Forenote: About Tomorrow, Tomorrow
This is my take on a psychological and character-driven story set in 19th century Aubervijr and Faursia. It follows Ariejan Damaen, a young man recently released from long-term institutional care, as he attempts to rebuild a quiet, anonymous life. Returning to Faursia under a false name and a vague personal history to conceal his own complex past and complicated family ties, he carries with him the weight of a misunderstood condition — one he is determined to keep hidden from those around him.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow explores themes of identity, grief, alienation, the fragile performance of normality and the stigma surrounding mental health in 19th century Aubervijr. Its nevertheless been something I’ve been wanting to try for a while — a story less focused on geopolitics or statecraft, and more on the personal, internal experiences that can shape a person. While the story is subtle and not graphic in nature, certain subjects may be sensitive for some readers. These include:
Chapter One
‘As if Returning’
April 1861
The ferry to Faursia had left Nieuwheeg nearly an hour ago, and the land behind them had already vanished into fog. The strait was at its narrowest this far north — slate-coloured, slow-moving — and the ferry, though modest, handled it with confidence. Most passengers had migrated inside to the long cabin, where oil lamps swung gently from overhead and benches faced each other in twos and fours. The air was warm with breath and fabric and boiled tea.
Ariejan Damaen sat near the cabin’s rear, close to the stove, with one gloved hand resting in his lap and the other wrapped loosely around a paper cup of cooling coffee. His coat, dark and buttoned to the throat, looked several seasons out of date. His boots were polished but cracked at the sides. His hair, sun-burnished brown, curled lightly above his collar where it hadn’t been trimmed close. His face was pale but not unwell. His eyes were grey-green — or green-grey, depending on the light — and unreadable. His face, in profile, was the kind that didn’t draw attention — not striking, not forgettable either. His features were symmetrical but muted, with pale lips and hollows at the cheeks that might’ve once been handsome. There was something about him that suggested order without ease, care without vanity. He looked like someone who dressed himself each morning with a quiet sort of dread.
There was something else too — something harder to name. Not illness. Not oddity. Just a sort of dissonance. A slowness to his blinking. An uneven stillness. A gaze that landed too softly and stayed too long. He was quiet, but not alone.
Opposite him sat two men — Faursians by their accents, mid-thirties perhaps, travelling with matching carpet bags and the confident manner of businessmen. One had a square face and a drooping moustache; the other a sharper build, dark eyes, dark coat, and an instinct for conversation that could not abide silence.
“You said your name was Damaen?” the sharp one asked, returning to a thread Ariejan hadn’t realised was still alive.
Ariejan nodded once. “Yes.”
“Uncommon.”
“I’m told so.”
“Faursian?”
Ariejan lifted the cup to his lips, then set it back down. “It’s from my mother’s side.”
The other man — moustached, heavier — leaned forward slightly. “Are you returning home, then?”
“I suppose so,” Ariejan said, almost absently.
“You suppose?”
“I’ve never lived there.”
The men glanced at each other, polite but intrigued.
The dark-eyed one smiled. “You don’t speak like a Faursian.”
“No,” Ariejan said. “But I still remember how.”
The moustached man laughed. “You remember how to speak like someone you’re not. That makes you either a diplomat or a poet.”
“I don’t write,” said Ariejan.
“Ah, so a diplomat.”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
A pause. A smile, thin and apologetic.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
The sharp man raised his brows, amused. “Well. At least you’ve come to the right country. We’re all something else these days.”
The men laughed. Ariejan didn’t, but neither did he flinch. He folded his hands around the cup and looked past them, toward the narrow window where water blurred past like sleep.
The sharp-faced man leaned back, resting his elbow on the bench rail, fingers tapping idly at his knee.
“Well, if you haven’t decided who you are,” he said, “perhaps Faursia will decide for you. It tends to do that. One way or another.”
Ariejan offered him a small, still smile. “Countries only decide who you are if you give them the chance.”
Moustache chuckled again. “Philosopher, then. I knew it.”
“I read,” Ariejan said simply. “It’s not the same.”
“Then what were you in Aubervijr?” the sharp one asked, his voice light but leading now. “You’ve the look of a teacher. Or a lawyer.”
“Neither.”
“Clergy?”
Ariejan shook his head.
The man raised his eyebrows with theatrical patience. “Well, then?”
Ariejan hesitated just a moment too long.
“I was away,” he said at last. “For some time.”
“Away?”
“Travelling.”
“Where?”
Another pause.
Ariejan set down the cup gently on the bench beside him. His voice, when it came, was quiet, not defensive — just final.
“Nowhere worth writing down.”
That silenced them for a moment. Not because the answer was cold, but because it was so softly spoken — as if he himself believed it. As if there was nothing about his past that deserved to be remembered.
Moustache shifted, glancing toward the other end of the cabin. The sharp one watched Ariejan for a breath longer, then nodded once and looked away.
The ferry creaked. Someone sneezed. The lamps swung slightly in their brackets.
From across the cabin, a young woman with a travel-worn notebook and ink on her fingers glanced up from her writing. She had been listening for some time — not rudely, but openly, with the natural attention of someone curious about the people she would be confined with for the next several hours.
Her gaze lingered on Ariejan.
