Touya had been so eager, so excited and so desperate to show his father what he could do, prove to him he wasn’t the failure he saw him as.

But now, as he sat on a wooden log in the silent forest of Sekoto Peak, a heavy weight of anguish and despair pressed down on him as time passed and he came to realize that his father had truly given up on him.

Heat seethed beneath his skin, flames on the brink of erupting into a fiery explosion. Tears well up in his eyes and just before the dam could break—a sound caught his attention. Touya looked up, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

Touya: “…Dad?”