J?kob woke to an empty house and the heavy, lingering smell of cold grease. It was a lonely scent, one that spoke of a breakfast already eaten and a day already begun without him. On the scarred kitchen table sat a heel of stale bread, the crust hard enough to bruise the roof of his mouth, a few shriveled strips of leftover salt-meat, and a jar of milk Matáo must have pulled from the cool dark of the cellar before the first light of dawn.
He stared at the meal, waiting for a voice to call from the wash-yard or the rhythmic thud-thud of a butter churn. But there was no "Happy Birthday." No special honey-glazed sweet-bun waiting from his sister, Nìa. There wasn't even a scrap of ribbon or a carved wooden toy left by his brother’s plate.
Three years had passed since the Great Sickness turned their world to ash. Their parents’ deaths had not only claimed the heart of the home but had forced a transformation. The farmhouse was no longer a place of laughter and messy evenings, but a quiet sanctuary of shared labor and weary mends. They had learned the hard art of fending for themselves, trading their childhoods for the grim necessity of survival.
Nìa, now eighteen, ran the household with the same unwavering precision she used to pierce the townfolk's fine clothes. To the people of the valley, she was more than a pretty face. She was a master of makeshifts, a weaver of ways and means, and she possessed a mind that clicked with the cold efficiency of a merchant’s ledger. J?kob watched her sometimes, marveling at how she could stretch a single sack of grain to last a fortnight or calculate the exact moment to slaughter a hog for the best yield.
When she wasn't sewing or meticulously planning communal festivals, ceremonies designed to trick the village into sharing the burden of costs under the guise of celebration, she was bartering. Her needle was her primary tool, but her true passion lay in the dust-covered merchant wagons that rattled through town. J?kob remembered seeing her eyes light up at the sight of a new spine, her fingers tracing the leather bindings of books she couldn't afford. She would trade her rarest thread, her extra shifts of mending, or even her own meager rations just to secure a new volume. In those pages, she traveled to empires of gold and marble, places her feet would likely never touch so long as she was anchored to this farm.
When she sang, her voice possessed a haunting, ethereal quality that could calm a savage heart or pull a man from the deepest well of grief. But this morning, the house was silent, and the silence felt like a weight on J?kob’s chest.
Matáo, he assumed, was already deep in the timber-line or out in the high pastures. At seventeen, his brother was the town’s golden child; he was faster, stronger, and more capable than any man in the valley. He was the one the elders called upon when a barn beam cracked or a wolfpack grew too bold near the sheep-pens. In their small village, Matáo didn't always bring back the gleam of silver coin. Instead, he was often paid in the currency of the land: a bleating goat, a bushel of apples, or a side of cured bacon. He filled their larder through the sheer strength of his back and the callouses on his hands. To the village, Matáo was a hero of iron and grit. To J?kob, his brother was a shadow that loomed so large and cast such a long, dark reach that J?kob feared he would never find a place to really shine.
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J?kob stood from the table, his limbs feeling as heavy as wet clay. The sickness that had spared his life while stealing his parents had left him a ghost of the boy he should have been. His chest felt hollow, his lungs often whistling like a cracked bellows whenever he tried to keep pace with the world. Nìa always told him he was "getting stronger," but he knew the truth. He could see it in the way the village boys his age looked at him: a mixture of pity and annoyance. He was tired of being the "helpless kid," the fragile pane of glass that everyone was afraid to break.
He wandered into town, the dust of the road puffing up around his boots. He had hoped for a distraction, perhaps a game of stones or a chance to watch the blacksmith at his forge, but the atmosphere was unsettling. He found Mrs. Porter near the village well, her hands red from scrubbing, but when he asked where the others were, she offered only a cryptic gesture toward the hills.
"Berry-picking," she claimed, her voice trailing off into a suspicious, high-pitched giggle that made J?kob’s skin crawl.
It wasn't just her. Every person he encountered, from the miller to the tanner’s apprentices, had the same "up to something" glint in their eyes. They looked at him and then looked away, whispering behind raised palms. When he finally plucked up the courage to mention it was his birthday, they didn't offer a blessing. They laughed. It wasn't an ordinary, warm laugh; it was a strange, secret tittering that made him feel like an outsider in his own home. Even Matáo, whom he found sharpening an axe near the commons, merely grunted a few words about being "too busy to fish" before turning his back.
Hurting and feeling the familiar sting of isolation, J?kob retreated. He left the giggling town and the silent farm behind, trekking up the steep, jagged path toward the high falls.
He headed for the one place he felt whole: The Great Sycamore.
It was a place of ghosts and ancient magic in his eyes, standing sentinel over the valley like a stoic king. He and Matáo had found it years ago, in the "before times," when their parents were still alive. He could sometimes see the faded image of his mother spreading a checkered cloth under its massive boughs, his father laughing as he tossed a young Matáo into the air.
J?kob reached the base and crawled into the hollow of the trunk. He squeezed through a narrow, dark crevice that led to an even deeper, underground limestone cave. This was his true domain. He had fashioned a small world here, lit by stubs of stolen tallow candles and decorated with "treasures": a bird’s skull, a smooth river stone, a rusted dagger pommel he’d found in the woods. Here he could be himself, and imagine himself in one of Nìa's books. He never ventured into the very back of the cavern, where the light of his candles couldn't reach. The darkness there felt ancient and hungry, and some fears stayed with you even in a sanctuary.
Safe within the embrace of the roots, J?kob closed his eyes and let the world of the "helpless orphan" fade away. In the silence of the stone, he acted out a knight of the realm or a wizard of the high towers. When he tired of play, he would drift off to the land of dreams, where his game would continue, but sometimes he would dream his favorite dreams; the ones that felt more real than the cold grease and stale bread. In these dreams, he was a young dragon. He loved dragons, and in these dreams he could feel the phantom itch of leathery wings sprouting from his back, the heat of a furnace in his belly. In the clouds, he raced others of his kind, banking through the mist and diving over the peaks, until the weight of being "useless" finally fell away, leaving him light enough to fly.
