Chapter Text
ARC 1: THE BOY WITH SOULLESS EYES
The orphanage was always calm and silent in the mornings. It wasn’t that good kind of quiet, like when you are finally drifting off. No, it was a suffocating silence that rang in the ears. It was the kind of stillness that made the hair on your arms stand up like a constant warning that something was terribly amiss, even if you could never quite pinpoint the danger.
Edgar sat on the very edge of the splintered bench in the dining hall. His small, shaking hands were folded neatly in his lap, the knuckles white from the pressure of grabbing his pants too hard. He had been told, repeatedly and with the sharp crack of a willow switch, that this was how civilized children of God were supposed to sit: still, rigid, and entirely unnoticeable.
The morning bell did not just ring; it completely shattered the quiet atmosphere of the hall. It was a heavy, iron toll that reverberated through the floorboards, vibrating straight up through the soles of Edgar’s bare feet. With the final echo, thirty chairs scraped forward in perfect, synchronized terror.
The sound of wood grating against grit was deafening, yet not a single child whimpered.
A caretaker stood at the front of the hall, her arms crossed over a starched white apron that smelled aggressively of lye and boiled cabbage. Her eyes, sharp as sewing needles, swept over the rows of lowered heads. Edgar kept his chin tucked tightly into his collar. He could feel the communal breath of the room being held, like they were a collective lung waiting for permission to expand.
Around him, thirty other children shifted uncomfortably on their bare feet. They whispered like dry leaves when the caretakers turned their backs, and occasionally, a sharp glance would dart in his direction. Edgar did not look back. He had learned through painful experience that looking back only made things worse.
“Don’t stare at people like that,” a caretaker had snapped months ago, her heavy, unwashed wool skirt rustling loudly as she passed behind his bench.
Edgar honestly didn’t remember staring at someone. In fact, his eyes had been fixed entirely on a dark, swirling knot in the grain of the pine table, losing himself in its pattern. But he remembered the icy, paralyzing dread that followed her words—that hollow, sinking sensation that he had broken a rule he didn’t even know existed.
There were rules for everything here.
Speak when spoken to.
Eat quickly.
Do not ask for more.
Do not make noise.
And, most importantly—
Do not draw attention.
He had understood that last rule very early on.
The other children called on his condition when they mistakenly thought he was well out of earshot. Their voices would carry down the drafty corridors in cruel, hushed tones:
“Creepy boy.”
“Look at his eyes… it’s like they’re completely empty inside.”
“They belong to the devils themselves!”
The words didn't make him angry anymore; they merely showed him the importance of the high stone walls he had built around his own mind, reminding him that safety only existed when he was entirely alone and invisible.
Edgar kept his gaze lowered to the floor as he stood in the breakfast line. The oak floorboards beneath his bare feet were worn and dipped in the center from decades of miserable footsteps. Everything in this orphanage looked like it had been used too much and cared for too little—from the chipped tin mugs to the fraying gray tunics they wore.
A boy behind him nudged his neighbor, a low, mocking laugh escaping his throat. Edgar didn't turn around. He didn't need to. He already knew what they were mocking. It was always the same thing.
His eyes.
He didn’t understand what was wrong with them at first. As a toddler, he only knew that adults paused slightly whenever they looked at him. Their cheerful conversations would suddenly drop an octave. Their faces became tight and careful, as if they were handling something fragile, or perhaps something deeply unpleasant (though now he knew that it was the latter).
Eventually, when he turned six, the old headmistress had handed him a strip of rough black cloth that looked like it was ripped from a worn and no longer needed dress.
“Cover them properly,” she had said. Her voice wasn't unkind, but it wasn't kind either. It was completely indifferent, as if she were telling him to wipe mud off his boots.
So he did. At first, he only tied the blindfold when he was explicitly ordered to do so. Later, as the stares grew heavier, he began adjusting his messy hair to fall like a curtain over his face when the cloth wasn’t available. He learned exactly how to angle his chin toward his chest so people didn’t have to glimpse those horrid, unnatural irises of his.
It was easier that way. He had learned that if people did not look at him too closely, they would stay in the room longer. That was the ultimate rule of the orphanage:
Stay useful.
Stay quiet.
Stay invisible.
