The first thing the boy learned was that nothing clean was ever meant for him.
Clean parchment was locked away in chests that smelled of resin and mouse droppings, guarded by priests and merchants and men who spoke softly only when it benefited them. Clean parchment belonged to records, to contracts, to God. It was not for a boy born between a cooling corpse and a reluctant breath.
What he learned instead was the language of what remained.
It began in winter, when the fields were stripped down to bone and the wind came unhindered from the hills, slipping through every crack in the timber walls. The hearth coughed more smoke than warmth. Ash gathered everywhere—on shelves, in bowls, in the lines of the floor—soft as fallen snow but darker, dirtier, unwilling to pretend it was pure.
One evening, after his parents' voices had exhausted themselves into silence, the boy crouched near the hearth and stared at the blackened ends of burned sticks. They were useless now, no flame left in them, only a fragile darkness that smeared the fingers when touched.
He picked one up.
The charcoal left a mark on his skin immediately. A thick, uneven streak, like a bruise given form. He watched it with the kind of attention other children gave to toys or sweets. This mark stayed. It obeyed.
Later, when the house slept in its uneasy way—half listening, half dreaming of debts and hunger—the boy took a scrap of parchment from the floor near his father's workbench. It was torn, rejected, bearing a mistake in ink that could not be forgiven. A number written twice. A word crossed out too roughly.
The boy laid it flat and hesitated.
There was a feeling in his chest then, quiet but sharp, as if something long buried had knocked once from the inside. He did not know the word for it. He only knew that if he did not press the charcoal down now, the feeling would retreat again, deeper, angrier.
So he pressed.
The charcoal dragged across the parchment with a dry, whispering sound. Not loud enough to wake anyone. Not loud enough to invite punishment. The line came out crooked, trembling slightly at the edges, but it was unmistakably his.
He drew another.
And another.
At first, the shapes meant nothing. Circles that failed to close. Lines that leaned too far, collapsed, tried again. His fingers were stiff with cold, his breath shallow so it would not fog the page too much. Still, something began to happen.
The lines started to gather.
A curve found another curve. A hollow appeared where an eye might be. The charcoal darkened when he pressed harder, lightened when he let it skim. Without being taught, without being corrected, he learned pressure. He learned restraint. He learned how to let a line stop before it ruined itself.
Hours passed without his noticing. The fire died down to embers. The night pressed its face to the window, patient, unblinking.
When he finally leaned back, his knees aching, he saw a face.
It was not a face he recognized. Not fully. But there was something familiar in it—something in the set of the mouth, the heaviness beneath the eyes. The face did not smile. It did not accuse. It simply existed.
The boy stared at it, heart moving strangely in his chest.
"I did not mean to make you," he whispered, though he did not know why he spoke at all.
The face did not answer.
He hid the parchment beneath a loose board before dawn. He washed the charcoal from his hands in cold water until his fingers burned. No one noticed anything different about him the next day. That, too, he learned was important.
From then on, he watched for scraps.
A torn corner discarded by a scribe. The back of a ledger page deemed too damaged to matter. The thin wood of crate slats when parchment was scarce. Even stone, sometimes—flat enough to hold a shape, patient enough to receive it.
He drew when the house was loud and when it was quiet. He drew when his parents argued and when they pretended they were not tired of each other. He drew when his stomach hurt and when it was empty enough to stop complaining.
Faces came easiest.
Not beautiful faces. Not the kind carved into churches or painted in bright colors. His faces sagged. Their eyes were uneven. Their mouths looked like they were holding words they did not trust themselves to say.
Sometimes, without meaning to, he drew himself.
Not as he was, exactly, but as he felt: smaller than his bones suggested, shoulders curved inward, eyes always turned slightly to the side, as if bracing for a sound that might arrive too fast.
Other times, he drew people he had never met.
A woman with hollow cheeks and hair like loose straw. A man whose eyes were too kind for his mouth. A child looking upward, always upward, as though the ground had betrayed him once already.
Each face carried something he could not put into words. Each one took something out of him and left him lighter, though never lighter enough.
The charcoal wore down quickly. He learned to break sticks in half, in thirds, to stretch their usefulness. He learned which fires burned wood cleanest, which left charcoal strong enough to hold. He learned patience.
Once, his mother found a smudge on the table.
She stared at it for a long moment, her mouth tightening.
"Don't waste," she said finally, and wiped it away with her sleeve.
That was all.
The boy felt relief so sharp it frightened him. He hid his drawings more carefully after that, not because he thought they were precious, but because they were fragile. Because they were the only place where nothing shouted back at him.
As the weeks passed, his hands grew surer. Lines steadied. Shapes obeyed more often than they resisted. He began to notice things—how a shadow beneath the cheekbone could make a face look tired, how the angle of a brow could change everything a pair of eyes seemed to say.
He noticed, too, that drawing made time behave differently.
Moments stretched. Pain dulled. Hunger receded into a manageable distance. The house, with its rot and noise and tension, faded until it was little more than a shape holding him upright.
Sometimes, while drawing, he felt almost… held.
Not by hands. By attention. By the act of looking closely enough that the world slowed to meet him halfway.
One night, while the wind rattled the shutters like bones in a sack, he drew until his fingers cramped and his eyes burned. He did not stop until the charcoal snapped in two with a quiet, final sound.
He stared at the broken pieces in his palm.
They looked like nothing. Like trash. Like something meant to be swept away.
Instead, he placed them carefully beside the parchment and pressed his forehead to the floor. The wood was cold. The floor smelled faintly of damp and ash.
"I will remember you," he thought—not to the charcoal, but to the feeling itself. The feeling of making something where nothing had been given. Of taking what was nearly gone and asking it to stay a little longer.
That night, he dreamed not of voices or blows or hunger, but of lines moving across empty space, leaving behind proof that he had been there.
In the morning, he woke with charcoal still under his nails.
And for the first time since his birth, he did not scrub it away completely.