The light in the orphanage was never enough.
It wasn't something Rowan could explain — not to himself, not to anyone. It was simply true. The mornings came pale and flat, spilling through the long windows in a thin wash that faded before it reached the corners. The nights came without any light at all, except the dull yellow of the hall lamps that never reached the floor.
But somewhere in him — deep and old, like something planted before he could remember — there was the knowledge of more.
He didn't have a picture of it. No memory of where it had happened, or when. Just the feeling of it: the air so thick with light it hummed, the threads so many and so close they seemed to touch each other in the air. It was as if he had once been in the middle of a great river of them, all colours, all moving, and now he lived in a dry streambed, catching the rare drip that made it through the cracks.
The absence gnawed at him in ways he couldn't name. He only knew he was looking for something — always — even when he sat still.
At five years old, the days had a shape to them.
He woke early, before the other children stirred. The air was quietest then, and if he was lucky, a thread or two would slip through the gap in the curtains before anyone else could disturb them.
Sometimes they came in pale silver, curling like thin smoke; other times they were gold, bending and turning as though following a current only they could feel. He never grabbed at them anymore — the lesson from the golden knot years ago had sunk deep — but he watched them intently, committing every flicker of movement to memory.
By the time the other beds creaked and the voices rose, the threads would be gone.
The mornings belonged to the matron, Mrs. Carter — a tall woman with sharp shoulders and a habit of clapping her hands when she wanted attention.
She didn't dislike Rowan, but she didn't quite know what to do with him either. He wasn't disobedient, but he wasn't like the other children. He lingered at the edges of things, and when spoken to directly, he had a way of answering that seemed both polite and distant.
She would watch him sometimes, her eyes narrowing slightly, as though she was trying to work out if something was wrong with him. Then she'd shake her head and get on with her work.
The other children had stopped inviting him into their games. At first, when he was smaller, they'd pull at his sleeve or shove a ball into his hands. But after enough refusals — or worse, after he wandered away mid-game without explanation — they learned to leave him alone.
They called him "ghost" sometimes. He didn't mind.
It wasn't that he didn't want to be around them. It was that their noise made the air flat, made the threads hide.
When he was with them, he could feel the absence like a weight pressing at the back of his skull. And then, when he was alone again and the air softened, the threads would creep back into the room, tentative at first, as though checking if it was safe.
Those moments alone became his favourite part of the day.
Sometimes, in the corner of the laundry room when no one else was there, a thread would drop low enough that he could stretch a hand toward it. If it let him touch it, he would trace its movement carefully, feeling the subtle shifts in temperature and texture — silk one moment, coarse the next. Other times it would dance away, as if teasing him, curling just out of reach until it slipped through the crack in the door and was gone.
He'd learned that the threads were not random.
They had moods, if that was the word for it. Some were shy and would vanish at the slightest movement. Others were bold, brushing against him as though daring him to react. A rare few seemed curious, circling him in slow loops, testing the air around him before drifting off.
Once, a silver thread lingered so long he fell asleep watching it, only to wake with it still there, hovering inches from his face. The warmth of it stayed with him all day.
But no matter how close they came, there was always a limit.
They never filled the air the way they had in that half-remembered before. And no matter how patient he was, the moment someone entered the room, they would vanish — as if the presence of another person snapped some hidden thread that held them there.
It made him crave solitude more than he craved company.
By now the matron and the other children had accepted that Rowan preferred the quiet.
At mealtimes, he sat at the far end of the table, where the noise was softer. In the yard, he found corners hidden by the shadow of the old brick walls. He wasn't hiding from them — not exactly. He was making space for the chance that a thread might come.
The others thought it was because he was shy, or strange, or simply didn't like people. They didn't understand that people made the air heavier, and heavy air made the light go away.
Once, a boy named Thomas tried to follow him into one of his corners. Rowan didn't say anything, just watched as the air stayed empty, no matter how still they both were. After a while, Thomas gave up and went back to the others.
Rowan didn't try to explain. It wasn't something anyone could explain without seeing it.
It was a Tuesday in late autumn when the air changed.
The yard was cold, the kind of cold that made the skin on his hands sting if he stayed still too long. The other children had huddled around the football, kicking it half-heartedly between them, their breath puffing into the grey sky.
Rowan stood near the wall, where the bricks still held a little of the morning's warmth.
The first thread appeared low, winding lazily just above the frozen grass. It was thick and pale, with a faint green glint that caught when it passed through a patch of light.
Then another came, from the opposite direction. And another.
Within minutes, the air between him and the wall was alive with movement — half a dozen threads, curling and twisting in slow arcs, as though drawn to the same invisible centre.
He could feel their pull. Not toward him exactly, but toward something in the air around him.
He held out a hand, palm up.
The nearest thread hesitated, then curved toward his fingers, brushing them with a cool, slick sensation like water running over glass. The others seemed to notice, their loops shifting subtly until they, too, drifted closer.
His heart beat faster.
It had been years since the golden knot — years since he'd dared to try more than a single thread at a time. But these weren't bright gold or molten red. They were soft, muted, almost sluggish in their movement.
