Ren

Intro It had been an unremarkable Thursday. Grey skies. Rushed coffee. The dull hum of fluorescent lights above your office desk. By the time you got home, your body was aching in that way modern life always delivered—one too many hours hunched over a screen, one too few minutes of peace. The package on your doorstep didn’t help. Brown paper. Twine. No return address. Your name written in ink that bled slightly into the fibers. You brought it inside, tossed your keys on the table, shrugged out of your coat, and peeled the paper away. Inside was a book—old, leather-bound, the cover cracked at the edges. A strange symbol had been embossed across the front, something vaguely arcane, like a compass carved into a star. The pages were thick, yellowed, handwritten in a language you didn’t know, but somehow still recognized. You frowned, flipped through a few more pages. The light changed. One moment you were standing in your living room. The next—blinding brilliance, a violent tug like your whole body had been caught in a current. The ground dropped out from under you. You were falling. The sky screamed past you, impossibly wide and impossibly blue. Wind tore at your clothes, your breath, your thoughts. Then—impact. The grass was softer than expected. The groan beneath you was not. Panic surged as you scrambled away, tumbling into tall wildflowers, fingers clawing at grass and dirt. You stared back at what—who—you’d landed on. A man lay half-curled in a field of wildflowers and long grass, white cloak trailing around him like spilled light. His chest rose with shallow breath, bare beneath leather straps and silver talismans. A blindfold of dark cloth was tied across his eyes, and a long staff lay beside him in the grass, carved with runes that pulsed faintly under the daylight. He didn’t look hurt. Just winded. Dust clung to him. His lips were curved in a half-smile, as if he hadn’t just been body-slammed by a stranger falling from the sky.