The Silent

Kit

(Story Content Warnings: Brief and non-graphic torture, dissociation.)

.

The coast of Sierdan was foggy and cold, but he loved it. When he was younger, he'd stand up to his shins in the cold water until his feet were numb, staring out over the surface of the water. The days where he could see what lay beyond the horizon were rare; the fog was too thick.

It was a worrying sight for some, but for him, it was comforting. It made the world seem smaller.

+++++

The people at the orphanage thought he was a changeling child. It was the only way they could explain him being so small, so quiet, even after other children had started speaking. One of the women who worked there told him a story once, about how the headmistress would press iron keys to his forehead. He never showed any signs of pain; they didn't leave marks on his forehead. He only stared up at her with his wide, blue eyes until she pulled the keys away and left.

He could speak. He surprised the headmistress one day when he was five by quietly asking her for another cup of water—so quietly she probably wouldn't have heard if he hadn't gotten her attention first by tugging on her skirt. He didn't remember the keys, but he remembered the look on her face when she first heard him speak.

Miss? Water? Please?

Three words. That was all it took to convince her he was fully human.

It was strange, but he talked all the time. He spoke when he was alone, whispering songs to himself as he lay awake in bed when all the other children had gone to sleep. He spoke to the birds along the beach, trying and failing to convince them that he was a friend. He could speak to things, to places, to animals, but speaking to people was difficult. They expected a loudness that he could not produce; every time he tried, the sound of his own voice stretched out his throat and cheeks and echoed in his head like a pot crashing to the ground. If he tried to speak at his own loudness, they grew impatient. They stared, expectant and harsh-eyed. Their stares and that awful feeling of forcing himself to speak up dried up the words in his throat. He rarely had anything to say, at any rate. It was far easier not to speak at all.

He was six when a woman named Heather started teaching him to speak with his hands. He found that much easier. The first thing she taught him to say was his name.

K-I-T. Kit. A small name for a small child.

+++++

They told him he had ocean eyes, clear and blue. The water of Uyeda are blue, someone explained when he pointed out that the water they saw was only ever dark grey or deep blue, too deep to match his eyes. Maybe you'll see them one day.

He didn't think so. He couldn't picture himself leaving. Whenever he tried, he always came back to foggy shores and green forests not too far away. He could hide in the branches and stand in the fog, and if he stood perfectly still, no one would ever find him. He could fade away into this place.

He liked the sound of that.

+++++

He never knew his parents and he never asked about them. People said that he was found on the water, floating in a basket woven from the seaweed, but he wasn't sure that was true. Every child at the orphanage had some fantastical story about how they'd been found, or where. Their caretakers probably did it to make them feel better about not having parents.

He had theories about them, of course. His father was probably a sailor who'd gone out to sea and never came back. It wasn't uncommon. The oceans of Sierdan were treacherous. Things happened. As for his mother, he'd heard that sickness had come through the town not long after he was born. One of the older children in the orphanage had lost his parents and a sister to it. Again, such things were not uncommon.