He came into the world in a rush of sound.
At first, it was all pressure — the squeeze, the push, the hot flood of movement — and then a sudden drop, the air around him cold and sharp, scraping against skin that had never known anything but warmth. He drew in breath without meaning to, and the air clawed at his throat, heavy with the scent of something metallic.
A cry broke from him. It was thin, raw, the only sound he had, and it startled him to hear it. But it seemed to make the world move — the hands around him shifted, lifting him from the dark place into a space so blindingly bright that it stung the soft parts of his eyes.
The brightness wasn't just light. It moved. It spilled. It carried strands of colour that stretched and swayed, thin and trembling, like they were alive.
He didn't understand what he saw. He didn't know seeing was what it was called. He only knew that these glimmering lines were the first things that made sense in the cold, strange air. They were everywhere — drifting above him, curling around the shapes that bent over his small body.
The shapes themselves were harder to look at. They were dark, heavy, edged with shadows. But the lines — the lines had a kind of softness that nothing else did. They were warmth and motion all at once.
A sound came from above — low, steady, with a pulse he could feel through the thin air. A shape leaned closer, bringing with it a warm, rhythmic beat. Something brushed his cheek, and the lines swayed, bending toward him as if the touch pulled them.
He didn't have the words for comfort, but it was something like that.
The shapes moved quickly now. There was another cry — not his — from somewhere close. The lines in the air shuddered, twisting in on themselves, then snapping outward like rope pulled too tight. The air changed again — heavier, charged, as though the very space between the shapes was suddenly crowded.
The warmth that held him shifted, passed him to another shape. This one was less steady, the motion jerky, the lines around it thin and sharp. He whimpered at the loss of the other warmth, but the sharp-lined shape pressed something against him — fabric, coarse and unfamiliar, wrapping him until the cold air could only reach the tip of his face.
More sounds filled the space now — urgent, overlapping, like waves breaking over each other. The sharp-lined shape moved fast, carrying him through a place where the air thinned and the light grew dimmer.
The brightness in the air was still there, but it had changed. The lines were longer here, stretching out in strange, bent angles, tangled in corners where shadow pooled. They didn't sway gently anymore; they trembled, like something was pushing against them from far away.
His head turned without knowing why, and he saw it — a place in the air where the lines bunched together so tightly that they glowed. The glow had depth, like looking into water lit from beneath. It was the most there thing he had ever seen in his short, breathless life.
The sharp-lined shape didn't seem to notice. It kept moving, each step jostling him, until the glow was lost behind the turning of the walls.
The space they entered next was smaller, darker. The air smelled different — still heavy, but edged now with something bitter. The shape carrying him slowed, and other shapes came forward, their lines moving in quick, darting strokes. They spoke to each other in bursts of sound that rose and fell.
He tried to follow the movement of the lines, but his eyelids felt heavy, dragging downward. The warmth of the fabric around him was pulling him into a slow, deep place where the sounds blurred and the lights thinned.
Just before sleep took him, something shifted in the air — a ripple in the lines, as if they'd all turned to look at the same point. The shapes in the room went still. Even in that fading moment before darkness, he felt it: a presence, stronger than the rest, stepping into the room.
It was not warmth. It was not cold. It was… weight.
The lines bent toward it without touching.
When he woke again, the world had changed.
There was no bright place above him now. The air was dim, the sounds slower. He was lying on something soft, the coarse wrap loosened so that cool air brushed his arms and face. His eyes searched automatically for the lines — and found them thinner here, stretched further apart.
The space was quieter, but not empty. Somewhere nearby, something breathed, slow and steady. It wasn't the same warmth from before. This was gentler, lighter, but it carried a steadiness that made his chest feel less tight.
He turned his head and saw the source — a shape sitting nearby, its lines drifting lazily, as if resting. Every now and then they would twitch, reaching out faintly before settling again.
He didn't know that this was the beginning — that the presence of those lines, so faint compared to what he'd seen before, would become something he would chase for years. He only knew that the space between them made the air easier to breathe.
The days blurred.
He learned the shapes of voices — the low, steady one that came with slow-moving lines; the sharper one whose lines flicked quick and restless; the rare, heavy one that bent the whole room. He learned the rhythm of warmth and cold, the times when the air was soft and the times when it was thin and biting.
And always, he searched for the lines.
Sometimes they were gone entirely, leaving only the dull shapes of the world. Other times, a faint strand would drift past, catching on the air for a heartbeat before vanishing. He would reach for them without knowing why, his small hands grasping at the empty space they left behind.
When they stayed, the world felt wider. When they vanished, it felt hollow.
He grew enough to crawl, then to walk. The lines became a secret game — a thing only he could see. They would appear in the corners of rooms, hovering above the heads of the shapes around him. He learned that if he stayed still and watched, sometimes they would move toward him.
They never stayed long. But the brief moments when they brushed against him were enough to make something deep inside him go quiet.
It was in those moments — in that quiet — that he first understood the difference between wanting and having, even if he didn't have the words for it.
The world kept him busy.
Not in the way it did for the other children — if he could have understood that yet — but in the way it pushed and pulled at him with constant sound, motion, and unfamiliar touch. Every day, the air shifted in temperature and weight. Every day, new shapes moved in and out of the spaces where he lay, sat, or toddled along on unsteady legs.
