This is an old story.
No, better put: it is a memory. One of those that hide deep in the chest, between what was and what could have been.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived among the vines.
His world had scents marked by the seasons: the sweet-sour smell of crushed grapes in autumn, firewood crackling on winter nights, his father's shoes, always stained with red earth. The sound of a wine bottle being opened at Sunday lunch. His mother's hands, forever dirty with paint or clay.
Lastly, the house – old, the kind that breathes history – creaked under the weight of secrets. In the hallways, painted pictures hung with pride. The cracked walls held more than dust: they held dreams. In the kitchen, sometimes an off-key song echoing among the pots, other times the most beautiful voice in all of Tuscany.
The boy's mother was a spectacle all her own.
She sang opera while washing the dishes, at times off-key and sublime. Other times so perfectly in tune she seemed to be on a stage. She painted pictures that no one bought, but that the boy found more valuable than the ones in the museums of Florence. She sculpted crooked vases that, in her hands, looked like works of art. She recited Dante and Petrarch to the chickens in the yard, because inside the house no one listened.
It was an ordinary Italian family, the kind sustained by simple traditions:
The father, a man with a graying mustache and eyes that smiled before his mouth did. He showed how to taste a new wine, making a face when it was sour. And he taught his son the value of honest work. "Wine, like life, needs time and care," he would say, while teaching the boy to prune the vines, after all, the boy would inherit the family winery.
The Moretti Vineyards were as old as the boy could remember. It was one of those things passed from father to son, no matter how many generations. It was a tradition and the pride of the family.
The mother, in her paint-stained clothes, showed that beauty is not in perfection, but in passion. She painted the sunrise on the roof of the chicken coop, wrote poems on paper napkins, danced alone in the living room to the static of the radio, often making the boy join in what she called “Artistic expression.”
But his own personal ray of sunshine was his sister – always barefoot and with a secret to tell. Too small for so much life, noisy as the birds at dawn. Two years younger and a thousand times braver. The accomplice in every adventure, from stealing grapes out of the barrels to swearing they would find treasure hidden in the Tuscan hills.
On Sundays, when the church bell echoed over the red rooftops, the Moretti family lost themselves in small luxuries:
The cinema with its badly dubbed American movies
Gelato melting too fast in the Piazza della Signoria
Endless walks until the golden sun swallowed the vineyards
Were they poor? Yes.
Happy? Like few others.
Until the day the men came to collect.
They didn't knock. The door exploded into splinters of old wood. The boy hid behind the sofa – the same one where his mother slept on the nights when the wine spoke louder than his father. A tablecloth flew over him, while his mother, quick as a cat, hid his sister behind her stained dress.
Then the boy saw.
Tucked behind her back, hidden in her apron: the handle of a kitchen knife.
The men were shouting. One of them, with a voice rough as stones being dragged, called the father names the boy had never heard.
— CRACK —
The dry sound of a hand against his mother's face echoed like a gunshot. The boy moved before he thought. He threw himself at the intruder, small and fierce as a wolf cub.
The response was brutal.
A punch to the stomach folded him in half. A knee to the face sent him against the wall. His head struck one of the imperfect vases his mother loved so much – the ceramic shattered into a thousand pieces, just like his world.
Hot blood ran down his temple, clouding his vision. Still, he saw:
His mother pulling out the knife with trembling hands
The men laughing when she let the blade fall
His sister being dragged by the hair, like a lamb to slaughter
Her screams: "Mama! Brother! Papa, please!"
And in the darkest corner of the room, motionless as a marble statue, stood his father.
Silence.
The boy sank into darkness before hearing the answer.
✦ ✦ ✦
Strangely, the men never came back.
But the boy's world had lost its colors - as if someone had washed Tuscany with dirty water. Where once there had been the gold of the sun on the vines, now only an endless gray remained.
