silent witness to his agony.

He lifted me from the table and gripped me with a fury born from despair. The voices grew stronger, and another face took shape in his eyes. Another ghost from the past, another victim who wore the old, time-scorched brooch. She had become familiar to him, and he began to weep and beg for forgiveness. But the voice of the face began to scream and curse him, and from its eyes flowed streams of bloody tears.

“You will never escape! We are part of you! We are all that you have left!”

The image seemed to swell before him, filling the entire room with its presence.

“There is no forgiveness for you!”

He trembled, crushed by memories and the weight of his deeds. Clutching me tighter, he knew that I was his only remaining solution. Suddenly, the woman’s face vanished, but in the other corner of the room, it transformed into a crib from which came the wailing of a child. A cry of desperation that had never had the chance to turn into words. The search for his mother had found no path to life but to death. Deafened by voices, another knife had found its way into his heart! The sound became wrenching, like the lament of a life wasted in time.

His gaze, fixed on me, turned towards that shadow of the past.

“My child… please, forgive me! I never meant to hurt you… I never meant to lose you!”

The bloodstained shawl was, in fact, a swaddling cloth for the one who was supposed to be his child. The objects were not trophies but his link to reality. A harsh reminder of the voices, which had been reduced to mystifying silence. But in that crib, the voices grew louder, soaked with a mix of fury and despair, and the grip in which he held me became suffocating, the desire to end it all turning into a clear goal. He sought release desperately, and I became the object of his tragic ending. Before my blade unfolded an absurd theater in which the agony of his crimes was unstoppable, where he was a mere secondary character.

The dance of reality and illusion grew more and more frantic, for his mind was caught in a whirlwind of memories and hallucinations. The chorus of the underworld pushed him towards the edge of the abyss.

Suddenly, everything became quiet. The voices abruptly fell silent, and the whole world seemed to slow down. I could no longer find a trace of his crimes’ agony or the despair of the voices in his mind. It was just him, with a lost gaze. Before him, the air took the form of a beautiful woman, a young girl dressed in a black gown, with skin white as milk and black hair that seemed to foretell the end. She took the hand in which he held me and guided me towards his chest, battered by the burden of a life born from chaos. The tip of my blade pierced his skin, and she, Atropos, pushed me gently. The final moment felt like the prelude to his release.

The woman with the face of death looked at him with a cold tenderness, a caress that promised peace, not punishment.

“You know what you have to do… At last, you will be free!”

I saw him as he sought peace, and I was the magical object that paved his way into the void.

I felt his body gradually give way, as I wrapped myself in his warm blood. Each beat of his heart became an embrace and turned into a distant echo, like a final breath. His eyes looked at me, and with a sad smile, his face turned towards the woman who brought him peace.

“Forgiveness… forgiveness…”

He whispered those words not only for those he had lost but for himself, for the mistakes that had marked his existence. In that moment, in that final look, I felt how his pain and despair transformed into the deep peace he had sought for so long.

The silence was now complete, without the voices that tormented him, without the ghosts of the past that gnawed at his mind. I, the Knife of Silence, had been the quiet witness to his fall, and along with his last breath, I felt that he had been freed from the cycle of suffering.

In that silent room, everything became still. For me, the burden of carrying the peace of those who had been freed remains. I do not take lives, but I carry their silence within me, and now I carry his as well. My cold gleam, clothed in blood, is the silent witness to his end. This is the burden I will always carry within me until someone else finds me and takes me from a forgotten shelf, and I will dance again in the light of shadows.

For him, it was all over, but for me, the dance continues, wrapped in that silence, carrying the peace that only death can bring.