Free Web NovelChapter 77: Cross And Straw [26] Punishment
Fear fell fast, a frantic flutter flattening his focus. His pulse filled the fissures where his thoughts had been filed before. The boy stared blankly at his father, who was now standing just before him.
The man reached out, his hand covered by an obsidian glove, and buzzed faintly.
He reached to the side, fingers extended, and closed them around something that wasn’t there. Or hadn’t been.
The air between his fingers compressed, a faint shimmering outline of grayish energy. It buzzed like a bee, the sound low and continuous, the sound of a storm that had yet to pass. It wasn’t a violent tempest, more like a smiling rain storm.
The outline gray turned clearer, growing more ’material’ with each passing second.
The boy knew what it would turn into. He had seen it before, many times in fact, in the way you came to know the instruments of a recurring nightmare, recognition mere words would always fail to describe.
His father walked forward with the newly formed stick of wind in his hand.
Each of his steps rang out in the silence that blanketed the room, the vermillion cloak behind him caught the torrent that had followed the conjuration, billowing outward in a sweep of dark red that filled the narrow room with color it didn’t deserve. freёweɓnovel.com
The man didn’t acknowledge the wind...didn’t acknowledge anything, including the boy himself.
His cerulean eyes—the ones the boy saw every time he looked in the mirror—were fixed on him with glassy clarity, as if he was looking far into the distance.
He stopped beside the chair.
The boy kept his hands in his lap.
Kept his spine straight.
Kept his face neutral, the same face he always had when he wasn’t alone. He was very good at doing that.
Without a single word, his father placed the stick of wind on his left shoulder.
A sudden gust of wind passed through the room, cold and indifferent. Following it came a pressure...a pressure so intense it felt like gravity itself had increased.
It pressed down through his shoulder, through his collarbone, through every small bone that made up the architecture of a ten-year-old boy sitting very still in a chair.
The boy stayed still under the torturous wind, excuses swirling through his mind like a whirlpool.
It’s fine. He loves me, that’s why he’s doing this. Father would never want to harm me. Yes, it’s all for my safety and betterment.
He begged it. He begged the pressure to stop, to ease, to reconsider. He begged the wind in his father’s hand to lose interest, to dissipate, to remember that it had not asked to be shaped into this and might prefer to be something else.
As if hearing his words, the pressure lessened for a moment, but the boy knew better than to wish. The next second, it increased, a violent lurch in the gradual property the wind had occupied previously.
His father stood beside him, watching with indifferent eyes, the vermillion cloak still billowing, filling his peripheral vision with the ceremonial red, something that belonged at events where things were decided, and consequences were handed down.
The chair creaked.
The sound was small and wooden and entirely too loud in the silent room. The sound made its way into his ears as if it belonged there, deafening under the ringing in his mind.
His teeth cracked against each other, clenching together so tightly that faint cracks spread through their milky expanse.
The pressure increased.
The boy shifted in his seat...but that was a mistake. His shoulder blades creaked with a haunting sound. A deep interior sensation followed, somewhere below the reach of normal pain, the sensation of something structural being asked to do something it could not.
Then the sound followed, muffled and intimate, the sound of something breaking. The sound of glass shattering under pressure.
His spine buckled, and his head churned.
Yet he still didn’t scream.
He wanted to, the dead gods knew how much he wanted to.
The wanting was enormous, bigger than the room, bigger than the castle, bigger than the very world itself.
The scream existed in its entirety somewhere inside him, fully formed, ready. But it didn’t leave, it could not leave, because the consequences were something the boy did not want to face.
The chair creaked a final time. Then it shattered like an over-ripe watermelon, the ones he ate whenever he sneaked into the kitchen.
He went down with it, landing on his hands and knees in a scatter of wooden debris, his shoulder on fire, his spine sending reports he didn’t have the capacity to process.
A grunt escaped his lips, the shattered debris stabbing into his soft skin.
A second later, he was relieved from his pain...albeit a much worse one followed.
His father’s boot connected with his stomach, a blow so sudden that he didn’t even have time to process what had just happened.
The air left him.
All of it, at once, like light leaving a room when someone closed the door, complete and immediate and leaving nothing behind.
He folded over his own knees, forehead nearly touching the floor, and stayed there while his body trembled and shivered.
He was in pain; it embraced him from all directions, like a mother hugging their child. But his mother had never done it like this, never in his ten years of existence.
A voice came soon after, shattering his thoughts, plunging him deeper into the depths of despair. Did his father truly love him...was this truly what a loving father did?
"A warrior does not show emotion."
Why is Seridius’s father so different?
His best friend’s father was much better; he was warm, like a ray of sunlight in the accursed darkness that enveloped his own world.
But mom said that this is all for me...that it isn’t fathers fault.
He knew his mother was nice; he knew she was kind. She didn’t hit him...but she still forced him to do things that he didn’t like.
The boy stared at the floor. A splinter from the shattered chair sat three inches from his right hand. He looked at it very carefully.
"You have failed, Leonidas Hector Aristeus. You were also late...the Heir of War cannot make mistakes. You are pathetic, and mistakes need to be corrected."
He knew that was his full name, but when his father used it...he didn’t like it. The boy didn’t like his father, but it was all for his future.
"Get ready for punishment."
