Ever since he was a child, Ellias thought he was a ghost.

 

Not in the theatrical sense. He had no white sheet over him or rattling chains around
his ankles. But in the way people looked past him. Through him.

 

He had the life most wanted. He grew up surrounded by tutors, starched linens, and
portraits of grim ancestors staring down from velvet wallpaper.

 

The Durand name opened doors, just not for him.

 

His father was never home. He was always travelling, attending court, and sailing
between cities whose names Ellias had only seen in books and maps. When he did
return, he was a storm in tailored suits, full of cold pride and endless expectations.
He greeted his four children like one would at an estate inspection, his eyes lingering
on their posture, manners, and bowing.

 

It had been he who insisted on four children. Three sons, specifically. Three potential
heirs, in case of war or sickness.

 

Ellias was not the heir; that honour went to his eldest brother. He was the last, a duty
child.

 

By the time he came along, his mother, a woman of fine bone and finer silks, had long
since tired of motherhood.

 

She rarely spoke to him unless absolutely necessary, and she moved around him like
one might step around an unwanted piece of furniture: with practised grace, without
ever acknowledging its presence. Her eyes skimmed his frame without ever settling.
She would speak only when he was in the way, and Ellias realised early on that he was
always in her way. Her voice held the sharpness of someone burdened by something
she didn’t choose.

 

Ellias learned how to blend in with his surroundings, to disappear.

​

The servants assigned to him did only what was required. They ensured he was fed,
washed, dressed, and tutored. And once those duties were complete, he faded from
their notice like mist.

 

It was more than most ghosts ever got, he reasoned.

 

Once, when laughter rose and fell, music enveloped the halls; Ellias stood near the
edge of the ballroom, half-shadowed by a marble column.

 

An empty glass was pressed into his hand. “Another.” The man said without looking
at him.

 

Ellias’ fingers tightened around the stem. The glass was still warm.

 

Across the room, his mother laughed. She didn’t correct them.

 

“At least he found himself useful,” he overheard his siblings say, brushing past him
like dust.

 

Used to neglect, he stepped away from the column, careful not to disturb anyone,
and carried the glass into the kitchen.

 

He was a prince in a cage lined with velvet and silence.

 

“Hey, creep,” one of his brothers muttered one spring day, tossing a stone at the dirt
near Ellias’ feet.

 

The tingling warmth on his skin was a blessing after months of grey. The gardens
were starting to bloom again, buds stretching toward sunlight. His siblings were
around playing a game of speed and shouting. The kind of activity Ellias never joined,
not that he was ever invited.

 

He had wandered beneath the old willow tree, where the light thinned, and the air felt
quieter, heavy with the scent of moss.

 

He stood still, like a statue, staring up into the swaying branches at a solitary
blackbird, perched alone and unmoving, cloaked in an eerie stillness birds sometimes
wore just before flight. Its feathers shimmered dark like ink in the wind. It was the
kind of bird the sorrowful poets wrote about.

​

The bird didn’t feel like spring. It felt like fall.

 

The bird didn’t sing like the others. It only watched.

 

So did Ellias.

 

Maybe it didn’t belong here either.

 

Maybe it had wandered too far from its flock. Perhaps it had never had one. Maybe
its song was strange, or its silence too long. Perhaps the others didn’t like how it sat
still, or how its eyes didn’t blink enough.

 

His siblings were like that.

 

They moved fast, laughed loudly, and always ran in and out of rooms without him,
always speaking above him. He was always too young. Too still. Too slow. Too pale.
Too strange.

 

Maybe this bird was like him.

 

Maybe it was just waiting for someone to see it. To actually acknowledge it.

 

The others never understood Ellias’ silences. He was too much but not enough. They
said his eyes were unsettling: too wide, like he’s trying to see your soul. It made their
skin itch.

 

His mother had mentioned once that he was born with his eyes wide open, that he
was unnatural.

 

“Don’t you have a book to go whisper at?” his brother sneered, already turning back
to the others, laughing as if Ellias' strangeness was an inside joke among them all.

 

Ellias said nothing.

