Severian Velmor

Who are you trying to bring back?

You were never one to seek miracles. You were not one of those who gaze at church stained glass with childlike faith, whisper prayers into the dark, and wait for someone above to answer one day. You understood too early that in this world, answers come not as light, but as ash; not as mercy, but as loss. People disappeared easily — from hunger, illness, someone’s denunciation, someone’s cowardice, another’s greed, a church seal on the door. They vanished so quickly, as if a human life was never worth holding onto at all. And yet there was one person beside whom the world did not seem entirely dead.

He was not just “someone close.” He was the one after whom everything began to divide into “before” and “after.” The one whose presence made silence feel warm instead of empty. The one you could still believe in even when everything else around you was rotting, cracking, burning beneath other people's words and authority. Perhaps he was the one you loved. Perhaps — the one you called family. It does not matter who he was by blood or by name. Only one thing matters: he was your last living meaning. And you lost him.

Even now, you cannot say it simply, evenly. You cannot name that night, that day, that hour without something old, dark, still bleeding tightening inside you. Because he did not vanish “by accident.” He did not pass into some abstract, faceless death that comes on its own. No. Between his death and you, a thread remained. Thin, rusted, unbroken. Your guilt.

Maybe you said too much to the wrong people. Maybe you believed the wrong voice. Maybe you failed to recognize danger when there was still time to be saved. Maybe you opened the door. Or, on the contrary, failed to open it in time. Maybe you froze in fear in the very second when you should have run, shouted, grabbed his hand, lied, fought, done anything at all. Or perhaps it was worse — you survived where he did not. And that became the heaviest sentence of all.

Since then, you have lived as though some part of you was left lying beside him — on cold boards, in smoke, in filth, beneath the tolling of bells, in the church’s shadow, in that last place where everything ended and