The morning after I finished the book felt strange.
For the first time in weeks, I woke up rested. My mind wasn't racing ahead to the next plot twist, the next emotional beat. There was only stillness and the soft, golden light of dawn pouring through the window.
Then I heard it.
The gentle sound of rustling parchment.
I turned my head.
There, sitting at my desk—my desk—was my father. His broad back was slightly hunched. His large, calloused hands carefully sorted through the stack of handwritten pages I'd poured my soul into.
He had set them in neat piles, arranging them by number, smoothing corners bent from my fevered writing.
He hadn't noticed I was awake yet.
"Papa?" I croaked, my voice dry from days of ink and silence.
He turned, slowly, as if he didn't want to be pulled away from the world he was holding.
"You're awake," he said, quietly.
I sat up, my muscles sore and stiff.
His eyes dropped back to the pages. "Is this the one? The story you've been buried in for so long?"
I nodded.
He paused, his thumb running along the edge of one of the sheets.
"May I read it?"
A thousand thoughts fought in my chest at once. What if he hates it? What if it's too strange? Too sad? Too much?
But I pushed them away and said the only word that mattered.
"Yes."
He didn't say anything more. He simply adjusted his chair, picked up the first page, and began to read.
The room fell into silence again.
But this time, it was different.
It wasn't the silence of loneliness, or obsession, or isolation.
It was the silence of being seen.
He read slowly. Line by line. Turning the pages with care. Sometimes, his eyebrows lifted in surprise. Sometimes, his jaw tightened. Once, I saw him run his fingers along a paragraph twice—reading it again, like he wasn't sure he'd felt it right the first time.
He didn't speak for a long while.
Then he reached the chapter where Nael—the fish—was ambushed by the eel priests, stripped of his name, and left drifting in black, still waters.
His hand froze on that page.
I saw it in his eyes. The pain. Not just from the story—but because he understood it.
He wasn't just reading about Nael.
He was seeing me.
He read until the sun was high in the sky.
And finally, with trembling fingers, he turned to the last page.
"And with one last breath—not of water, but of air—Nael broke the surface, and the sky welcomed its first dragon."
My father didn't move for a long time after that.
Then he let out a slow, uneven breath and looked up at me.
"You wrote this?" he asked, his voice quieter than I'd ever heard it.
I nodded again, unsure what to say.
He stood, walked toward me, and gently set the manuscript down beside my bed.
There was something in his eyes I had never seen before. Not pride, exactly. Not amazement.
It was awe.
"I… I didn't know," he whispered. "I didn't know it was all inside you."
I didn't either, I wanted to say. But maybe it was always there, just waiting to be written.
He looked away for a moment, trying to compose himself. Then he added, "It was beautiful. Painful. But beautiful. That little fish… it suffered so much. And yet…"
"It became something more," I finished.
He nodded.
"I didn't think I'd ever cry over a fish."
We both laughed, but there was a shimmer of something deeper between us. A shared understanding. He didn't just see me as his son anymore. He saw me as a writer.
A creator.
A boy who dreamed with ink.
"I want to help you," he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. "If there's more inside you like this… the world should read it."
And for the first time in my two lives…
I believed it too.
After my father closed the final page of my story, the room lingered in silence, thick and reverent, like the air after a prayer.
He didn't say much more that day, but something had changed in his eyes. A subtle shift. A quiet fire.
Later that evening, while we sat at the dinner table and Lina hummed as she spooned stew, he looked at me across the candlelight.
"Ethan," he said, his voice warm but firm, "what you've written… it deserves to be read. Not just by me. Not just by your mother or sister. By everyone."
I blinked. "You think so?"
"I know so," he said. "You may only be seven, but that story—" he tapped the manuscript beside him "—that story holds more heart than most books I've sold in years."
My heart thumped. Not in fear—but in hope.
"Would you let me print it? A few copies, to start. Just enough to sell in the shop and see if others feel what I did."
I swallowed hard, then smiled.
"Yes," I said.
He grinned. Not wide and boisterous like when he'd win at dice games, but quietly—like something precious had just been placed into his hands.
The next morning, he dusted off the old printing press in the back of our little bookshop. It hadn't been used in years—replaced by shipments of books from larger cities. But this… this was ours.
For days, he worked in the evenings after the store closed. He copied every page by hand, tracing my cramped but careful script into neat blocks ready for printing. He didn't change a word.
Not a single word.
And on the seventh day, the first five copies of "The Sky Beneath the Water" sat proudly in the front window, bound in rough twine, the title burned onto the covers with a careful hand.
The morning after, he opened the shop early.
By mid-morning, all five copies were gone.
Sold. With full payment. One to a merchant, another to a teacher. One to the baker's daughter. One to a passing traveler who said he liked the cover. And the last… to a boy my age, who asked if the fish really became a dragon. My father only smiled and said, "You'll have to read it."
He printed ten more.
Then twenty.
And they vanished just as fast.
Word spread like wildfire. Customers began lining up before sunrise, waiting outside in the cold. Some even knocked on our home's side door, asking if they could reserve a copy in advance. We had to post a notice:
"New copies of 'The Sky Beneath the Water' will be available each market day. One per household, please."
By the end of the month, my father was working late every night to keep up. My mother helped bind the pages, humming softly as she stitched spines together. Lina drew tiny fish on the inside covers when no one was looking.
I watched through the front window one morning as two people argued over who had arrived first for a copy.
That was when I realized:My story didn't belong to me anymore.It belonged to them now.To the boy who'd never seen a dragon but now dreamed of flying.To the widow who said it reminded her of her husband's strength.To the fisherman who claimed the river near the east field "felt different now."
One day, a young woman entered the store with tears in her eyes. She didn't say much. Just placed her hand on the book, whispered, "Thank you," and left.
My father turned to me then, his expression full of something fierce and proud.
"This," he said, resting a hand on my shoulder, "this is what it means to touch people, Ethan. You did that. With nothing but ink and heart."
And for the first time… I started to believe that maybe, just maybe—
A pen could shape a world.