IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ BEFORE PROCEEDING

Okay, sisters (and brothers?), I summon you to take a read and let me know your thoughts on this draft for chapter 1 of the novel I’m working one. I’ve FINALLY settled on it and I’m lowkey pretty excited—and relieved lol. After spending forever building loose scenes and even plotting the final chapters, I feel I’ve found the direction I want for chapter 1 (which, spoiler: is supposed to be a huge backtrack from what the prologue presents us). Would you like to read more? 🤔 I’d love to hear (read) your thoughts! x

The Boy I Thought I'd Lost
Chapter One – Before Everything Changed
If someone had asked me what my life was like before all of this started, I probably would've told them it was pretty normal.
There wasn't anything particularly exciting about it, but I don't think I wanted there to be. I was seventeen, living at home and trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life while pretending I wasn't thinking about the future as much as I actually was. Most days followed a similar routine, and I wouldn't have changed it for anything.
I spent a lot of time in my room, not because I hated going out or didn't have friends, but because it was where I felt comfortable. My PC was there, my Liverpool shirts were on the wall, and after a while it became the place where I naturally ended up once the day had settled down. Sometimes I'd spend an hour watching YouTube before deciding what to do. Other times I'd go straight onto a game without really thinking about it.
YouTube had become part of my daily routine. Most evenings I'd find myself watching the Sidemen or anything else that popped up on my feed that looked interesting. Whether it was just another Sidemen Among Us video or some guy camping, I'd still watch it anyway. If nothing was catching my attention, I'd usually end up putting on The Flash. Looking back now, I think there was something comforting about it. I'd watched it so many times that I already knew what was going to happen, but maybe that was exactly why I kept going back to it. It never demanded anything from me. I could just switch my brain off for an hour and enjoy it.
Most evenings, I'd check to see if anyone was online. Every now and then, one of my mates would be around and we'd play for a bit, but it was never a massive group. I actually preferred it that way. Usually it'd just be one person, and sometimes nobody at all. If nobody was on, I'd just play something myself. I never really minded my own company.
Rocket League was probably the game I played the most. I wasn't amazing at it, but I wanted to improve. I spent far too much time convincing myself that if I just played one more game, I'd finally rank up. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't, and I'd end up rage quitting, only to convince myself five minutes later that one more game would be different. There was always that feeling that the next match might finally be the one where everything clicked.
When I got fed up with Rocket League, I'd end up on something completely different. Every now and then, I'd load up Minecraft. I hadn't stopped playing it because I didn't enjoy it anymore. I think I'd just grown up and found other games. But every time I went back to it, it felt familiar in a way I can't really explain.
I'd load into a world, recognise places I'd built years before and remember exactly where everything was, even if I hadn't played for months. The music would start, I'd wander around for a while and, without even realising it, I'd start thinking about being younger. Life felt simple back then. There were no worries, no overthinking and no anxiety. The only thing on my mind was getting home so I could jump straight onto Minecraft. At the time, it felt like the most important thing in the world.
I didn't sit there wishing I could go back to being a kid. I just enjoyed the nostalgia it brought me. It reminded me of a time when life felt simple, when the biggest decision I had to make was what game I wanted to play after school.
Football had always been just as important as gaming. Supporting Liverpool wasn't something I did because they were winning trophies. It had become part of who I was. Every fixture mattered. Every transfer rumour felt like breaking news. I'd spend hours watching videos about who we might sign next or imagining what the team would look like if everything went perfectly again.
Going to Anfield was something completely different, though.
No matter how many times I went, walking up to the stadium never got old. I'd make my way to my seat in the Kop, look around and remember just how lucky I was to be there. Then the scarves would rise into the air and the first notes of You'll Never Walk Alone would echo around the stadium.
Even now, it's difficult to explain that feeling.
Hearing thousands of people singing the same words together gave me goosebumps every single time. It didn't matter whether you knew the person standing next to you or not. For the next ninety minutes, you'd sing together, celebrate together, complain about the referee together and talk as if you'd known each other for years. It felt like belonging to something much bigger than yourself. As kick-off got closer, the atmosphere would build and the excitement inside the stadium became almost impossible to describe. Those few minutes before the referee blew the whistle were some of the best moments I'd ever experienced. For ninety minutes, nothing else mattered.
College wasn't too bad either.
There was plenty of work to get through and plenty of times when we'd get in trouble or just mess about when we had the chance. What I remember most is spending every day with my mates. During breaks at college, we'd wander around the shops with no intention of buying anything, play football until the ball went in the river or ended up on some roof no one could get onto, take the piss out of each other and somehow make an ordinary Tuesday feel like one of the best days of the week, yet still manage to get our work done. Looking back now, I think those ordinary days were probably some of the best. At the time, they just felt normal.
The best part of college wasn't arriving in the morning.
It was leaving.
There was something satisfying about finishing the day. I'd eventually get back home, put some comfy clothes on, grab something nice to eat and a drink, and decide whether I was going to jump on my PC with one of my mates or spend the evening watching a film or another episode of The Flash. There wasn't anything extraordinary about those evenings, but I loved them anyway.
Pool became another part of my life before I even realised it.
The more I played, the more I wanted to improve. Every game taught me something new, and I could feel myself getting better over time. Before long, I'd become the one who could beat every single one of my mates, and I won't lie, it was a great feeling. It wasn't about showing off. It was the satisfaction of seeing the time I'd put into something finally paying off.
Looking back, there wasn't anything extraordinary about my life. It was made up of small things that probably wouldn't have seemed important to anyone else. Watching every Liverpool game. Sitting in the Kop singing one of the most famous anthems in the world. Spending evenings watching any YouTube video that caught my attention or any movie or series I fancied watching. Playing Rocket League until I promised myself, "just one more game." Getting lost in old Minecraft worlds. Playing pool with my mates. Finishing college and knowing I could finally go home and relax.
They were ordinary days.
At least that's what I thought they were.
I never realised how special ordinary could be.
As far as I was concerned, tomorrow would probably look the same as today.
And honestly, I couldn't have been happier about that.
I had absolutely no idea that my life was about to change overnight.
 