His parents insisted that his sister had "gone to study in Milan," fragile lies that dissolved in the air like cobwebs. The boy knew the truth. He knew those empty words served more to protect his parents from their own guilt than to protect him from the pain.
Time did not heal.
Time rotted.
The house, once full of songs and laughter, now echoed with:
His mother's crying behind closed doors, the creak of the empty chair rocking on the porch
His father's shouts “It was you! You're the witch who destroyed us!”
His mother's whispers “I should have listened to my parents. I lost everything when I chose to marry you, my life, my dreams, and my daughter!”
Until one particularly cold winter, on his eleventh birthday, the boy found the dinner table covered with open pill bottles, pills scattered like macabre confetti, and his mother collapsed on the floor, arms outstretched like Christ in the Pietà.
Her lips were bluish, her breathing labored and irregular, and her glassy eyes did not recognize her own son.
The boy called the ambulance with trembling hands, the phone numbers burning his fingers.
The paramedics arrived in time.
They tore his mother from the claws of death with oxygen pumps and ice-cold fluids injected into her veins. When she grabbed the boy's wrist, her fingers were cold as grape clusters in winter.
“Why didn't you let me go? Why? I was so close to seeing her again.”
Her voice sounded like spoiled wine, sweet and sour at the same time.
That night, his father did not come home.
But the boy invented stories to fill the emptiness:
Father went to get Sister.
Mother will get better if I'm good enough.
Everything will go back to normal when the grapes ripen.
For months, he lived in that waking dream.
He became the guardian of a woman who was no longer a mother, only a ghost in a paint-stained dress. He stopped her from throwing herself down the stairs. He took knives from her trembling hands. He counted the pills and hid the belts.
But deep down, where he kept the truths that hurt worse than blows, he knew:
Father wouldn't come back, he had the same empty look as the men who frequented the darkest parts of the city.
Mother was already dead, only the body had yet to understand.
Until one dusk the color of old wine, she simply... disappeared.
The police combed the region with the bureaucratic efficiency of people searching for a lost animal. It was the workers of the abandoned winery who found her:
At the bottom of the dry well — the one that, in better times, had supplied the vines — she lay. She wore her favorite dress, the blue now faded by time, and a nylon rope was wrapped around her neck — the same one she used to hang the laundry. Her bare feet still held traces of green paint — the same color as the hills she used to paint in her pictures.
The boy, upon seeing his mother's body, did not cry.
He only looked at his own hands: dirty with soil, with fresh wounds on the fingers.
In that instant, something inside him broke. He did not feel his heart grow heavy, nor grow light. Only... empty.
✦ ✦ ✦
With the help of the police, the maternal family was located. The boy went to live with his mother's sister and her husband.
Unlike the boy's biological parents, the couple could not have children. She was infertile. For that reason, they took the boy in as their own son — and, with sincere dedication, offered him love and affection and tried to make him understand that he was not alone.
They were a different kind of family from his own. Humble in spirit, yes, but with a materially comfortable life. They lived in a spacious apartment. The aunt was a renowned writer; the uncle, a successful surgeon.
They gave the boy the best education, an excellent school, toys, books, and everything a boy could wish for.
But, for some reason, he still had an empty chest.
Still, he recognized the effort of his new parents. So he acted like the perfect son.
He smiled at the right moments. He answered politely. He had grades that they hung on the kitchen refrigerator like trophies. His new parents were proud of him at family parties, while he stood impeccable beside them, hands clean and shoes well polished.
But there was one detail.
His smile never reached his eyes.
It was as if there were a pane of glass between him and the world — transparent, impassable.
✦ ✦ ✦
His adoptive parents noticed.
How could they not?
He was
sociable
, but had no friends.
Athletic
, but never celebrated victories.
A genius in chemistry
, but spent hours staring at poison formulas with an interest that bordered on the morbid.
They changed psychologists.
The new one was different.
Dr. Matteo Bianchi didn't try to force conversations about feelings. He didn't hand him drawings to color. He didn't ask about his mother or father.
