[nascent] || volume distortion

and so folly and triumph,
twined past where the trees take root,
spur nascent wonder ever onward beyond eye's reach

---

Alena goes quiet long before her world takes issue with Nascent's silence.

A haze against her vision, all of the sounds too bright and too close, so many faces passing by without a hint of regard.

In the before, she passes her days in empty repetition, breathing all of her frustration into Jeremiah, and screaming, begging for him to actually try to fight her, but he has found peace in something. Jeremiah, who had never been known to string two words together without wanting to start a fight, finds peace in something, and it strips Nascent of what little patience she's shored up in a way she's never felt before. He disappears in the night, when none of their brothers and sisters are awake, and in the morning he arrives at training as if his absence hasn't shifted her world in some way. His shoulders are settled, and the near constant furrow to his brow, the clench of his jaw, softens day by day. Before long, their trainers take note and take offense, but he doesn't swing his staff any harder at her despite their instruction. Nascent goes home with fewer bruises, goes a full year without a broken bone for what feels like the first time in her life, and takes matters into her own hands by punching a wall so hard she can feel the splitting crack in the wake of her aggression.

And then she strikes it again, because she can and she needs to feel herself shatter like she needs to breathe because then at least she's feeling.

For so long, it feels like she is nothing but anger. Ash in her lungs and ashy skin at her elbows, her knees. Her eyes avoid mirrors, and she cuts her hair close to her scalp so she doesn't have to think about caring for herself or her broken knuckles or the growing ache in her chest. It doesn't help. She becomes the one who cannot stop fighting, the one who slings words like they're acid, hoping to sear into the core of her siblings, and her trainers, and her parents.

Alena is twelve, and seemingly doing her best to rip her skin from her bones at training day in and day out just to feel something, and wondering all the while why Jeremiah gets to find joy that doesn't come from the blood their trainers demand of them. She is twelve, and she is screaming into her knees until she is hoarse, until she is silent, wishing that someone would just open her bedroom door and ask her if she is okay. She is not.

Nothing is okay.

Everything feels broken, not the least of all herself. Is that normal? It is all she has even known, and yet how can that be all there is to this life? Is not the moon allowed both its darkness and its light?

Thirteen, and she breaks another girl's arm for taking the staff she prefers, scowl on her face and wide circle around her as everyone steps away.

Fourteen, and she trains with broken ribs for a week before a kick makes her vomit for the pain of it, hands shaking as she tries to insist that she can keep going.

Fifteen, and she follows Jeremiah into the dark, and then down, down, down, where the smell of wet earth fills her senses and gives way to brick and the soft echo of voices down the hall. She goes quiet, not from the sheer force and duration of her screaming, nor the rush of blood to her head that makes her vision go dark when she has hardly eaten in days in her disinterest. Alena goes quiet, and it is awe. Candle-lit and quelling, words that have long since been forgotten are spoken back into living memory just around the corner. It's the first time she's ever been able to hear a smile, and it is Jeremiah's, rich-toned and cradling her in the dimly lit hall in a way he has never done in all of their years. How small she feels, pressed to a crumbling arch and listening to her brother's mouth give form to some formless joy. How small she has always felt, even in the anger that has wrapped layer after layer of hurt upon her until it has swelled to consume all she is.

Was? Has been?

They find her there, glassy eyed and trembling as the anger unwinds itself from all around her, exposing the bruising she has pressed upon herself for years with not a word to stop her. Jeremiah, Confluence shows her line by line under flickering light, whole-spun worlds that others have put to page, and Alena is so much more for knowing that others have looked to the sky and wished for more than they themselves could bear to give name to. Above them, a sea of stars in the darkness, so many faceless thoughts glittering beyond where she can see, but they are there, just as real as Confluence beside her. There is so much more to the world, to her world, than she ever hoped to find. It burns in her, and when they return home under the cover of night, her eyes stare at the empty spaces between the stars and she wonders.

What else lies beyond eye's reach?