Chapter 1: The Heavy Silence

I had the same creaking floorboards beneath me as I woke to the distant smell of stale bread hanging in the air. The sun had not yet risen, but the light in the window was enough to wash the room in variations of gray and pale yellow. My fingers grazed the burrs of the blanket that never fully stayed on me and half-hapless moments that trailed me playfully all over the house.

Every morning felt the same. The house reeked of damp wood and dust, the walls hung with ancestral portraits that seemed to gaze down at me as I dragged myself from bed. If you can even call it a room, my room was small, really no bigger than a storage closet. The wooden walls had chipped there, flaking in spots where I had attempted to scrape off years of neglect. But it didn't matter. Nothing ever changed.

The only noise in the house, apart from the creaks of the old wood under my feet, was the muted sound of my father snoring in the next room. I had no idea when the last time he had been sober was when I'd woken up. He loomed as a vapor over the atmosphere, dense and stifling. Even when he wasn't actively yelling, he was still present, always watching, always waiting for something to break inside him.

My mother, in contrast, was… missing. She was there in the way that a ghost hangs around a house — silent, cold, distant, like she was living in another world entirely. I never quite understood her. It wasn't that she didn't care — it was that her care seemed to come with strings attached, like she was always measuring something I could never see.

I did not want to leave my bed. I didn't want to deal with the day, deal with the house, deal with my parents, deal with myself. But the sun was rising higher in the sky, and the day wasn't going to wait for me. It never did.

The wooden floor was icy to the touch of my bare feet as I stood up slowly. I got dressed fast, just the basics — a shirt that was tired-looking and pants that didn't fit exactly. It was useless to try to appear presentable. Not in this house. Not with everything falling apart around me.

I stepped into the dark hallway, a slight scent of alcohol still imbuing the air. My father started drinking again. Cheap liquor with the fetid stench of sweat and neglect. I walked past his room, where I heard the soft murmuring of his snoring, an occasional grunt or mumbled word as he dreamed in his haze. I avoided looking inside. I always avoided it.

In the kitchen, the table was strewn with leftovers from last night's dinners — empty plates, half-drunk cups of cold tea and crumbs that had never been swept away. My mother was out, yet the delicate haze of her perfume lingered, faint, but unmistakably hers. I couldn't recall the last time we had a conversation that didn't devolve into fighting or cold silence.

I began cleaning up, even though there was no actual reason to do so. The house never felt clean enough to matter. My mother's voice floated from the other room, thin and disinterested, as if she were talking to someone behind a wall.

"Alarion, clean that mess," she said, voice flat, as if it were another task to mark off a list.

I knew she didn't care how the house looked, but she cared enough to want me to do the work. She had always been concerned with control. She didn't yell or scream. She didn't need to. She had perfected the indifference, the coldness that nibbled at you until hollowed.

I laid down the broom, my gaze wandering to the window. Sunlight at this hour was feeble, trickling through the broken panes of glass and creating long shadows on the floor. Outside, the world progressed, unaware of the events unfolding inside these walls. The world hadn't been as nice to me. And I wasn't sure I wanted to contend with it not yet.

But there was nothing more to do. I knew what was coming next. The same routine. The same insults. The same silence.

Eventually my father would rise, stumbling down the stairs and into the kitchen with a bottle in one hand and his breath reeking of alcohol. He'd grunt some command at me, perhaps throw in a few barbs about how I wasn't good enough, wasn't deserving of his approval. It was always the same. I learned to expect it.

I went to the stove and warmed up some old stew that had been on it for hours. There wasn't any real love in cooking, only necessity. The consumption of food wasn't a question of pleasure; it was a question of survival.

The odor of the stew filled the room, thick and greasy, but it didn't evoke any hunger in me. And my stomach turned, not from their food but from the weight of it all. The tension in the air, the silence between my parents. The fact that nothing was ever going to be different. I felt like this was the way it was going to be, like I was going to feel this weight, like my soul would always be chained to a life that I did not want, that I could not release, and that I could not run away from.

The screech of a chair startled me. My father was awake.