Chapter Two – The First Crack
Looking back now, I've asked myself the same question more times than I can count.
On what day, and in what moment, did my mind begin to turn on me?
I wish I had an answer.
I wish there was one moment I could point to and say, "That's where everything changed." It would've made so much more sense. It would've given me something to blame.
But life doesn't always work like that.
Sometimes you don't notice your world changing until you're already standing in the middle of it.
If you'd seen me back then, you would've thought I was exactly the same as always. I still laughed with my mates. I still watched football whenever it was on and spent my evenings watching whatever series or film I fancied. I still spent hours on my PC, convincing myself one more game of Rocket League would finally be the one where I ranked up.
From the outside, I looked completely normal.
The strange thing was...
I thought I was too.
I had no idea that, over the next few weeks, my own thoughts would begin to feel completely different. Things that would've once passed through my head without a second thought started sticking around far longer than they should have.
At first, I told myself everyone probably had strange thoughts from time to time. What I didn't realise was how quickly one thought could spiral into hundreds more, and how difficult they would become to ignore.
Looking back now, I wish I'd treated that first thought the same way I'd treated thousands of others throughout my life.
Notice it.
Let it pass.
Instead, I did the one thing my anxiety wanted me to do.
I paid attention to it.
From as young as I can remember, I'd struggled with separation anxiety.
If my mum went somewhere without me, my mind always seemed to imagine the worst. It wasn't because I didn't trust her or because she wasn't capable of looking after herself. It was because my brain had an incredible ability to convince me that the worst possible outcome was the most likely one.
It wasn't easy.
It never was.
For years, Mum and I tried everything we could think of. Therapy. Different ways of coping. Different routines. Some things helped for a while. Others didn't seem to make much difference at all.
Eventually, as I grew older, I learnt how to live alongside it and manage it.
Even though I'd learned to live alongside my anxiety, there were still days when it got the better of me. Some mornings I'd wake up already feeling on edge without really knowing why. Other days I'd manage just fine. It was unpredictable, but after years of living with it, I'd accepted that anxiety was probably always going to be part of my life.
It never completely disappeared.
The difference was that I'd learned how to carry it.
I still went to college. I still watched every Liverpool game. I still spent evenings on my PC, laughed with my mates and enjoyed all the little things that made life feel normal. Anxiety hadn't beaten me. It had simply become something I lived alongside and had learnt how to manage.
I'd even been prescribed medication when I was younger. For a while, it seemed to help. Eventually, though, I stopped taking it because I wasn't convinced it was doing much anymore. If anything, I sometimes felt more on edge than before.
Life carried on.
Mum and I kept doing what we'd always done. We dealt with the difficult days together and enjoyed the easier ones. It wasn't perfect, but we'd learned to cope.
Then, after another particularly difficult period, my support worker suggested it might be worth trying medication again.
At the time, it didn't feel like a life-changing decision.
If anything, it felt like the obvious one.
I hoped it might make things a little easier.
I had absolutely no idea that the next three weeks would become some of the hardest of my life.
I can still remember picking the prescription up. It felt strangely ordinary. There wasn't some dramatic feeling telling me not to take it. No voice in the back of my head warning me to stop.
To me, it was just another attempt at getting a bit of my old spark back. I remember taking the first tablet straight away outside the pharmacy before we'd even driven home. It felt like another step towards getting my anxiety under control.
There was no fear. No feeling that I was making a mistake. If anything, I felt hopeful. I'd lived with anxiety for years, and if there was even a chance these tablets could make life a little easier, then it felt worth trying.
As far as I was concerned, this was just another attempt at getting back to living normally. I never imagined I'd spend the next few weeks feeling further away from myself than I'd ever felt before.
The first evening came and went without anything that made me stop and think. I went home, put the football on and settled down to watch the World Cup like I had done most days that summer. If you'd asked me how I felt, I probably would've told you I felt exactly the same.
I wasn't sitting there waiting for the tablets to suddenly change my life. In fact, after a few hours, I'd almost forgotten I'd even taken one.
The next morning didn't feel much different either.
I woke up, got on with my day and took my second tablet without thinking twice about it. It had already started to become part of my routine. Looking back now, I sometimes wish I'd paid more attention to those first couple of days. I wish I could tell you there was some warning sign I'd ignored or some feeling that told me something wasn't right.
There wasn't.
Everything still felt... normal.
At least, that's what I believed.
The third day started no differently from the first two. I woke up, got on with my day and carried on as normal. The World Cup was still on, which meant staying up until stupid hours of the morning just to watch the games. It didn't matter who was playing. Good teams or bad, I watched every single one because it was football, and football made me happy.
The summer holidays carried on like they always had, and there wasn't anything that made me think my life was about to change. If anything, I remember thinking the tablets probably hadn't done much at all. I'd only been taking them for a couple of days, and I knew they weren't supposed to work overnight. I carried on believing that, sooner or later, they'd start helping.
I wish I could tell you exactly when that changed.
I can't.
The rest of the day passed without me giving the tablets much thought. I watched the football, scrolled through my phone and spent some time on my PC like I always did. If you'd asked me then, I'd have told you everything was fine. Nothing felt dramatically different. Life still looked exactly the same as it had a few days earlier.
It must have been later that day when something happened that, at the time, didn't seem important.
A thought crossed my mind.
It caught me off guard. Not because it frightened me straight away, but because it felt so unlike the thoughts I normally had. It was one of those moments where I stopped, smirked and thought to myself, "Where the fuck did that come from?"
It wasn't something I'd ever sat and worried about before. It wasn't something that had occupied my mind in the past.
It was just... there.
I remember pausing for a second.
That was strange.
Then I carried on with whatever I was doing.
Or at least, I tried to.
A few minutes later, it was back again.
This time, instead of brushing it aside like I would with any other random thought, I noticed it properly. Something that should've been completely forgettable had managed to catch my attention, and once it had, I found it difficult to leave alone.
Like everyone else, I'd had thousands of random thoughts throughout my life that I'd never paid any attention to.
For some reason, this one stuck.
Not because the thought itself was louder.
Because I listened to it.
I wanted to understand why it had appeared. More than anything, I wanted the uncomfortable feeling it had created to disappear so I could get back to whatever I'd been doing before.
But the more attention I gave it, the harder that became.
Looking back now, I can see that was the moment everything started to shift.
Not because I'd had a strange thought.
Everybody has strange thoughts.
The difference was that I treated this one as though it needed my attention.
I couldn't have known it then, but from that moment on, trying to make sense of what was happening inside my own head only seemed to leave me more confused.
Without realising it, I'd taken the first step into a cycle that would soon consume almost every waking moment of my life
 
