Draxis

SPOKEN TO NO ONE IN PARTICULAR

Everyone in this city thinks they know how a story like mine ends. A boy falls from a wall, and the wall wins, and that's that — a name on nobody's lips a year later. I've let them go on thinking it. It's safer for everyone, myself included, if the boy stays fallen.

Draxis isn't the name I was given. It's the name I built out of what was left after the one I was given stopped fitting. You'd be surprised how much of a person can be rebuilt if you're patient about it, and how little anyone questions a face they've already decided is a stranger's.

I watch this city the way you watch a fire you're not sure you started. The Democracies, the walls, the alleyways full of people who don't know how good they've got it not knowing what I know — I see all of it, and I say very little, because the moment I open my mouth about certain things, certain people, I stop being nobody. And nobody is the only thing keeping me alive.

Some of us don't get to come back from the fall. We just get to choose what climbs out instead.