"The Boy Who Should Not Be Here"
They called him a monster long before he could walk.
Said the air around him felt too still.
Said his eyes were too empty for a child.
They whispered it behind his back.
Behind closed doors.
Behind trembling hands holding cups of tea.
But they never said it to his face.
Because he was the Duke's son.
And because he stared back with a silence that unsettled them all.
---
The night the west wing burned,
they found him in the rubble—
not crying, not screaming,
just staring.
Not a scratch on him.
His mother's body lay beside him,
burned beyond recognition.
He didn't shed a tear.
They said it was trauma.
They said he'd blocked it out.
But something in his silence made even the healers leave the room early.
---
The servants avoided his hallway.
The maids replaced his bedding without meeting his gaze.
His siblings said nothing at breakfast,
offering smiles that cracked like frost beneath sunlight.
And his father—the cold, distant Duke—
watched him like one might watch a ghost.
No one said what they were thinking.
But everyone acted like he had died that night—
and something else had come back wearing his skin.
---
He was the villain of every bedtime story.
The shadow in every corridor.
The reason no one visited the estate after sunset.
But when he asked why—
no one answered.
And when he tried to remember what came before the fire—
all he saw was blood.
A sword.
A scream cut short.
A name that tasted like ash.
Whose voice had called out for him?
Why did he feel like he'd been left behind?
Why did the mirror feel more like a window
than a reflection?
---
No one around him knew.
They didn't need to.
They only felt the wrongness in their bones.
Like the air turned colder when he entered the room.
Like something ancient stared back from those too-calm eyes.
He laughed sometimes.
But no one believed it.
He smiled sometimes.
But it never reached his eyes.
And deep beneath the surface—
in the cracks between moments—
something stirred.
Something forgotten.
Something waiting.
---
He was not supposed to be alive.
He should not have returned.
But he had.
And the world… was holding its breath.