The distance left before touching was only a few centimeters.
And yet, those few centimeters felt impossibly far to Barış.
Deep inside Derinkuyu Underground City, the silence felt cut off from the passage of time aboveground. The ceiling was low, the walls were rough, and the carved surfaces of the stone still held the dry coldness of long years. The light reaching them from the far end of the narrow passage was weak, sinking the dog’s white fur into a shade closer to gray than pure white.
The dog did not run away.
It did not bark.
It did not come closer.
It was simply there.
Barış’s hand was still suspended in the air.
His fingertips were trembling slightly. Even when he tried to stop them himself, they would not stop. It was not because of the cold. The underground air was certainly cold, but it was not his body that was trembling. It came from somewhere deeper.
Behind the dog were three short scratches.
The same mark he had seen in Episode 50.
They did not look like marks formed naturally. Nor did they resemble graffiti left by tourists. They looked as though someone had touched the stone briefly and without hesitation, wanting to leave something behind.
Barış remembered the fragment in his pocket.
A small fragment.
Similar lines.
Broken letters.
…afa.
And the faded numbers he had seen somewhere.
/04.
They were not answers yet.
But the things that were not answers were the ones that remained most deeply inside Barış.
The air of the underground city did not move. And yet it was not completely still either. Somewhere far away, the footsteps of tourists echoed faintly. Each time the sound turned through a stone passage, its shape changed, making it impossible to tell whether someone was approaching or moving farther away.
Here, even sound lost its way.
Barış looked at the dog.
The dog was looking too.
There was nothing accusing in its eyes.
It did not seem to be waiting.
It did not seem to be asking for help.
There was only a stillness in it, as though it had known from the beginning that Barış would come this far.
“…What are you?”
His voice was quiet. It touched the stone wall and disappeared at once.
The dog did not move.
It did not answer.
That silence only tightened something in Barış’s chest.
Until now, he had always been searching for answers. What kind of man his father had been. Why his mother would not speak. What the map had shown. Why every trace of his father had been left incomplete, always missing a piece.
But now, touching the dog in front of him did not feel like moving closer to an answer about his father.
It was something more frightening.
Accepting something even while no answer came.
That was what frightened him.
Barış moved his hand a little closer.
He felt as though the dog’s fur had changed the air around his fingertips.
He still had not touched it.
But he could tell that there was the warmth of a living creature there. It was different from the stone walls. Different from the old map, the fragment, and the dried letters. Something was there, breathing now.
That unsettled Barış.
The mystery of his father had always belonged to the past.
The back of a drawer.
An old envelope.
The folds of a map.
Soil on the soles of shoes.
Scratches left in stone.
Every one of them pulled him back into the past the moment he touched it.
But this dog was different.
Though it stood beside a trace of his father, it did not belong to the past.
It was here, now.
Breathing.
Looking at him.
Barış felt as though he had heard something shift inside himself.
He had come this far searching for his father.
But if he looked only at his father, he would never be able to touch this dog.
To touch the dog, he would have to leave his father’s shadow as a shadow, at least for a moment.
That was something Barış had never done before.
Until now, every time he found something, he searched for its meaning.
Without searching for meaning, he could not remain standing.
But before Barış could ask what the dog meant, it simply existed.
Existence came before meaning.
In the darkness of the underground city, that simplicity felt overwhelmingly strong.
Barış breathed in.
He smelled stone.
Dry earth.
Ancient air.
The scent of a place where people had hidden, prayed, waited, and passed through.
From the outside, this was an underground city.
A tourist destination, a place of history, and one of Cappadocia’s famous archaeological sites.
But to Barış now, it was the point where his father’s past and his own present stood in the same place for the first time.
One of the dog’s ears moved, only slightly.
Barış’s body stiffened.
The dog still did not move.
It only lowered its face a little toward Barış’s fingertips.
It did not look as though it were telling him to touch it.
It did not look as though it were telling him that touching it was allowed.
It simply did not run away.
That was all.
That refusal to run away felt heavy to Barış.
His mother had not spoken.
His father had left nothing complete.
Deniz had become angry.
Elif’s name still belonged to a distant place.
No one had moved easily from where they stood.
But this dog had not run away.
It was not an answer.
It was not kindness either.
And yet it was more direct than any silence Barış had ever encountered.
“I…”
He began to speak, then stopped.
He did not know what he had been about to say.
He was afraid.
He wanted to know.
He wanted to touch it.
But if he touched it, he felt he might never be able to go back.
All of those feelings existed in the same place.
Barış’s hand moved closer still.
The tips of the dog’s fur were almost touching the skin of his fingers.
At that moment, a small sound came from deep underground.
It was almost too quiet to hear, like sand falling onto stone.
Barış lifted his face instinctively.
No one was in the passage ahead.
The light had not moved.
The dog had not looked back either.
Only the small hollow beneath the three scratches looked clearer than before.
It looked as though something was there.
Or perhaps he only wanted to see something there.
Barış stopped his fingertips.
Only a little farther to the dog.
He could touch it.
But he still did not.
Within that distance was his father’s name.
His mother’s silence.
Deniz’s anger.
The lines of the old map.
And something he would have to choose from now on.
The dog was not looking at Barış’s hand.
It was looking into his eyes.
As though it were not watching to see whether he would touch it, but what he would acknowledge before he did.
Barış slowly breathed out.
His fingertips were still suspended in the air.
Only a few centimeters.
But that distance was not the distance between him and the dog.
It was the distance between him and the father he still did not know.
