He was born in a house that never heard laughter.
The boy's name was Silas, though no one spoke it often. His mother had whispered it once while bleeding out on the floor of their kitchen, her eyes wide and glassy with terror and wonder as she looked past him, not at him. His father hadn't been there. He hadn't been there in a long time.
Silas had only been six years old when he held her hand and begged her to stay. She didn't. Neither did the priest who found them the next day, or the aunt who took him in for less than a month before declaring him "too quiet, too strange, too useless" and leaving him at a rusted orphanage on the edge of a forgotten town.
I am The Narrator. And I will not soften this part of the tale, though I speak it with sorrow. Because to understand Silas — to truly understand him — you must first know what it means to be alone in a room full of people and still feel like an echo no one hears.
The orphanage fed him, clothed him, and never once cared about him. The other children feared him in the way children fear still water — unsure of its depth, unsettled by its silence. The caretakers rarely said his name. He spoke when spoken to. He never cried. But he watched. Always watched.
One winter night, when he was nine, he saw one of the younger boys crying alone in the hall. Silas sat next to him and said nothing. Just sat. The boy wiped his nose, leaned into his side, and whispered, "You're not scary." Silas had smiled. The next day, that boy was gone — adopted, they said. No one ever mentioned his name again.
He kept a notebook under his bed where he wrote things he couldn't say aloud. Questions. Dreams. Hurts. He wrote about his mother's eyes, the sound of her last breath. He wrote about the ceiling crack above his cot that looked like a hand reaching down. He wrote that maybe he'd come from somewhere else. Somewhere far away, where people weren't cruel for no reason.
He wrote about God.
Not the God in the storybooks or sermons. But a God that hid behind the stars, silent and watching, like he was. A God who saw everything and said nothing. A God who could explain why it all hurt so much.
At fourteen, he ran away. No one came after him.
He walked through the rain for two days, slept in a hollow log, ate from a stranger's trash. On the third day, a man in a van tried to take him. Silas escaped — barely. He didn't speak for a month after that.
Eventually, he found a ruined cabin in the hills. He made it his home.
No lights. No heating. No one.
He survived on stolen apples, rainwater, and the books he stole from a library in a town where no one recognized him. He read until his eyes burned — science, philosophy, myths, history, theology. He didn't want to be smart. He wanted to understand. He needed the world to make sense.
But it never did.
When he turned fifteen, he stood on a cliff above the ocean. The sky was grey. The sea below was wild. He looked out at the horizon and whispered:
"Why?"
It wasn't a prayer. Not exactly. It was a surrender. A crack in his silence. A final offering to the sky that had watched him suffer since he could form memory.
"Why did you make me like this? Why do I feel things no one else seems to notice? Why did you let her die? Why do I hurt so much, and never show it? Why did no one stay?"
The wind did not answer.
But something else did.
Not a sound. Not a vision. Not a light.
Just a stillness.
A presence.
As if the stars themselves had taken a breath.
He looked up.
The sky — familiar moments ago — was wrong. The stars shimmered as if made of ink and language instead of light. They spun in patterns that should not exist. Between them, a single black thread shimmered — a tear in the fabric of what was real.
It blinked.
Then vanished.
Silas didn't move. He felt his heart pounding. His body shook, not from fear, but from… recognition. As though something long asleep inside him had heard a name it had forgotten it possessed.
When he finally returned to the cabin, he found his notebook open. The last page had a message he didn't remember writing.
"You may ask. But you will not be spared the answer."
He stared at those words long into the night.
He did not know what he had touched.
Or what had touched him back.
But something had heard him.
And he would not stop until he found it.
Even if it shattered everything he believed was real.
And I — The Narrator — will tell you this: it is not often that a boy speaks so bravely into the silence. It is rarer still that something answers.
But it is unheard of… that something listens and changes its silence.
This story begins in a cabin in the woods.
But it will not end anywhere you recognize.
For Silas has taken his first step toward a place none return from.
The place beyond the sky.