BOOK I: THE ARCHITECT
PROLOGUE — THE BOY WHO LEARNED TO BE SILENT
Aurelian discovered at the age of nine that silence was not the absence of sound, but its correction.
That day, while his parents argued in the kitchen—words overlapping without meaning, inefficient noise—he found an injured bird on the lawn. He held it with exact precision, restraining its wings without breaking the structure. He felt no compassion. Only scientific curiosity.
He observed the sequence: erratic breathing, rigid body, mechanical transition toward absolute stillness. He found it logically satisfying.
He placed the body among the roots of his mother's rosebush, the beak pointing toward the center. A detail of order no one would ever notice.
When he returned to the house, his mother asked what he had been doing outside.
"Nothing," he replied with a flawless smile.
She believed that smile. That was when Aurelian understood that a smile was the key to closing uncomfortable conversations.
That night, as they ate in silence, he listened to his father chewing with his mouth open. The wet, repetitive sound cut through him like physical friction. His mother laughed too loudly at a joke that was not funny. His sister struck her cutlery against the plate without rhythm or reason.
Friction. Imperfection. Noise.
And then the idea stopped being a sketch and became his only truth: the world was a noisy organism, destroying itself through its own dissonance.
He would be the architect of its order.
And one day, the silence he created would carry his name.