Tristan was born on a night when the last stars disappeared from the sky.
The air was thick with the scent of ash and rain that never fell. The villagers said it was a cursed night, a night when life and death wrestled for the same soul. Inside a crumbling house at the edge of the village, a woman's final breath melted into the wail of a newborn child. She never heard his cry.
His mother was young, barely twenty, with eyes like pale water and hands soft from tending small gardens. They said she smiled once before the light left her face. When the midwife handed the child to his father, the man did not look upon him with love. Only disbelief. As if the universe itself had chosen to mock him.
Some called the boy a miracle. Others an omen.The midwife whispered, "A child born when the last star dies must carry both endings and beginnings within him." But his father saw no poetry in her words. Only silence. Only loss.That was how the boy received his name: Tristan — born of sorrow.
Before that night, his father had been a builder. A mason whose hands could raise walls that outlasted storms. He had crafted homes that stood straight and proud, and even the chapel bore his mark. But when his wife died, his hands forgot their strength. He sat before the ruins of their home, staring into the emptiness where love had once been.
He no longer prayed. No longer worked. The villagers tried to console him, but he pushed them away. His face grew hollow, his beard tangled, his eyes dull and lifeless. And when he looked upon his son, the gaze that met Tristan's was neither hatred nor affection—it was something far colder: despair.
"You shouldn't have lived," he muttered once, his voice trembling. "It should have been her."
Tristan was only six, but the words cut deeper than he could understand. After that, he stopped waiting for affection. He learned to listen to the wind instead. It spoke through the cracks of the broken house, filling the silence his father left behind. Sometimes he imagined it spoke with his mother's voice—gentle, kind, alive.
The years turned slow and colorless.Winter blended into summer, and summer into decay. Tristan grew taller but thinner, his skin pale and his frame frail. The house that once stood tall began to sag, its beams splitting with rot. His father's madness deepened—prayers turned to curses, and silence to violence.
When drunk, the man would strike him without reason, shouting words Tristan could no longer bear to remember. Other nights, he simply stared into the empty hearth, muttering to a woman who was no longer there.
Tristan endured it all without a sound. He became a ghost in his own home, silent and watchful. When storms came, he would sit by the doorway and let the wind speak to him. It was the only voice that didn't hurt.
And then one morning, that voice was joined by another—the sound of a rope creaking under weight.
He found his father hanging from a beam, swaying gently as the morning light spilled through the cracks in the wall. The air was still. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Tristan stared for a long time.Then he fetched a stool, climbed it, and cut the rope.
The body fell, heavy and silent. He buried his father by the ruins of their home. The ground was hard, and his hands bled as he dug. When it was done, he marked the grave with a stone and carved one word into it: "Stranger."
He didn't cry.
The villagers pitied him. Some left food by his door; others crossed the street to avoid his shadow. They whispered that he was cursed, that death followed wherever he went. "First the mother," they said. "Then the father. What next?"
Tristan heard it all. At first, he tried to forget. But the words began to settle inside him, echoing like the beating of a second heart. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he was different. Not cursed—chosen.
Sometimes he stood alone at night, feeling the faint tremors beneath his feet. There was a rhythm to them, steady and alive, like a heart too deep to die. He would kneel, press his palm to the ground, and whisper,"I can hear you."
When he told the villagers, they called him mad. They said he was becoming his father. Tristan only smiled.
Years passed. The boy who had once cowered in corners learned to survive. He hunted small game, grew what little he could, and lived alone among ghosts. But the tremors beneath the earth grew stronger, and so did his belief.
He came to think the gods had taken everything from him not to punish him, but to prepare him. The loneliness, the pain, the hunger—it was all shaping him into something meant to endure.And if the gods had abandoned this world, then perhaps he would take their place.
He spoke to the grave of his father often, not with hate but conviction."You said I shouldn't have lived," he murmured. "Maybe I lived because no one else could."
And the earth answered with a single tremor—soft, deep, like a pulse.
By seventeen, Tristan had become part of the ruins themselves. His hair fell over pale eyes that seemed to look through things rather than at them. His voice, when he used it, carried strange weight—soft, yet resonant, as if the air itself bent to listen.
The villagers avoided him, whispering that he was not entirely human anymore. They said the wind followed him when he walked, that the earth quieted when he slept.Tristan didn't deny it.
He rebuilt part of the house but left it unfinished, the broken beams jutting upward like ribs. "It doesn't deserve to be whole," he said once. "Not yet."
At night, he stood at the doorway as he had when he was small, listening to the wind sing through the cracks. But now, it wasn't his mother's voice he heard. It was the world itself—faint, tired, and calling to him.
And one night, the earth trembled louder than ever before. The grave of his father cracked open, the stone that read Stranger splitting clean in two. Tristan knelt beside it, placing his hand on the dirt.
"I hear you," he whispered.
Beneath his palm, the ground pulsed once—slow and heavy—like the beat of a dying heart.
And in the ruins of a world that had forgotten its gods,a boy who had been called cursed began to dream not of being loved,but of being remembered.
He would not be the child of sorrow forever.He would become the one who silences sorrow itself.