The force sends me crashing into the rough stone wall. The brutal impact rattles my teeth and scrapes a long line ofscales from my shoulder. The dull ache of the injury is another sensation in the overwhelming void of silence.
"He's sick," Torin says, swimming closer and aggressively sniffing the water around my head. "He smells like… nothing. He smells exactly like dead water. He has lost his hum."
"He's completely useless, is what he is," Jora corrects him. She swims over to me, her scarred face looming uncomfortably close to mine. She grabs my heavy jaw in her strong hand, squeezing the bone hard enough to leave deep bruises. She peers clinically into my open mouth, her black eyes searching for a cause she can't comprehend.
"There is nothing physically blocking his airway," she reports, releasing my jaw with a disgusted shove. "He's biologically locked up. He probably swam entirely too close to the bright surface and got his brain scrambled by the bends. Or maybe he finally realized he has absolutely nothing worth saying to us."
She turns her back on me completely, dismissing me with a flick of her powerful tail.
"Get down to the lower vents, Kael," she says dismissively over her shoulder. "If you are not going to talk, you can at least do the heavy labor."
I stare at her retreating back. My desperate, silent pleas mean nothing. The frantic gestures are the useless flailing of a broken tool.
They don't understand the severity of the injury.
They don't care enough to look deeper.
To my family, I am not a brother. I am a blunt tool currently malfunctioning. In the trench, if a tool doesn't work perfectly, you don't waste precious calories trying to fix it. You discard it in the dark.
I look to Mother on her high ledge. She is watching me with cold eyes. Her face is a mask of ancient stone and disapproval.
"You are disrupting the pack meal," she says, her expression completely devoid of maternal warmth. The water pressure shifts with the force of her words, a sensation my broken ears can barely detect. "If you are physically broken, go to the jagged-rocks until you mend yourself. Don't you dare bring your weakness back into this cave."
The jagged-rocks. The barren, exposed shelf where we send the old and the dying to be consumed by the hounds.
A slow, agonizing death sentence.
My chest completely caves in.
Family. The word is a bitter taste in my dead throat. I was never family. I was the largest shadow who cleared the grates so their hands stayed clean. The silent wall who absorbed their complaints because their own voices were too loud and arrogant to hear one another.
Now that I physically cannot hear, I am nothing. The space I occupy has been emptied.
I back away from the center stone. Each movement is a mechanical function, a disconnected command to a body that no longer feels like my own.
I don't go down to the lower vents.
I go to my sleeping niche in the back of the cavern. The water here is still. Stagnant.
I reach under the heavy slab of stone where I hide my few collected possessions. My fingers brush past sharpened tools and spare knives. They search the dark until they find it: the smooth, cold metal handle of the silver mirror.
I pull it out.
I hold the glass up to the dim, ambient light of the cavern.
The reflection staring back is a stranger. A monster. My black eyes are wide, hollowed-out pits. My mouth is a thin, trembling line of despair. The pale skin of my throat is a mess of dark bruises and fresh blood from where I clawed at the numbing ice.
You were dragging him down into the dark.
The thought is not my own. It is the echo of my family's judgment. The echo of my own deepest fear. I look at the distorted mirror, and the memory of Vaelis holding it burns in my mind. The way he smiled when I touched his face. The way his golden eyes lit up when I told him he was a signal. I'm not that. I'm dead static now.
If I stay here, I will die. Slowly. My family will watch me wither, or Rusk will grow tired of my silence and end me with a single, efficient blow. And if I try to go back to the boundary wall...
Vaelis belongs to the light. To the glittering plaza where his laugh bounced off coral spires, where silk flows around him like water, where his beauty is a treasure, not a death sentence. He belongs to a world built on songs, on intricate lies, on the gentle hum of voices that never freeze in the dark.
If I go back to him like this—silent and broken—what will he see? He will not see the shadow who pulled him from the collapse. He will not see the monster who taught him the taste of real darkness. He will see a pathetic creature. A burden. A mute beast whose hands once held him but now tremble with uselessness.
I will become the monster he was always taught to fear.
