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Between Broken Homes
After my mother was arrested, I thought the nightmare was over.
Some naïve part of me believed life would finally turn kind, that I'd step into a world of warm households where birthdays were remembered, where someone would greet me in the morning with a smile, where hugs and kisses weren't things you had to imagine but things you could feel.
But life doesn't work like that.
Instead, I was shuffled from one foster home to the next, passed around like some defective toy no one wanted to keep. A name on a file, a mouth to feed, a problem to solve.
The first home wasn't terrible—just… cold. The couple there kept their distance. They gave me food, a bed, and new clothes that didn't smell like mildew or bloodstains. On paper, they were good people. But I could never shake the feeling that I was a guest in someone else's life, one who had overstayed his welcome. They never yelled, never hit me, but their smiles never reached their eyes. Birthdays were forgotten. Christmas meant socks or a booklight, wrapped with minimal care. "We thought you'd need this," they'd say, like it was an obligation rather than a gift.
I remember once asking if I could call them Mom and Dad. The silence that followed was worse than any slap I'd ever endured.
The second home was cruel in a way that felt all too familiar. Rules were endless, punishments came quick, and I learned to shrink myself again—silent, careful, invisible. The man of the house had a temper, and his wife pretended not to see. I reminded myself every day that at least he wasn't her, but sometimes the echoes blurred.
By the third home, I stopped expecting warmth. I stopped asking for birthday cakes. I stopped hoping someone would remember what day I was born. Hope, I had learned, was dangerous. Hope made the fall hurt worse.
The only thing that never left me was the library.
The library was safe. Books didn't slam doors in your face. They didn't yell when you made a mistake. They didn't punish you for crying or for existing. They stayed, patient and unyielding, waiting on the shelves for someone to pick them up.
I practically lived there. After school, while other kids went home to families that at least pretended to care, I went to the stacks. I'd curl up in corners, read until my eyes stung, and sometimes even fall asleep over a book until the staff gently woke me. The librarians never pushed me away. Some of them pitied me, I think. They'd let me linger past closing, slip me snacks, or pretend not to notice when I took home more books than the borrowing limit allowed.
Fantasy was always my favorite. In those stories, the powerless became heroes, the broken became whole, and family was something you could build, not just something you lost. Heroes who came from nothing—orphans, outcasts, rejects—rose up and became everything. They were loved, chosen, irreplaceable.
I wanted that. Desperately.
And then… I found it.
Tucked between shelves like it didn't belong. No record in the system, no barcode, no stamp on the inside cover. A book that shouldn't have existed: The Sealed Realms.
It was a disaster. Contradictions piled upon contradictions, characters that broke their own rules, timelines that bent until they snapped. Whole paragraphs repeated themselves; chapters cut off halfway; the formatting made it nearly unreadable. It was ugly. Messy. Forgotten.
But when I held it in my hands, I felt something strange.
It was like looking into a mirror.
Because wasn't I the same? A mess. Contradictory. Broken in ways I didn't know how to fix. Abandoned by the one person who should have cared, lost between homes like a misfiled book in a library system.
So maybe I didn't pick it—maybe it picked me.
I started with small annotations. Fixing grammar. Correcting sentences. Then I moved to patching lore holes, rewriting dialogues, fleshing out characters that were no more than names on a page. Every mark of my pen was like stitching flesh over a skeleton.
The more I worked on it, the more it began to change—not just the book, but me. Because as I shaped The Sealed Realms into something coherent, something whole, I could almost believe I was doing the same for myself.
Fourteen years I spent on that book. Fourteen out of the twenty-seven I've lived.
You already know this—if you've been with me since the start of this story, I told you before. But some things are worth repeating, aren't they?
Because that book wasn't just ink and paper. It was the only constant in my life.
And then came the day the apocalypse tore everything apart.
The day I met him—the main character of the story I had stitched back together with my own hands.
And for the first time in years, something inside me stirred. Something fragile, trembling, but alive.
Hope, though that extinguished as soon as I remembered that he was still grabbing me by my throat, lifting me off the ground and pointing a sword at my neck.
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