But beneath all that, quieter than voices and dimmer than sunlight, the threads were always there.
Sometimes they came in the middle of the noise — bright arcs sweeping through the air as a new shape entered the room, curling for just a moment before dissolving. Other times they would appear in the quiet, drifting slowly across the edge of his sight when he sat alone.
He learned — without ever thinking about it — that there were ways to invite them closer. Sitting still helped. So did listening. When the air was thick and full of sound, they were shy; when the air was empty and slow, they were curious.
The first time one touched him directly, it felt like warm breath over skin. He had been lying on his back, staring at the dull colour of the ceiling, when a thin silver line drifted down from nowhere. It wavered, hovered just above his chest — and then sank into him, so light and quick it might have been imagined.
He gasped, a sound so small no one else in the room even noticed.
For a few heartbeats, the hollow part of him — the part he didn't know was hollow until then — felt full. Not full like food, but full like light spilling into a dark place. And then it was gone.
He cried without knowing why.
He grew more aware of the shapes who cared for him.
There was one whose voice was always quiet, whose lines moved slowly, thick and soft like threads of wool. She smelled faintly of something sweet, and her hands were steady. When she carried him, the threads around her seemed to press closer, folding inward as if they wanted to stay with her.
Another shape had quick movements and louder sounds. The lines around this one were always taut, flickering like candle flames in a draft. They never came near him — they stayed wound tightly around the shape's arms and shoulders, jerking in small bursts when she moved.
And then there was the one with weight. The lines here were the hardest to look at. They weren't bright or soft; they bent everything else toward them. When this shape entered the room, the other lines — the soft ones, the flickering ones — would pull back, like grass flattening in wind.
He learned to watch for the lines before he noticed the shapes themselves. The shapes were only bodies; the lines told him what the space would feel like.
Seasons passed without him knowing what seasons were.
The air in the rooms changed — sometimes warm and heavy, sometimes thin and biting. The light shifted colour, sliding from gold to pale white to dim grey. The threads shifted with it. In the warm times, they seemed lazier, drifting with long stretches between them. In the cold times, they were sharper, as if the air held them tighter.
He became surer on his feet. The spaces around him grew larger — not because they changed, but because he could move through them. And with each step, he saw more of the places where the threads lived.
Corners were good for them. So were high places, like the tops of shelves or the upper edges of doorframes. If he stood still long enough, they would creep down toward him. He tried to catch them once, stretching his hands as far as they would go, but his fingers closed on nothing.
Still, he could feel them when they came close — a faint prickle at the edge of his skin, not unpleasant but so fragile he was afraid to move.
Once, he followed one.
It was a dull afternoon, the kind where the air felt heavy enough to press on his shoulders. The thread appeared without warning, drifting across the open doorway like it had somewhere to be.
He stepped after it, his small feet soft on the floorboards. The thread kept just ahead of him, dipping and swaying as if teasing him forward. Down the hallway, past the rooms he knew, into a narrow space where the air smelled faintly of dust and something sharper.
Here, the thread slowed. It hovered in the centre of the space, twisting on itself in a slow spiral. He stood very still, watching. And then, without any sign, it darted forward and vanished into the thin crack where the wall met the floor.
He crouched, pressing his face close to the place it had disappeared. Nothing. Just the smell of wood and the faint taste of dust on his tongue.
He stayed there for a long time, waiting for it to return. It didn't.
Sometimes, the lines came when he was upset.
Once, after a fall scraped his knee, the air thickened in front of him and a small cluster of threads gathered. They hovered there, trembling faintly, until his crying slowed. Then they drifted away as quietly as they had come.
It made no sense. But he remembered it, the same way he remembered the warmth of the first silver thread that had touched him. Not with clear pictures or words — just with the certainty that these things mattered.
And slowly, that certainty began to pull at him in ways he didn't yet understand.
By the time he could run without falling, he had learned that most people didn't see the threads.
He didn't know how he knew it — only that when he pointed at them, the shapes around him would look in the wrong place, their eyes sliding past the drifting lines as if nothing was there. If he reached for one, they would frown or tell him to stop pretending.
So he stopped pointing. He stopped reaching where they could see.
The lines became his secret.
The older he got, the more he noticed the difference between days with lines and days without them.
On days without, the air felt thin. Sounds were sharper, but emptier. Colours seemed duller, even when the sun was bright. He moved through those days slowly, as if walking in a place that had been hollowed out.
On days with, the air felt heavier in a good way. His chest would ease, and the space around him seemed wider, deeper. Even the sound of footsteps in the hallway seemed richer.
He didn't understand why it changed. But he began to search for patterns.
It wasn't about the time of day. It wasn't about which shapes were nearby. The only thing he knew for certain was that stillness helped. If he could be quiet — really quiet — the threads would sometimes come.
One night, long after the shapes had gone to their own rooms, he sat by the small window in the corner of his own. Outside, the air was dark, and the only light came from a faint glow far away — the kind that never seemed to move or fade.
He kept his eyes on the blackness between the light and the glass, waiting.
It took a long time, but eventually, the threads came. Thin at first, barely there, like the ghost of spider silk. Then thicker, brighter, curling in slow loops as they drifted toward him.
He held his breath as one came close enough to brush the tip of his fingers.
It slid along his skin like warm water. And for just that instant, he felt whole.