 

The bird tilted its head, its charcoal eye catching the light. For a fleeting moment,
Ellias wondered if it understood what this otherness felt like. “Do they ignore you, too,
because you’re different?”

 

The bird didn’t answer him. So he did what his brother said.

 

He returned to the library, his sanctuary of stillness.

​

He spent most of his days there, hidden between tall shelves and dust-laden
curtains. In the quietest corner of the manor, where the sun filtered through stained
glass and lit the pages like relics, Ellias found long-forgotten volumes whose spines
cracked like bones when opened. He devoured them all. Comedies, tragedies, farces,
and epics.

 

Sometimes, Ellias would pause and listen in the stillness between turning pages.

 

He most often heard nothing.

 

No footsteps coming down the hall. No voice calling his name.

 

It didn’t hurt, not in the sharp, obvious way. It was a quieter ache. The kind that
settles behind the ribs and makes a home there.

 

He told himself he was lucky. He had walls, warmth, food and books. But even in
comfort, a boy can still starve for softness.

 

He remembered once, when he couldn’t have been older than eight, his mother,
irritated by his presence at one of her gatherings, told him to go “take air” and not
come back until the candles were out.

 

It was raining. But he left anyway. There was no point in arguing. There never was. She
was not going to listen to him anyway.

 

The streets were nearly empty. The clouds hung low, and thunder cracked as if the
sky were coming apart.

 

He passed a bakery near the square, its warm yellow light spilling onto the
cobblestones. Outside, a woman sat huddled beneath a tarp in the narrow alley. Her
coat was threadbare, and her baby, maybe a year old, was pressed to her chest.

 

A flash of lightning tore across the sky. The baby cried out. But the woman didn’t
flinch. She didn’t scold or hush it harshly. She simply leaned close and began to sing.

A lullaby. Soft. Wordless. Just the hum of something warm. The baby calmed within
seconds. Its tiny hand curled in her coat.

 

Ellias stood frozen, rain slipping down his neck. He didn’t remember the sound of his
own mother’s voice like that. He wondered what it would have been like to be held
like that. To be sung in the middle of a storm.

​

He walked home through the thunder, quiet and soaking as if the sky hadn’t stopped
raining just for him, a favour to hide the acid salt trailing down his cheeks, to shield
him from a strike for being caught weeping.

 

No one noticed when he returned to the estate; he was soaked through, his clothes
clinging to his skin, and weariness settled deep in his bones.

 

That night, he lay awake staring at the ceiling, whispering a tune he didn’t know how
to finish.

 

He learned to measure love in crumbs: a coat laid out by a silent servant, a nod of
approval from a tutor when he answered correctly, a glance from his mother that
didn’t carry disdain. It wasn’t affection, just mere routine, and over time, it can start
to feel like care, especially in a house like his.

 

When he was shoved past in the corridor, or his mother would let her voice slip
behind an ajar door that she never wanted a fourth child, he didn’t cry.

 

Instead, he would apologise to her for existing. She would roll her eyes and click her
tongue, muttering, “Society has no patience for softness, Ellias. Especially not for
men.” She would say, pouring herself a glass of wine. “No one applauds the boy who
cries in corners. Learn to smile through it”.

 

He had found books on a forgotten shelf in the mansion’s library; leather covers worn
softly with age, the edges curled like scorched paper. Some were missing pages.
Others were marked with strange symbols in the margins, symbols he didn’t
understand but traced with his fingertips anyway.

 

In them were gods of salt and storm, of harvest and shadow. Gods who lived in trees.
Gods who slept in stone. Gods who answered only if you bled.

 

He would look at the ceiling at night and whisper his small, broken prayers. He prayed
to everyone, anyone. Not just to the God they spoke of in church, but to every saintly
creature that ever existed. Names no one said aloud. Names with too many vowels.
Names he couldn’t quite pronounce.

 

He prayed to them all. Not because he believed, but because he needed to. He
whispered to every god in those crumbling pages, hoping one might hear him. Might
choose him. But none did.

​

He wasn’t asking for too much. He wasn’t praying for riches or power. He just wanted
one small miracle: “Let her love me”. Let her look at him like he mattered. Like he
hadn’t ruined her life simply by existing. But no one answered.

