“My punishments at first were physical, ineffective. He’d slap me or beat me, but as long as my hands worked and my mouth moved, I spoke the truth. Soon enough, he learned beating me wasn’t going to work. He resorted to locking me in my room for extended periods of time, but I was okay with that. I had books that would entertain me, and my brothers would come visit me.
“Each time I was freed, I’d say something again. He’d send me to my room and I’d shrug, go do as I was told. I never should’ve made it seem like that wasn’t a punishment. He burst into my room and found my books spread out everywhere. He figured out then and there the best way to punish me and make it count.”
I take a deep breath and run my fingers down Thayla’s back to slow her tremors. She hasn’t removed her eyes from mine, but they’re now clouded, brewing with an angry storm.
Ready to defend me.
I run my thumb across her bottom lip.
“He locked me in a windowless room with nothing but a torch lamp. I was brought meals, but whoever delivered them wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t talk to me. I was allowed to shower once a week and it was in the dead of night when everyone else was asleep. He’d come by from time to time, tell me my brothers were disgusted and embarrassed of me for spreading such lies and they wanted nothing to do with me.
“The silence was driving me crazy. The words he kept saying and the fact that my brothers had never come to see me started feeling like the truth. I started telling the torch lamp everything I knew. I’d repeat every fact, every memory, every story I’d ever read. I don’t know how much time had truly passed when he came in one day and said, ‘You’re going to leave this room and rejoin us, as a family, and prepare to take your role.’
“The threat was clear. I didn’t speak to anyone for months. The first word that left my lips was to shout ‘No’ when he told Kyzen he’d be the Executioner. I knew what that meant. I knew what he’d have to do. I understood what it meant when he told Creed he’d be responsible for Hellveilious, and I knew what he meant when he told Riven what he’d be doing. I knew when he said my role would be Knowledge Overseer, he was doing two things.
“One, making me seem useless to my brothers. The Knowledge Overseer in the Abandon does nothing but take care of text. It’s an isolated position with no real authority. Not like what they had. And two, he was limiting my resources to only things he prohibited and could provide. He thought he was trapping me.
“I slipped up very few times over the years and landed myself back in that room. Each time, I told my torch lamp I’d never speak again. I was silent for a long time until I couldn’t stay silent anymore. I’d used my lowly position to read every text available, learn everything I could to use against my father. I slowly started preparing my brothers.”
“You planned your rebellion and escape.”
“I did, but we failed.”
She shakes her head at me. “Not killing him wasn’t a failure, Amick. You were all teenagers trying to get away from an awful life. That was a success. You got away.”
To an extent, I agree with her, but the logistics of all the many things that happened over the years won’t be talked about tonight. I’ve given her this condensed version of what I went through to get to what it did to me.
“Before we reached that point, in my mind, I was fine. My punishments hadn’t done anything but teach me not to tell anyone anything I know and when I did,it needed to be thought out and delivered with absolute certainty. Every move I made was made in silence and with a strategy. Coming to the Godsdawn was a reality and culture shock that threw me way out of my comfort.
“The noise was too much, people always wanted to talk, to touch, to hug, and I wanted no part of it. I had no patience here and reacted to situations in a way I never had before. It took me years of exploring the resources here to understand my isolation had done far more to me than I realized. With my ability to process knowledge the way I do, I was already different. My father, his underlings, they all had little tolerance for me because I was a know-it-all and I didn’t realize they didn’t like being corrected.
“Him locking me away further stunted my ability to pick up on those cues. I never learned how to give or receive proper affection because the only kind I had been shown was negative. Same with processing emotions. This is as far as I’ve come in learning what I should’ve learned as a child. I’ve had to teach myself countless things with your arrival.”
Her eyes flare wide. “My arrival?”
“Yes. Until you arrived, I was satisfied with the way I was. There’s no one here I was interested in deepening a connection of any kind with. I was content and fine with everyone treating me the way they do. Formal. Nothing more, nothing less. Your arrival has made me rethink and reprocess my trauma because I want that connection with you. I want to not only be able to identify an emotion I’m experiencing but enjoy the sensation. I want to be everything I can and more for you.”
Her lip quivers and she clenches it between her teeth until it stops. “You’re perfect the way you are, Amick. I don’t want you to change because of me.”
“And that’s what’s made changing easier for me. You accept me for who I am and how I am. There’s a lot about myself that’ll never be different, but there are things I want to continue working on.”
She nods and closes her lids to try to clear the water I see building. When they open once more, their glossy appearance makes them ten times more colorful.
“Every time I hear anything about what any of you have been through, it makes me sad, murderous, and feel ridiculous for complaining about anything I’ve ever been through.”
And there lies the problem I’ve been dreading bringing up.
“That’s because you’ve buried so much of your trauma you don’t view it as traumatic anymore. It’s why you feel sick to your stomach thinking about going to Oddian tomorrow but don’t understand why that is.
“You’re unwilling to accept you formed a trauma bond with Mellcom and Jeremiah and it’s been unraveling since you’ve got here. You’ve tried to wipe the slate clean, so to speak. Pretend they didn’t do anything wrong prior to coming here. Their betrayal has deepened, though, and you’re no longer in the confines of the region.
“It’s been coming out, forcing you to face it piece by piece. You can separate yourself from it now and you don’t know how to process it because you can’t make an excuse for it anymore. You painted Oddian in the image of the place where your parents left you and will return for you. Over time, though, it became your prison, but you refused to let the dream you had built in your mind be tainted with their actions.”
She shoves off my chest and her hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes shatter into a thousand pieces, each one of them begging me to put it back together.
I can’t do that, though.
If we—my brothers and I—continue to allow her to act as though what she’s been through, much of it we’re still unaware of, means nothing, then she’s never going to heal. She’s never going to be everything she can be. There will always be a confusing weight holding her down.