Not because of his answers — but because of the way he occupied silence. The way he answered, then folded back into stillness, like someone who had lived under the weight of his own voice for too long.
The conversation at his table dissolved into soft coughs and shifting coats. The two men turned to speak of more casual things — business routes, poor weather, a delayed freight shipment in Lauwert. Ariejan made no effort to contribute. He rested his wrist against the side of the bench and stared through the window again, the sea now all colourless motion and no direction.
He didn’t feel cold, but he was aware of the cold. Didn’t feel tired, but his limbs were slow. Didn’t feel watched — and yet.
His breath, he noticed, had grown shallower since boarding. It did that when he spoke too long. His throat still itched with the edges of those answers. Harmless, perhaps, but too soon. Too exact. He should have said less. Or more. But never what he’d said.
He shifted his fingers along his knee. Counted quietly to six. Then stopped.
Across the cabin, the woman with the ink-stained fingers dipped her pen once more, then closed the book, not bothering to blot the page.
She was about thirty, pale with light features and storm-grey eyes that had the quiet confidence of someone used to looking directly at things. Her hair was pinned half-clumsily at the back, a few strands shaking loose each time the ferry rocked.
She studied people the way some people studied dialects: with patience, with method, with instinct.
There was something in that man’s posture that drew her attention — not simply stillness, but a cultivated kind.
He was sitting like someone who had learned how. His gaze didn’t wander. It deliberately stayed. He blinked in sequences — too rarely, too suddenly.
She didn’t find him handsome, though she noticed his face had once been more symmetrical. There was some long-healed fracture at the bridge of the nose, and the upper right canine was dulled in a way the others weren’t. His hands, gloved, moved rarely — but when they did, they did so perfectly, with a conscious rhythm, as though the smallest thing risked too much.
She wrote nothing now. Just watched.
And wondered what kind of man it was who seemed to occupy less space than his own body required.
The ferry shifted course slightly, and the wind changed with it. The windows fogged briefly with condensation before clearing again, and Ariejan’s reflection flickered once across the glass — long enough to mistake it for someone else.
He looked away.
His legs were beginning to ache. Not from standing, not from sitting — from holding still. That quiet effort had its own gravity. Each hour wore through it a little more.
Behind him, someone shuffled cards too loudly. A child began to hum. Two benches down, the man with the sharp voice mentioned Esonstêd again — his sister’s home, he said, or maybe a warehouse he’d invested in.
Esonstêd. The name hardly meant anything. A place chosen for its lack of memory. A modest port town. Quiet. Mostly Faursian. A doctor there, supposedly, who could help him manage things — though Ariejan hadn’t decided yet whether he would go. Or whether he should.
The sea was flattening. He could feel it beneath his boots. The ferry had found its rhythm now, gliding low across the surface with a dull, hypnotic pull.
He remembered — for no reason — the walls of a corridor he had once walked for weeks, painted pale yellow, the kind that swallowed colour without protest. And the sound his own shoes made on tile. And a door at the end that never opened, even when they told him it would.
He blinked. The memory folded itself back down. He shifted his weight slightly and let out a slow, silent breath.
He was fine.
He had spoken clearly. He had answered when spoken to. He had not drawn attention.
That was enough.
Still — he could feel something beneath the calm. Not panic. Not illness. The shape of something unnamed, watching the inside of his mind like weather behind glass. Not near yet. But present.
He moved his hand along the bench, subtly, until it rested once again on the cup.
Lukewarm now. Slightly sweet.
Familiar.
That, too, was enough.
A few minutes passed before the woman rose.
She moved lightly — not with elegance, but with intent.
Notebook in hand, ink-stained thumb pressed casually against the spine, she approached Ariejan’s bench with a mild nod to the two men still engaged in their own quiet quarrel. They barely noticed her.
“Is that still warm?” she asked, gesturing to the coffee cup beside him.
Ariejan turned, surprised not by the question but by the softness of her voice. She spoke like someone who was used to being overheard, and didn’t mind.
“No,” he said, glancing down. “Not really.”
“Shame,” she said. “I was hoping the pot was still out. Ferry coffee always tastes like it’s been made with sea water, but I suppose there’s a kind of honesty in that.”
He allowed a faint smile — brief, instinctive.
She waited, just long enough for it to pass.
“Do you mind?” she asked, indicating the empty space beside him.
He hesitated — not visibly, not in a way she could see — but he felt the decision stretch a little too long behind his eyes before his mouth caught up.
“No,” he said. “Please.”
She sat, folding her coat beneath her, and pulled out a crumpled scrap of cloth from her pocket to wipe her fingertips, which bore the faded outline of a sentence she hadn’t let dry.
“I was sitting over there,” she said, nodding to the bench across the cabin. “But the wind’s quieter here.”
He nodded.
“I’m Miertje,” she added. “Miertje van Santen.”
A pause. He understood this required something of him.
“Ariejan,” he said. “Damaen.”
“Damaen,” she repeated, as if testing the weight of it. “Faursian?”
“My mother’s side.”
“Is that where you’re going, then? Family?”
Ariejan shook his head. “No. Just… going.”
“That makes two of us.”
She didn’t press. She didn’t need to.
Instead, she glanced at the notebook, as though debating something, then tucked it into her coat.