The line moved with the efficiency of a factory belt. Edgar stepped forward when the heels of the girl in front of him cleared the knot in the floor. One step. Stop. Wait for the slap of the wooden ladle. One step. Stop.
When it was his turn, he held out his chipped tin mug with both hands, keeping his wrists perfectly rigid.
A dollop of gray, lukewarm gruel dropped into his cup with a wet, heavy thud. It smelled faintly of scorched oats and damp cellars. He didn’t look up at the cook, but he saw the woman's knuckles whiten around the handle of the ladle. She pulled her hands back quickly, as if his proximity might contaminate her hands.
"Move along, boy," she muttered, her breath whistling through a gap in her teeth.
Edgar glided forward without a single sound or hesitation. He had spent years learning how to walk without shifting his weight too suddenly, mastering the art of the ghost-step. To the grown ups, he didn't just seem quiet; he seemed detached from the physical world entirely.
As he reached the end of the bench, a foot shot out from beneath the table.
Edgar anticipated it. He subtly altered his stride, lifting his knee just enough to clear the scuffed leather boot of the oldest boy in the ward. He clicked his tongue in disappointment, leaning to whisper malice across the table to his neighbor.
"Look at him. Walking like a corpse," he hissed, his voice was a low vibration that could be barely heard past the table-leg. "Bet he can see right through that rag. Bet he's looking at your soul right now, boy."
The younger boy shuddered, visibly pulling his shoulders inward. "Shut up. Don't provoke it. You want the Headmistress to bring the switch out before the sun has truly risen?"
Edgar sat down at the very end of the bench, leaving a two-inch gap between himself and the next child. No one fought him for the space. In a crowded orphanage where privacy was a myth, Edgar’s radius of isolation was the only luxury he possessed. He picked up his rusted spoon, staring into the dull reflection of the metal.
Behind the black cloth, his eyelids fluttered. He didn't need to remove the blindfold to remember what lay beneath.
He remembered the only time he had ever seen his own face clearly. It was two years ago, in the puddles that formed in the courtyard after a torrential rain. The Headmistress had been distracted by a delivery of winter firewood, and Edgar had knelt by the murky water.
What he saw didn't look like eyes at all. They were twin pools of appalling, midnight-purple venom, unblinking in the muddy water, and bearing the horrific, sharp stillness of a demon waiting patiently in the dark to claim its next prize. Every drop of rain that broke the surface of the puddle only fractured the silhouette into something more grotesque, until the reflection no longer felt like a mere mirror of his own face, morphing into a pair of bottomless, unholy orbs that belonged to a fallen angel rather than an orphaned boy. There was an ancient, mocking intelligence hidden beneath that bruised violet iris—a gaze so entirely devoid of human warmth that it seemed to actively swallow the meager grey light of the courtyard, threatening to pull his very soul down into the freezing mire.
“No human being should have eyes like those.”
The memory of the whisper snapped him back to the dining hall. The gruel was growing cold, forming a thick, unappetizing skin across the top.
After the watery oatmeal was cleared away, the bell tolled once more, sending the children to their daily chores. Edgar kept his chin tucked tightly into his collar, his gaze locked on the heels of the boy's boots in front of him. But soon, he drifted toward the back staircase, his feet moving toward the library without his mind explicitly deciding to go there.
The library was off-limits. He was strictly forbidden from entering the room without a caretaker present. But as Edgar pushed open the heavy, groaning oak door and stepped into the dim room, he comforted himself with the only rule that truly mattered: rules only matter when someone is watching. Feeling safe in the shadows, he yanked off the thin blindfold that had obstructed almost everything from his vision and tossed it to the floor.
The library was small and claustrophobic. Narrow pine shelves pressed tightly against the damp stone walls, as if they were trying their best not to take up any space in the cramped room. The books crammed inside were like decaying relics—some completely stripped of their leather covers, others marred with torn pages, water stains, or text faded into ghostly grey ink. Still, despite the rot, it was the only room in this orphanage that didn’t feel completely empty. The pages held voices, even if they were dead ones.
Edgar stepped across the threshold and closed the heavy oak door gently behind him. The click of the latch was softer than it should have been, muffled by the thick layer of dust coating every surface. For a long moment, he simply stood in the dimness, listening to the frantic beating of his own heart. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the heavy footsteps of a caretaker to echo down the hall, waiting for the inevitable shout that would drag him back to reality.
