Rain fell like thin needles, pricking the skin and silencing the world.
In the darkness, a boy Zekki sat hugging his knees in the corner of a cramped room, the only place where even the shadows stopped yelling at him.
That house was full of voices.
Not laughter.
Not warmth.
But shouts, breaking plates, and a child's name used like a punching bag.
His parents weren't monsters.
But they weren't protectors either.
They were simply broken people rough, exhausted, spilling their lives onto a child who never asked to be born.
And inside that house…
a wound was born.
There were nights when his father's voice slammed like a hammer, and his mother's words sliced like knives.
Zekki's small world became a theater of humiliation
a place where silence was a shield,
and crying was a sin.
To him, the world was too loud to listen to,
and too heavy to endure.
Every shout, every insult, every night without a single hug…
they stacked like water behind a cracking dam.
But Zekki found something.
Something no one could take from his hands.
Something that began as an escape… and ended as destiny.
Writing.
Under the trembling glow of a candle, with a dull pencil and worn-out paper, he wrote out everything he couldn't say.
Hatred.
Fear.
Desire.
Trauma.
Frustration.
Sometimes he wrote lines like:
"If my life is a wound, then let my ink be the blood that spills without permission."
And with every word, he saved himself a little more.
The pen became his wings.
Ink became his breath.
And those little stories…
became the home he rebuilt again and again.
Years passed.
Zekki grew up.
Now he walked through heavy rain, clothes soaked and stained with blood
not his parents' blood,
but the blood of a debt collector who came because his parents never stopped borrowing what they could never repay.
He held the final page of his novel torn, scorched at the edges while standing before the graves of his parents.
He stared.
Silent.
Sharp.
No hatred.
No love.
Then he knelt in front of the gravestones.
"I don't hate you. I don't resent you.
Thank you… for everything," he said, voice steady, a few tears slipping down his cheek.
He rose, closing his eyes.
"Because of you… I learned how not to become you," he whispered, cold but honest.
He sat beside their graves, looking up at the dark sky broken by the sound of wind brushing through brittle leaves.
Then his gaze dropped to the last page of his novel.
"We never truly leave our past…
we just learn to stand on its ruins," he murmured with a faint smile.
He turned away.
Walked forward.
Leaving behind a past that could no longer touch him.
But fate had other plans.
On the road, Zekki froze the ink on the page suddenly writhing like a living thing.
His hands trembled.
His face drained in fear.
"W-What… what is this?!" he gasped.
The ink burst off the paper, swirling around him.
Then
everything vanished.
His body collapsed to the ground, while a faint white light seeped out of him, pulled into the page as it ignited completely.
And then
darkness.