Welcome to Gaia! ::

According to Gabhan’s family, he was way too happy and confident to be scared of anything. He was a young man full of song and dance, of obnoxious flutesong and jovial, deep throated singing as he worked day to day. He was the one who scooped his little sister up from the table at dinner with a wink and a smile, leading her in a twirling dance around the kitchen as their siblings laughed and tapped a beat of drums with their feet and hands on the table. He was the one to shove his brothers when they professed nervousness over the influx of immigrants to Belrea over the last few years, berating them with smiles and rolls of his eyes. “Why’re you worried?” He’d bleat out, thick eyebrows cocked teasingly. “No one can work stone up here like our family - where’d your pride go?”

His brothers would even call him too thick and stubborn to ever be worried or scared about anything.

But at night, when he was laying on his bed in the room he shared with his brothers Braden and Fillan, Gabhan had a hard time remembering that fearlessness. Maybe, in the end, it was because he just wasn’t afraid of the same things his family was. Why were they afraid of people stealing their jobs, when the people moving to Belrea only meant MORE work? The construction of new homes and places of work was at an all time high, and the less civilized mainlanders were all too eager to pick up jobs that locals hadn’t wanted to do in ages.

No… no, Gabhan worried about other things. As a teen, he’d already known he wanted to leave Belrea to explore the world. No for any particular reason than life here chafed, it was boring, and he loved meeting new people, talking to them, learning about their lives…

But here he was. Years later, now in his mid twenties, and he was still home - still waking up at the crack of dawn to go work with his father and brothers, still putting all his energy into the same old thing, day in and day out. Still spending every night around the table with his family, or going to the local tavern to sing and dance and try and forget his woes in drink.

“You’ll need to get married, one of these days.” His mother had started to say from time to time, to him and Braden. Once, all the brothers would exchange exasperated looks, elbowing one another as they fell into another round of speculation about what kind’ve lass their brothers would marry. The game was less fun now that their oldest brother Kalen was married and had his own home just down the lane from them. A home complete with a big, round pregnant wife who seemed over the moon for him; a good, healthy Geian girl. And more and more often even Braden was meeting with girls, and really putting some effort into that perfect ideal that their parents had tried to instill on them, growing up.

Every time Gabhan was sat with a girl at a community get together, after a harvest or during festivals, it was like all the food turned to ash in his mouth. The girls were pretty - he might even have enjoyed courting them, if that didn’t mean staying here. When he saw the girls, when his mother gave him pointed looks and urged him about grandchildren, he only saw shackles - saw an iron around his ankle trying to tie him to Belrea forever.

Fearless. No, Gabhan wasn’t fearless, not by a long shot. Gabhan was afraid of that life. It wasn’t that he was opposed to a family, or marriage, or children - that was probably the one facet of his current life that appealed to him. But he also just… wanted to leave. He wanted to see the sights, to not be tied to one place, to be able to up and go and meet people and explore to his heart’s content. He didn’t want the responsibilities of his father’s life. And every day that he stayed, it felt like he was encasing another piece of himself in the stone he worked on every day - bricking himself up into a jail of his own making, a face carved into some facsimile of a smile for his family’s sake.

It was a fear that, deep down, he was afraid would leave him - because then that meant he’d given up, and just accepted this life. And that, maybe, was his greatest fear of all.

[764]