“I apologise,” she said. “I was listening earlier. Not deliberately.”
“You weren’t the only one,” he said, not unkindly.
“They were a bit much, weren’t they?” she said, smiling. “The moustache especially. Always trying to box people into professions or ancestry.”
He didn’t answer — not with words. But his silence was permissive, not cold.
She studied his face then. Not in a way that was rude — just observant. Measured.
“You speak differently,” she said at last. “Carefully.”
He looked down at his gloves.
“When you’ve had too much silence,” he said, “you have to measure things, or you spill.”
Her eyes softened, just slightly.
“I think I understand that,” she said.
He nodded, though he wasn’t sure if she truly did.
But she had said it quietly. Without performance.
And so, for the first time in the journey, Ariejan Damaen allowed himself to exhale without calculation.
The ferry rocked gently. The lamps above them creaked in their sockets.
Miertje folded her hands in her lap, not quite looking at him. It wasn’t shyness — more like restraint. She had the bearing of someone who knew how to be listened to, but was testing whether she could be trusted first.
“Do you write?” Ariejan asked, nodding slightly at her pocket.
Miertje gave a soft laugh. “I try. Notes, mostly. Observations. I tell myself they’ll turn into something someday.”
“About what?”
“About people. Places. The way they move through each other.” She smiled faintly. “I suppose it’s the same sort of thing men write in dull reports, except I do it with too much feeling and too little accuracy.”
He watched her for a moment. “Accuracy isn’t always useful.”
“No?” she said.
“It doesn’t make a thing more true.”
Miertje tilted her head, as if storing that. “You don’t talk like someone without a profession.”
Ariejan shrugged, eyes returning briefly to the sea beyond the glass. “Maybe I had one once.”
She paused, then said, very gently, “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“I’m not trying to hide,” he said, and immediately regretted the words.
Miertje didn’t flinch. She just said, “You don’t need to explain that either.”
A silence passed, this one lighter than the last. Neither of them rushed to fill it.
He looked at her again, more directly now. “Are you going home?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think I am. Though it’s the sort of thing I’d say at the customs post if they asked.”
“Then where?”
She shrugged, smiling a little. “To Faursia. To see it again, maybe. I haven’t been in years. It’s a place full of pasts — and they never seem to belong to anyone anymore. I like that.”
Ariejan looked down at his hands, then slowly removed his gloves, laying them flat on the bench. His fingers were long, thin, unmarked — the kind of hands that looked like they belonged to someone who read too much, or touched nothing that left calluses.
“I like that too,” he said.
A gust of wind rolled under the hull then, lifting the ferry just enough to sway the benches. Miertje reached out instinctively to steady herself, her fingers brushing his forearm. He didn’t move — not away, not toward — but there was a brief, nearly imperceptible tightness in his shoulder.
She withdrew her hand a second later, politely, naturally. Not apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” she said, nodding to the cup beside him. “I interrupted your quiet.”
Ariejan looked at her — his expression unreadable, but not closed.
“You didn’t,” he said. “It was already going cold.”
Miertje said nothing more for some time, and neither did he. The lamps flickered as the clouds shifted above the glass, and the quiet hum of the vessel filled the gaps where conversation might have gone. It was not uncomfortable.
Ariejan leaned back slightly, as if his spine had only just remembered its shape.
Across the cabin, the moustached man had fallen asleep, mouth open and nodding in rhythm with the sea. His companion was still talking — now to a uniformed woman with a cane and a sceptical tilt to her head. At the far end, a steward muttered irritably as he re-tightened a hatch door with gloved hands.
The ferry moved as if the world weren’t waiting.
Ariejan looked out at the glass again.
There was still nothing beyond it but fog.
Good.
He closed his eyes for a moment — not to sleep, but to settle something behind them. His thoughts, when they came, were slow, half-framed. Not memories. Not fully. Just the things that flicker when the body is still and no one is looking.
He opened his eyes again. The fog hadn’t lifted. He exhaled through his nose and flexed his fingers once.
Still fine.
Miertje had returned to her notebook. Not writing. Just holding it.
She didn’t look at him again, not directly. But once, when she reached into her coat for something, her eyes passed over his — not curious anymore, just… aware.
The kind of awareness that doesn’t speak unless it’s needed. He appreciated that.
Outside, somewhere in the white blur of sea and sky, a gull cried once and was gone.
The steward passed through the cabin again, announcing that lunch would be served below deck in half an hour. A few passengers stood and began to stretch their legs, exchanging polite groans about the cold, the length of the crossing, the Faursian bureaucracy waiting on the other side. Ariejan remained seated.
Across from him, the sleeping man stirred and muttered something in his dreams — a word in Faursian, then one in Mercanti, then nothing. He turned his head sharply as if reacting to a blow. Then settled again.
Ariejan’s eyes fixed on him for a moment too long. The dreamer’s breathing slowed. Ariejan didn’t move.
Then, from somewhere to his left — near the stairwell — a young voice said plainly, “He’s ill.”
It was a child’s voice — a boy, perhaps seven or eight, standing beside his seated father and pointing not at the dreaming man, but at Ariejan.
His father, startled, caught the boy’s wrist. “No, no, he’s not,” he said quickly, glancing toward Ariejan with forced embarrassment. “Don’t say things like that.”
