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Hex sat alone in his room, silence enveloping the whole house. Usually, his siblings would have been squealing and yelling as they played in the next room over, but even they stayed quiet now. It had been months since his dad had been imprisoned. He went mad , Hex had been told, something in him broke and couldn’t be repaired . Now, he was locked away, for the safety of himself and for everyone around him.
B Square had told him over and over again to forget about it. Whatever A Square had tried to convince him of in his deluded state shouldn’t be paid any mind. His odd ramblings should be ignored, and Hex should focus on silently hoping for his recovery instead. But he couldn’t just forget .
It was ingrained into his mind, at this point. The feverish craze in his father’s voice as he begged Hex to understand what he was trying to tell him. The hopelessness in his voice as he trailed off, desperately trying to push a toy Shape upwards, and yet not northwards, trying to tell him something that Hex couldn’t comprehend.
The look in his father’s eye was what terrified him the most; dim and distant, as if he was looking through this world, into a different place. The look of someone who had seen something he was never meant to know, something that broke his limitations. His body might have been there, but his mind was somewhere else entirely.
Hex didn’t know what he had been trying to tell him, but he knew for sure something had happened to him. Something horrible, that had transformed him from the caring father he once knew, into somebody he could no longer recognize, blabbering on about something that nobody else could see or understand.
Since then, his Uncle B had been taking care of them, but now even he was gone too. He hadn’t given any explanation; he had just vanished into thin air without telling anyone where he was going. Hex wondered if he would come back like his brother, with a mind that was not there and words that didn’t make sense. But he had been gone for days now, and Hex was starting to lose hope that he would ever come back.
All he had left was his mother, and it seemed that even she wasn’t all there as he opened the door to watch her pace back and forth in the main hall. Hex was meant to look after her now. She was apparently an unpredictable threat who had tried to help A Square escape, only allowed to live on house arrest because she had children to look after.
She seemed empty now, like her soul had been shelled out of her body. It was a gradual change; first, she had just become quieter, silently watching the world pass by her without her usual liveliness. Then, her eye had become permanently dim, and she barely left her room, speaking no more than was absolutely required of her.
It was all Hex could do to coax her out into the main hall in an attempt to bring some fraction of feigned normalcy into their lives, and now she showed no signs of stopping her endless back and forth journey across the room.
“Mom?”
His weak voice made her come to a slow halt, and she waited for a few moments, back pointing towards him, before she turned around to look at him. Her eye was almost entirely dim, sending a shiver up Hex’s sides. She did not speak, but resumed her pacing as if she hadn’t heard him.
Hex stared after her swinging form for a few more moments, then clicked his door shut and leaned against it.
Something completely out of his control had ruined everyone he thought he had known, some vague thing that everybody danced around and kept hidden from him. It was a secret that only A Square held, something everyone else was trying their best to forget, something Hex was trying his best to understand.
Something had turned his entire family upside down and emptied them out, and now whenever he looked at them, all he saw were ghosts. Ghosts that would never return to how they used to be.
Loneliness crushing down on him like all of the Southward pull in the Plane, Hex sat in that house devoid of all life and began to cry.
When A Frau Line’s husband had burst through the door after mysteriously vanishing all day, she had promised to herself in that moment she would do absolutely anything necessary to make sure he would never worry her like that again.
When he had held her to that promise by telling her they had to deflect to the North to escape the police, she had not hesitated for a moment. Even when those police did rush in, ready to take him away, she had not faltered. Even when he was nowhere to be found at the border, already captured by Soldiers, she had continued her search well into the late hours of the night, waiting to find him and follow him to the ends of the Plane.
She could not accept that he had gone mad, locked away in some padded cell. Her husband was stubborn, yes, steadfast in his beliefs, but never, never would he be insane. All she had to do was wait, and he would come back to her. She had to believe in that. If she lost hope in him, she knew she would lose hope in all life.
Reaching the top of the house, she almost turned back around to continue her pacing, but then hesitated. The storeroom laid right ahead of her view, and she slowly walked towards it. Locating the small latch along the wall, she slid open the door, and brought her end to the deactivated glow point contained within it.
When she had been escorted home, it was one of the first things she had noticed; a dim, circular object, sitting right outside of the small room in the upper corner. Earlier in the week, she had watched A Square putting the glow point away, making sure the door was securely locked behind it while Hex trailed after him.
Her husband had made sure to keep the key in his own room, so none of the children could try to mess with it. Why would someone so dedicated to keeping such a valuable item intact purposefully take the glow point out of its place and be so careless with it so as to make it stop glowing? She could make no sense of it. She held it against her eye, trying to wrap her mind around the mystery it held. What had her husband done to cause this? Had he been the one to do this?
A beautiful glow point, shining and brilliant, in its prime. Then, without any warning, taken out of its careful placement in the world, abruptly extinguished, without leaving a trace to explain how it had happened. A promising life, cut short in a single second by something nobody could understand.
She could not help but be reminded of someone. Sighing, she returned to her endless march.
She knew what everyone thought of her. A mindless wife, only mourning her husband because she had been doing it so long that she didn’t know how to do anything else. Her limited capacity for doing anything worthwhile was spent in making herself a routine of grief that she couldn’t break out of.
They didn’t expect her to understand what was truly going on behind the scenes, why her husband had been captured in the first place. She was much too simple to comprehend a situation so complex as someone being shunned for possessing knowledge they weren’t supposed to have.
Women were not supposed to remember. Their brains were too small for it. Their memory could not be trusted; tell them one thing in the morning, and by the afternoon, they would have no remembrance of it. But she remembered.
She remembered everything.