But no shout came. The silence here was entirely different from the ringing silence of the dining hall. It was a protective kind of quiet. Sunlight struggled through a single, high window, casting long, geometric columns of dancing motes across the unwashed floorboards. The air was cool, damp, and perfectly still.
Then, he reached out. His fingers brushed against the spine of a worn volume. His touch was careful and hesitant, as if the object might react to his presence, or as if a single rough movement might shatter the fragile peace of the room. He could feel the texture of the decaying leather, peeling away like old skin.
He pulled it free from the shelf and opened it. A small cloud of dust rose into the air, catching a stray beam of light. The pages smelled of dust and something far older—perhaps the distinct scent of history itself. He ran a thumb along the rough, uneven edge of a page. It felt fragile, like a dried autumn leaf.
He began to read. At first, he remembered how the words were just weird shapes a few years ago. They were symbols arranged in patterns that he had to decode by himself. He recalled the frustration of those early days, the stinging in his eyes as he stared at black characters that refused to speak to him, and the way the caretakers would snatch any paper away if they caught him idling.
But the longer he looked, the more the patterns began to make sense. He had spent hours tracking the shapes with a trembling finger, memorizing the curves and lines. Months later, sentences formed and their meanings soon followed. The abstract black ink changed into images, ideas, and voices.
And somewhere inside him, something shifted slightly. It wasn’t happiness or excitement. It was something much more meaningful to him: recognition.
‘So this is how thoughts can be kept,’ he realized.
The thought struck him. People could fade, caretakers could yell, and the other children could mock him, but a mind could be poured onto paper and kept safe from the world. A book could not change its mind, nor could it strike him without warning.
He turned another page. Then another. Time stopped behaving normally after that. The light through the high window shifted from a sharp morning gold to a dull, bruised twilight purple, but Edgar never noticed the chill settling into his bones. He traveled through thoughts that were entirely separate from his miserable existence in the orphanage. He was no longer the boy with the monster's eyes; he was just an observer of a vast, magical universe.
When he finally closed the book, the heavy thud of the cover echoed softly in the dark. The shadows had stretched across the room, swallowing the shelves into blackness. He had no idea how long he had been there. He only knew that he wanted to remember what he had just experienced. He wanted to keep this feeling of control forever, keeping it deep within himself before he had to step back into the light.
Later that night, when the lights were dimmed and the hallways settled into its usual silence, Edgar reached under his thin mattress. His fingers found a pencil stub. He didn’t remember where it had come from; in the orphanage, small things sometimes appeared and stayed, so it was important to never grow attached.
He held it for a moment, then began to write on a single piece of paper that he found lying on the ground.
At first, his movements were clumsy. He scrawled short fragments and descriptions without structure. But as the minutes passed, his focus sharpened and his words became more cohesive.
He started writing about the people around him. He used no names, only observations:
The boy who never looked at anyone directly.
The girl who laughed too loudly when she was told to be quiet.
The caretaker who avoided being in rooms with him for too long.
He paused, looking at the words. For the first time, he felt a sense of control.
If he could understand people this way—if he could reduce them into something readable—maybe they would stop being so unpredictable. Maybe they would stop hurting him without warning.
A sound came from the hallway.
Footsteps.
Edgar quickly tucked the paper under his pillow and waited. His heart hammered violently against his ribs, but he forced his limbs to remain perfectly still, holding his breath as the footsteps ground to a halt right outside.
The heavy timber door groaned on its hinges.
A caretaker stepped into the crowded dormitory, holding a rusted iron lantern high. The flickering amber light threw long, distorted shadows across the rows of iron cots. His sharp eyes scanned the room briefly, dismissing the sleeping forms of the other boys before landing squarely on Edgar.
“Still awake,” he said.
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the flat, tired tone of someone checking an item off a daily list.
Edgar nodded once, his chin barely lifting.
The caretaker walked closer, the heavy leather soles of his boots thudding against the bare floorboards with an agonizingly slow rhythm. With every single step he took, the amber flame inside his oil lantern sloshed, casting violent, towering shadows that danced and twisted across the cracked plaster walls. For a terrifying, breathless moment, the man's gaze slithered down toward the edge of the sagging mattress, landing precisely where a tiny, jagged white corner of the hidden page peeked out from the dark void beneath the frame.