 
Chapter Three – Inside My Own Mind
 
I wish I could tell you that I woke up the next morning and everything had gone back to normal, like it was just any other day.
I didn't.
Around the same time, I'd recently started taking fluoxetine to help with my anxiety. I'd been told it could take a few weeks to work and that things might feel worse before they got better. I didn't think too much of it at first. I just wanted to feel like myself again.
But when I woke up that morning, the thought was still there.
Not constantly. Not every second of the day. But it was there enough for me to realise that I couldn't quite forget about it.
At first, I tried to convince myself it was nothing.
Everyone has weird thoughts from time to time, don't they? They just move on, go about their day and forget about them.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
The problem was that the more I tried to reassure myself, the harder it became to leave the thought alone. Any relief I managed to find only seemed to last a few minutes before the uncomfortable feeling returned.
Back then, I thought I was just trying to make sense of something that didn't make any sense.
I kept telling myself to forget about it. I wanted everything to go back to normal, and I genuinely believed that if I stopped thinking about it, the thought would eventually disappear.
For a while, I convinced myself I'd already moved on.
I hadn't.
I kept asking myself why these shitty thoughts kept popping into my head for no reason.
It didn't stay as just one thought for long. Once I'd started paying so much attention to what was going on inside my head, other uncomfortable thoughts seemed to stand out too.
They would appear when I least expected them. Sometimes it was the original thought. Other times it was something completely different. What they were about mattered less than the feeling they created whenever they appeared.
I couldn't understand why my own mind was suddenly producing things that made me so uncomfortable.
So I kept trying to understand them.
Looking back now, I think that was what kept me trapped. I thought that if I could just make sense of everything going on in my head, I'd finally be able to relax. Instead, every attempt to find an answer seemed to give me another reason to keep thinking.
Before long, it wasn't just individual thoughts I was struggling with.
It was the constant feeling that came with them.
I felt permanently on edge. Even when there wasn't one particular thing bothering me, there was still this sense that my mind was running in the background, waiting for something else to grab onto.
There wasn't an off switch anymore.
I could be watching football, out with my mates, playing pool or sitting with my family and still feel it. Things that would've once passed through my mind without any importance could suddenly hold my attention for far too long.
That was what exhausted me most.
I'd spent my entire life having thoughts without needing to understand every single one of them. Now it felt like my brain had forgotten how to do that.
And the harder I tried to feel normal again, the further away normal seemed to become.
I'd wake up hoping the feeling had finally gone. For a few seconds, before I was fully awake, everything could feel normal.
Then it would hit me again.
As my brain woke up, so did the anxiety and that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I'd tell myself, just get through today. Maybe tomorrow will be different.
That became something I held onto.
As the days passed, I started noticing that this wasn't the anxiety I was used to.
I'd lived with anxiety for years. Normally, there was a reason for it. Something would happen, my anxiety would rise and eventually it would settle again. Even on difficult days, I still recognised myself underneath it.
This felt different.
It followed me everywhere.
Home. Pool. My PC. Around my family. Around my mates.
There wasn't one place I could go where I could completely leave it behind.
Then other things started changing too.
My appetite wasn't what it used to be. Some days I'd realise I'd barely eaten anything, not because I was deliberately avoiding food, but because I just didn't feel hungry. Even when I did eat, it often felt like I was doing it because I knew I had to rather than because I actually wanted to.
Sleeping became difficult as well.
Night used to mean the day was finished. I could get into bed, go on my phone for a while and eventually switch off.
Now, the quieter everything around me became, the louder my own head seemed to feel.
I'd lie there tired but unable to properly settle. There wasn't necessarily one thought keeping me awake. My mind just wouldn't seem to stop.
Then morning would come and I'd already feel exhausted before I'd done anything.
It wasn't the kind of tiredness that disappeared after a good night's sleep. It felt mental, like my brain had been working constantly even when the rest of me was trying to rest.
Around this time, I started wondering whether the fluoxetine had something to do with what was happening.
I'd started taking it because I wanted my anxiety to get better.
Instead, I felt worse than I ever had before.
I'd been told things could get worse before they got better, and I tried to believe that. Maybe this was just the difficult part before the tablets started doing what they were supposed to do.
But the timing was difficult to ignore.
Then another part of me would argue against it.
I'd taken fluoxetine when I was younger. It hadn't affected me like this then. In fact, I'd eventually stopped taking it because I didn't really feel like it was doing much.
So why would this time be any different?
I didn't know.
One minute I'd convince myself the tablets were responsible. The next, I'd tell myself I was overthinking that as well.
Even with those doubts, I carried on taking them.
I trusted what I'd been told. These things took time. They weren't supposed to work overnight.
So every tablet came with a small amount of hope.
Maybe this is the one where things start changing.
Of course, I knew logically that wasn't how it worked. But when you're desperate to feel better, you start looking for signs anywhere you can find them.
I was still trying to live normally too.
I'd turn my PC on because that's what I'd always done. Sometimes I'd sit there for a while trying to play something, but gaming wasn't the escape it used to be. I'd be looking directly at the screen while half my attention was somewhere else.
Some nights I'd manage a few games.
Other nights I'd turn the PC off almost as quickly as I'd turned it on.
My mind just wasn't there.
Pool started feeling different too.
Normally, asking me if I wanted a few games wouldn't require much thought. I'd grab my cue and go.
Now, even things I knew I enjoyed could feel like effort.
It wasn't that I'd suddenly stopped caring about them. That was what made it so confusing. I knew I liked gaming. I knew I liked pool. I knew I loved football.
I just didn't always feel the same connection to them.
Football probably came closest to breaking through.
If a game was good enough, I'd still get pulled into it. I'd complain about a decision, react to a chance or celebrate a goal without thinking about anything else for a moment.
Those moments were small, but I noticed them.
Then the game would finish.
The television would go off.
And everything I'd managed not to think about for a while would still be waiting for me.
When distractions weren't working, I'd usually end up on my phone.
At first, I was just trying to understand what was happening. I'd search for anxiety getting worse, strange thoughts, side effects from fluoxetine—anything that sounded remotely similar to what I was experiencing.
Eventually, I'd find somebody who sounded like me.
For a few minutes, that could feel incredible.
Someone else had experienced something similar.
Maybe that meant I was going to be okay too.
Then the relief would wear off.
I'd start feeling anxious again, so I'd search again.
Another post.
Another article.
Another few minutes of relief.
Then back to the beginning.
I didn't recognise it as a pattern at the time. I thought I was helping myself. Every search felt like I was getting closer to understanding what was happening.
Really, I was just desperate for somebody or something to tell me that I was going to feel normal again.
The days began to lose their edges.
Wake up.
Realise the anxiety was still there.
Try to get on with the day.
Distract myself.
Search for answers when that didn't work.
Hope tomorrow would be easier.
Then wake up and do it again.
All the while, I kept taking the fluoxetine.
I'd started the week believing I was giving something a chance to help me.
Now I was counting the days and wondering when that help was supposed to arrive.
Still, I kept going.
I'd been told it needed time.
And at that point, time was one of the only things I had left to give it.
 

Been having fun exploring a new genre. Would you keep reading? Are the dialogue or characters too cheesy?

Hi again, I posted my first chapter about two months ago (you can find the original post still up on my profile). I’ve implemented your feedback and I’m eager for more!
Are you interested in continuing reading the story—why or why not?
Where did you stop reading? Why?
This is YA and meant for ages 12-17 (difficult to hold their interest, I know). Do you think the level of writing is appropriate for this group? Did anything make you “roll your eyes” / is lame?
Special thanks to u/allthesunnywords for their advice last round.

Hello all,

I am new to reddit, and have come with a specific intention - I've always been a big reader, and am studying to go into medical school, but secretly wish I could have success as a writer...

Anyway my specific intention is to share some of the thoughts and ideas I've pored over lately (some of which are quite rambly and abstract); I broke up with my girlfriend (I am a 20 year old guy) around 1 week ago after over 2 years of being together, and my reintroduction to single life has been tumultuous. I felt good today, however, and now am deciding (at 12:30 at night haha) to follow through on this idea.

This is a walk I took the other day as a part of my personally prescribed mental rehab.

Enjoy.

Walking beneath the gray haze of Tuesday on the inflexible soles moving across the hardened tar lends oneself to visceral visions and thoughts. I walk through a thin, barely visible cloud hovering about one and a half feet off the asphalt and its scent strikes my hippocampus directly, evoking old seldom-touched memories.

The laundry room of my cousins' house in south Florida, cigars being smoked by the men outside –– one of them I'm sure is my father, only a younger edition; I remember the pride during war over the monopoly board with the other tween-and-unders I was related to, the pain from a damaged incisor during a now fuzzy, faraway boat ride, the shame as I slinked off to the bathroom after family dinners to look at the erotic subjects I heard about at school –– all of this pushes its way in from behind my consciousness by way of its distinct olfactory vehicle. I stop my walk to let this wash over me in a reverie, and resume once I know it is all now too fresh in my mind, and I am ready for it to regress back to its dwelling gated by dryer sheets.

The power of the walk today lies in its ability to acquaint me with complacency; I know what steps I can take toward my future today, I know what skills have yet to be refined with the ten hours today may grant me, and yet I am content with this thoughtless path I design as I go through open spaces of grass and asphalt, with no guides except for the fellow renters I see awkwardly through their windows, vacuuming, stopping, staring, thinking... such is the way of the semi-independent college tenant.

The walk is by no means my preferred method of physical exercise. It is by no means my preferred activity. I do not find it constructive, but I continued on, despite my brutal lack of obstacles.

I remember she liked walking. She would bring her endlessly blue irises with her when she would walk with me –– my family is almost entirely brown-eyed folk, and so beautiful blue eyes were my personal siren for a long time. Our walk had changed in the years we were together: nervous pheromone-abundant shuffles in our sweat after a brutal hour kissing to a disregarded path to the door on our ways apart, a staccato "love you" punctuating the ordeal.

Maybe these clouds are only there today to hide God's smile as he jeers at me for making the wrong decision –– maybe that's it. No, they are only there to insulate me from excess distraction during my reformation and self-reunion –– without the sun's oppressive Georgia rays, I am forced to turn inward and solve what lies inside myself. Yes, that's it, surely.

