The Seven

Chapter 4 - Nyles

Nyles stood silently in front of his home, the air around him hot and still. He was one step away from the door, but never had he felt so far from it. So much had happened since the last time he was here, yet, the house remained ever the same. He felt seven years younger, staring up at the wooden structure for the first time and taking in everything from the rusting metal of the windows, the cracking on the wood, and the makeshift drapings of old ship masts that he pinned down to keep the wind from blowing too much sand inside. It wasn't much, just a bunch of scraps nailed together, but, to Nyles, it was home in more ways than one. It was his. It was theirs. It was a place where he could come back to, a place that he could grow a family in.

Yet, as his hands reached for the door shaking, Nyles knew everything was different. He looked at the hand outstretched before him—his fingers, his arm, his skin never more foreign than now. As he heard the metal tap against the doorknob, he felt his body tense and his throat grow tight.

Would she still love me?

He had tried to send her a letter weeks before to give her the rough details of everything that had happened, but he found himself writing a whole bunch of bullshit to delay the inevitable and each version seemed worst than the one before. He couldn't think of a way to tell the love of his life that he wasn't the same man she decided to love all those years ago. For a long while, Nyles even contemplated not going home. She loved him with only this picture of who he was then and believed it was the same person he was now. If he didn't come home, how would she know to stop loving him?

But, by the Maker, he missed her so much it hurt his soul. The thought of not seeing her after all these years was enough to make him physically sick.

On his journey here, he thought of the exact moment when he stood before the door, his hand raised, and the love of his life inside. He would knock and she would open the door and see him—all of him and what little he had left—and the disappointment on her beautiful face, the loss of admiration in her eyes, the lack of warmth in her embrace kept haunting his thoughts.

He closed his eyes, clenching his teeth, and just as slowly as he had grabbed the doorknob, he released it, the sound of metal scrapping against metal mocking him as he dropped his hand.

He thought back to when he first left and how tight she had hugged him. He thought of her kiss and the way she looked at him like he was the only person in the world. He thought back to when they started dating ten years ago, and how he never realized someone could mean so much to another like she meant to him.

Before they met, Nyles was in the lowest position that a soldier could be in. He was a nobody; he possessed no fancy title, no remarkable history, no power in his name. For the longest time, he liked to tell people that he had enlisted because he wanted to help people, but he was very aware that this was not the case. In reality, he understood he had no other options. He had no special talents, no brilliant ideas, no dreams—he was just a guy who wanted to fit in.

For his entire childhood, Nyles was bullied. He understood why, for the most part, he was scrawny, short, and dumb with nothing going for him except a single charming dimple on his left cheek that encouraged adults to instill a level of trust in him that he did not deserve. Yet, despite his best efforts, he was consistently ridiculed by the same group of boys who used to scrape sand up the gills on his neck until they were permanently ruined, chanting "NEAPER, NEAPER, NYLES' A NEAPER!"

He hated being called that. He had nothing against Neapers, frankly, he had no idea why anyone did. His mother told him it was because they couldn't fulfill their "civil duties" because of their inability to reach the underwater capital city and many saw them as less than Tiders. Of course, it kind of made sense, what was a Tider without their gills? How could one control water but not be able to breathe in it? When he asked where "Neaper" came from, she explained a neap was a weak tide, and Neapers were considered weak Tiders.