The midwives expected a cry.
Instead, he opened his eyes, and the Blinding Flame snuffed out.
He wasn't born in silence. He brought it.
–
On the night of the Red Moonfall, when every newborn was blessed with their Elemental Oath, the temple was busiest. The matrons and priests were preparing for the ritual, carving runes into copper plates and sharpening the ceremonial needle. The circular walls shimmered with a silver too faint to trust, like a mist that remembered prayers. The Moon had bled into the sky, covering the room in crimson light, not in warmth, but in warning. In the ash-gray, high-ceilinged chamber, the Blinding Flame—a golden fire said to recognize and awaken glyphchains in all newborns—was suspended above a stone basin and burned in the center of the room. It pulsated and morphed as the Servants of the Flame glided past.
The midwives were chanting hurriedly, as they had to complete the ceremony before the ember moon finished its arc.
A child was placed in front of the flame, and the air thickened—not with heat, but with pressure. The flame flickered, spilling threads of golden light, searching for the child's skin like a blind prophet. And then slowly, a glowing symbol etched itself along the side of the child's neck, appearing like breath on cold glass—three curved lines intersecting at a single point, like wings in motion. The child was blessed with the Oath of Wind.
It was then that a silent knock echoed across the quiet room.
Though it was a bad omen to interrupt the Binding Ceremony, a young attendant opened the large door with haste. He looked down to see a baby left on the cold steps, wrapped in a strange cloth with stitches of a strange language. The baby's eyes were already open, glassy and unsettling, and when the young man picked him up, the cloth cooled his skin as the wind seemed to pull away from the child.
The head priest wearing long vermillion robes whispered, and gestured to bring him the boy. When the child was brought closer to the flame, it flickered violently. One priest dared to place him at the flames edge, and the fire died.
The moon froze, and the wind ceased.
Not a breath.
Not a movement.
A matron dropped her ritual bowl, and not a sound was heard when it crashed against the stone.
"He wasn't born in silence,
He brought it," whispered a priest.
A figure watching from the edge of the chamber, cloaked in ashen robes stepped forward. Ignored for years, the Vowkeeper—a silent watcher of old rites—knelt beside the baby and examined the cloth. He traced the mark with the tip of his trembling finger and murmured,
"Nullen…"
The priests and matrons gave him a look of confusion.
"A word from before glyphs. Before Oaths. It is unbound.
This child has no chain to call. He has no chain to break."
Glyphs carved into the walls quietly cracked, and the Binding Flame refused to be lit. Somewhere in the woods, a glyphbeast cried a distant, ghostly howl late into the crimson night.
–
In the years that followed, most forgot the child of silence.
But silence remembers.
And one day, it will speak.