Instead, he pulled a biochemistry book from the shelf and said: “Do you know why cyanide kills so fast?”
The boy raised his eyebrows for the first time in months.
And so it began.
✦ ✦ ✦
Dr. Bianchi's office became a clandestine laboratory:
They discussed
the chemistry of emotions
(how dopamine fools us)
They mapped
the human brain
(and its design flaws)
They studied
real cases
(from poisonings to degenerative diseases)
The boy devoured everything.
It was knowledge.
And, without realizing it, he began answering the questions the doctor let fall between formulas:
“If you mix these two compounds, what happens?”
“An explosion.”
“Just like when we hold in too much anger?”
“...”
✦ ✦ ✦
Until, five months later, the doctor asked the question: “Why don't you get close to anyone?”
The boy didn't hesitate: “Why should I? In the end, everyone leaves.”
The doctor didn't argue. He didn't cite statistics. He just opened a drawer and took out a card with a handwritten code.
“Play this.
Paths of Ragnarok
.”
“Why?”
“Because in the game, when you die, you respawn. And the NPCs? They never care.”
The boy looked at the card, then at the man. “That's a bad metaphor.”
“No.” The doctor smiled. “It's an experiment.”
That night, he created his character.
And discovered that, sometimes, even in digital worlds, there are real players.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the game, the boy was what many would call an addict — but with limits. His grades stayed good, and he still went out with his parents from time to time.
What held him there was not pure escapism, but curiosity. The endless variety of potions, items, and effects awakened in him a constant desire to understand, experiment, test.
Although fantastical, the game had a certain level of realism. Some classes, in fact, were parodies of real-world professions. Among them, one stood out: the Scientist class. Unlike the Alchemist, which worked with predefined formulas and systems, the Scientist was one of the few classes in which the true power belonged to the player. He could create.
Create new items. New effects. Experiments with unpredictable results. After all, he was a scientist. Although the difficulty level also increased because of the endless mechanics and options required to make those creations. Either you were someone with advanced knowledge in certain fields, or you were rich.
And well, the boy was both.
So, if something didn't exist in the game yet, a suggestion to the developers was enough. After a few weeks — sometimes months — there was the new feature.
He was one of the few active players in the communities who pointed out logic flaws between the real world and the virtual one. "Why isn't it possible to make a Vinegar and Baking Soda bomb?" — he often asked.
And then, the effect the young "doctor" was looking for began to show. He started to socialize more. But not by choice.
Thanks to his unique skill in the Scientist class, he began to be sought out by other players. Even though, at first, he wanted to refuse, he knew that, eventually, he would need them. Some quests could only be completed in a group.
He preferred to stay alone, use people when necessary, nothing more. His interactions were transactional and he was always the first to leave the group, before anyone else could leave before him.
After all, if you leave first, there's no way to get hurt, right?
But one day, he met someone different, or, perhaps, someone exactly like him. Someone who also preferred solitude. Who, even in quests that required a group, complained in the communities that the game should allow solo alternatives.
The boy agreed. But, deep down, he knew it made no sense, the game had been designed with variety for a reason. Different classes. Complementary items. Enemies that required cooperation.
In other words, in his mind, he was a realist — and the other boy, an idealist.
But something united them beyond solitude: both were addicts. The first, because of his Scientist class, spent hours creating items and potions. The second loved putting together builds, breaking the game's meta, and testing crazy combinations with the most unlikely items. Often his ideas were unworkable, even absurd, but that didn't stop him from trying.
Thus, a transactional relationship was born between them: one produced the items, the other brought rare materials and ideas for new creations. From time to time, they did quests together, just the two of them — they avoided as much as possible interacting with other players who didn't understand them. After all, playing an MMO without using voice chat, communicating only through emojis, wasn't for everyone.
