This chapter, drawn from Zyphar Chronicles I: The Becoming, reveals the earliest wound that shaped the fire ahead—his childhood questions about faith, identity, and the father they erased in name but not in blood.
It is not a tale of rebellion. It is the moment a soul first steps beyond the rituals—toward something real. And that is where the becoming truly begins.
My Mother used to tell me stories—about a man who was never shaken by greed, never bent by fear. A man who did what needed to be done, not for reward, but because it was right.
I think she was talking about my father.
Though she never named him that way.
I never met him. He was gone before I even knew what it meant to recognize myself—gone so early, I only had stories. And the way my mother’s voice changed when she told them.
This way, I was introduced to the Wolf Gang—thrown among the predators not for who I was, but because of the name I carried.
Some looked at me with friendly eyes, the kind that wait before they bite. Some showed their rage too early, already burning for a fight. One even came up close and said it outright—
“So you’re the boy we’ll have to beat someday.”
I didn’t respond.
There was nothing to say.
So I just watched. I was getting bigger. I could feel it.
Not just in my bones, but in the way their eyes changed when they spoke to me. And I was happy, in a quiet way—because it felt like what my mother had said was coming true.
Day by day, I was becoming a man.
When I grew into a man’s body, something strange happened—no one wanted to claim me. Not fully.
The Wolf Gang stayed friendly, as they had always been, but there was a line I never crossed. I wasn’t quite one of them. But I didn’t resemble the Vultures or the Serpents either. I was somewhere in between, unspoken and unclaimed.
It felt like that boy from the jungle I once saw on television—Mowgli, surrounded by creatures, but not one of them.
That makes for a good story when you’re watching from a warm room. Not so much when it’s your life.
They all stood together, eventually—each by their kind.
And I… stood apart.
Mother was struggling more by then. But her love for me never changed. Still, I had become too shy to speak my discomfort.
It felt like asking her would only add weight to the load already crushing her shoulders.
So I kept quiet. And in that silence, I made a decision.
I started asking other peopleabout my father.
Some hushed me the moment I asked.
“Don’t speak of that,” they’d say.
“There’s no father you need to remember.”
But others… pulled me aside, into corners, into the backs of rooms where no one was listening. And there, I heard strange things. They said he was a man who visited the unknown.
That he could have sat above his people, but chose to stay among them. That the path he followed was never allowed by the system. And because of that, they made the path forbidden.
They said his kind of fire ruins a child’s future.
So they erased his memory to save me.
But what they never understood is this—you can’t erase what already burns in the blood.
They told me I should vow to the Lord.
But no one could explain what that meant.
Was he a mythic creature?
A story people chose to follow so they didn’t feel lost? Or something real, just hidden behind language too old to feel alive?
I didn’t know. But this time, it wasn’t just a casual tradition—
it was serious.
And I found myself asking—how can I worship something I don’t understand? How do you vow your soul to an entity that’s never spoken back?
So for the first time in years, I shared the weight with my mother.
She looked tired, but calm. And she said yes.
“You should vow to him. He’s the one who gave us everything.”
I shook my head.
Not in rebellion. In truth.
But, Mother, I said, we don’t have anything at all.
If you don’t work like breaking your own hands each day, there’s no food. We stay hungry. Even I’m trying hard to find work, to help you. But no one helps. They only say wait, or come back later, or you’re not what we’re looking for.
I looked around. At the cracked walls, the bitter silence of nights without heat, the way hope had to disguise itself just to survive.
I asked her—“This is the everything?”
And if it is… “why should we vow to anyone else for it?”
Nimo had been sitting beside her sister when I began the story, but as the weight of my words began to settle and the air grew still between moments, I noticed her glance—brief but clear—passed quietly to Marisha.
Without a word, she rose and walked over to where I sat.
It felt like this was not a decision made in the moment, but one that had been living beneath her breath for some time.
She sat beside me, close—closer than she ever had before—and the old shyness that once traced her presence seemed to have vanished without ceremony.
In front of both her sister and the man who had followed the whole tale with silent fascination, she leaned in and kissed me—softly. I said nothing.
I simply took her hand into mine, gently, as if I had been waiting for this exact shape of her. And then I continued.
They said I had no right to question the authority or presence of the Lord. Some even came to our home to speak with my mother about it—stern voices, veiled concern, the kind of visit meant more as a warning than a conversation.
She didn’t look surprised. But I could see she was angry.
Not with me—never with me—but with the world that expected silence from a boy who had never been taught to lie.
That night, she sat beside me, just like she had when I was small—her fingers combing gently through my hair, her voice low enough to settle the weight but not silence the fire.
“My love,” she said, “even if you feel these questions, you don’t need to ask them out loud.”
