Ceres at School
At school, Ceres’s development was marked by absolute isolation. She never got involved with other students — no friendships, no alliances. Any attempt at physical contact was met with immediate violence. At times, she ended up in the administration office, serving punishments and completing corrective exercises.
In one of these episodes, she tore the ear off a student who tried to assault her.
The student was removed.
Ceres was given only additional assignments.
She watched the other students from a distance. They were all afraid of her.
They silently called her the blue-eyed demon.
The teachers tried to redirect her aggression. They put her in swimming, but soon realized she had an unusual aptitude for diving. Ceres showed no fear. None. She dove from absurd heights with cold precision, as though her body did not recognize risk.
Even though she stood out in water sports, she could not develop any kind of bond. She saw everyone around her as enemies who could easily be broken. There was too much hatred for a child — a cursed inheritance from the father who had rejected her at birth.
Beyond the hatred, there was destiny: Silencium was her future.
She was an awaited child, protected — and watched — by Mother Ceres.
She studied at the school in the center of the city of Ceres. The irony was cruel: the city was called Ceres, there was Mother Ceres… and she was Ceres too. The demon with enormous blue eyes, capable of containing the entire sky — and yet harboring hell within her mind.
It was in the pools that she met her rival: Gris.
Between the two of them, there was never a single word. The rivalry was silent, purely psychological. Gris knew that Ceres was emotionally dysfunctional — any approach became a bite, a punch, a rupture. Gris, on the other hand, was well-connected, sociable. She was there to improve Ceres at diving.
Gris was used as a level gauge. A moving benchmark. She did not understand why she constantly changed schools — she still lacked the maturity to perceive the pattern. She did not see Ceres as an enemy, only as someone to be socially avoided. Inside the pool, however, they were opposing forces.
Some teachers gathered just to watch them compete.
Dives becoming increasingly extreme.
Dangerous sequences.
At times, the coaches had to forcibly pull them out of the water.
The competition did not end in the pool: it continued in the locker room, in the showers, during physical exercises. Who left last. Who gave in first. All of it without exchanging a single glance. They were not bodies competing — it was something more primitive.
It was a contest to determine who was, in fact, a daughter of Ceres.
Gris realized that the other girl had an advantage. The name was not ordinary. No one was named Ceres by accident. No one carried the name of the Great Mother without a purpose. Gris suspected it: that girl was far too important to be just another student.
Gris wore her platinum hair short.
Ceres kept hers shoulder-length, with heavy bangs.
Both eventually cut their hair — efficiency above identity.
The rivalry became so intense that Mother Ceres herself went to watch them compete.
Gris noticed immediately: the Great Mother’s gaze lingered too long on the girl Ceres. It went beyond the name.
Ceres was alone — and seemed not to miss anyone.
She had been born with feelings of lead, hardened even further beneath the gaze of the Great Mother. Inside, she was molten lead. She hated feeling. She hated any emotion that was not hunger, impulse, or obedience.
She struggled against the desire to want something beyond Mother Ceres.
That enraged her.
She was a difficult girl. Isolated. Feared.
Some students still tried to provoke her — always from a distance.
They knew that running was safer than insisting.
The Silence of Silencium
The military schools of the city of Ceres did not educate students based on grades. They educated them according to identity and efficiency.
The best were separated early, directed according to aptitudes, gifts, or interests detected under a full-time regime. Everyone was interested in something. Mother Ceres knew how to play at educating her children within her own doctrine.
In the dining halls, no one wasted food.
Hunger was a historical memory, not an everyday practice.
Ceres, however, always occupied the same table. Fixed.
Around her, students who avoided her company — not by order, but by instinct. Her presence was difficult, dysfunctional. Her harsh temperament, inherited from the father who had rejected her from birth, kept the space around her permanently tense.
That day, the Silencers appeared at the central school.
They announced nothing.
They explained nothing.
The entire dining hall froze.
Cutlery suspended. Breaths held.
No one knew the reason: crime, punishment, detention?
Or simply the fulfillment of something promised long ago.
Ceres carefully put down her cutlery.
She opened her hand and placed it on the cold stainless-steel table.
She smiled — not from fear, but from relief.
She remembered.
When her hand became the size of another, larger hand, she would know Assum. Until then, she would survive. She would use the impulse inherited from her father as a tool. She was important. She always had been.
She stood up without haste.
Obedient. Patient.
The Silencers escorted her out of the school.
Some students followed at a distance, curious, like people watching a dangerous animal being removed. And she was dangerous. But above all, she was valuable.
The armored train was waiting.
Inside it, Ceres kept a serene expression.
She seemed asleep in a cradle made of metal, grease, and sparks.
A mechanical womb driven by hatred and efficiency.
She was taken to the main tower.
From above, the city opened beneath wide windows:
Ceres functioning, pulsing.
In the sky, the CERES II space station shone even in daylight — suspended, vigilant.
There, Ceres felt the city inside her own body.
The blood of the railway arteries vibrated through her veins.
The irrigation water pumps marked an underground rhythm.
Autonomous agricultural machines breathed in the distance.
The wind struck the glass, not by chance, but with purpose.
Everything functioned.
Everything endured.
It was too obvious.
Silencium was waiting for her.
Not as punishment, but as preparation.
Not as a fall, but as molding.
There, in her father’s hands, the girl Ceres would learn what it meant to resist without choice.
She would learn to endure before she learned to rule.