Vicky always woke before dawn — not because he wanted to, but because sleep never stayed long enough to matter. Morning light rarely touched his room; the curtains were thin, the window cracked, and yet somehow the darkness inside felt heavier than anything outside. His room was small — a bed, a shelf, neat stacks of folded clothes — but it wasn't the size that made it hollow. It was the absence of presence. No posters. No photographs. No proof that a child ever lived here.
He sat upright slowly, blankets falling from his shoulders like pieces of a life that never learned to hold him. The air was cold, the kind of cold that seeps into bones, but he did not flinch. Comfort and discomfort had long ago blended into the same sensation for him — invisible, unnoticed, unimportant. He crossed the room quietly, because quiet was the first language he ever learned.
In the bathroom mirror he paused. Not to check his hair or face — he wasn't the kind of boy who expected reflections to offer reassurance. He stared because habit forced him to. His eyes, shadowed and dark, stared back without accusation. Tall for his age, thin, almost stretched — as if life had tried to shape him into something else but stopped halfway. His shirt lifted beneath his fingers, revealing the pale mark carved into his chest — a triangular scar he had carried since birth. It looked wrong. Too sharp. Too intentional. A shape that didn't belong on the body of a child.
He touched it. It felt like nothing. Not healed. Not sore. Just numb — like a memory the body refused to explain.
He dressed and walked to the kitchen. Silence greeted him — not soft silence, but the brittle kind, the silence of places where voices once lived and no longer do. A metal jug sat on the counter, a single cup beside it. He poured water, watched ripples form and fade. Sometimes, he wondered if water remembered faces better than people did.
He swept the floor, wiped counters, folded blankets — the rituals of someone who knew that leaving a mark meant giving the world a reason to notice him. And he could not afford that. Not here. Not anywhere.
Outside, daylight hit him like something he wasn't meant to touch. The world beyond his door was alive in ways he could never be. Streets glowed faintly with prāṇa-runes carved into stone. Vendors whispered blessings that heated food without flame. Children recited mantras that made their bags float, or summoned tiny sparks of light from the air. Every breath outside felt like magic belonged to everyone.
Except him.
He walked to school like a shadow wearing a body. In class, he sat in the farthest seat — a place the teacher's voice rarely reached. Conversations blossomed around him, futures were spoken aloud, friendships stitched themselves together like threads forming cloth. His existence remained the gap — the unsewn space.
When school ended, he walked home the same quiet way. The world thrived. Runes lit beneath every footstep except his. He passed security posts where morphite-born students were scanned and permitted. He walked through without anyone noticing. Ghosts rarely trigger alarms.
His home was waiting, dark and still. He stepped inside, closed the door with a careful touch, and let the walls swallow him again.
That was his life—
a body moving through space,
a presence never acknowledged,
a boy born from silence,
returning to silence.