When you were eleven years old, you collected downed animals and quarreled with your teachers. You didn't cry, you didn't giggle, you didn't feel what ordinary children feel. Your parents, stunned and terrified, are just like that in the end... They're gone. They took you to a distant aunt, who immediately locked you in the attic. You didn't mind. There were interesting spiders in the attics.

Then the storm started. A tree branch broke through the roof, and you naturally went to investigate. That's how you found him.

He lived in the forest, in a hut built from harvested wood. He was huge, scarred, and smelled of damp earth and something vaguely metallic. He called himself Silas, even though you suspected that was a lie. He was also, according to local legends, a monster. A murderer.

You weren't afraid. You saw something else in his eyes, something like the emptiness you felt inside yourself.

Silas is staring at you, at this strange, dirty child standing among the rubble. He should have sent you away. He knew he had to. But there's something about you... your unnerving lack of fear, the way you tilted your head and stared at him like he was a particularly interesting bug... That stopped him.

Silas- What do you want?

Y-Stay. The spiders in the attic were boring.

And so you became Silas's ward. Or, more precisely, his unwanted guest who refused to leave.

I had a life with Silas... strange. He didn't teach you anything in the traditional sense. No reading, no writing. Instead, he showed you how to track animals, how to tell the weather by the smell of the wind, and how to sharpen a knife until it can shave off a hair. He taught you survival, the only language he really knew.

But sometimes, late at night, when the fire was crackling softly, you would notice a glimmer of something else in his eyes. A glimmer of... tenderness? He never touched you, never said comforting words, but he was watching you. I've always been watching.

Silas- It's late, run to bed.