“But he is,” the boy said, louder now. “He’s sick.”
Ariejan turned his head very slightly, meeting the boy’s eyes with a calm that wasn’t quite expression. The boy faltered, suddenly unsure. His hand dropped.
The father gave an apologetic nod in Ariejan’s direction and murmured something to the child as they shuffled away.
Silence returned.
Miertje looked up, but said nothing.
Ariejan stared out the window again. His face was still. Still as ever. But his hands had begun to tremble — just a little.
He moved them to his lap, out of sight.
The dining area was warmer — close, low-ceilinged, with wooden beams that forced even the average man to stoop. The lamps burned lower here, their light honey-gold, and the tables were built into the walls to keep them steady against the motion of the sea. Every surface smelled faintly of salt, metal, and boiled meat.
Ariejan entered quietly, joining the end of the queue where passengers waited for trays and cutlery. He kept his hands behind his back, gloved again now. He kept his eyes down. The boy from earlier was nowhere in sight.
He could feel the blood in his temples — not fast, not loud, but present. It always came like that after a moment of exposure. The words had not hurt. It wasn’t even the words. It was the way the father had looked at him — not frightened, not angry, but something more dangerous: uncertain.
Uncertainty invited scrutiny. Scrutiny invited questions. And he could not afford questions.
“Sir?” the steward said, offering him a plate.
Ariejan blinked once. Took the tray with a nod.
He found a seat near the corner, far from the stove but close enough to a porthole to see nothing but grey wash. Around him, voices hummed in soft Faursian — coastal accents, some familiar, some not. There was laughter, the scrape of knives, the occasional cough. A woman two seats down blessed her meal aloud.
He cut the bread carefully. He held the knife in his hand, somewhat curiously, tilting it, watching it glint in the light. He examined the razor sharp edge, the weight of it. Nevertheless, he set the knife down and avoided the broth.
Across from him sat a man with deep-lined hands and a travelling case between his feet. Their eyes met only once.
“You’re from the mainland,” the man said — not a question, just a fact.
Ariejan nodded once. “Passing through.”
The man shrugged and said nothing more.
That was fine.
He could feel Miertje enter the room ten minutes later — not from any sound she made, but from the change in atmosphere around her. She sat across the room, alone again. She didn’t look toward him. But he was certain she had seen him.
And in that certainty, there was something like relief. Not trust. Not safety. Just the absence of threat.
He finished half the bread and none of the broth. His appetite was always like this on the water.
When he stood, the man with the lined hands said, “You’re steady on your feet.”
Ariejan paused. “I’ve had practice.”
“Merchant navy?”
Ariejan smiled faintly, shook his head.
The man looked at him again — not quite suspicious, not quite convinced — then nodded and returned to his meal.
Ariejan climbed the stairs without another word.
When Ariejan returned to the upper deck, the fog had begun to thin — not break, not lift, but stretch itself wider, as though reluctant to leave. In the distance, faint lines appeared. Masts. Chimneys. A pale red roof. Esonstêd.
The town rose low from the shore, built in staggered terraces, its tallest buildings no higher than three storeys. Modest. Faded. A port that did not dream of being more than what it was.
He felt the vessel shift its weight beneath him — the first signs of approach. The pace slowed. Ropes groaned somewhere behind the wheelhouse. A voice called something sharp in Faursian. The crew moved with the kind of efficiency that made them look bored.
Passengers began to gather by the gangway, collecting coats, hats, travel slips. Children pressed against the railings to see the gulls. Miertje stood apart, reading something from her notebook and not pretending to look busy. She caught his eye once, nodded softly. Nothing more.
Ariejan joined the line. Not near the front. Not near the back. Just somewhere invisible.
A uniformed official appeared at the dock ahead — short, olive coat, cap askew, a clipboard in one hand. Two younger assistants with armbands waited beside a stamped table on the pier, ready to process arrivals. Behind them, a soldier in olive green leaned on his rifle, not looking at anyone in particular. His presence was ceremonial, not practical. But it still meant something.
Ariejan adjusted his collar and reached into his coat.
The papers were there. Folded crisply, just as they had been stamped. His name — his new name — printed cleanly at the top. A doctor’s signature on the bottom. A date. A diagnosis, buried behind bureaucratic euphemisms: institutional discharge — no recurrence observed.
He could recite it without reading it.
“Next.”
A boy ahead of him handed over a birth certificate and a scribbled letter of reference. The official skimmed them, stamped once, waved him on.
“Next.”
A mother and child. A clerk. A man with a fishing pole and a nervous mouth.
“Next.”
Ariejan stepped forward, document held gently in gloved fingers.
The official glanced at it. Then at him.
“Purpose of travel?”
“Resettlement,” Ariejan said. “No fixed address yet.”
The man’s eyes paused a moment too long on the form. “Medical?”
“Former,” said Ariejan, evenly.
The official flipped the page, scratched something with a pen.
“Length of stay?”
“Undetermined.”
A final look. A final scratch.
The stamp hit the page with a soft, satisfying click.
“Next.”
He stepped off the gangway onto Faursian soil for the first time in years.
He felt nothing.
