***CONTENT WARNING, subject matter contains memories involving domestic abuse*** (Scroll down to ‘End Content Warning’ notification if you don’t want to read this type of content.)
***
Throughout his childhood, Aaron lived in the shadow of his biological father, Cade Bana—a man whose ruthlessness often manifested in violent outbursts against Aaron’s mother, Wren O’Keefe.
Despite Wren’s attempts to hide the abuse, Aaron and his sister were well aware of the reality, witnessing the aftermath in the frequent cuts and bruises that marked her skin.
When Aaron was nine and Amanda was six, the situation reached a breaking point: a brutal assault by Cade left Wren hospitalized with seven broken ribs and an intracerebral hemorrhage1.
Despite the severity of her injuries, justice was sabotaged by Cade’s career as a corrections officer.
His professional ties to the police reduced a near-killing to a stalled investigation of “his word against hers.” Ultimately, Cade faced no criminal charges; instead, the court simply transferred him to a state-run facility several hundred miles away, leaving the family with no true sense of closure.
While the fear did not vanish instantly, the growing distance eventually allowed an uneasy sense of peace to take root.
***
For the three remaining family members, life became a quiet, slow rebuilding.
The haunting silence, once terrifying, transformed into a fragile sanctuary.
His mother, healing from both physical and psychological wounds, no longer had to hide bruises or flinch at the sound of a closing door.
Finally, Aaron and Amanda stepped out from the shadow of terror, learning to occupy space without fear of random punishment or retaliation.
Their daily routines shifted from survival mode to a quiet, simple normalcy.
The kitchen, once a stage for violent outbursts and broken dishes, transformed into a place for calm meals and light conversation.
Fragile at first, laughter began to return to a home that had known only tension.
While the horror of what Cade did could never be erased, his absence was a profound blessing—a forced, necessary reset that allowed them to finally breathe, sleep, and live on their own terms.
Though the scar remained, the poison was gone.
From the wreckage, Aaron grew into a “good” kid, deeply averse to fighting, yet still haunted by the memory of his father’s cruelty and terrified of standing up to bullies like Tank.
****END CONTENT WARNING***
Back in the Media Center, Aaron returned to his assigned seat and laid his head down on the desk.
“He will not give up his chase, Sir Aaron,” the General said, his voice echoing like old stone—deep and strong.
“That…
devil, that vile creature, thrives on the scent of fear, drinking in your hesitation; we should give him no such satisfaction.
Tank Pritchard is nothing more than a parasite, a weak-willed blight.
You need to decide; you need to rise and hold your ground.
Aaron shifted, a wave of despair washed over him.
I’m not like you, General, Aaron thought, his mental voice trembling.
Rykker added, “Even a timid creature will fight back if cornered.”
A timid creature; perhaps a mouse.
Aaron looked down at his bony, pale hands, feeling instantly small, the memory of Tank shoving him to the ground surging back.
He looked over the sea of silent students in the study hall, the air was suddenly thick with distress and the walls were closing in on Aaron.
He imagined a cornered creature, desperate and trapped.
Was I in a corner?
He wondered.
Was I the mouse?
How could he fight back?
Aaron’s heart hammered against his ribs.
He didn’t know the first thing about throwing a punch.
He imagined trying to hit Tank—a mountain of muscle—and the mere thought made his stomach churn.
He felt weak; a fragile thing in a world of predators ready to crush him.
Aaron slowly shook his head in absolute, grave disapproval, his eyes stinging.
He couldn’t fight.
“I’d lose, for sure,” he groaned.
He imagined the aftermath: a broken nose, a bloody face, his pride shattered, and Tank coming back even harder, relentless and merciless, knowing Aaron was, in fact, just a mouse.
“Losing is not the issue, young one,” the General continued, determined to convince his host—to harden his resolve.
“The issue is that you have already lost the moment you decided to accept the corner.”
Aaron squeezed his eyes shut, trying to drown out both the General and the fear of the next time he saw Tank in the hallway.
The silence between them was intense, filled with the terrifying, impossible advice to stand up.
***
“Do not fear, Sir Aaron.
I have woven certain designs in my mind to dismantle this ‘Tank’ of yours,” Rykker’s mental voice hardened, vibrating through Aaron’s mind like the strike of a tectonic plate.
We begin with the scroll.
Strength, young man, is not found exclusively in the clenching of a fist.
It is found in the leverage of knowledge.”
“By “scroll” do you mean like books?
Research?
As in information?”
“Does this world still house its great archives?” Rykker’s voice rippled with a mocking tone.
“This ‘Earth’ must have eons of forgotten lore buried beneath its vanity.
While I descend into the catacombs of my own memory, you shall sift through the dust of your…
ancestral literatures.
Somewhere in those ink-stained relics lies the thread.
If we find the lore, boy, we find the Weaver’s fire.”
Aaron paused, his brow furrowing as he looked around the media center.
The space was a cavernous cathedral of the digital age, where the air hummed with the low, steady drone of cooling fans and the faint clicking of keyboards.
Above, rows of recessed LED lights cast a sterile, even glow over endless ranks of sleek workstations, their monitors flickering like restless electronic eyes.
They were surrounded by an endless supply of knowledge, an architecture of information that stretched from the physical to the intangible1.
Along the perimeter, heavy oak shelves groaned under the weight of leather-bound archives and colorful spines, their earthy scent of aging paper clashing with the sharp tang of the hardware.
In this era of technology, the world’s collective memory was no longer a distant treasure but a pulse vibrating through miles of fiber-optic cables beneath their feet.
Every breakthrough, every historical tragedy, and every whisper of human discovery was at one’s fingertips, waiting to be accessed behind a glowing glass screen.
Right at this moment, the absolute sum of all human thought was just steps and fingertips away
Aaron’s lips curled into a playful grin.
He could almost picture the General’s face—the man would likely collapse if he ever glimpsed the digital tidal wave of the Internet.
In the General’s realm, the gathering of information was a slow, physical labor where scribes spent agonizing weeks or months hunched over parchment, their fingers stained with the ink of a single handwritten scroll.
The General lived in a world where information was a massive task that took generations to collect, record and lock away in cold, subterranean vaults to keep the air from eating the parchment.
To him, knowledge was an irreplaceable treasure to be protected; to be hoarded and hidden from prying eyes.
To Aaron, knowledge was available to every soul on the planet with a single tap on a keyboard.
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