 

Not the gods. Not the saints. The pages stayed silent.

 

So eventually, he stopped praying to them. And he started praying to the Moon.

She never demanded obedience or rituals. She was easier to talk to, he thought. She
didn’t seem to judge him. His words came freely when he spoke to her, like sharing
secrets with a friend. Or at least, what he imagined that might feel like. He’d never
had a friend.

 

She didn’t answer either. But at least… she stayed.

 

And that, Ellias thought, was almost the same as love.

 

— — — — — — — — — —

One night, Ellias stood by the window, staring at the Moon as long-distance friends
reunite with each other.

 

An untouched slice of cake sat on the table beside him, and the candle burned down
to a curl of wax. A small gesture from the servants. Or maybe just duty.

 

No one else had mentioned it. Not at dinner. Not in passing. Not even by accident.

The Moon hovered above the still gardens. Her one silver eye kept him company.

 

He pressed his fingertips lightly against the cold pane. “I know we haven’t talked in a
while,” he whispered.

 

His breath fogged the glass, blooming outward before fading again. “Just once… help
me be noticed.” After a moment, he drew the curtain closed.

 

The next morning, before the house woke, Ellias wandered into the gardens, allowing
the fresh smell of dew to invade his lungs.

 

The blackbird was there again. Beneath the willow tree this time. It pecked at
something pale against the dirt.

 

“Hello again,” he said softly, stepping closer, careful not to startle it. The bird didn’t
move.

​

ts beak struck the paper once more, then stilled. Head tilted, watching him with its
dark, unblinking eye.

 

He crouched. The page on the ground was thin. Smudged with soil along the edges.

 

THE SOLENNE

A theatre once known across the kingdoms was reopening its doors and now hiring
crew.

 

The wind shifted. The paper slipped from the ground, but Ellias caught it before it
could drift away.

 

He didn’t know why, but something in his chest tightened like a thread being pulled.
Ellias glanced upward. The sky was pale now. The Moon was barely visible in the
morning light. “Thank you,” he said quietly. When he looked down again, the bird was
gone.

 

He folded the pamphlet carefully and slipped it into his coat.

 

He did not tell anyone. He just packed his bags, and by the next morning, he was
gone.

 

Ellias got a job at the Solenne, not as a performer, but as a stagehand.

 

He swept aisles before the audience arrived, tied ropes for falling curtains, and
stitched torn seams in silence. He fetched tea for coughing divas and whiskey for
red-faced directors.

 

He knew the building better than anyone. But no one knew him. He was still a ghost,
housed and fed. Just that this time, he was being paid to be one.

 

But he watched the actors move as they belonged under the spotlight, loud, glorious,
alive. They wept and roared and kissed beneath the stage lights, then laughed and
smoked backstage as if none of it had affected their souls.

 

Ellias didn’t envy their fame. He envied their freedom. To step into another life. Even
for a moment.

 

He practiced in secret. Long after rehearsals ended, he lingered in the wings,
whispering lines into the empty theatre. His voice echoed back to him, faint, as if the
building itself were listening.

​

He auditioned once. Just once.

 

It was a walk-on part. Two lines. Nothing significant.

 

He had combed his hair the way the servants back home would do, and stood
upright on that cosmical stage.

 

He felt minuscule. Defenseless.

 

The almost-empty sea of faded red velvet seats stretched before him like a
judgmental abyss. He had never felt like this before.

 

Standing in front of the casting director and some of the finest actors in town, Ellias
felt like he was being truly seen, for the first time. And it terrified him.

 

He could feel their judgment like heat under his skin. Their eyes crawled over every
inch of him, stripping him bare. Each word he spoke stumbled out, sharp and uneven,
resonating off the walls like staccato notes in the wrong key.

 

And when he finished…They laughed.

 

For a brief, flickering second, he thought it was the kind of laughter that followed a
clever line, a well-played comedic beat.

 

But then the sound hit him like acid rain. Each laugh stung, struck, and settled in his
gut, leaving him breathless.

 

The casting director didn’t even look up from his notes. He ran a hand through his
hair, exhaling as though this had been the longest performance he’d ever endured.