This is my take on a psychological and character-driven story set in 19th century Aubervijr and Faursia. It follows Ariejan Damaen, a young man recently released from long-term institutional care, as he attempts to rebuild a quiet, anonymous life. Returning to Faursia under a false name and a vague personal history to conceal his own complex past and complicated family ties, he carries with him the weight of a misunderstood condition — one he is determined to keep hidden from those around him.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow explores themes of identity, grief, alienation, the fragile performance of normality and the stigma surrounding mental health in 19th century Aubervijr. Its nevertheless been something I’ve been wanting to try for a while — a story less focused on geopolitics or statecraft, and more on the personal, internal experiences that can shape a person. While the story is subtle and not graphic in nature, certain subjects may be sensitive for some readers. These include:
- Mental illness and institutionalisation
- Hallucinations, delusions, and psychological distress
- Social alienation and emotional isolation
- Implied historical trauma
- Self-erasure and identity concealment
- Subtle political and ethnic oppression (Faursian context)
Chapter One
‘As if Returning’
April 1861
The ferry to Faursia had left Nieuwheeg nearly an hour ago, and the land behind them had already vanished into fog. The strait was at its narrowest this far north — slate-coloured, slow-moving — and the ferry, though modest, handled it with confidence. Most passengers had migrated inside to the long cabin, where oil lamps swung gently from overhead and benches faced each other in twos and fours. The air was warm with breath and fabric and boiled tea.
Ariejan Damaen sat near the cabin’s rear, close to the stove, with one gloved hand resting in his lap and the other wrapped loosely around a paper cup of cooling coffee. His coat, dark and buttoned to the throat, looked several seasons out of date. His boots were polished but cracked at the sides. His hair, sun-burnished brown, curled lightly above his collar where it hadn’t been trimmed close. His face was pale but not unwell. His eyes were grey-green — or green-grey, depending on the light — and unreadable. His face, in profile, was the kind that didn’t draw attention — not striking, not forgettable either. His features were symmetrical but muted, with pale lips and hollows at the cheeks that might’ve once been handsome. There was something about him that suggested order without ease, care without vanity. He looked like someone who dressed himself each morning with a quiet sort of dread.
There was something else too — something harder to name. Not illness. Not oddity. Just a sort of dissonance. A slowness to his blinking. An uneven stillness. A gaze that landed too softly and stayed too long. He was quiet, but not alone.
Opposite him sat two men — Faursians by their accents, mid-thirties perhaps, travelling with matching carpet bags and the confident manner of businessmen. One had a square face and a drooping moustache; the other a sharper build, dark eyes, dark coat, and an instinct for conversation that could not abide silence.
“You said your name was Damaen?” the sharp one asked, returning to a thread Ariejan hadn’t realised was still alive.
Ariejan nodded once. “Yes.”
“Uncommon.”
“I’m told so.”
“Faursian?”
Ariejan lifted the cup to his lips, then set it back down. “It’s from my mother’s side.”
The other man — moustached, heavier — leaned forward slightly. “Are you returning home, then?”
“I suppose so,” Ariejan said, almost absently.
“You suppose?”
“I’ve never lived there.”
The men glanced at each other, polite but intrigued.
The dark-eyed one smiled. “You don’t speak like a Faursian.”
“No,” Ariejan said. “But I still remember how.”
The moustached man laughed. “You remember how to speak like someone you’re not. That makes you either a diplomat or a poet.”
“I don’t write,” said Ariejan.
“Ah, so a diplomat.”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
A pause. A smile, thin and apologetic.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
The sharp man raised his brows, amused. “Well. At least you’ve come to the right country. We’re all something else these days.”
The men laughed. Ariejan didn’t, but neither did he flinch. He folded his hands around the cup and looked past them, toward the narrow window where water blurred past like sleep.
The sharp-faced man leaned back, resting his elbow on the bench rail, fingers tapping idly at his knee.
“Well, if you haven’t decided who you are,” he said, “perhaps Faursia will decide for you. It tends to do that. One way or another.”
Ariejan offered him a small, still smile. “Countries only decide who you are if you give them the chance.”
Moustache chuckled again. “Philosopher, then. I knew it.”
“I read,” Ariejan said simply. “It’s not the same.”
“Then what were you in Aubervijr?” the sharp one asked, his voice light but leading now. “You’ve the look of a teacher. Or a lawyer.”
“Neither.”
“Clergy?”
Ariejan shook his head.
The man raised his eyebrows with theatrical patience. “Well, then?”
Ariejan hesitated just a moment too long.
“I was away,” he said at last. “For some time.”
“Away?”
“Travelling.”
“Where?”
Another pause.
Ariejan set down the cup gently on the bench beside him. His voice, when it came, was quiet, not defensive — just final.
“Nowhere worth writing down.”
That silenced them for a moment. Not because the answer was cold, but because it was so softly spoken — as if he himself believed it. As if there was nothing about his past that deserved to be remembered.
Moustache shifted, glancing toward the other end of the cabin. The sharp one watched Ariejan for a breath longer, then nodded once and looked away.
The ferry creaked. Someone sneezed. The lamps swung slightly in their brackets.
From across the cabin, a young woman with a travel-worn notebook and ink on her fingers glanced up from her writing. She had been listening for some time — not rudely, but openly, with the natural attention of someone curious about the people she would be confined with for the next several hours.
