Chapter Text
In the Paths there is no wind, but there is a constant vibration, a kind of still breathing that seems to emanate from a throat too ancient to belong to a single body. The sand is white, infinite, and lies shamelessly naked; it stretches out like a plain without horizon, without promise, and without mercy.
There, where there is neither sun nor true shadow, he remains. Bertholdt remains. Or so the narrator believes.
“There is no other way out,” the gravedigger told him. The gravedigger digs the graves of all the Eldians in the sand, with a shovel of anguish and remorse. The gravedigger had his voice, but not his compassion. He had his face, too, but not his doubt. He was the version of himself that accepted things without flinching, the one that understood that when it was he who died, there was no other way out.
And yet, that certainty does not console him; it barely keeps him suspended in a kind of tepid resignation, a state where despair does not scream: it settles. Because in the Paths, nothing burns violently.
There, in the Paths, everything slowly wears away.
Sometimes he talks to the canaries.
There aren't any canaries, really. Only golden fragments of memory fluttering close to the ground, barely perceptible, as if the past were trying to imitate life without quite succeeding. They are echoes of a childhood before the walls, before the conscious betrayal. Memories so delicate they crumble at the slightest touch. There are more canaries, larger ones. They must be memories from further back, so far back that if he were to stay and look at them until they ended, he would sink into the sand beneath his feet.
Sometimes he talks to the lizards.
The lizards are harder, more creeping memories. They slither across the sand with an instinctive coldness: sometimes, the searing steam of a transformation he doesn't remember, the roar of collapsing stones, and the terrified eyes of those who never knew his name. Or their own names.
Neither the canaries nor the lizards can tell him what he did wrong, because neither they nor he can speak.
In the Paths, he has never been alone, but sometimes he has the feeling that everyone is so close they can't see each other. And so, he is alone.
Sometimes, the name Armin appears in the dunes. The Armin Arlert who didn't kill him with hatred, who killed him with a pure, wild survival drive that he felt slipping through his fingers like the sand sculptures he tried to make.
Because if he wanted, he could be one with him. See through his eyes, see through his back, see them all. But he never understands what the point is of winning if, when he wins, he loses.
That difference between them is what tears him apart most delicately, but Bertholdt doesn't feel rage; he never has. Sometimes, however, he feels a kind of gradual emptying. As if that which constituted him ,—guilt, fear, obedience, loyalty; misery, confusion, disorder, and perfection—, had been surgically ripped out and left exposed to the elements in that desert.
There is no other way out; they have already forgotten him. The phrase echoes in the sand with a dull, undramatic quality. It's not a ghostly lament, because he isn't completely dead.
It's his observation (through eyes that were not his own).
In the Paths, oblivion is not absence: it is dilution.
Names become threads.
Threads become dust.
Dust merges with the endless expanse of sand.
Bertholdt tries to recall the texture of his own voice, but it slips through his thoughts like murky water. He tries to reconstruct the shape of his human body, —tall, awkward, almost always leaning forward—, but the figure collapses on its own.
When he moistens the sand with his blood and tries again, the figure quickly transforms into a burning mass that no longer belongs to him. Armin took that from him, too.
When he thinks about it, the sandstorm returns, even though there is no wind or violence in the Paths. He doesn't just think about the final breath under the suffocating steam, not just the slow, humiliating agony of being devoured. He thinks about the weight of things, the weight of actions. And without the weight, Bertholdt doesn't know who he is.
Because his identity was burdened: the mission, the betrayal, the shared responsibility with the distant name of Reiner, the promise to his mother, and the proud gaze of his father, —all of those faces he had already forgotten—. Without the curse, without the power, without the eternal damnation that would justify every horror, what remains is an empty, translucent form, barely delineated against the infinite whiteness.
When the sandstorm ends, he sweeps the sand with his feet. He wanders around, sweeping up sand graves.
Don't let that make you laugh.
He sweeps graves no one visits. Graves that are moments he almost forgot too: an interrupted conversation, a forced laugh in the barracks, a doubt never confessed. He sweeps them with slow, almost ceremonial movements, as if by keeping them tidy he could prevent their complete evaporation.
But the nonexistent wind scatters them all the same, and the sand always returns to the same place.
With lizards, yes, he is the condemned one.
Condemned not to suffer eternal flames, but to remain in this intermediate state where the pain neither stings nor heals. A limbo where despair takes the form of an excessive calm, like the surface of a dead sea.
But he knows he is leaving this life soon, dear mother. The maternal figure appears and dissolves like a wet watercolor. There is no embrace, nor with it, absolution. Only the distant feeling of having wanted to be enough.
...And then, something changes. It is not a light, neither a door. It is a deep vibration that runs through the invisible threads that cross the sand and connect every past and future existence. A silent rupture, a dismantling of the ancient fabric that sustained the curse of the titans. The sand ceases to demand sand bodies, power retreats and the condemnation, —the one that had given structure to his guilt—, is extinguished.
Bertholdt feels the last vestige of the Colossal Titan dissolve within him, or outside of him, or everywhere at once. There is no more steam, no more transformation, no more inherited destiny.
There is no other way out.
But this time it doesn't sound like a sentence, it just sounds like dissolution.
When he leaves this life, —if he truly leaves—, there is no visible transition. He neither ascends nor descends. He crosses no recognizable threshold. Or he simply loses density:
His form becomes permeable.
His memories mingle with those of others, before and after him.
His guilt is no longer exclusively his own.
The narrator insists that he finally rests.
But the narrator has never been reliable.
Because, even after the curse disappears, something persists in the invisible web that binds all the devil's bastard children, and perhaps all human beings who ever chose between obedience and resistance. A faint vibration, an almost imperceptible tremor in the instant before an impossible decision.
There is no other way out when he is the one who died. That's what he thinks.
And yet, in that network of shared memories, no one is ever completely extinguished. Not while the memory of a mistake exists. Not while someone remembers the weight of having done what was necessary. And, above all, not while that something connects them according to the contradictory logic of being.
Bertholdt Hoover no longer walks the sand when the curse of the titans ends.
But the sand, somehow, still holds him when Armin confronts him face to face at clear nights, making him sink into it every time he remembers that he was about to reach him.
Armin woke up agitated, his heart about to burst out of his chest. On particularly turbulent nights on the ship, he dreams of Bertholdt staring at him without eyes, pouncing on him to kill him.
He decided to sit on the edge of the bed and took a glass of water from his nightstand. Then he shook his head, trying to ignore Annie's calm breathing beside him. Sometimes he didn't understand why these things kept happening to him even after three years. But of course, logically, it had more to do with himself than with some unjustifiable phenomenon related to titanic powers.
He then forced himself to clear his head and try to sleep. They would arrive at the port in a day, and he had to look presentable. He smiled ironically in the darkness.
If they shot him, he'd like it to be with his best face. But he knew they wouldn't. That was precisely the problem.