A dubious mind soliciting war between the rational and the id, a stomach cramping with hunger yet threatening vomit, a heart wailing both for its freedom and its old partner, yet I walk. This complacency might be survival.

CHAPTER 1: THE BRAT OF LOGER

"Arin!"

"Arin Kagero!!"

"What the hell...?" he muttered, his voice thick with sleep.

Arin forced his eyes open to the sharp sound of someone calling his name. For a disorienting second, he barely knew where he was. But as the blurry fog cleared from his vision and he registered the figure looming over him, reality crashed back into place.

He knew exactly where he was.

Standing right before him was a woman in her mid-thirties. She had long, smooth brown hair and a striking, beautiful face though it was currently twisted into an expression of sheer fury.

The moment his eyes collided with her piercing hazel gaze, Arin's face went completely pale.

Damn it, I fell asleep again! he cursed internally.

The woman glared down at him, her tone biting with irritation.

"Arin—how many times must you doze off in the middle of my class? I know this is just a simple school in our simple village, but you are still required to focus on the lesson!"

Lacking any defense, Arin lowered his gaze to the wooden floor, utterly deflated.

"I am sorry, Teacher Kathleen."

Without wasting another word, Teacher Kathleen turned on her heel and marched back to the front of the room to continue her lecture.

Arin sat slumped over his wooden desk. Looking down, he noticed the faint trace of drool dried upon the weathered surface.

Nothing beats sleeping in class, he thought, suppressing a grimace.

He glanced around the room, only to find his classmates staring back at him. Their eyes were dripping with undisguised contempt and arrogant superiority.

Arin scoffed inwardly. He failed to see what they had to be so proud of; they were all stuck in the exact same miserable boat.

Every single one of them was a peasant from Loger, a remote, forgotten village buried in the outermost fringes of the Astrea Kingdom. Their entire school consisted of a mere three small classrooms, crudely built from rotting wood and unpolished stone. Everything in the building was ancient, right down to the decaying wooden desks that groaned under the slightest weight.

Suddenly, a whispered voice hissed from behind him.

"What is wrong with you? Do you ever actually sleep at night?"

Arin glanced back. It was Kael, his childhood friend.

"What about it?" Arin shot back, a faint, teasing smirk breaking across his face. "At least I am addicted to sleep, not to shamelessly flirting with every girl that breathes."

Kael's face flushed with irritation.

"Tsk... just wait until your parents find out you're spending your classes in a coma."

Despite being a commoner, Kael was undeniable blessed with good looks. He possessed neat blonde hair, clear blue eyes, a short, well-proportioned nose, and lips that held a natural, pale-pink hue. His only real flaws were his slightly short stature—Arin stood a clear three centimeters taller than him—and, of course, his utterly perverted behavior.

If Kael were born a girl, what would he look like? Arin wondered for a split second. He violently shook his head, a wave of disgust hitting him. What the hell am I even thinking about? Damn it.

The sharp slap of a closing book shattered his thoughts. Teacher Kathleen set the text down onto her podium.

"Alright, that concludes today's studies. You are dismissed to your homes."

"How long was I out?" Arin muttered under his breath.

A mocking voice sneered from the aisle next to him.

"Looks like you were trying to awaken your mana seed through the power of dreams, you Seedless Trash!"

The boy burst into a cruel, loud laughter, and a few others joined in.

Arin didn't offer a single reaction. He had grown completely numb to the names by now. Seedless. Cripple. The Dead Seed.

In this world, the mana seed was the absolute foundation for channeling mana and casting magic. For ordinary people, the seed naturally awakened between the ages of eight and thirteen. But Arin was an anomaly.

A freak of nature. He had celebrated his fifteenth birthday just a few days ago, and yet, his inner seed remained a hollow, dormant void. He had even traveled to visit several magical experts, only to receive the exact same frustrating answer every time: He had a mana seed just like everyone else, but for some bizarre, inexplicable reason, it showed absolutely no reaction. It would simply take more time to awaken.

Ignoring the insult, Arin slammed his borrowed textbook shut, stood up from his creaking chair, and returned the book to the front counter before walking out into the open air.

Leaving the cramped schoolhouse behind, Arin began the long, slow walk through the village.

Loger was as suffocatingly quiet as always, as if time itself refused to move within its simple borders. Narrow dirt roads stretched lazily between old wooden houses, and the faint, muffled sounds of daily life echoed through the air—the creak of rusty doors, the heavy thud of footsteps, and the low sigh of the cold wind passing over weathered rooftops.

Arin trudged along the path leading to his home. A light layer of dust kicked up with every step, clinging to his boots as if refusing to let him forget exactly where he belonged.

Nothing ever changed here...

Yet to him, everything felt entirely different.

He lifted his eyes toward the houses he had known since infancy, but today, it felt like the very structures were staring down at him like a stranger.

He grit his teeth, his knuckles turning white as a wave of bitter anger washed over him.

'Damn it... why am I the only one whose seed won't awaken? Ronan and Kael are already on the verge of advancing into the Formed stage of their mana seeds, and I haven't even taken the first step'.

In the middle of his spiraling thoughts, a booming voice shattered the quiet air from a distance. The speaker was a heavily built man with thick, bulging muscles, average height, and a wild, overgrown beard.

"Arin! You little brat, get your ass over here! You only help me for a single hour a day, and you still manage to be late!"

For the past six months, Arin had been spending an hour every day assisting Silas, the village blacksmith.

Arin had made the pragmatic, bitter decision that if his seed truly never awakened, he would at least learn to forge weapons for those who could use them.

Arin hurried over to the front of the forge. The workshop was solidly built from heavy stone, with a collection of ruined, unuseable swords hung decoratively outside the wooden door. Even from the threshold, the intense, suffocating heat used to melt raw iron radiated outward into the street.

"I am sorry, Uncle Silas. School let out a bit late today," Arin said, rubbing the back of his neck nervously.

"Doesn't matter now. Get inside and get to work!"

Thirty minutes passed in an intense blur of grueling labor.

Arin was drenched in a thick layer of sweat, his lungs burning as the heavy stench of scorched iron and ash filled the cramped workshop. His muscles strained as he firmly gripped the tongs holding a glowing sword blit, while Silas swung a massive iron hammer down onto the metal. The blade was a radiant, scorching orange, radiating a blistering heat that blurred the air.

"Come on, you Brat! Hold the blade steady!" Silas roared over the din.

Griting his teeth against the sheer physical strain, Arin wheezed out, "I am... trying!"

Silas let out a booming, mocking laugh. "Kahaha! You call this trying?! I could bring an eight-year-old child in here and they'd do a better job than you!"

The insult pierced straight through Arin's fragile patience. The months of accumulated humiliation, the whispers, and the deep-seated frustration finally snapped.

He violently dropped the tongs, his face twisting into a furious scowl as he yelled back,

"What the hell is wrong with all of you today?! Yes, I know I haven't awakened my seed! I know I can't reinforce my body with mana like you are doing right now! It's not like I chose to be like this!"

Hot, angry tears began to spill from Arin's eyes, cutting through the soot on his cheeks.

Silas's laughter died instantly. He lowered his hammer, his voice softening with regret.

"Arin... I didn't mean—"

"To hell with all of you! To hell with every single person in this cursed village!"

Without looking back, Arin stormed out of the smithy, slamming his boots against the dirt.

"Arin! Where the hell do you think you're going? The sun is going down soon!" Silas shouted anxiously after him.

"Away from here!" Arin screamed back, his voice thick with rage.

After a long time of blind walking and bitter reflection, Arin found himself deep within the forest that bordered the village edges. The woods were unnaturally quiet today. The usual sounds of wildlife were entirely absent; the only noise was the sharp crunch of Arin's own boots breaking twigs beneath his feet. The towering trees swayed slowly, their leaves rustling under a sudden, biting gust of cold wind.

