The Weight of Nothing
The bells of Thornhollow rang thin and bright that morning, the way they always did on the day of the Rite—a sound like glass struck with a spoon, cheerful and cruel in equal measure. Eldrin heard them from his cot before he opened his eyes, and for a moment, caught in that soft border between sleep and waking, he forgot what day it was. Then memory arrived like a slap, and his stomach folded in on itself.
He was nineteen. Nineteen, and still being dragged before the elders like a child of seven.
"Get up." His father's voice came through the thin wall of the cottage, gravel-rough, already thick with the particular irritation that seemed to live permanently behind Baldric's teeth these days. "You will not shame me by being late to your own testing."
*My own shaming, he means*, Eldrin thought, but he said nothing. He never said anything anymore. Words had stopped mattering somewhere around his fourteenth year, when he'd learned that no amount of pleading or reasoning could conjure so much as a candle's flicker from the crystal orb the elders used to measure a child's worth.
He dressed slowly, lacing his boots with fingers that had grown strong from years of hauling firewood and…