I glanced toward the doorway at his bloodshot unfocused eyes. He smiled, although it wasn't a smile. It was the kind of smile you have when you know you lost something, and you're trying to make believe you didn't care.

"Breakfast," he said with a slur, wiping his mouth with his hand. "I'd go get it myself, but…" His voice faded as he settled into a chair at the table, his body sagging under the weight of his own exhaustion. His clothes were creased, liquor odor lingering on him.

I didn't say anything, I just turned back to the stove. I couldn't afford to be weak. I couldn't show him how much I hated him, how deeply resented everything about him.

He laughed darkly, his voice breaking the quiet once more. "What, not a word for your old man?" I could hear the venom lurking underneath, though, no hint of sincerity, his tone almost jocular. "Still thinking you're better than me, huh?"

I didn't respond. There was no point. His words were like water off a stone, meaningless and never worth my time.

I placed the bowl of stew in front of him. Without a word, he seized it, slurping it down like a man who hadn't eaten in days — this I knew to be false, but. He always ate. He only ever seemed to give a shit about other things. Not my future, not my dreams, not even whether I was still alive.

There was so much I could have told her. So many things I wanted to say, but they were lodged in my throat, as if there were a rock there I couldn't dislodge.

When he was done he propelled the bowl away from him and stared at me, his eyes glazed but keen enough to see through me.

"You're wasting time here," he said, barely above a whisper, almost as if he were whispering a secret to the walls. "You're not welcome here, Alarion. This place, this life — it's not for you. You can never make it out of it. No one ever does."

I didn't know what to say. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel something, anything.

Instead, I just nodded. A token gesture, barely an act of kindness, but it got him off my back.

I turned and walked out of the kitchen, letting him sit in silence, as he always did. There was nothing else to do. Nothing else to say.

I all of a sudden wanted to get out, to run as far away as I could from this place. But I knew I wouldn't. Not yet. Because no matter how much I loathed it, no matter how much I ached for escape, I was stuck here. Connected by the same blood coursing through my father's veins. Trapped in the same cold silence my mother did best.

And so I simply did what I had always done: I returned to my room, shut the door, and waited for the next day to come.

I leaned back on the edge of my bed, the silence pressing down on me like a thick, wet blanket. The walls felt like they closed in a little more each day, and I'd stopped pretending that I could escape them. There were no windows to peer out of, just the peeling plaster, the cracked floorboards underneath my feet. No escape.

I placed my fingertips over the thin crack slashing across the wall. It was the only thing in this room that had any sort of shape to it, anything that wasn't collapsing into dust. The thought of forging anything with my hands, being able to create something — anything — felt impossible. What would I shape in a place like that? What could anyone mold in this house where everything was already shattered?

I heard a faint creaking sound, like a door opening, and the shuffling of bare feet on wood. The dim light from the hall outlined the silhouette of my mother as she appeared in the doorway. She didn't really look at me. She never looked at me.

"Alarion," she said, her voice empty, but the voice had always been empty, like the sound of a voice from far-off. "I want you to clear out the garden. "My weeds are out of control."

I didn't answer right away. It was never an ask, those words; they were demands bundled up in the same cloud of indifference she ventured around with. She never looked at me, but I could feel her presence like weight. It was like she was trying to sink me, even when she wasn't actually saying anything meaningful.

As always, her eyes didn't meet mine. Her angular features, pale skin and thin lips made her a stranger rather than a mother. It was the way she carried herself, I suppose, that didn't place her where she was, how she never really seemed to be there, as if the place she always was mentally was somewhere light-years away, and she was sort of always apart. It made me feel small, insignificant, like I wasn't even worth being acknowledged by her.

I rose slowly, not looking at her, as she didn't look at me. There was nothing to say. I didn't want to argue today, not after the usual silence between us.

This garden, a small plot of soil so tiny you could scarcely call it a garden, was in the rear of the house. It was simply a collection of rows of vegetables that were always covered with weeds, an ofttimes failed attempt at something better. My hands were used to dirt, to the sting of the weeds I pulled from the ground like they were the only things that would grow around here.

