The flames that stole his father at six still danced in Albion's nightmares—embers that glowed in the forgotten corners of his mind. He remembered the roaring heat, the frantic scramble through smoke and ash, and the searing pain of loss that burned longer than any inferno. That day, innocence was incinerated, leaving behind a brittle shell of a boy who learned early that the world cared little for tender hearts.
At first, the scars were hidden—masked beneath a fragile hope that someone might still protect him. But the years unfolded like a dark tapestry. Till eleven, bruises had become the punctuation of his daily life. In a foster home ruled by a man whose discipline was as frigid as a winter's dawn, each strike and sneer served as a lesson in submission. The violence was not shouted but delivered in the silent cadence of pain that played out in dim, cramped rooms. Albion's lean, trembling body bore the secret language of welts and a broken spirit—a record etched by harsh words and callous hands.
Then came another threshold—a battered, creaking doorway leading to a home where kindness was a scarce luxury, reserved only for those born into privilege. Here, a stern foster mother reigned with an iron fist softened only for her own flesh and blood.
As the days wore on and her brief kindness emerged—a whispered, "How are you, Albion?"—he noticed something unsettling in the softness of her gaze. It wasn't warmth, nor was it pity. It was the haunted tremor of a soul resigned to its own silent battles, a hint that her care might be less a benevolent gesture and more a mirror of her own hidden despair.
The other children, assembled like spare parts, labored from sunrise until the shadows claimed the day. Albion's hands, already tender from old wounds, became instruments of ceaseless toil: scrubbing floors until the stains bled into the wood, washing garments that held the memory of neglect, and carrying the weight of an unending list of chores. The sour tang of stale milk and the sharp sting of bleach clung to him as persistently as the sorrow that lived inside.
One early morning, as the sun struggled to lift itself above a bleak horizon, Albion's world fractured anew. In the haze of exhaustion, he knelt before a stubborn stain on the threadbare carpet. The rhythmic scrubbing was interrupted by a gentle knock—a soft, insistent sound that stirred the air. Bucket in hand, he paused, eyes following the frail beam of light that crept beneath a door. The sound of police boots tapping on worn wood and a quiet, broken request—"Do you have any bread?"—escaped his cracked lips. It was a plea far deeper than hunger; it was a cry for a semblance of warmth, of humanity, in a world that had long forgotten both.
The officers, their faces etched with unspoken tragedies, found him crouched in a corner—a small, nearly invisible figure amidst the shadows of neglect. They uncovered the silent testament of a mother who had slipped away into despair. Upstairs, in a room sealed off from the relentless demands of daily survival, her body lay still, as if caught in an eternal slumber. The sight was otherworldly.
The silence was different—heavier. Not the silence of cruelty or chores, but the stillness of something final. Albion never forgot the smell. Not the sour tang of old pills, nor the sweet rot of curtains left unwashed for years. They asked him if he saw the body. He hadn't needed to. The absence had been louder than any scream.
Her death, a deliberate escape from an existence of relentless neglect, reverberated through the room. It was suicide—a quiet, haunting retreat from a life in which she too had been buried under layers of unhealed sorrow. Albion did not weep then; tears had become too dangerous a luxury in a world where vulnerability was met with cruelty.
Later, in the sterile corridors of a hospital, the white walls and the clinical scent of disinfectant contrasted sharply with the chaos of his inner life. Confined in a room meant for children marked by neglect, Albion's reflection in the polished floor betrayed nothing of the tumult within. A nurse, exhausted yet tender, tried to mend what was broken. Her soft words— "How are you, Albion?" whispered between meager meals—were delicate stitches attempting to sew together the ragged remnants of a fractured soul.
Her gentle presence was a fragile salve on wounds that ran deep.
He flinched at the touch. It wasn't fear—it was reflex. No one touched him gently unless they wanted something first. Her kindness confused him more than cruelty ever had.
Her hand lingered on his shoulder like a promise, yet his mind recoiled from the intimacy. It was as if every gentle caress was a prelude to betrayal—a lesson learned in the endless corridors of abuse.
