They tried to overwhelm him with numbers. He refused to break.
When I regained consciousness, he was still standing.
Long after the last bandit fled, I realized he had never truly stopped fighting. He stood alone in the burning rain… and he was already gone.
I buried him beneath a great ash tree, as is custom for our people.
The farm never recovered. The fields withered. The barns became ash. The cattle were stolen or slain. I remained there for many months after, trying and failing to piece together what my life had been before that night.
It was beneath the ash tree that I began to notice something I could not explain.
At times, I could feel the world around me as if it were layered—close enough to touch, yet never fully aligned. Wind, stone, sky… and something deeper beneath them all. I did not understand it. I still do not.
On a stormy night not unlike the one that took everything from me, I sat beneath that same ash tree when lightning struck it. I did not move. I did not flee.
I let the storm pass through me.
For a moment, I saw my father again.
He looked at me as he once had, but not as a memory. As something present, and distant, and half-removed from where I stood. He looked upward toward something I could not see… and then he was gone.
After that night, I left the farm.
Since then, I have wandered the coasts and wild places. I work when I must, and travel when I can.
Without knowing why, I am drawn always to places where the world feels… thin. Where storm meets stone. Where cliffs meet sea. Where the air feels like it might split and reveal something just beyond it.
I do not yet know what I am searching for.
But I have never been able to stop searching.
When I think back to my last encounter with my father I hear echoes that answer only in moments of violence, storm, and silence.