Grabbing the rusted gardening tools sitting in the shed, I dashed toward the outside, faint fallen dirt and rotting leaves carried with the wind. The sky was overcast gray — as it often was — and clouds hung heavy above, promising rain but always failing to deliver. It was the type of weather that would start in your bones and make you feel cold, hollow.

I knelt down and started pulling the weeds and remembered that it was always the small, quiet moments that hurt the most. It is the absence of any warmth, any love, any hope. Outside this garden the world felt like a distant place that I would never reach. I felt differently for as long as I could remember. I had no memory of feeling anything other than being buried in this heavy, suffocating silence.

I heard the front door creak open and looked up, half expecting to see my father stumble out, seeking a fight. Instead it was a mother, my mother. She was standing in the doorway, her eyes moving across the yard as if searching for something. For a moment, I thought she was going to say something to me, perhaps tell me to stop what I was doing, to go inside. But nothing came out of her mouth. She just stood there, watching.

I long ago stopped trying to understand her. I no longer wondered why she was the way she was. I had stopped seeking any kind of approval from her a long time ago. She didn't inspire hope and desire in me, she merely reminded me of the extent to which I had failed to live up to whatever idea of me she had in her head.

Back I went into the weeds, pulling them out of the earth one by one, each movement slow and deliberate, as though I could will the time to pass more quickly, as if I could outrun the future. There was no running, no escaping, however. Whether I wanted it to or not, whether I was ready or not, life went on.

I dug for hours, the dirt gluing itself to my hands, the sun reaching a higher point in the sky, even though time seemed to stand still. I tried to get lost in the rhythm of the work, in scooping and pruning, but my mind kept wandering back to the same place — this house, this life, my family.

And then, for the first time in what seemed like a long time, I heard a voice. A real voice, not my mother's distant dirge, my father's I don't give a shit grumbling, but a voice that pierced the tedium.

"You do know that you're wasting your time, right?" The voice was soft but clear, feminine and calm, but it had an edge of something sharper, something deeper.

I looked up, surprised, feeling my heart leap in my chest. The woman at the gate was a stranger to me. She dressed without frills, her long, dark hair framing her shoulders. Her face was inscrutable, but there was a stillness about her that somehow felt peaceful, a stark contrast to the tempest I'd always felt churning within.

"You're not from around around here," I stumbled out, my voice shaking, and for a moment I didn't recognize the words coming out of my own mouth. My hands remained held on the rake, knuckles white at the intensity of the grip, but I couldn't pull my eyes from her.

She smiled a little, but it was a smile that never made it to her eyes. "No, I'm not. I just… felt like visiting."

I didn't know her, didn't know why she was there, why she had come to talk to me, didn't know what to make of her words. Except there was something about her, something that left me unsettled, something that made me feel both scared and fascinated.

She paused, her voice lower now but still heavy. "You're different than the rest of the folk in here, Alarion. You should not be in this place. You're still running, but you're gonna know that soon enough."

I stopped short, my breath catching in my chest. She knew my name.

"How do you know my name?" I said, the words escaping sharper than I meant.

She didn't answer right away, took only a step toward me, her eyes drilling through me as if she could see me deeper than I could see myself. Then finally she spoke again."

"There's more than this world here in front of you, Alarion. But the first step is knowing that there is something within — something that is waiting to be awakened."

It was a phrase that lingered in the air, weighty and disquieting. I wanted to say something, to ask further, but there was silence between us and I felt the burden of her words sink further and further into my chest.

She turned then, as if our conversation had ended. As if she had said what needed to be said, that now it was time to go.

But before she left, she turned her head back, and her eyes locked with mine for a moment. "Remember, Alarion. There's always a way out. You just have to find it."

With that, she left, her steps muffled against the track of dirt, until she disappeared altogether.

I stared after her, the rake still in my hands. The air surrounding me felt thick like a syrup. The heft of her words dug into me, touching something deep inside — something I hadn't even known existed.

But what did it mean? How was there a way out when everything in my life seemed like a cage?

I didn't know what I just experienced. All I knew was that something had changed, like what had previously been would just shift a little out of alignment. And for the first time in as many years as I could recall, I had no clue what was next.

But I was about to find out.