 

Ellias felt his vision blur. Tears threatened to rise. He felt helpless. Exposed.

 

He had always lived in the shadows. Now, for once, he had been seen. And it felt like
bleeding.

 

He clenched his fists. Every part of him howled to scream. To shout. To demand to be
taken seriously. But that would mean more eyes.

 

So he said nothing. He left the stage without looking back.

​

One of the actresses backstage snorted and asked, “Did you really think you could
get the part?”

 

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t even sure how he’d found the audacity to audition.

 

He walked past her in silence.

 

He wasn’t made for the spotlight, he had heard them say. And for a while, he thought
they were right. In the shadows, he was safe.

 

But the ache to be seen and recognised didn’t go away. It lived in his chest like a
second heartbeat.

 

And late at night, when the theatre emptied and the candles burned low, he would
take the stage alone.

 

Not to perform. To kneel at the centre stage, head tilted back, eyes locked on the
theatre’s dome.

 

There, the Moon always waited. Pale and constant, gazing down through dusty glass.

 

He whispered to her confessions. "I just want one moment. One role. One person to
say, 'You. I see you.' Is that so much to ask?"

 

She didn’t answer. But her light didn’t flicker

 

And Ellias clung to that silence like faith.

— — — — — — — — — —

Years later, his voice deepened, his hands grew calloused from lifting more sets than
applause ever warranted, and yet, no one saw him.

 

Then one autumn evening, a traveling circus arrived on the edge of town.

 

Ellias hadn’t meant to go. He lingered at the gates long after the crowds had poured
in, unsure why he’d even wandered that far. A banner above the entrance read:
“Maravella & Sons: Wonders, Whispers, and What the World Won’t Say.”

 

Something about it tugged at him. A strange hum in his ribs. Was it curiosity? Or was
it fate?

​

He walked through the grounds with his hands tucked in his pockets, watching
children squeal and couples laugh. Performers flipped and twirled through firelight. A
man swallowed swords. A woman danced blindfolded on a tightrope.

 

Then, tucked behind a cage full of silent peacocks, he saw it: a small crimson tent,
nearly forgotten behind a half-collapsed sign that read: “The Oracle Who Sees the
Unseen.”

 

The entrance was barely open, but the smell of incense and candle wax drifted out
like a beckoning finger, pulling him in.

 

Ellias stepped inside. It was dim and warm, lit by a single swaying lantern. Heavy
velvet curtains lined the walls. At the centre sat a woman wrapped in silks the colour
of dying embers. Her hair was silver, like metal spun fine or the colour you see in the
moon.

 

She did not look up when he entered—only gestured to the empty stool before her.

 

"You’ve come far to ask a question you already know the answer to," she said. Her
voice was low and melodic, like smoke curling in candlelight.

 

Unable to respond, he sat down.

 

She placed a deck of worn, hand-painted cards on the table between them. He
watched her fingers as she shuffled. There were symbols carved into her rings. He
thought he’d seen symbols in one of those old books in his library, the ones he’d
prayed over in vain.

 

The cards whispered as they moved.

 

Then she laid the first one down.

 

The Fool. Reversed.

 

She drew again.

 

The Five of Pentacles.

 

And then The Ten of Swords. A man lying face down, ten blades in his back.

 

She stared at them for a long moment, as if listening for something.

​

"These are not omens," she said finally. "They are echoes. Your soul’s shadow is taking
shape. It will lead you to where you crave the most."

 

The woman looked up for the first time, her silver eyes locking with his.

 

"You are calling out for help with a voice the world has chosen not to hear."

 

He swallowed hard, shaking his head aggressively.

 

"That’s not fair," he whispered. "I’ve tried everything."

 

"Desperation," she said, "is a powerful invitation. And something has heard you.
Something older than fate."

 

Elias blinked. "You mean… something good?"

 

The woman tilted her head. Her smile was soft, but not comforting.

 

"No," she said. "I mean something that will answer. Not everything that listens comes
to save you.”

— — — — — — — — — —

Ellias Durand had searched for too long. He had chased a rumour, a story, a promise
hidden between the lines of circus prophecies.