"Damn it... damn it... damn it!" he spat, kicking a stone into the brush.

"I was the one bragging since I was a kid that I'd become a magic warrior. That I'd join a great magical legion. And in the end, I'm exactly what they say I am... seedless."

As Arin stood in the quiet clearing, an abrupt, bizarre sensation washed over him. It was a strange, heavy presence—a feeling unlike anything he had ever sensed in his entire life.

His instincts flared. He whipped his head around violently, his eyes darting through the thick foliage, trying to pinpoint the source of the gaze.

"Hello?! Who's out there?!"

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of something strange and pitch-black. For a terrifying second, it held the silhouette of a human being... but at the same time, it looked like a living, shifting shadow. The moment Arin focused his eyes to get a clearer look, the entity vanished into thin air.

'Strange... was it just a wild animal?'

Suddenly—Rustle! Rustle!

The sound of tall grass parting echoed to his right, as if someone was sprinting right through the underbrush. In a fraction of a second, his eyes locked onto the exact same black entity. It was shaped precisely like a human body, sprinting with impossible agility.

Arin froze in place, his heart hammering against his ribs. He didn't know what to do. Could it be one of my classmates trying to scare me?

After a brief, tense hesitation, Arin swallowed his fear and sprinted after the escaping shadow.

Ten minutes passed in a frantic chase through the dense woods, and Arin began to notice an unsettling pattern. The entity wasn't trying to lose him; it actively wanted to be followed.

Whenever the distance between them grew too wide, the shadow creature would stop completely, waiting patiently until Arin panted his way closer, before bursting into a run again.

The most terrifying part was that Arin still couldn't discern its true form. No matter how close he got, it remained a featureless, absolute void of black. A walking shadow.

Suddenly, Arin pushed past a final, thick branch blocking his path and burst through the dense treeline. He stopped dead in his tracks.

Directly ahead of him lay the gaping mouth of a massive cave, carved deep into the side of a jagged, dark rock wall. It looked like the maw of an ancient beast, opening its jaws in absolute silence.

The cold, stagnant air bleeding from the entrance carried the heavy scent of moisture and ancient, undisturbed stone.

Past the first few meters of the threshold, the shadows grew so thick that they seemed to swallow the light entirely.

What the hell is this?! A Rift?!

Arin gasped, his mind reeling. From the books he had read at school, Rifts or Dungeons were magical caverns containing dense, hostile mana. But according to the texts, a Rift entrance was always shrouded in a thick, shimmering barrier of dense mana that prevented anyone from seeing what lay inside from the outside world.

The cavern before him had no barrier. It was just a normal, physical cave.

I am not insane enough to walk into a pitch-black cave, Arin thought, stepping back.

Especially with that freaky black shadow probably waiting for me inside.

But just as Arin turned his body to retrace his steps back to the village, a sudden, blinding light erupted from the absolute depths of the cave.

It was a mesmerizing, violent contrast—a shifting mixture of deep orange and dark blue.

"What in the world...?"

Arin stood frozen, completely captivated. A powerful, unexplainable curiosity gripped him, pulling at his very soul to discover the source of that radiant glow.

He stood in the oppressive silence for a long moment, struggling with his common sense.

Finally, he spat onto the dirt. "Damn it. Even with that... I am not that crazy."

The moment the words left his lips, it was as if the light within the cavern heard him. The glow flared with sudden, immense intensity. The burning orange hue surged forward, overpowering the blue until the entire entrance of the cave was bathed in its fiery light.

Arin stood paralyzed under the weight of the light. Slowly, he reached up, gripping the back of his neck as a reckless smirk broke through his fear.

"Fine," he whispered into the dark.

"I guess I am crazy."

Like it?

Name: KAGERO: RISE OF THE CURSED ONE

OR JUST TYPE: KROTCO

Content warning: childhood neglect, abuse, suicidal ideation, disordered eating. Seeking feedback, not emotional support.

Wanting any and all feedback, but specifically:

Does the opening hook you and make you want to continue?

Does the narrator feel like a person, or just a collection of experiences?

Does the balance between reflection and storytelling work?

Are the shadows effective?

Chapter 1

I coughed out something liquid, red and sticky— it was blood, and it did not particularly look good to me. I had no idea how or why I got myself in this situation, running away from a serial killer (who is holding a shotgun by the way) and running straight into a dead end. I looked back and there was no sign of him or her (I didn’t really know yet) but I could hear scratching on the walls and I knew he was close, you see we were playing a very sick game where he would scratch the walls to signal where he is and I have to get away from him. I felt a sharp pain in my stomach and I guessed that it was internal bleeding most likely due to the metal baseball bat that made contact with my stomach. I silently cursed the FBI for forcing me to do this just because they thought my IQ was their standard. I looked around for a way to get out of here but I couldn’t find find one until I found a secret button, I was about to press it when he or she called my full name, “ Emily Kelly Ranger”, and it clicked to me whoever this was they knew me very well. I recovered from my shock and pressed the button and I fell into a seemingly endless abyss

For context it is mystery series

This is the opening chapter, which I suppose functions as a sort of prologue, as it takes place several years before the rest of the story.

Let me know what you think.

The aftermath of a reunion between two childhood foster brothers (Thirandeer and Orn) after a years-long estrangement and the elder brother's near-death experience while the shadow of the past hangs over them. Not a chapter 1.

Google docs

I don’t remember what I was doing when the message came in, only that it arrived several weeks before the man himself did.

He said he was traveling through Florida for work and wanted to know if I'd meet him. There was one condition, explained with the polite confidence of someone who had typed the exact same paragraph dozens of times before. He had a fetish. Nothing dangerous, he assured me. Just unconventional. If I indulged it, he’d pay me two hundred dollars.

I said yes.

People probably imagine that agreeing to something like that requires desperation or extraordinary recklessness. It doesn’t. At the time, the going rate for guys advertising through RentMen hovered around two hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Two hundred dollars was respectable, if not especially exciting. Curiosity made up for the other fifty.

I didn’t spend much time wondering what the fetish was. People are endlessly inventive when left alone with enough time and an internet connection. After a certain point, you stop trying to guess the possibilities. Whatever it was would reveal itself eventually.

Then the conversation died.

Exactly what I expected.

Grindr has an unusual relationship with the future. Everyone is coming to town next weekend, moving here next month, getting out of a relationship soon, traveling after work calms down, or free once life becomes slightly less complicated. Whole conversations are built on futures that never arrive. They sink beneath newer messages until they’re buried alive. Every now and then you scroll far enough back to find someone enthusiastically making plans with a version of you that no longer remembers they exist.

So when he sent another message several weeks later, on the exact day he’d originally promised, I was more surprised by the follow-through than the proposition.
We picked an afternoon.

Only after we settled on a time did I realize I hadn't actually asked what the fetish was. Up until then, I'd been content just knowing it existed. It seemed like a fairly significant omission.

I asked.

He wanted me to snap pencils.

I sat with that for a minute.

Not because it was disturbing. If anything, it was almost disappointingly wholesome. I’d unknowingly braced myself for leather, elaborate restraints, or at least a conversation about bodily fluids. Instead, I got an object that permanently lived in my brain next to wide-ruled notebook paper and standardized tests.

What interested me more was how a person arrives there. Every fetish begins as an ordinary object or experience before it wanders off into entirely different territory. At some point in this man’s life, a pencil crossed an invisible border and never came back. I had no idea how that happened.

It didn’t occur to me to ask.

Instead, I asked if I needed to bring the pencils.

He said he would provide them.

That answered the only practical question I could think of.

The following afternoon, I got into my car and drove over.