Since both were loners, they found a peculiar way to communicate outside of quests. When they needed to exchange messages, they used the game's official forum. They created a section there with only emojis, like a private code. That was where they left notes and instructions — always silently and always with meaning.
Until, one day, the other boy simply stopped showing up.
They had never added each other as friends. There was no history, no private messages, no way to know if he had stopped playing or was just avoiding him. And, for the first time, something weighed inside him. The emptiness in his heart was no longer quite so hollow.
At first, he didn't understand the reason for that feeling. It was only as the days passed, returning alone to the dungeons, sometimes still posting emojis on the forum with no reply, that the conclusion finally came.
That was when he understood the Doctor's experiment.
Some connections hurt precisely because they cannot be replaced.
The name of the boy who, for the first time, understood the meaning of a friend… was Luca.
Luca Moretti.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Young lord... don't you think we should turn back?” The young servant's voice sounded shaky, full of nervousness. “There's still time to retreat.” His eyes were fixed on the mountains ahead, and his whole body trembled at the sight of the rocky range.
“I agree with Remington,” said a second voice, deeper, marked by weariness and experience. “The Eternal Darkness Range is called the Ridge of Perdition for a reason, young lord Elijah.”
The man adjusted the heavy cloak that dragged at his feet. “Unprepared adventurers who try to cross it rarely return.”
“Yes, yes, thank you, Jareth,” Remington sighed. “And there's still the chance that we end up, out of sheer bad luck, in the Demon Forest before reaching our destination…”
“The Demon Forest is sealed.” A third voice interrupted, soft, yet laden with arrogance. “There is a magical barrier guarded by Dracknum. No one enters except through the official passages.”
He was finishing wiping fresh blood from his whip with apparent disdain. “Though there are rumors of flaws in the barrier, the chance of us stumbling across one is minuscule.”
“Even so,” Remington insisted, “the Black Forest alone already houses beasts of level 3 to 5... and there are reports of level 7 creatures, even 8.” He then knelt before Elijah. “Young lord, please reconsider. We can speak with Grand Duke Valentine, look for another solution…”
In that world, though unusual, it was not all that rare for an adult to kneel before a child. But perhaps, even on Earth, they would do the same... if that child were sitting atop a pile of slain beasts, hands stained with blood, eyes cold as steel.
“If you want to turn back, then turn back,” said Elijah, curtly, without raising his gaze. He was seated, one knee bent as a support for his arm, the other resting on the dead bodies. “I never asked for company.”
Then he looked directly at Remington. One look was enough to make the atmosphere heavy — a wave of killing intent burst from his green eyes.
“And never dare utter that name in front of me again.”
“Ugh…” Jareth, a level 4 mage, reacted instinctively. Without realizing it, he took a defensive stance. The sensation was suffocating.
“Hiss…” whistled the man with the whip, with a mocking half-smile. “Someone has upset the young master…”
He continued studying the scene.
'Lord Valentine... what did you do to Elijah to cultivate a look like that...?'
“But... he is your father, young lor—”
“ENOUGH!” Elijah roared. The intent radiating from his gaze surged like an explosion.
“I'm going to cross this damned mountain. Whatever is on the other side, monsters, demons, or death itself, I will face it. And when I reach Dracknum… I will rescue her.”
He clenched his fists, his breathing steady, his jewelry glinting, the most noticeable being the set of rings and the bracelet on his hand.
“The decision is yours, Remington. Stay here, or come with us to get her?”
“Whew,” whistled the man with the whip, starting to walk toward Elijah. “You heard, right? The young lord has spoken.”
“His words are orders,” murmured Jareth, his face tense, still shaken by the boy's decision.
Elijah turned to the immense mountain range before him. His eyes, clouded with thought, faced the horizon with a mixture of pain and stubbornness.
“Dal... No, Alexander…” he whispered. “Why do you still insist on isolating yourself?”
His gaze hardened.
“Just wait for me. I'm coming to you... and I'll knock some sense back into you, even if I have to beat it into you.”