Her gaze lingered on Ariejan.
Not because of his answers — but because of the way he occupied silence. The way he answered, then folded back into stillness, like someone who had lived under the weight of his own voice for too long.
The conversation at his table dissolved into soft coughs and shifting coats. The two men turned to speak of more casual things — business routes, poor weather, a delayed freight shipment in Lauwert. Ariejan made no effort to contribute. He rested his wrist against the side of the bench and stared through the window again, the sea now all colourless motion and no direction.
He didn’t feel cold, but he was aware of the cold. Didn’t feel tired, but his limbs were slow. Didn’t feel watched — and yet.
His breath, he noticed, had grown shallower since boarding. It did that when he spoke too long. His throat still itched with the edges of those answers. Harmless, perhaps, but too soon. Too exact. He should have said less. Or more. But never what he’d said.
He shifted his fingers along his knee. Counted quietly to six. Then stopped.
Across the cabin, the woman with the ink-stained fingers dipped her pen once more, then closed the book, not bothering to blot the page.
She was about thirty, pale with light features and storm-grey eyes that had the quiet confidence of someone used to looking directly at things. Her hair was pinned half-clumsily at the back, a few strands shaking loose each time the ferry rocked.
She studied people the way some people studied dialects: with patience, with method, with instinct.
There was something in that man’s posture that drew her attention — not simply stillness, but a cultivated kind.
He was sitting like someone who had learned how. His gaze didn’t wander. It deliberately stayed. He blinked in sequences — too rarely, too suddenly.
She didn’t find him handsome, though she noticed his face had once been more symmetrical. There was some long-healed fracture at the bridge of the nose, and the upper right canine was dulled in a way the others weren’t. His hands, gloved, moved rarely — but when they did, they did so perfectly, with a conscious rhythm, as though the smallest thing risked too much.
She wrote nothing now. Just watched.
And wondered what kind of man it was who seemed to occupy less space than his own body required.
The ferry shifted course slightly, and the wind changed with it. The windows fogged briefly with condensation before clearing again, and Ariejan’s reflection flickered once across the glass — long enough to mistake it for someone else.
He looked away.
His legs were beginning to ache. Not from standing, not from sitting — from holding still. That quiet effort had its own gravity. Each hour wore through it a little more.
Behind him, someone shuffled cards too loudly. A child began to hum. Two benches down, the man with the sharp voice mentioned Esonstêd again — his sister’s home, he said, or maybe a warehouse he’d invested in.
Esonstêd. The name hardly meant anything. A place chosen for its lack of memory. A modest port town. Quiet. Mostly Faursian. A doctor there, supposedly, who could help him manage things — though Ariejan hadn’t decided yet whether he would go. Or whether he should.
The sea was flattening. He could feel it beneath his boots. The ferry had found its rhythm now, gliding low across the surface with a dull, hypnotic pull.
He remembered — for no reason — the walls of a corridor he had once walked for weeks, painted pale yellow, the kind that swallowed colour without protest. And the sound his own shoes made on tile. And a door at the end that never opened, even when they told him it would.
He blinked. The memory folded itself back down. He shifted his weight slightly and let out a slow, silent breath.
He was fine.
He had spoken clearly. He had answered when spoken to. He had not drawn attention.
That was enough.
Still — he could feel something beneath the calm. Not panic. Not illness. The shape of something unnamed, watching the inside of his mind like weather behind glass. Not near yet. But present.
He moved his hand along the bench, subtly, until it rested once again on the cup.
Lukewarm now. Slightly sweet.
Familiar.
That, too, was enough.
A few minutes passed before the woman rose.
She moved lightly — not with elegance, but with intent.
Notebook in hand, ink-stained thumb pressed casually against the spine, she approached Ariejan’s bench with a mild nod to the two men still engaged in their own quiet quarrel. They barely noticed her.
“Is that still warm?” she asked, gesturing to the coffee cup beside him.
Ariejan turned, surprised not by the question but by the softness of her voice. She spoke like someone who was used to being overheard, and didn’t mind.
“No,” he said, glancing down. “Not really.”
“Shame,” she said. “I was hoping the pot was still out. Ferry coffee always tastes like it’s been made with sea water, but I suppose there’s a kind of honesty in that.”
He allowed a faint smile — brief, instinctive.
She waited, just long enough for it to pass.
“Do you mind?” she asked, indicating the empty space beside him.
He hesitated — not visibly, not in a way she could see — but he felt the decision stretch a little too long behind his eyes before his mouth caught up.
“No,” he said. “Please.”
She sat, folding her coat beneath her, and pulled out a crumpled scrap of cloth from her pocket to wipe her fingertips, which bore the faded outline of a sentence she hadn’t let dry.
“I was sitting over there,” she said, nodding to the bench across the cabin. “But the wind’s quieter here.”
He nodded.
“I’m Miertje,” she added. “Miertje van Santen.”
A pause. He understood this required something of him.
“Ariejan,” he said. “Damaen.”
“Damaen,” she repeated, as if testing the weight of it. “Faursian?”
“My mother’s side.”
“Is that where you’re going, then? Family?”
Ariejan shook his head. “No. Just… going.”
“That makes two of us.”
She didn’t press. She didn’t need to.
