Seamlessly Underwater

Like any other day, light seeped from the cracks of the broken windows, and the stench of stale bread and burnt wood hung in the air. But in the silence today, something felt different. An unease, a murmur that crept beneath the skin of the house, like a secret yearning to be set free.

The floorboards creaked as Alarion settled into the corner of the small room, his weight shifting. Outside their farmstead, the sun was dimmed by the hazy clouds that so often sat over their village — like a heaviness that would not abate. It was a day when Alarion felt like he was invisible. It wasn't even noon, but his mind was tired, as if the hours had dragged on far too long.

Next door, his mother was yelling again. Or was she? It didn't matter. The voice that until now had any control over him had become a mere background sound in his ears, a part of the ambient noise of his life. She had never stopped being this way, or at least not since he could remember — screaming, insults raining down, ripping him apart at the very seams of his soul with every nasty word. But it wasn't the pressure of anger in her voice that weighed on him. It was the vacuum that accompanied it. A silence that settled over her words long after they had faded from the air, cutting the throat of any shred of comfort that remained.

Footsteps, heavy and familiar, sounded from the staircase and Alarion stiffened, breath stuck in his chest somewhere. There was a slow creak, and he saw his father standing by the door, the man always leaving the scent of liquor, sweat and defeat in the room.

"Alarion," his father muttered, slurring his words. "You're still here?"

It was a question, yet it sounded more like an accusation. His father's eyes glassy and faraway barely registered his presence. Alarion did not answer immediately. I felt like the words we're saying were in vain, futile even. So why speak when everything had already been said a thousand time over? The Nothing answered, asking them, what was the point in asking for anything when nothing was ever given?

"Father," Alarion said quietly, not even sure if the word meant anything anymore. His father had ceased to be a father long ago, yet the word seemed to slip out, like an old habit when he'd been starved of it for years. He lowered his gaze, holding his hands in his lap, digging his fingers into the fabric of his clothes.

The man lurched into the room, breathing the stench of liquor. He regarded Alarion as if seeing him for the first time, and Alarion felt the weight of the scrutiny.

"Is that what you think you're going to be, a knight, eh?" His father's voice dripped with mockery, as if the concept itself was hysterical. "Do you think you're above this? Better than me?"

Alarion didn't reply. It was not worth defending a dream that felt so removed, so inaccessible. It was foolishness, he knew. But it was all he had. He had to believe that something out there hoped for him beyond this hole of a village. Something more than the stifling hold of his family's dysfunction.

His father's laugh, empty and bitter, shattered the silence. You gonna wind up like me, son. Mark my words. We all do."

But the words no longer had sting. They didn't carry the same weight. He'd heard them so often that they were as meaningless as the dust on the floorboards. It was a cycle he couldn't break out of, a cycle that had begun to define him.

But before he could say more, a knock at the door broke the tension. It was a soft knock, soft enough not to be a threat but loud enough to catch the eye.

His father turned his glare to the door, hand reaching for the half-full bottle at the table. "Who the hell is that?"

Alarion lacked the strength to give a fuck. However, when the door opened and the figure of a very old man—one of the village's few remaining elders—came into view, Alarion stood up out of reflex. This man, though, was different from the rest in the village. His eyes were old and clouded but sharp in a way that made Alarion wary in the way only the truly wise could.

The elder's gaze fell instantly upon Alarion, and a flicker of something—recognition, maybe—flickered across his features. But before Alarion could set it, it was gone. It was a few seconds before the man spoke, folding his fingers over each other in a gesture that looked like respect, but was probably just an old habit.

"Good afternoon, Alarion," the elder said, gruff but not unkind.

"Afternoon," Alarion muttered, remaining in the corner, glancing nervously at his father. The elder's presence created an unsettling stillness in the room.

"I've come to speak with you," the elder persisted, glancing at his father, who was seemingly more focused on the bottle than on anything else. "Alarion, there are things concerning you that—things you should know. Things you cannot ignore."

The words sliced through Alarion, freezing him in place. For a second his heart peppered his chest, a flood of questions just waiting to spill forth. But what was this man speaking about? What did he know?

But before he could say anything, his father hissed. "What do you want with him, old man? He's just a boy wasting his time dreaming. Go back to your hut."

The elder did not recoil from the affront. Instead he stared at Alarion. "It's not about the age," he said quietly. "It's a question of what's ahead for you, Alarion. You cannot escape your past, but you get to create your future. Don't forget that."

For Alarion, standing there in stunned silence, not a clue how to react. His father grumbled in the corner, however, and Alarion felt the weight of the elder's words burrow deep into his bones. They sounded like a warning, or maybe an invitation to something much bigger than he understood.

The elder's eyes clung an instant longer before he nodded curtly and turned to leave, but stopped thinking better of himself by the door.

"I will be watching," he said, his voice nearly wavering. "You don't see it now, but the path is already there in front of you. And you have some decisions to make."

With that, he exited, the door creaking shut after him.

Alarion remained still, suffocated by the exchange of the air. His father's soft curses were far away, almost irrelevant. He had heard something — something big, something that would change everything — but he couldn't quite get a handle on it. All he could figure was that this was no ordinary visit. And this was no ordinary warning.

It was a signal. And for the first time in his long life, Alarion didn't feel completely hopeless. There was something beyond the village, beyond the crushing weight of his family, beyond the looming shadow of his father's drunken ridicule.

But what was it? And why did it seem like he was standing on the brink of something so large that it could either pull him in and digest him or liberate him?

The door creaked shut, and for a moment, the house had fallen still again. The outside world, the creaking floorboards, the murmurs of the village, it all disappeared. Alarion stood rooted to the same spot, his hands still clasped at his sides, his mind a swirling tangle of confusion and quiet fear. The words the elder had given him weighed down on his heart like an invisible hand. It felt like he was a seed they planted deep within himself, waiting for the perfect moment to grow.

