Whispers of the Soul

Cyrus Morgan learned very young that there were different kinds of silence. There was silence that settled over the house before Verena entered a room. When the servants seemed to know better than to let dishes clink too loudly or shoes scuff too hard against polished floors. There was the silence that came after Claire laughed and received a kiss on the crown of her head. The kind that stretched wide and hollow when Cyrus waited for the same softness and got nothing. And then, there was the silence Verena gave him most often. The sharp, deliberate kind that was colder than any slap. It was meant to remind him that he was not a son in her eyes. Not truly. Not cleanly. Not enough of anything worth claiming. He was five years old, and already knew the shape of unwanted things. Verena Silny made certain of it. She had a way of looking at him that made him feel like dirt tracked across the marble entry way. Something that was unpleasant and brought in from outside and tolerated only until someone else found the time to scrub it away. She never raised her voice at first. That would have been too simple and too honest. Verena preferred quiet cruelty. Words that were dropped like pins where only Cyrus could hear them. They were little wounds tucked between orders and glances and the faint curl of her mouth. “Stand straight, Cyrus. You already have enough against you.” “Don’t touch that. It belonged to my family.” “Your father may forget what you are, but I do not.” What he was. A bastard. A Morgan. A child born from an affair his father never spoke of and Verena never let die. Morgan was not a name so much as a sentence. Even at five, Cyrus understood that. He understood it in the way servants paused before addressing him. They were never quite sure whether to call him young master or nothing at all. He understood it in the way visitors looked at his brown hair, his grey eyes, his small, solemn face. Then, they’d look away quickly when Verena mentioned his mother. His real mother. A poor Parebant woman somewhere far from Center City. She was somewhere beyond the walls where streets turned to mud and houses leaned into one another like tired bodies. “You’ll never have powers like the rest of us,” Verena told him one morning while Claire sat in her lap, plump hands wrapped around a sugared biscuit. “Not real powers. Not with that blood in you.” Cyrus stood near the edge of the breakfast room with his hands clasped tightly behind his back. He watched flakes of pastry fall from Claire’s mouth onto Verena’s skirt. If he had made that mess, Verena would have sent him away before the crumbs hit the floor. Claire only giggled, and Verena smiled down at her as if the sun had risen inside the child’s chest. Cyrus looked at his sister and tried not to hate her. Claire was three. Golden-haired and rosy-cheeked, she was too young to understand the cruelty of being loved in front of someone starving for the same thing. She was Verena’s child entirely, pure Imperium from both sides, born without the stain Cyrus carried. Their father, Jed, was a Soulfinder. Verena was a Healer. Claire, everyone said, would be something remarkable when her powers came. Perhaps a Healer, like her mother. Perhaps even something stronger. No one dared say such things about Cyrus unless Jed was in the room. And even then, they sounded like apologies. “He has Imperium blood,” Jed would say, not quite looking at Verena when he said it. “That has to count for something.” Verena would smile then, a thin, polished smile that made Cyrus’s stomach twist. “Half of something noble does not make him noble, dear.” Cyrus didn’t understand everything adults said. Not then, but he understood enough. He understood that Verena believed his blood had ruined him before he had even done anything wrong. He understood that his father wanted to defend him, but rarely did enough to make it matter. He understood that power was the only thing that could save him from the way his house looked at him. So, Cyrus wanted power. He wanted it with the fierce, secret desperation only a child could carry. He wanted to wake one morning with something burning beneath his skin. Something undeniable. He wanted to lift a chair without touching it, or find a soul across the city, or heal a cut with a brush of his fingers. He wanted Verena to look at him and be forced, just once, to swallow her disgust. But for now, there was no power. There were only the dreams. They came nearly every night, strange and vivid and so real that sometimes Cyrus woke with tears on his face that did not feel like his own. In the dreams, he was not in Verena’s cold house with its drawn curtains and careful rooms. He was somewhere brighter. Warmer. He was inside the life of a girl he never met. She lived in an Imperium home, too. He could tell by the high windows, the fine furniture, the servants who moved quietly through the halls. There were rich fabrics and polished wood and candlelight. But her house did not feel like his, not exactly. There was love there, or something that looked close enough to it to make Cyrus ache. Her parents touched her gently. Her mother brushed hair away from her forehead. Her father smiled when she spoke. There were gifts and pretty dresses and tutors with gentle voices. And yet, even in that house, there was something wrong. Cyrus felt it in the way her family’s attention shifted whenever her brother entered the room. He felt it in the tightness in her chest when she watched him be praised. He felt it in the awful, familiar sting of standing close enough to love to see it clearly, but not close enough to be warmed by it. The girl did not know him. He knew that. But Cyrus knew her sadness as if it were his own. Some nights, he fought sleep because he was afraid of what waited on the other side. He never knew whether he would find the girl standing beneath starlight, lonely and quiet. Or if she would be shrinking under her brother’s sharp, little smile. But more often than not, he let himself fall into the dreams anyway. Her life, as confusing as it was, was still softer than his own. Her house did not smell of Verena’s rose oil and resentment. Her voice, even when frightened, did not sound like someone who had already given up.