 

And now, at last, he had found it.

 

The stage was empty, the seats abandoned. Yet the air still hummed with the
memory of applause, as though the audience had never truly left. The theatre’s
dome, fractured by time, lets slivers of the dark sky seep through as if the stars had
reclaimed their place among the old walls. The moon watched from above, round and
full, her silver eye unblinking.

 

Then, a rustle. A breath. A voice, neither male nor female, curled around the edges of
shadows.

 

“Oh seeker, oh stray, have you lost your way? Or did you step where shadows play?”

 

Ellias turned sharply. The presence was there, coiled just beyond sight, pressing
against the corners of his vision. A silhouette where there should be nothing, shifting
like smoke.

 

“I came looking for you,” Ellias said, voice steady.

​

A chuckle, soft as velvet, cold as bone. “Know me, do you? What a clever man. But tell
me, what can I offer someone of your refined station?”

 

He hesitated. The shadow circled him. The moonlight bent around it, as though even
the Moon could not quite see what it was.

 

“You grant what I seek,” Ellias said slowly. “That is what they whisper in the streets.”

 

The voice tittered, flickering between notes too high and too low. “Ah, promises,
whispers, wishes, and lies. Don’t forget that many gifts are but a cage in disguise.”

 

Ellias clenched his fists but said nothing.

 

A hush fell. Then, the thing in the dark laughed, a sound without humour or joy, like
cracking ice.

 

“You wish to be remembered, a name carved in stone?”

 

“Yes, but more than anything, I want to be seen!”

 

“Be wary of what you wish for, young man. The world may adore a performer but may
not weep for him when the curtains fall.”

 

“What do you mean?” Something about the words gnawed at him. "I don’t
understand."

 

The shadow’s form stretched and wavered. "A mask worn too long becomes the face.
A stage once stepped upon never lets go—so tell me, is this truly what you long for?"

 

"Yes," Ellias whispered. "I’m tired of disgrace. Tired of being ignored. I don’t want to be
laughed at."

 

"Yet what you seek is laughter."

 

"Not at my failures," he snapped. "I want them to adore me. To laugh because I
command it. I want my name to live on, ‘the jester of kings and queens’."

 

The shadow’s laughter curled around him, making him shiver. "Ah. Fame. Greed. Pride.
Such lowly things, yet the world will break itself to claim them.“

​

"Then step forward, Harlequin. Step forward and be seen."

 

The parchment emerged from the darkness, its surface alive with swirling ink. An
onyx quill floated next to it. The contract bore no price or clause for escape.

 

Ellias hesitated for only a moment before pressing the quill to the page. The ink felt
warm, almost alive, as it bled into the parchment.

 

Ellias Durand

 

The moment the last letter of Ellias’ name dried, the shadow stirred, drowning the
parchment in eternal darkness.

 

"It is done." A weight settled over Ellias. He exhaled, but the breath did nothing to
steady him. Something felt… off.

 

His fingers twitched. A whisper of tension ran up his limbs. His knees locked. His
shoulders stiffened.

 

He felt them, thin, invisible shackles threading through his very being. He tried to
move, but the pull remained, a silent marionette’s command. And yet, to any
onlooker, he would seem unchanged.

 

A thought pressed against his mind, slipping past his lips. "What… what’s the price?"

The stillness that followed was almost amused. Then, the laughter returned.

 

"Oh, Harlequin…the ink is set, the dice are thrown."

 

Ellias felt something coil tightly around his ribs. His pulse quickened.

 

The laughter softened, almost tender. "The strings won’t shake. A puppet dances until
the puppeteer commands."

 

His mouth felt dry. “What? What does that mean?”

 

The presence vanished in a flicker.

 

"Wait!" Ellias' voice cracked with sudden desperation, panic rising like bile. "Come
back!"

​

But the only answer was a soft, distant laughter fading into nothing, leaving only
silence.

 

And then the restraints tightened. He stumbled, falling to the vast emptiness of the
deserted stage.

 

A curtain of night fell, swallowing the world whole.

 

And somewhere high above, the moon turned her face away.

​

​