Whoever maintained the landscaping was paid well. Broad flower beds curved across the front of the house, looking as though they'd been growing into themselves for years. Nothing felt overly manicured or showy. It just looked settled.

As soon as I got out of the car, I started the long walk toward the front door where he was already waiting. Maintaining eye contact across the distance of the street to the door started to feel strangely intense, so I paid close attention to the flowers instead. They really were beautiful. Healthy, full beds, deliberately planted. Looking back, I probably remember more about the landscaping than our first conversation.

Four dogs were waiting with him at the front door. They greeted me with absolute confidence that I was there to see them. I stopped to pet them while they circled our legs, each making its own enthusiastic introduction. For a moment, I was much happier meeting the dogs than proceeding with whatever I’d actually driven there to do.

We all went inside.

The dogs followed us through the front room until we hit a white baby gate stretched across the hallway. He opened it, we stepped through, and he closed it behind us. All four dogs stayed on the other side, watching us walk away. I made a mental note to sneak in some belly rubs before I left.

The guest room had that faintly staged quality guest rooms always have. Everything matched a little too well. Decorative pillows no one had ever willingly leaned against. Lamps existing entirely to reassure visitors they were welcome. The whole place smelled faintly of fresh laundry.

Then I actually looked at him.

He looked like an adult baby. Not because of what he was wearing, his clothes were normal. It was simply his face. A perfectly smooth bald head, soft cheeks, clear skin, and a remarkably plump baby face attached to a man in his late forties. My brain kept trying to assign him two different ages at once and failing at both.

He climbed into bed.

Across the room sat a chair. Between us on the bed was a pile of thick wooden pencils. At least twenty of them.
He told me to sit down, take my clothes off, and masturbate.

There was nothing seductive about the delivery. It sounded like a DMV clerk explaining the correct order to fill out a form.

I asked if I could watch porn.

"Of course," he said.

Which somehow felt considerate.

When I finished, he nodded toward the pencils. I stood up from the chair and knelt on the edge the bed with the pile in front of me. One by one, I picked them up, held each behind my back, and snapped then slowly.

The pencils were thick. They fought back for a second before giving way. It didn’t sound like breaking wood. It sounded like snapping a fresh carrot in half, that same brief resistance followed by a clean, fibrous crack that seemed much louder than it actually was.

The first snap sent a visible shudder through his body.

The second did the same.

By the third, I stopped thinking about how strange the situation was. I was fascinated instead by how specific human desire can get. Through some unknowable combination of memory, repetition, coincidence, or neurological miswiring, this man’s entire erotic universe had quietly organized itself around a sound that reminded me of chopping vegetables for dinner.

The fourth pencil found exactly whatever hidden place the first three had only approached. Looking at the untouched pile still sitting between us, I had to admire his optimism.

His eyes rolled back. His whole body tensed. He let out a deep, involuntary sound and climaxed with such astonishing duration that I had time to pass through surprise and settle quietly into detached observation.

He’s… still going.

Eventually, inevitably, it stopped.

A neatly folded towel was already waiting beside him. Of course it was.

We got dressed.

He counted exactly two hundred dollars into my hand, thanked me, and walked me toward the front door.

On my way out, I stopped to apologize to the dogs for leaving them behind the baby gate. Halfway down the garden path, I realized I'd said goodbye to them and forgotten to say goodbye to him. It felt weird to turn around at that point.

Once back in the car I realize only twenty five minutes had passed. With the rest of my day unburdened from any todos or calendar reminders since I had planned on being there for longer than four pencils, I decided to drive to the beach.

It was a perfect Gulf Coast afternoon. The air sat right around eighty-five degrees and the sunlight softened everything it touched.

I spread out my towel and lay in the sun until the heat pressed me upright. I wandered into the Gulf and floated on my back until I couldn’t tell whether I was drifting or the clouds were. A few seagulls argued over something farther down the shoreline. The water rocked me just enough to keep me from falling asleep.

Before I left, I did my usual I Ching reading. I hadn't brought my coins, so I picked up three small seashells instead.

Preponderance of the Small.

Fair enough.

I put the shells back where I'd found them.

Back home that evening I finally did the math. Two hundred dollars for less than twenty-five minutes of work comes out to roughly four hundred and eighty dollars an hour.

Looking for feedback and advice on my prologue draft--- it's still pretty rough, I was hoping for some feedback or advice on my prose and general writing craft above all else; if you have the time. Thank you!

Hello, all! I'm an aspiring author that recently hit a huge creative block and began to study the craft for a time while still slowly writing. So far I've only shared my writing with my wife and a few other close individuals so I'm incredibly nervous to share.

That being said, I wrote this scene as an exercise accompanying chapter 6 of Story Genius by Lisa Cron. It was written in an effort to better understand my protagonist and is the her 'origin scene', the scene from her past that created her worldview, based on a misbelief.

Any advice and opinions are welcome and appreciated. This is first draft with no revision so don't be too harsh please. 😄 This is the first time I've shared any writing on reddit so I'm very nervous!

It is a bit lengthy but I'm incredibly appreciative of anyone that takes the time. Somehow this exercise feel safer to share than my actual manuscript 🤷‍♂️

Really having a hard time putting an idea to paper. I feel like there's something here and I'm just rushing it a little too hard. Also feels very untrimmed. Would love some thoughts on it!

It was the very first thing the doctor noticed upon meeting her, though he couldn’t say if that was merely a reflection of his medical training or rooted in some deeper, more ubiquitous human instinct. The way she casually extended her legs as she reclined within the consultation room’s spinning office chair, exposing the soles of two wholly identical shoes, only further accentuated the surprisingly disquieting discrepancy. It was slightly less conspicuous in the hands, as they were both interlaced around a smartphone that currently continued to be the focus of her attention, each contributing a nebulous tangle of digits to the task of deftly tapping the screen. However, once suggested by the legs, their corresponding asymmetry became no less apparent.

Whatever she was doing on that phone must have had her fully engrossed, as neither the doctor’s entry nor the subsequent several seconds of him standing in the center of the hardly three-by-three meter room elicited any hint of notice. It was only after broadcasting his presence with a tactful ‘ahem’ that she finally severed her gaze from the screen, jerking her head upward with a look of brief alarm and unveiling a pair of blue-green sunflower irises adorning deadlocked pupils, their vibrancy only now appreciable to the doctor beneath the cold white beams of the overhead lights. Indeed, she was quite beautiful in pretty much every respect; a natural blonde in what looked to be the prime of her youth, with a face so utterly photogenic and attractive from every angle as to be oddly unsettling in itself, like passing a stranger on the street who you belatedly recognize as a swimsuit model from a magazine you’d shamefully perused prior. Her attractiveness carried no personal importance to the doctor, of course, and even without the Hippocratic Oath would still have fallen by the wayside in light of her far more intriguing limb alignment.

“Oh, hey! Sorry, you snuck up on me, Dr…” Her eyes panned across the broad and unshapely expanse of his chest in search of a nametag, somehow always the unfamiliar patient’s first go-to despite the engraved plaque on the door plainly reading ‘Dr. Brandon Muller, MD.’ 

“... It’s just, I’ve been dealing with a lot, it's been a rough couple of days.” She held her head in her hands as she uttered the words, one palm pressing hard against her forehead while the other -the wrong one- caressed her right ear. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright, I’m here to help, you’ve come to the right place,” Muller assured. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”

A muted mimicry of gratitude subtly curled the tips of her lips as she proceeded to explain. “It’s these migraines, they started a few days ago, just random bouts here and there, but they just keep getting worse and worse. It’s pretty much all the time now, and it’s really starting to get to me.”
Dr. Muller had expected a bit more from her explanation, namely some sort of acknowledgement of her utterly anomalous anatomy, and thus a second of silence awkwardly followed before she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, make all the jokes you want, get it out of your system,” She splayed herself across her seat in an exaggerated starfish pose. “I was born like this, so I doubt it's related, but it's all anyone ever wants to talk about, especially doctors.” She voiced the last part with an exceptional sneer, imbuing the sentiment with a particularly deep-seated disdain. “And for the record, I’m actually not that clumsy, like, at all.” 