The man did not hesitate. He leaned down, the scent of damp wool and sulfur match-smoke drafting off his heavy coat, and violently yanked the flat pillow away.
The crumpled paper was snatched up by his rough hands, unfolding the brittle sheets with a cruel lack of care. He raised the lantern, filling the space with a bright, oily yellow glow that caught the messy, hurried graphite script. The jagged lines of Edgar's private thoughts were practically on stage under the intense light. Edgar lay perfectly still, his muscles locked into stone. He didn’t speak. He didn’t offer a plea. He had already learned that explanations were entirely useless when a decision had already been made.
“This is what you were doing?” the caretaker asked.
His voice held no anger. There was no thunderous, dramatic rage or the sharp, violent intake of breath in his sentence. It was something much worse—it was just deeply, profoundly disappointed. He spoke as if Edgar had failed an incredibly obvious, simple test of obedience. He had.
“We told you not to waste time with nonsense like this.”
The caretaker gripped the top and bottom edges of the salvaged page with his thick thumbs. Then, he tore it.
He did it slowly.
Each tear sounded unnaturally, agonizingly loud in the dead quiet of the quarters—the screaming, distinct sound of individual paper fibers snapping and splitting apart one by one under painful pressure and malice. He ripped the sheet straight down the middle, then crossed the halves and ripped them again, reducing Edgar’s sentences into meaningless, white fragments as small as snow. Edgar watched without blinking, his wide, unshielded eyes tracking the destruction until the very last shred of paper fluttered through the lantern light and settled into the dust on the floorboards.
Without another word, the man turned on his heel and walked away, carrying the warmth of the amber lantern light with him. The heavy oak door closed with a dull, final click, and the absolute darkness rushed back into the room like rising water. The freezing silence reclaimed the barracks.
Edgar lay in the pitch black, slowly lifting his hands to his face. To his utter amazement, his fingers were perfectly steady. They weren't trembling or shaking the way they normally did during a confrontation. That stillness surprised him.
He waited for the familiar, visceral sensations to arrive. He waited for the sudden, icy spike of panic, the burning sting of tears behind his eyelids, or the tight, suffocating knot of helpless anger in his throat.
Absolutely nothing came.
Instead, realization slowly began to form in the hollow space where his emotions should have been:
Writing caused trouble.
Writing out observations was dangerous.
Expressing the world inside his own skull meant punishment.
That night, Edgar did not reach beneath his mattress for the hidden pencil stub. He left the tiny lead weapon buried deep in the dust and lint under the iron bed frame, letting the darkness swallow it whole.
Instead, he lay perfectly still in his bed, staring up into the pitch-black void where the cracked plaster of the ceiling was hidden. Somewhere down the long hall, a younger child was crying—a thin, miserable sound that echoed off the cold stone walls.
Edgar listened to the small voice fracture and break. He found himself counting the seconds between each sob, waiting for the heavy footsteps of a caretaker to go comfort them. But the footsteps never came. No one went to offer a kind word. No one spoke a word of reassurance. In this place, a cry for help was just noise. It was a beacon that signaled vulnerability, and vulnerability was always met with indifference or punishment.
The crying child was looking for something—a hand, a light, a savior. And they were getting nothing.
Edgar realized then that the world didn't care about what you needed. It only noticed you when you made a sound, and when it noticed you, it crushed whatever you were holding onto. The boy who cried was looking up, hoping the dark would look back with mercy. But the dark had no mercy. The caretakers had no mercy. To look up, to hope, to seek any kind of connection was a trap. It just made you a target.
After a while, the crying simply softened, shrinking into a small, exhausted whimper before stopping entirely as sleep took over. The silence returned pressing down on Edgar’s sides like he was trapped between two metal magnets.
Edgar turned onto his side. He moved carefully and quietly, shifting his weight by fractions of an inch, as if even the slight rustle of his coarse blanket might be noticed too much by the sleeping house. He tucked his chin down, pulling his blanket over his shoulders, burying his face into the safety of the shadows. He decided he would never be like that crying child. He would never seek a face in the dark. He would never ask the world to acknowledge him again.
And he thought, finally understanding the brutal truth of the idea:
‘If I do not look up… then perhaps nothing will look at me.’