But how was he supposed to make sense of any of it? And his thoughts were still lost in the maelstrom of his day-to-day life. His mother's constant, humming anger, his father's drunken rants, always fighting to survive in a world that seemed to want to squeeze him into a corner — it all felt so powerful. Could he really break free? Could he really make an about-face?

Alarion's mind wandered back to the last words of the elder: The path is already before you. It was like a riddle — like the thing was there, but just out of reach, like a whisper in the wind you couldn't quite catch.

The tinkle of shattering glass snapped him back to the present. His father had dropped the bottle once more, and the loud, angry curses followed. Alarion squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to ignore it, but the fact of the matter was, the tension in the room never really went away. His father's presence — all through, a dull, oppressive thing lurking behind it all — became impossible to ignore.

Alarion slowly stepped toward the petite kitchen, the pungent scent of charred wood still heavy in the air. His mother was probably making another meal, hand movements pummeling, swift. She noted that there was nothing out of the ordinary about her silently simmering in a corner, wiping the sigils of a different argument. Her silence — so often far more dangerous than any word — was louder. Over the years he had figured out how to walk the fine line between her outbursts and the calm before the storm.

As he entered through the doorway, he found her hunched over the stove, stirring the pot with practiced motion. Although her back was turned to him, he could see the tension writhe through her shoulders, could see the way her knuckles turned white around the handle of the spoon like she was squeezing onto something other than a piece of kitchenware.

He knew she wasn't referring to the dream of knighthood he clung to with such desperation. She was talking about survival, about ensuring he didn't follow in his father's footsteps — end up another broken man too weak to stand for himself. Her own demons, after all, and despite her cruelty, he knew how heavy her own burden was. It's possible she was suffocating, but she was definitely not heartless.

A silence fell between them, Alarion looking at her as he waited for more. She never did, though. Instead, her mind appeared to fold inward, a region Alarion never quite reached. And she had kept herself shut away in her own world of unwritten regrets and unwilled terrors.

The haggard sound of a door slamming open behind him pulled Alarion from his thoughts. It was then that he looked back to find his father stumbling into the room with an angry look on his face.

"You're both useless!" his father spat, pockmarked words slurred. "Don't you want to clean up this mess? "What the hell are you if you're just going to sit there?"

His father lurched over to the table, his fist slamming down on the wood with a loud thwack. Alarion shied but stood his ground.

"Look at you," his father went on, glaring at him. "A the boy who thinks he can do something. Do you think they'll allow you to be knighted? Nobody gives a damn about your dreams! You're not made for that life. You're meant to be here in this house cleaning up the mess I made."

Alarion's chest tightened, but he fought the urge to let the anger rise up within him. He was wiser than to reveal his feelings right now. He turns to his father, only to give the older man more impetus to perpetuate the cycle.

"I'm not like you," Alarion murmured, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. "I'm not going to be here forever."

His father let out a deep, bitter laugh. "You'll see. You do not escape your bloodline. You don't get to evade your fate."

Alarion's gaze shifted to his mother, who, since her husband's entrance, hadn't stirred. Her hands still held the spoon but no longer stirred; she was gazing down at the pot. Her silence spoke louder than his father's words. At that moment, Alarion did what he hadn't done in a long time — see a crack in her armor. A little shake in her hands, like a flicker of some words buried in her heart.

"Mother?" Alarion's voice was timid, uncertain. She didn't answer. Her eyes never left the pot, the flame below dancing off her gaze as it licked the pot's base.

He didn't expect a response. She had already made her choice. He had no room there, only her own survival. She had her own life to pay attention to, and he had to find his own path.

But the elder's words haunted his mind. They could not stop bothering him. "You cannot run from your past, but you do have the ability to create your future."

For the first time in ages, Alarion felt something stirring deep inside him. A yearning not only to escape, but to carve a road — one that had belonged entirely to him."

But that path, if there were one, remained obscured, shrouded in a fog of uncertainty. For now, all he could do was wait as the life he knew continued to unravel before his eyes, one piece after another.

Alarion let his feet remain frozen in place, the heaviness of his father's words hanging in the air. Everything in the room seemed claustrophobic, and for a moment, he wanted to become one with the darkness, waning out of existence, this place, this room, where dreams came to die before they even had a chance to grow. But he couldn't. Not yet.

His father's laughter—bitter, mocking—shattered the silence, and for the first time in a long time, Alarion saw the man standing across from him, not as a father but a hollowed man, desperately grasping the shards of a past already lost. There was no power in the laughter, no strength in the anger. Only fear. Fear of being forgotten. Fear of being insignificant.

Alarion's eyes turned to his mother, still frozen in the doorway by the stove, her features as hard as stone. The subtle tremor in her hands was gone, replaced with the stillness of someone who had long learned to lock their feelings away. She did not look at her husband, nor Alarion — she was lost in the beat of the mundane, as though this were all that mattered to her, all that was permitted.

"Is that what you want me to become, like you?" Alarion whispered, the name escaping his lips before he could catch himself.

His dad froze, the derision in his gaze wavering for a moment then the facade clicked right back into place. "No," he said, the word hardly a growl. "You're never going to be anything but a disappointment."

Alarion felt his chest constrict at the knife-like sting of his father's words. The rage, and the decades of anger, boiling up to the surface. It was a feeling he had never fully confronted, and now — now it needed to be freed.

He stood taller, hands balled at his sides, the little voice inside him getting louder, stronger.

"I am not you," Alarion said, his voice growing loud. "I won't be."

And in that moment, the ensuing silence was not one of defeat but of some other thing. A silence that suggested newness. A silence that suggested transformation.