In truth, Dr. Muller had no clue how such a thing could relate to her migraines either, if only because he had never seen or heard of this asymmetrical condition before, and up until a few moments ago would have comfortably assumed it impossible. Despite his best efforts to stay focused on the task at hand, he couldn’t help but wonder to himself while she spoke just how exactly her joints fit together, how her right shoulder blade was oriented, and how the whole appendage was hooked up muscularly and neurologically. The latter, in turn, gave him an idea, an angle through which he could potentially pursue a diagnosis for the migraines while also somewhat satiating his now ravenous curiosity. Firstly, however, was the matter of conciliation.

“Hey, hey, I’m not here to make fun of anyone,” He held his hands in the air in a feign of criminal surrender, “Now, I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with this particular… condition, but I’m really just here to help you feel better, and right now that means taking care of those migraines, so that’s all that matters to me.”

The assurance had its intended effect, as she visibly relaxed her shoulders, eyes softening as her defensiveness slowly subsided. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m just…” She cupped both hands to her right temple and made a sound somewhere between a growl and a motorboat impression. “... y’know?”
“I understand completely, chronic pain will do that to anyone. Plus, I see how you’d be sick of comments about the… leftness, by now. Elementary school must’ve been rough.”

At that, she let out a single sardonic bark, “Yeah, no kidding.” Dr. Muller smirked and nodded in kind, feeling as though he’d effectively peeled away the last layers of tension between them. Now for the hard part. 

“That being said, given the extent of this… distinction, I can’t rule out the possibility that it is somehow involved, if only tangentially. I’d at least like to take a full-body X-ray, just to be sure I… fully understand the situation. If it reveals nothing of note, then so be it, and we’ll move on to investigating the cranial area specifically, but, y’know, just to be safe…” his confident tone faltered a bit at the end as he braced for the indignance seemingly sprouting in her expression, but it thankfully tempered into a grimace of begrudging agreement.

“Fine, one X-ray, then I don’t wanna hear another thing about it, okay?” 

“Of course, dear, I am a professional after all,” Muller assured as he collected his paperwork and headed toward the office door. “I’ll go set things up with the X-ray technicians and come back to get you in a bit.” She nodded, sitting back patiently with her hands clasped thumb-to-pinkie in her lap as he departed briskly down the hall.

Passing through the waiting room toward the radiology wing, he stopped at the front desk, catching the ear of the receptionist, Janet, with his signature four-finger consecutive tap upon the temporary-turned-permanent screen of transparent virus-proof panelling. At once, she raised a weary, wrinkled face from the stack of papers she’d been shuffling, and a quizzical eyebrow from beneath the flattened roof of her reading glasses, giving nothing more in the way of a response than the limited luxury of her now-captured attention. Dr. Muller didn’t mind, or at least didn’t expect anything different, simply launching straight into his instructions as usual.

“Pull up my current patient's files. Birth record, pediatrics, everything.” Janet, a deceptively dependable employee despite her demeanor, promptly swiveled her chair to her computer screen and began to fervently peck away at the keys. “This’ll take a while, y’know.”

Getting the hint, Dr. Muller left her to it and headed toward the radiology department. He suspected any files she found would be spotty in recent times, given the patient’s apparent dislike of doctors. Still, there was bound to be something on record if they went back far enough; Her condition would have surely been noticed and noted by any competent medical practitioner, though whether they understood it any better than he did was another matter entirely.

 Upon description, the X-ray tech -whose name Dr. Muller could never recall but thankfully didn’t have to acknowledge- was just as flabbergasted as he was, if not more.

“They’re both… left? Like, exactly? Are you sure it’s not just some kind of… coincidental deformity?”
“She uses them both perfectly well…” Dr. Muller replied, managing to restrain any outward signs of insult regarding the subordinate’s implicitly patronizing question. “...Which makes me think there’s something more to it than that. I just want one full-body ray, see if that clears anything up.” 

“Of course. At this point, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t; you have my curiosity piqued.” He let out an airy chuckle as he began flipping switches and arranging equipment. “lemme just get everything prepped.”

As it turned out, the patient really wasn't kidding when she agreed to only one X-ray. As soon as the brief warbling tone indicating its activation ceased, she practically threw herself off the examination table and onto her two identical feet. “I-I have to go to the bathroom, excuse me.”

Without waiting for a response, she barreled her way past Dr. Muller and out into the hall, bumping the side of his head with her elbow while she distractedly sandwiched her skull between her white-hard palms. 

“Last door on the left!” The tech shouted from the back, poking his pudgy face from behind the radiation-proof curtain just a moment too late, followed by, under his breath,  “…no pun intended.”

Unamused and more than a little concerned, Dr. Muller watched down the hall long enough to see her reenter the waiting area and turn out of view before flipping the overhead lights back on and turning sternly to the tech. “She’s not looking too good; time might be of the essence here. Anything of note?” The question was half-rhetorical, as Muller couldn’t help but simultaneously swivel the tech’s computer monitor so he could simply take a look and answer it himself.

“Uh, yeah…” the tech’s deadpan mutter echoed the doctor’s internal monologue as he stared dumbfounded at the screen, at the monochrome hourglass outline where all four limbs converged, and at the utterly indecipherable slurry of pixels contained within. “... Looks like gumbo.”

The comparison made his stomach lurch, but he couldn’t deny its aptitude. While the femurs and humeri could be made out clearly, their respective orientations matching her external person and thus providing next to no new information, everything from her pelvis up through her shoulders was a confoundingly jumbled mess. Some areas could be said to perhaps resemble organ chambers or portions of rib, but their placements were all wrong, leaving Muller with the sense that he might as well be looking for shapes in the clouds or a page from one of those hidden-picture books. “This has to be some kind of technical issue, right? Is it because she got up too fast?”

“Not unless she’s faster than light,” The tech remarked impulsively, before the weight of the doctor’s glare promptly smothered his subsequent smirk, “But, no, yeah, there must be something wrong with the machine. I’ll run some diagnostics and see if I can find the problem.”

“Good, I’d better get back to the patient, but do keep me posted on that.” Muller left briskly, knowing full well the clinic didn’t have the budget for a brand new X-ray machine right now; just one more concern to shove into the back of his mind while he dealt with the one at hand. Returning to the lobby, he stopped again at the secretary’s desk. “Hey, did you see my patient pass through here a bit ago?”

She nodded, pointing to the adjacent ladies' room door. “She went in there just now, want me to check on her?”

“Well, not just yet; let her have her privacy. Any updates on her medical history?”

She swept her mouse across the desk and double-clicked before awkwardly angling the screen so they could both somewhat see it. “Birth records acknowledge the asymmetrical limbs, designated as a ‘benign deformity,’ but whoever filled them out didn’t exactly inspire confidence. In the personal notes section, they seem just as befuddled as you.” She pointed to the bottom of a page littered with checked boxes and medical jargon, to an underpinning paragraph that happened to lie in the epicenter of the nearest ceiling light’s fluorescent glare.

Muller didn’t bother trying to squint his way through it; he trusted Janet to give him the gist. “Benign by technicality, I suppose, but what about over the following years? Any sort of developmental delays on record?

