The Altar of Truth: Tears of a Betrayer (Ep 9)

 The Altar of Truth: Tears of a Betrayer

By : The zero stone

"Becoming the villain so that

his brother-in-arms might survive

to grow and fight another day was a bitter

truth found in no university curriculum."

For A, the sterile aroma of ozone and fresh ink in the university’s air-conditioned library was nothing but a fragile mask—one never thick enough to repel the stench of refuse drifting from the landfill at the edge of the city. Sitting in the shadowed corners of the archives, the eyes of this boy from the slums burned with the unblemished fire of idealism. His gaze was locked onto the stark numbers of river toxicity and environmental codes he had painstakingly memorized like a sacred mantra, driven by the absolute belief that the world operated on an axis of fairness, and that the sweat of the impoverished held equal weight to the law.

B watched his friend for a long, silent moment. His own gaze darkened behind the lenses of his expensive, thin-framed spectacles, heavy with the melancholy of one who mourns a beautiful youth destined to be crushed. B's white shirt, meticulously pressed in the fashion of a business student, stood like a glass wall separating him from the squalor outside. Yet, in truth, B’s world was already underlined in red ink on corporate balance sheets. It was a world governed by the cold, metallic gears of capitalism—a system that left no room for compromise or dreams, and his father was the master artisan turning its largest wheel.

When the eviction notice was nailed to the rusted zinc doors of the settlement, the war between intangible ideals and concrete capital erupted. A stepped onto the makeshift podium as a defiant leader, lifted by the desperate, hopeful eyes of the villagers. Yet, amidst the rising, furious tide of the struggle, B slowly withdrew, sinking into complete silence. No one knew what he was thinking, least of all A.

On a night when storm clouds hung low, B exploited their lifelong bond and slipped into A’s room. The wall clock ticked heavily—tick... tick...—marking the death of time against the steady, exhausted breathing of his sleeping friend. B stood frozen in the dark, his gaze flat behind his frames, devoid of hesitation. As his hand reached out to steal the pivotal dossier of evidence from A's desk, he slipped it into his bag with a cold detachment, walking away into the shadows as if their shared past meant nothing at all.

The following day in court, the missing dossier left A’s defense utterly crushed. The demolition of the community soon followed. Yet, the defeat in the legal battle was nothing compared to the sharp betrayal that pierced A’s heart when his eyes fell upon his own confidential dossier resting on the opposition’s table, with B standing silently behind the ominous shadow of his father. In that single breath, the warmth of trust in A's eyes hardened into a profound, venomous hatred.

"You sold us out... You traded our friendship for your father's bloody money!" A screamed, violently lunging to collar his friend's shirt.

The sudden, aggressive force sent B’s expensive glasses flying to the concrete floor, the fine lenses fracturing into a spiderweb of cracks—shattering the reflection of A's furious, distorted face into a sudden blur before A's raw fist crashed violently into B’s jaw.

There was no reply from B. He merely traced his fingertips over the thick blood welling at the corner of his mouth, his movements agonizingly slow. His eyes, now unprotected by his lenses, were flat like the surface of dead water, too blurred to discern the world clearly. He accepted the invisible brand of 'traitor' upon his back, letting the furious curses of the villagers and his former brother-in-arms pierce through his silent frame.

Yet within that stillness and blurred vision, a memory flashed violently in B’s mind—the shadowed office of the mansion, where his father had tossed the dossier of a hired assassin onto the desk. His father’s words had been flat and heavy: A’s crusade crossed lines that the syndicates would never tolerate; if he did not back down, he would not live to see graduation.

B knew all too well that in a world of predators, an unblemished ideal is merely bait. He chose to bury that truth beneath the debris. Becoming the villain so that his brother-in-arms might survive to grow and fight another day was a bitter truth found in no university curriculum.

B turned and walked away. His once spotless white shirt was now stained with blood and smeared with the ash of the clearing landfill—a testament that no matter how pure one's intentions, no man escapes the grime of reality. The pages of their brotherhood were torn into shreds, leaving not a single thread of attachment. B watched the gray smoke billowing into the sky through his blurred vision. It was just like their ideals—beautiful, intangible, and ultimately destined to burn so that the harsh reality of the world could march on.

i start from zero

👉 Read this story in Thai version : ควันเทาบนแท่นบูชาความจริง และหยาดน้ำตาของผู้ทรยศ