“Not in front of people. They don’t like it.”
“I agree with your words,” she went on. “The Lord hasn’t given us much, it’s true. But there are others—those who seem to receive more than we do. And so, they might say you have no right to question Him. They may believe that because you owe Him nothing, He owes you nothing in return.”
“They might tell you to seek His mercy, not His explanation. And, in their world, that is logical.”
I understood. At that stage of my life, I had begun to see it clearly—if you owe nothing to someone, they owe you nothing back. So I asked her again—how I could do something…that might make the Lord owe me something in return.
She smiled. A real smile, tired but still lit from within.
“If I knew that,” she said, “I might have done it already.”
“But perhaps,” she added softly, “you should walk among those who say they know Him better than we do…listen to them. Watch them. See what they carry that we don’t.”
And from the very next day, I began.
I walked to the temples, the shrines, the roadside altars.
I spoke with saints, with wanderers, with self-named prophets and quiet monks. I sat with those who said they were close to the Lord—because I needed to know what closeness really meant.
But instead of truth, I found rules.
Instead of clarity, rituals.
These people—the ones who claimed to walk close to the Lord—offered me nothing I could touch with the soul.
Their words were dressed in borrowed holiness, but even they didn’t seem to believe what they preached.
They told me to act in certain ways, to obey certain verses, to carry out rituals they themselves never followed.
I watched closely. And I could see it. They were pretending.
If these acts were truly the currency of favor with the Lord—then why didn’t they offer it honestly?
Why wear the cloth but not walk the fire?
Why speak the name but never reflect the cost?
Still… I had no other options. I needed answers.
So I did the only thing left—I followed what was written.
Not as they did. Not with half-lies and borrowed gestures.
I followed what the Book said, line by line, with the full weight of belief—even if I didn’t fully understand it. Because if there was any path to make the Lord owe me something, it had to begin in sincerity.
And the first return I received—was a slap.
A hard one.
One of the younger wolves had done something wrong.
I was there when it happened.
When they called me as witness, I stood between two choices.
The cub was someone I’d known since childhood.
His father looked at me with a sharp, unspoken signal.
A glance that told me exactly what he expected.
To lie. To protect the name.
To betray the truth quietly.
But I didn’t. I spoke what I saw.
And the boy was punished.
His father walked up and slapped me across the face.
I didn’t say a word.
But something in me began to break—not because of the pain, but because of the return.
I had offered truth. And the Lord gave me punishment.
I stood in that break—until my mother arrived.
I hadn’t seen that fire in her eyes for years.
She came like a storm no one had predicted—cornering them, every one of them, forcing shame back into their mouths.
They stood silent, as if the air had suddenly become heavier than words. And in that moment, I saw her love again.
Not the tired warmth of daily care, but the ancient rage of a mother protecting what she still believed in.
The Lord may not have given me a justified return.
But that moment—That fire in her—was enough for me to be happy again. After that incident, I stopped meeting the others.
Part of it was simple—they didn’t believe in me anymore.
But that wasn’t the whole story.
We were living in an age of romance—where almost every fellow I knew was either booked, hooked, or in the process of being devoured by someone they called love.
Some of them encouraged me to find someone of my own.
They said it would balance me, soften me, make the days feel warmer. So I tried.
The first one I thought I might like gave me conditions almost immediately.
You have to look like this. Earn this. Become that.
Live like this. Die like this.
Within days, I knew it wasn’t for me.
The Opposite gender started to feel like a code I wasn’t designed to read. They seemed like creatures wired for transaction, not connection—something you must earn with performance, or purchase with sacrifice.
None of them felt like companions. And I had nothing to offer.
One fellow pulled me aside one day and told me the truth.
“A lot of us are like you, Zyphar. We have nothing to give. So we pretend. We wear shoes not made for us. We give flowers we didn’t grow. We play roles.”
He smiled like it was survival.
But to me, it was shame. Even those who came to me with sweetness—they came with strange offers.
One said, “You don’t have to give in. Just say yes to everything I ask. And when you can’t do it, I’ll adjust myself.”
That wasn’t compromise. That was surrender dressed up in obedience. And it felt like a slow death.
By then, I had gone too far into the Book. The laws, the do’s and don’ts, the sacred boundaries—they had started to take root inside me. And something strange began to happen.
Anytime something came near that didn’t match those laws,
my heart raised a red flag—sharp and undeniable.
That alone wasn’t the problem.
The real problem began—
when I started seeing red flags everywhere.
If this story moved something in you—if the silence, the fire, or the forgotten boy felt like they were yours too—
you can continue the journey in Zyphar Chronicles I: The Becoming.
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The fire was never meant to rest in a chapter. It was always meant to lead you somewhere deeper.
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