Marcus didn't need anyone to tell him what had happened.
He knew. He could feel it in every fiber of his being.
He saw it with his own eyes—his father, a man long regarded as a paragon of intellect and wisdom, changing right before him. In a strange, inexplicable moment, his father stood in his study, scribbling furiously on his manuscript, which had been the product of years of painstaking research. The soft sound of the quill scratching the paper was a familiar comfort. But that silence, so once filled with purpose, was suddenly pierced by something unseen. Something Marcus couldn't grasp.
While his eyes remained fixed on his father's writing, he noticed something terrifying—part of what was written on the paper simply... vanished. Not like the fading ink on a poorly kept manuscript, but as if it had never existed at all.
A moment of void. A moment of erasure. He saw it with his own eyes, but chose to pretend it hadn't happened.
"No… nothing happened," he whispered to himself, though a deep unease gnawed at him. Questions piled up in his mind, but fear quickly silenced them.
Even when the entire manuscript disappeared, even when his father's behavior began to change, Marcus remained silent. He had nothing to say. He had no answers.
The passing days carried with them a sense of dread and regret, yet Marcus remained in the shadows, ignoring the events that unfolded.
"What could someone like me do?" he thought, staring into the void, with no clue about what would come next.
He didn't feel the courage to change. He didn't possess the honor that could drive him to seek out answers. "I'm just my father's son. Nothing more."
But in those first moments after the incident, a small, uncomfortable thought began to slip into his mind. It was an unsettling thought, one he wasn't prepared for, but it was the only truth he could cling to:
Could he be something more?
Should he have done more than just live in the shadows of others?
He knew the answer deep down, but he was running from it, as he always had been