Instead, she glanced at the notebook, as though debating something, then tucked it into her coat.
“I apologise,” she said. “I was listening earlier. Not deliberately.”
“You weren’t the only one,” he said, not unkindly.
“They were a bit much, weren’t they?” she said, smiling. “The moustache especially. Always trying to box people into professions or ancestry.”
He didn’t answer — not with words. But his silence was permissive, not cold.
She studied his face then. Not in a way that was rude — just observant. Measured.
“You speak differently,” she said at last. “Carefully.”
He looked down at his gloves.
“When you’ve had too much silence,” he said, “you have to measure things, or you spill.”
Her eyes softened, just slightly.
“I think I understand that,” she said.
He nodded, though he wasn’t sure if she truly did.
But she had said it quietly. Without performance.
And so, for the first time in the journey, Ariejan Damaen allowed himself to exhale without calculation.
The ferry rocked gently. The lamps above them creaked in their sockets.
Miertje folded her hands in her lap, not quite looking at him. It wasn’t shyness — more like restraint. She had the bearing of someone who knew how to be listened to, but was testing whether she could be trusted first.
“Do you write?” Ariejan asked, nodding slightly at her pocket.
Miertje gave a soft laugh. “I try. Notes, mostly. Observations. I tell myself they’ll turn into something someday.”
“About what?”
“About people. Places. The way they move through each other.” She smiled faintly. “I suppose it’s the same sort of thing men write in dull reports, except I do it with too much feeling and too little accuracy.”
He watched her for a moment. “Accuracy isn’t always useful.”
“No?” she said.
“It doesn’t make a thing more true.”
Miertje tilted her head, as if storing that. “You don’t talk like someone without a profession.”
Ariejan shrugged, eyes returning briefly to the sea beyond the glass. “Maybe I had one once.”
She paused, then said, very gently, “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“I’m not trying to hide,” he said, and immediately regretted the words.
Miertje didn’t flinch. She just said, “You don’t need to explain that either.”
A silence passed, this one lighter than the last. Neither of them rushed to fill it.
He looked at her again, more directly now. “Are you going home?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think I am. Though it’s the sort of thing I’d say at the customs post if they asked.”
“Then where?”
She shrugged, smiling a little. “To Faursia. To see it again, maybe. I haven’t been in years. It’s a place full of pasts — and they never seem to belong to anyone anymore. I like that.”
Ariejan looked down at his hands, then slowly removed his gloves, laying them flat on the bench. His fingers were long, thin, unmarked — the kind of hands that looked like they belonged to someone who read too much, or touched nothing that left calluses.
“I like that too,” he said.
A gust of wind rolled under the hull then, lifting the ferry just enough to sway the benches. Miertje reached out instinctively to steady herself, her fingers brushing his forearm. He didn’t move — not away, not toward — but there was a brief, nearly imperceptible tightness in his shoulder.
She withdrew her hand a second later, politely, naturally. Not apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” she said, nodding to the cup beside him. “I interrupted your quiet.”
Ariejan looked at her — his expression unreadable, but not closed.
“You didn’t,” he said. “It was already going cold.”
Miertje said nothing more for some time, and neither did he. The lamps flickered as the clouds shifted above the glass, and the quiet hum of the vessel filled the gaps where conversation might have gone. It was not uncomfortable.
Ariejan leaned back slightly, as if his spine had only just remembered its shape.
Across the cabin, the moustached man had fallen asleep, mouth open and nodding in rhythm with the sea. His companion was still talking — now to a uniformed woman with a cane and a sceptical tilt to her head. At the far end, a steward muttered irritably as he re-tightened a hatch door with gloved hands.
The ferry moved as if the world weren’t waiting.
Ariejan looked out at the glass again.
There was still nothing beyond it but fog.
Good.
He closed his eyes for a moment — not to sleep, but to settle something behind them. His thoughts, when they came, were slow, half-framed. Not memories. Not fully. Just the things that flicker when the body is still and no one is looking.
He opened his eyes again. The fog hadn’t lifted. He exhaled through his nose and flexed his fingers once.
Still fine.
Miertje had returned to her notebook. Not writing. Just holding it.
She didn’t look at him again, not directly. But once, when she reached into her coat for something, her eyes passed over his — not curious anymore, just… aware.
The kind of awareness that doesn’t speak unless it’s needed. He appreciated that.
Outside, somewhere in the white blur of sea and sky, a gull cried once and was gone.
The steward passed through the cabin again, announcing that lunch would be served below deck in half an hour. A few passengers stood and began to stretch their legs, exchanging polite groans about the cold, the length of the crossing, the Faursian bureaucracy waiting on the other side. Ariejan remained seated.
Across from him, the sleeping man stirred and muttered something in his dreams — a word in Faursian, then one in Mercanti, then nothing. He turned his head sharply as if reacting to a blow. Then settled again.
Ariejan’s eyes fixed on him for a moment too long. The dreamer’s breathing slowed. Ariejan didn’t move.
Then, from somewhere to his left — near the stairwell — a young voice said plainly, “He’s ill.”
It was a child’s voice — a boy, perhaps seven or eight, standing beside his seated father and pointing not at the dreaming man, but at Ariejan.