Safe, maybe.
He moved his hand slowly through the air, drawing a loose circle.
The threads followed. Not perfectly — some drifted off, curling away — but enough that he felt a flicker of control. He drew another circle, tighter this time, and the closest three mimicked the curve, their movements smooth and unhurried.
A thin smile tugged at his mouth.
"Rowan!"
The voice cracked the air like a stone through glass.
The threads flinched. One broke away immediately, vanishing into the pale sky. Another snapped sharply upward, twisting as it went.
Mrs. Carter was crossing the yard, her hands tucked under her shawl. "What are you doing out here by yourself? You'll freeze."
Rowan lowered his hand quickly. "I'm not cold."
She gave him the look — the one that hovered between exasperation and worry. "You should be playing with the others. Go on."
He didn't move. "I don't want to."
Her sigh plumed in the cold air. "You can't spend all your time staring at the wall, Rowan. It's not healthy."
He said nothing. She studied him a moment longer, then shook her head and walked back toward the main door.
When he turned back to the wall, only one thread remained. It drifted listlessly before slipping away into nothing.
That evening, after the younger children had been put to bed, Rowan sat in the laundry room.
The windows were steamed from the heat of the drying racks, the air heavy with the scent of soap and damp cotton. This was usually a quiet place, but tonight there was a hum to the air — faint, like the vibration of a far-off train.
The first thread appeared above the ironing board, pale silver and very thin. Then another emerged from the shadow near the ceiling. Within minutes, there were seven, each with its own slow, deliberate path through the warm air.
He didn't hesitate.
This time, instead of trying to pull them, he moved both hands in slow, sweeping arcs, coaxing rather than forcing. The threads adjusted, looping toward the spaces his fingers passed through.
The hum in the air deepened.
It felt… right.
Not the fullness of the before, not the great river he couldn't remember, but closer than he'd been in years.
One of the thicker threads twined briefly around his wrist before gliding free. Another passed between his palms, cool and shivering. The others circled lazily, some brushing close, some hanging back.
He breathed carefully, keeping his movements slow. The colours stayed soft — muted greens, silvers, a pale blue that seemed to shift with the warmth in the room.
But then one thread — a dull silver, almost grey — began to twitch.
At first it was subtle, a faint stutter in its curve. Then the twitching quickened, its colour sharpening into a harsh metallic sheen.
Rowan froze, hands still in the air.
The silver brightened, a crackle running along its length. The hum deepened into a sharp tone that made his teeth ache.
He stepped back.
The silver thread snapped toward the ceiling, dragging two others with it. They tangled briefly, then shot apart with a sound like tearing cloth.
Heat and cold rolled over him in waves. He stumbled into the ironing board, catching himself against its edge.
The threads spun upward into the shadows and were gone.
Only the empty hum remained, slowly fading.
Rowan's pulse thudded in his ears. He stayed where he was for a long moment, hands still raised slightly, as if expecting another to appear. None did.
When the hum was gone entirely, he let out a slow breath.
He wasn't hurt. But the message was the same as the golden knot years ago — beauty and danger, together, inseparable.
Over the next weeks, Mrs. Carter began to watch him more closely.
She didn't say much, but he noticed her eyes on him when he sat apart, or when he lingered in doorways after the others had left.
One morning, as he sat with his porridge at the end of the table, she came over and crouched to his eye level.
"Why don't you play with the others, Rowan?"
He shrugged. "I don't like their games."
"Why not?"
"They're loud. And messy."
Her mouth tightened slightly. "That's what playing is for children your age."
"I like the quiet better."
She studied him a moment longer, then straightened and moved away, muttering something under her breath.
The other children noticed too.
A boy named Peter started calling him "Wallflower," and a few others picked it up. It wasn't cruel, exactly, but it stuck.
They didn't bother asking him to join their games anymore. Sometimes they'd watch him from across the yard or the dining hall, whispering to each other before looking away.
He didn't mind. The less they came near him, the more the air was his own.
Still, at night, lying in bed, he would stare at the ceiling and try to summon the memory of that great abundance from before. The weight of the light. The endless movement. The sense of being inside it, not reaching toward it.
It was never clear — just a feeling, heavy and bright, like the moment before something bursts.
And he wondered, not for the first time, if he'd ever see it again.
The days began to fold into each other in the way laundry does — creased, stacked, and indistinguishable unless you inspected them closely. Morning, noon, and night blurred, the boundaries between them marked only by the clang of the dining bell and the dimming of the gaslights in the corridors.
If he tried, he could remember the way it had been when he'd first arrived — the noise, the heat of bodies pressed together, the constant flicker of motion. But those early impressions had been worn thin by repetition, until all that was left was a quiet, repetitive rhythm: wake, eat, lessons, chores, eat again, sleep.
In that rhythm, he began to notice the small ways in which he no longer fit.
At the long wooden tables, where once he'd sat elbow-to-elbow with the others, there was now a faint but visible gap. A space. No one ever said anything about it — no one needed to — but it was there all the same, like the missing tooth in the smile of the room.
