By the time he was three, he had mapped the entire palace above him.
Not consciously. Not with intention beyond the hunger for information that had been his defining characteristic since birth. But his hearing, which had never been normal, which had been building on its own foundations since before he could walk, which had developed into something remarkable, and remarkable things have a tendency to be used.
The palace above him had acoustics. All buildings had acoustics, but stone buildings of a certain age and construction had particular ones, the way sound moved through a specific arrangement of chamber and corridor and foundation was not random. It was the product of the building's structure, and the building's structure was fixed. He had three years of practice in this specific acoustic environment, which meant he had three years of practice in learning what sound moved how through which path, and by the end of those three years that knowledge was sufficiently complete that he could do something he had never been explicitly taught to do:
He could listen to a sound and know where it came from.
Not approximately. Not with a range. With the precision of someone who has spent three years calibrating their perceptions against a fixed and known system.
Third floor, east wing: training hall. He knew this from the rhythmic impacts — sword against sword, body against body, the specific sounds of combat practice that he could now identify with considerable precision. He knew the sounds of different weapons by this point — the particular ring of a short blade, the heavier sound of a longer one, the different quality of impact when something was deflected versus absorbed. He knew the sound of a sparring match that was going well versus one that was becoming genuinely dangerous. The senior instructor's voice had a particular sharp efficiency when correcting someone's form versus when she was describing a technique in advance. He knew the difference.
Second floor, central: council chamber. He knew this from the formal register of the conversations that happened there. The different cadence of official speech, the way multiple voices organized themselves into a structured conversation with clear turns, the way certain voices always received a specific quality of attention from the others that told him, even without the content, something about the hierarchy of the room. One voice anchored every discussion. He had known this for over a year. Her voice was the voice around which all other voices oriented.
First floor, west wing: kitchens. He knew this from smell as much as sound, the only smells that reached him through the stone were cooking smells, which traveled through ventilation channels in ways that other smells did not. These arrived changed and diminished by distance and stone, but present. He had learned to identify specific things. He knew the smell of bread baking before he had the word for bread. He knew it as the good smell, and he knew when it was coming based on sounds in the wall that preceded it by approximately forty minutes.
Ground floor, directly above him: storage. He knew this from the near-absence of voice traffic. Footsteps, occasional dragging and shifting of heavy objects, brief visits without conversation. The women went there to retrieve things and left. It was a room of brief purposes and no lingering, which meant that the occasional conversations he caught there were louder, less guarded, transmitted with the specific clarity of people who believe they are effectively alone.
Below him: the springs. And below the springs: a silence so complete it seemed less like the absence of sound and more like the presence of something very old and very still that had chosen not to move.
He did not think much about what was below him.
He thought about what was above him.
* * *
The most significant discovery of his fifth year was not acoustic. It was conceptual.
He had been assembling, from years of overheard conversation, an understanding of what the women above him were. Not just that they existed, not just their names and schedules and hierarchies, but what they were. What category of thing they were. He had the word Amazon. He had the word warrior. He had the word island. And he had, from the way these words were used in relation to each other, the beginning of an understanding that the world above him had a specific shape, a specific organization, a specific logic that governed who moved through it and how.
He was in this world. He was not of this world. He was below it, which was different from being in it, and the difference was not just spatial. He was below it in a way that meant the world's logic did not apply to him in the same way it applied to everything above him. He did not have a category. He was not a warrior or a prisoner or a servant or a citizen of any kind he could identify.
He was a boy in a room.
He turned this over for weeks before he found a word for what he felt about it. The word, when he found it, was not rage. It was older than rage and simpler. The word was wrong.
* * *
He was four years old when he heard his mother's voice for the first time and understood it was hers.
He did not have the word mother. He did not know that the person who spoke two floors above him was the person who had carried him, held him once, placed him in this room with her own hands. He did not have any of this context. He only knew that this particular voice was lower than most of the voices he heard above, carrying an authority that changed the rhythm of every other voice in the room when it spoke, a voice that the building itself seemed to reorganize around, arrived in his chest differently than other sounds.
Differently. He didn't have a more precise word. Differently.
He pressed his whole body against the wall for the first time since infancy.
He listened.
She was issuing orders. He caught fragments: patrol rotations, northern approach, supply inventory. The words were mostly incomprehensible to him still, he was assembling the language piece by piece, and the administrative vocabulary of an island military-state was not the vocabulary that reached him most clearly through stone. But the voice itself was something he could hold onto separate from its content. He held it. He held it with the specific, focused quality he applied to everything in the room that gave him more than he had before.
He sat against that wall for two hours after she moved away, as though her voice had left something in the stone that he was not ready to let go of yet. He sat there in the silence and he turned over the fact of the voice, that it existed, that it had existed before now, that he could hear it from here if she was in the right part of the building, and he built it into the map.
She was the center of the map.
He did not know why he believed this. He simply believed it with a certainty that lived in his chest rather than his head, with the specific quality of a thing that is true before it can be demonstrated.
She didn't come back that day.
She didn't come back for a very long time.
* * *
He was five when he began having conversations with himself.
Not out loud. He used his voice so infrequently that speaking aloud felt effortful in the way that unused muscles feel effortful. The conversations were interior, between the things he was learning and the version of himself that did not know them yet. He would hear something through the wall — a word, a phrase, a tone — and he would sit with it, and the part of him that was trying to understand it would argue with the part of him that was certain it already did, and the argument was how he learned.
He was, at five years old, the most self-contained educational institution in the history of Themyscira.
He was also the loneliest thing on the island.
He did not have the word for loneliness. He would not have the word for loneliness for several more years, and even when he had it he would have to sit with it for some time before he was sure it applied to him, because the word implied knowledge of something other — knowing what company felt like, knowing what it was like to have another person present, so that the absence of those things was a defined loss rather than a simple condition.
He had never had another person present. He had only ever had the room.
The loneliness he felt was not, therefore, the grief of something lost. It was something else — the ache of a space that had been designed for something that was not in it. The ache of a shape without its content. He felt it the way you feel a draft without being able to identify where the cold is coming from. Present. Constant. Not sharp. Just always there.
He learned to work with it the way he learned to work with everything in the room.
He was five years old.
He sat against the north wall and pressed his ear to the stone and listened to the palace live without him, and the palace gave him what it always gave him: evidence. Information. The ongoing proof that a world existed.
It would have to be enough.
It was enough, because it was what there was.