His father, startled, caught the boy’s wrist. “No, no, he’s not,” he said quickly, glancing toward Ariejan with forced embarrassment. “Don’t say things like that.”
“But he is,” the boy said, louder now. “He’s sick.”
Ariejan turned his head very slightly, meeting the boy’s eyes with a calm that wasn’t quite expression. The boy faltered, suddenly unsure. His hand dropped.
The father gave an apologetic nod in Ariejan’s direction and murmured something to the child as they shuffled away.
Silence returned.
Miertje looked up, but said nothing.
Ariejan stared out the window again. His face was still. Still as ever. But his hands had begun to tremble — just a little.
He moved them to his lap, out of sight.
The dining area was warmer — close, low-ceilinged, with wooden beams that forced even the average man to stoop. The lamps burned lower here, their light honey-gold, and the tables were built into the walls to keep them steady against the motion of the sea. Every surface smelled faintly of salt, metal, and boiled meat.
Ariejan entered quietly, joining the end of the queue where passengers waited for trays and cutlery. He kept his hands behind his back, gloved again now. He kept his eyes down. The boy from earlier was nowhere in sight.
He could feel the blood in his temples — not fast, not loud, but present. It always came like that after a moment of exposure. The words had not hurt. It wasn’t even the words. It was the way the father had looked at him — not frightened, not angry, but something more dangerous: uncertain.
Uncertainty invited scrutiny. Scrutiny invited questions. And he could not afford questions.
“Sir?” the steward said, offering him a plate.
Ariejan blinked once. Took the tray with a nod.
He found a seat near the corner, far from the stove but close enough to a porthole to see nothing but grey wash. Around him, voices hummed in soft Faursian — coastal accents, some familiar, some not. There was laughter, the scrape of knives, the occasional cough. A woman two seats down blessed her meal aloud.
He cut the bread carefully. He held the knife in his hand, somewhat curiously, tilting it, watching it glint in the light. He examined the razor sharp edge, the weight of it. Nevertheless, he set the knife down and avoided the broth.
Across from him sat a man with deep-lined hands and a travelling case between his feet. Their eyes met only once.
“You’re from the mainland,” the man said — not a question, just a fact.
Ariejan nodded once. “Passing through.”
The man shrugged and said nothing more.
That was fine.
He could feel Miertje enter the room ten minutes later — not from any sound she made, but from the change in atmosphere around her. She sat across the room, alone again. She didn’t look toward him. But he was certain she had seen him.
And in that certainty, there was something like relief. Not trust. Not safety. Just the absence of threat.
He finished half the bread and none of the broth. His appetite was always like this on the water.
When he stood, the man with the lined hands said, “You’re steady on your feet.”
Ariejan paused. “I’ve had practice.”
“Merchant navy?”
Ariejan smiled faintly, shook his head.
The man looked at him again — not quite suspicious, not quite convinced — then nodded and returned to his meal.
Ariejan climbed the stairs without another word.
When Ariejan returned to the upper deck, the fog had begun to thin — not break, not lift, but stretch itself wider, as though reluctant to leave. In the distance, faint lines appeared. Masts. Chimneys. A pale red roof. Esonstêd.
The town rose low from the shore, built in staggered terraces, its tallest buildings no higher than three storeys. Modest. Faded. A port that did not dream of being more than what it was.
He felt the vessel shift its weight beneath him — the first signs of approach. The pace slowed. Ropes groaned somewhere behind the wheelhouse. A voice called something sharp in Faursian. The crew moved with the kind of efficiency that made them look bored.
Passengers began to gather by the gangway, collecting coats, hats, travel slips. Children pressed against the railings to see the gulls. Miertje stood apart, reading something from her notebook and not pretending to look busy. She caught his eye once, nodded softly. Nothing more.
Ariejan joined the line. Not near the front. Not near the back. Just somewhere invisible.
A uniformed official appeared at the dock ahead — short, olive coat, cap askew, a clipboard in one hand. Two younger assistants with armbands waited beside a stamped table on the pier, ready to process arrivals. Behind them, a soldier in olive green leaned on his rifle, not looking at anyone in particular. His presence was ceremonial, not practical. But it still meant something.
Ariejan adjusted his collar and reached into his coat.
The papers were there. Folded crisply, just as they had been stamped. His name — his new name — printed cleanly at the top. A doctor’s signature on the bottom. A date. A diagnosis, buried behind bureaucratic euphemisms: institutional discharge — no recurrence observed.
He could recite it without reading it.
“Next.”
A boy ahead of him handed over a birth certificate and a scribbled letter of reference. The official skimmed them, stamped once, waved him on.
“Next.”
A mother and child. A clerk. A man with a fishing pole and a nervous mouth.
“Next.”
Ariejan stepped forward, document held gently in gloved fingers.
The official glanced at it. Then at him.
“Purpose of travel?”
“Resettlement,” Ariejan said. “No fixed address yet.”
The man’s eyes paused a moment too long on the form. “Medical?”
“Former,” said Ariejan, evenly.
The official flipped the page, scratched something with a pen.
“Length of stay?”
“Undetermined.”
A final look. A final scratch.
The stamp hit the page with a soft, satisfying click.
“Next.”
He stepped off the gangway onto Faursian soil for the first time in years.
He felt nothing.
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