It wasn't hostility. It wasn't the kind of silence sharpened by cruelty. It was simply the absence of invitation.
If he reached for the butter dish, it would be set down just beyond his fingers, requiring him to stretch that little bit farther. If he spoke — which was rare — the boy opposite would look up, startled, as though the voice had come from the wrong direction.
The younger children treated him like a locked cabinet they were curious about but didn't dare to open. They would steal glances when they thought he wasn't looking, whisper something, giggle, and then drop their eyes when his gaze met theirs. The older boys were worse in a way. They had seen enough of the world outside to know what didn't belong, and they treated him accordingly — with the mild, tolerant detachment one might give a stray cat that might or might not stick around.
He could have resented it. But he found, to his own mild surprise, that he didn't. There was something comfortable about being left alone, about not being drawn into the exhausting swirl of other people's needs and noise.
It was on one of those bleached-grey afternoons, the kind where the sky seemed too low, that he wandered into the back staircase.
This was not the grand front staircase with its creaking banister polished by decades of hands. This was the narrow, forgotten spine of the building, used only by the staff when carrying laundry or boxes of supplies. The paint was chipped, the plaster stained by slow leaks from years past, and the wooden steps groaned in a voice far older than the rest of the house.
He wasn't looking for anything. Sometimes he just walked — corridors, staircases, unused corners — simply to map the place in his head. The building had its own language, and he was learning to read it: the slight sag in the floor near the south wall, the way the draft shifted when a door was opened somewhere else.
That was when he heard them.
The voices came from the room below, muffled by the thickness of the door but clear enough to be understood if one stood still and listened.
"...not quite right, that one," came the first voice. Mrs. Whittaker. Her words were low but not soft, edged with the firmness of someone who had run this place long enough to feel she knew its children like she knew the pattern of her own kitchen.
There was the scratch of a pen on paper. A pause.
The second voice — sharper, quicker — belonged to Miss Aldridge, the newer matron. "Strange quiet. I've seen quiet boys before, but not like him. It's as if he's listening all the time. Measuring, weighing. Doesn't say much, but when he does — it's... I don't know. Precise."
"He'll have to learn to speak up if he's to get anywhere," Mrs. Whittaker replied. "The world doesn't hand things to boys who sit and watch."
"It's not just the watching," Miss Aldridge said. "It's how he looks at people. Like he's working something out. Makes the others uneasy, though they wouldn't admit it. Children can tell when someone's holding themselves apart."
Mrs. Whittaker gave a dry laugh. "Maybe he's just brighter than the rest. We've had clever boys here before. Most of them learned quick enough to hide it."
"I'm not sure it's cleverness," Miss Aldridge murmured. "Feels more... deliberate. Like he's building a wall, one stone at a time. And I don't know if he'll ever let it down."
There was the sound of paper being folded, the squeak of a chair. "All the same," Mrs. Whittaker said, "he's no trouble. Eats his meals, does his chores. That's more than I can say for half of them."
"Yes," Miss Aldridge said slowly. "But sometimes no trouble at all is its own kind of trouble."
He stood frozen on the landing, one hand gripping the splintered banister. The words soaked in slowly, not like rain on a window but like water into earth — settling deep, where they couldn't be brushed away.
It wasn't the first time he had been spoken about in his absence. But this was different. They weren't speculating about his past or his abilities. They were naming — plainly — what he had begun to suspect about himself: that he was becoming apart from them.
And they were right. He did watch. He did weigh things before speaking. He had learned, without consciously deciding to, that words could be dangerous — that they could be spent carelessly or used to anchor something in place. And so he spent them sparingly.
When the voices drifted on to other topics — laundry schedules, the ordering of coal — he moved back up the stairs, each step deliberate. By the time he reached the dormitory, the conversation was already crystallizing into something else: a quiet understanding that whatever wall they thought he was building, it was already there.
The change was not sudden. He did not wake one morning and decide to keep to himself. It was gradual, like the dimming of a light as the oil in the lamp runs low.
In the yard, he no longer joined in the races across the cracked paving stones. When the others played marbles, he lingered at the far end of the circle, sending his shooter clattering without aim until someone else claimed his turn.
In the classroom, he answered only when called upon, and then with answers so precise they left no room for follow-up. The teachers, after a while, stopped trying to draw more from him.
Some noticed, and some didn't. The ones who noticed were often the same ones who avoided his gaze, as if they feared what they might see reflected there.
Occasionally, one of the others would try.
"You never say much, do you?" a boy named Harris remarked one rainy afternoon, as they stood by the window watching water pool in the yard.
"I say what's needed," he replied.
Harris frowned, as if there ought to be more to it than that, then shrugged and moved on.
On another day, one of the younger boys — Thomas, barely eight — approached him in the corridor. "Do you know any stories?" the child asked.
"Yes."
Thomas waited. "Well?"
He shook his head. "Not the sort you'd like."
The boy frowned in confusion and trotted away.
The truth was, he had learned something the matrons had not intended to teach him: the less you gave away, the less people had to use against you.
And so, stone by stone, the wall grew higher.