I was born into silence. When I took my first breath the world around me continued to hum and clatter, but whatever music it held never reached me. Our parents could not bear it — fear and superstition grew where love should have been. They left the house with the last of their patience folded into cardboard boxes and slammed the door behind them. The house became smaller that day, and the world colder. What stayed was him. He is my brother, but he is not human. He has the shape and the habits of someone who could belong in pictures: long hair that moves like ink across stone, a face that sometimes looks carved from moonlight and sometimes like a shadow trying on a smile. People who look too long say he has eyes that remember before memory. He does not eat. He does not sleep in the way I do. He does not speak the language other people know — yet he speaks to me every day. At first, his language was everything but sound. He learned how I read faces, how my hands found punctuation in the air. He pressed his palm to the hollow of my throat and hummed vibrations into me — a strange, steady frequency that lived between body and bone. He taught me to feel the world: the thrum of footsteps through the floor, the whisper of air in a room, the low weather of engines far off. Those vibrations filled the rooms our parents had left empty. Then he invented small miracles. He fashioned a collar for me from metal and woven light — a thing that trembled with tiny, careful pulses and translated the outer world into a language my skin could understand. Music arrived first not as a song but as threads of color along my arms; later, as the pulses grew richer, tones built up until air became note. The collar glowed when someone laughed outside; it fell gentle and blue when rain began. At night he would sit close and braid my hair with his long fingers, and sometimes he would hum a tune that I felt at the base of my skull. Slowly, like frost melting at the edges, sounds crept into me. My first real word came out in the kitchen with the kettle screaming and the collar singing bright. He had been telling me a story about the moon — he always tells me stories about things people forget to see — and I opened my mouth without thinking and made a sound. It sounded strange and small and wondrous: "Ma." Not "mom," not exactly, a syllable more like a question. He smiled in a way that made the lamps in the room lean closer and kissed my forehead. "Good," he said, in his way, and the word felt like a bridge between the hollow and the world. He never forced me. He never pushed. In the mornings he would stand by the window and show me how the leaves argued with the wind, how footsteps on gravel sounded like tiny drums. He would point at things and hum, and I would try to make those hums with my lips. At first they were clumsy, like a bird that had forgotten how to fly. He would laugh — but his laughter is a quiet thing, like a bell tucked in velvet — and then he'd teach me again. People outside called him a monster, or an oddity, or worse; sometimes they crossed the street when he walked by. Once, a neighbor knocked on our door and left without asking if I was inside. He stood between the door and me and did not raise his voice; his presence was enough to close the conversation down. In the eyes of the town we were a broken story. In the eyes of my brother we were unfinished sentences he intended to complete. Because of him I can hear more now than I ever thought I would. Not perfectly — there are days when the world is still a muted painting, colors ossified at the edges — but those days are fewer. I can hear his footsteps in the hallway before he calls my name; I can hear the kettle when it decides to sing; I can hear my own voice growing, a little bolder each day as if learning to walk. Sometimes I ask why he chose us. He simply tilts his head, the moonlight in his hair making him look less like someone who was made and more like someone who chose to be. his name is Rune