But fate had no patience for respite. The Celeste Empire's wrath fell like a storm over all that he had known. The purge of Charlevoix—a symphony of fire and steel—obliterated familiar structures and reshaped Albion's already fractured world. This vast, militarized enclave was not merely a prison; it was a mirror reflecting the ordered brutality of his past—a place where rigid routines echoed the horrors of foster homes and the iron discipline of his abusive upbringing.
Within the camp's cold, regimented confines, every step became a painful reminder of the life he had left behind. The barking orders were not alien; they resonated with the same terrifying familiarity of his early years.
The orders didn't feel foreign—they felt familiar. The war camp's rhythm echoed his foster home: silent compliance, brutal routine, and punishment dressed as discipline. The uniforms were different. The trauma was the same.
The endless drills brought back memories of sterile chore lists and the relentless demands of a man who treated punishment as love. Yet here, there was a strange kinship—a grim reminder that discipline, in any guise, carried the weight of broken lives.
Among these echoes, one name shone like a distant, stubborn ember: Winston.
He remembered Winston's laugh—rough, low, the kind of sound that made heavy rooms feel lighter. He remembered a hand gripping his shoulder the day on the cliff, grounding him when no one else had ever tried.
As dusk bled into night, the parade ground transformed into a barren landscape where every footfall was both a surrender and a rebellion. Each measured step stirred memories of loss and cruelty: the acrid smoke of the inferno that claimed his father, the echoes of a foster father's rage, the quiet suffering under a foster mother's indifferent tyranny. The ghosts of fire, fists, and forgotten years pulsed within him—a reminder of every scar and every stolen moment of childhood.
At the edge of the camp, where a rusted fence marked the boundary between the regulated present and the wild echoes of memory, Albion paused. Here, the light played upon rough metal and cast trembling shadows that whispered of lost days. In this suspended moment, the camp's relentless order melted away, and he was alone with the memories: the burn of fire that stole his father, the harsh reprimands of an abusive foster home, and the oppressive drudgery that had defined his early life.
The camp was just noise. Just structure. Just another cage. But he wasn't the same boy anymore.
His calloused fingers gripped the cold metal of the fence, and in that simple act, the full weight of his journey converged. In the quiet that followed, his inner world became a battleground of conflicting impulses. The foster mother's rare kindness, the fleeting moments of human connection in the hospital, and the brutal cadence of the war camp all collided within him. He recalled the worn faces of the soldiers, their eyes glazed with both resignation and suppressed yearning—a mirror of his own haunted gaze. Every step forward was an act of rebellion against a destiny forged in cruelty.
In one particularly searing memory, Albion saw himself, a small boy in a faraway foster home, forced to shoulder burdens no child should bear. Every morning, he rose with a weariness that belied his age, waking his younger siblings and dressing them in threadbare clothes. In a home where love was rationed like stale bread, his days were a ceaseless march of labor—a labor that left him scarred both inside and out.
Within this oppressive present, Winston's name was a north star—a lifeline in the oppressive dark. Rumors had woven his fate into a tapestry of mystery and hope. Whispers among the soldiers spoke of Winston's capture during the purge, of a man whose defiance had ignited sparks even in the heart of the empire's wrath. Then came the call to order—a piercing alarm that shattered his reverie. The camp stirred as soldiers snapped back into their formation, and Albion's eyes, haunted yet determined, scanned the barren parade ground. The regimented beat of the forced march was both a surrender and a defiance—a physical manifestation of the relentless weight of his past colliding with the will to forge a different destiny. In that precise moment, every scar, every memory of abuse and neglect, and every whisper of hope coalesced into a singular, unspoken promise: to search for Winston, the embodiment of defiant hope, amid the iron grip of tyranny.
In that poignant convergence of memory and resolve, as the harsh sounds of the Celeste war camp faded into a melancholic hush, Albion's silent question echoed into the night: Where was Winston? The answer was not given in words, but in the fragile promise that lingered in the cool air—a whisper of hope caught in the gentle breeze, a promise that even the darkest of nights might eventually yield to the tender light of possibility.
And so, Albion marched—not toward hope, but toward the last place he'd seen it.