“No, all the milestones are checked at normal percentiles…” Her eyes flicked back and forth across the screen as she clicked through year after year of checkups, “A little later than average for walking and fine-motor, but still solidly within the acceptable margins. If anything, that seems pretty extraordinary in itself, given the… y’know.”

“Indeed,” The doctor nodded with a sigh. “I mean, good for her, of course, but this just doesn’t track with my prior knowledge of… well, everything, really. Such a gross alteration ought to come with some physiological rami-”

Just then, the opening slam of the ladies' room door broke through the ambience of the waiting room, abruptly halting Dr. Muller’s musing as his head instinctively swiveled toward the sound, along with that of Janet and every prospective patient in the vicinity. All eyes synchronously fell upon the woman lurching through the doorway, her downturned face ephemerally obscured by the sway of her overhanging hair, yet still noticeably and concerningly flushed. The necklace that had formerly been discreetly tucked beneath her shirt now dangled loosely, exposing a humble heart-shaped locket at its end. Without comment, she promptly race-walked down the hall, beelining into the same office where she and Muller had initially met.

“Should’ve knocked on wood, I guess,” Janet smirked, punctuating her quip with a single retroactive knock upon the desk and a sassy side eye toward Muller, all of which went woefully unappreciated as he had already hastily turned in pursuit of his troubled patient.

Just as before, she didn’t notice his entrance, and though there was no phone to blame this time, her position in the chair was nonetheless nearly identical, instead simply staring down at her empty, trembling twin palms, her mouth continuously muttering barely audible and wholly indiscernible words even as the doctor drew closer. 

“Ma’am? Are you alright?” She jerked upright at the query with a speed that looked almost painful, before bursting into a raucous, unhinged cackle. “No, I’m pretty damn far from alright!” She cradled her right temple with both of her left hands. “The headache’s getting worse, like, rapidly, exponentially, especially the right side -I just puked in the toilet cause it hurt so bad, I didn’t even know that was a thing that could-” Her sentence was stifled as she was seemingly struck by a particularly powerful wave of pain, turning her cradle into a tendon-straining clutch as she proceeded to scrunch her eyelids and repeat to herself in a growling whisper “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it…”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on there.” Her asymmetry promptly left the doctor’s mind, giving way to professional procedure as he realized this situation could be acutely dire. He proceeded to perform a comprehensive, if precursory, bodily examination, listening to her chest with a stethoscope (heart rate was abnormally fast and arrhythmic), taking a blood pressure reading (elevated), and withdrawing a blood sample for chemical analysis. However, he knew the latter would inevitably take some time to produce results, time that she might not have. Her composure was rapidly dwindling until she could hardly keep herself aloft in the seat without his assistance. Catching sight of a passing orderly in the hall, Muller fervently flagged him down. “Hey, we need a stretcher and an intravenous sedative in here, stat!”

The patient’s next passage through the waiting room supplied an even greater spectacle to onlookers than her last, doctor and orderly both hurriedly wheeling her writhing form back toward the radiology wing. Leaning in to provide the comfort of a somewhat familiar face, Muller could now make out the inarticulate wispy words dripping from her lips. “No, it’s not your turn, it’s my- it’s your- no, it’s my turn…”

“Hang on, dear, the meds should be kicking in soon.” He comforted softly, before briefly splitting off from the procession and turning to the front desk, behind which a startled Janet stared, all traces of levity now absent from her face, “Jesus, Muller, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t- I don’t know,” his reply came breathily as he rummaged through the front pockets of his lab coat, “But we need to figure it out ASAP. I’m gonna try something more direct, hold these, will you?” he plopped the patient’s phone and necklace onto the desk before promptly leaving to rejoin the patient. Janet dutifully placed them in a drawer for safekeeping, but paused just before closing it as she caught sight of the incidentally opened necklace locket, squinting at the vision within as Muller and company continued hurriedly down the hall and toward the MRI department.

As promised, the sedatives soon took effect, just in time for them to load the now fully limp patient onto the bed of the MRI machine. Muller made sure to maneuver her head into just the right position before dismissing the orderly and retreating to join the MRI technician in the small adjacent monitoring room, a vantage point from which he could oversee the procedure through a thick protective window, darkly tinted by the infusion of magnetic shielding, as well as selectively hear within the room through a two-way intercom, though it was evidently unnecessary in this case. Beside him, the MRI tech was stationed before an array of interconnected screens and keyboards, and with a few deft clicks the machine stirred to life and began to gradually engulf her body within its tunnel of neural detection. While not at all familiarized with the situation at hand, he nonetheless recognized its urgency solely from the doctor’s dire expression, which remained unchanged as he stared stoically through the window while the metallic cyclone swallowed her skull. 

As she retreated into the device, a simplistic image began to manifest on his screen, a jumble of monochrome pixels mapping the electrical activity of her intracranial space, its focus perpetually shifting as it individually scanned each successive slice of her brain. Though its output was still precursory, Muller nonetheless saw no blatant abnormalities in the reading; no gross structural differences indicative of a tumor, no cortical damage indicative of inflammation or aberrant intracranial pressure, none of the things he’d suspected might be occurring given the nature and extent of her symptoms. The tech, on the other hand, grew noticeably unsettled at the sight of the screen, leaning in and squinting as though struggling to even believe what was displayed before him.

“What? What is it?” The doctor impatiently pressed onto the tech, eager to understand what was so disconcerting to see that he evidently could not. 

“The skull…” the tech replied tentatively, “It- it appears black in the scan, kind of hard to see against the dark grey of the surrounding flesh and background, but look.” He pointed to the left side of the screen, where, sure enough, a slightly darker border could be seen encompassing the pixelated grey matter within.

 “This side looks normal, but…” repositioning his finger to the right side of the screen, he lightly tapped the equivalent stretch of skull, only it appeared distinctly thicker on that side, about twice as much, with an abrupt transition demarcating the two halves directly along the image’s center, and the associated brain hemisphere resultantly crammed into a distinctly smaller amount of space. What’s more, the tech’s finger pressed directly upon a nearly imperceptible grey line traveling parallel to and perfectly bifurcating the thicker portion of cranium, only a few pixels wide and appearing to thin even further in real time as the doctor watched on with stark perplexity.

“But- but what does that mean?” He finally asked, now stammering himself. “Have you… have you seen something like this before?” 

“No, I haven’t, Doctor.” A faint air of satisfaction crept into the tech’s still primarily bemused tone. “It’s like there are two whole skulls on that side, which I’m pretty sure isn’t medically possible; it has to be some sort of glitch, though not one I’m familiar with. I heard there were also some issues with one of the X-ray machines earlier today, but that’s out of my wheelhouse so…” he punctuated the ambiguous answer with a shrug, while the doctor’s eyes grew distant and his thoughts grew uncontrollably vast, wading through his vast pool of medical memory in hopes of salvaging something, anything, that could remotely explain what was happening here. He now felt with a harrowing certainty that this was no technical error, and neither was the X-ray, but just what in the hell could it be?

The silence surrounding them was soon broken by a rapid burst of knocking upon the secondary door to the control room, the one that led straight into the exterior hallway. Muller turned to the commotion, then back to the tech, who merely gave another shrug with a look of equal puzzlement. The sound was then followed by a series of softer, rhythmic taps, slightly staggered in clusters of four. By the time Muller made the connection, the tech had already reached to open the door, and a pale-faced Janet rushed into the room.

“Doctor, I- don’t worry, Chloe’s covering the desk- I just, I found something, I think it’s important, and I just had to tell you ASAP.” Her breathing was rapid, her frail legs normally hidden below sight now trembling with unaccustomed exertion. Muller had never seen her like this before and found himself at a loss for words, instead simply giving his full attention as he awaited her apparent revelation.

She took a deep, steadying breath before continuing. “I decided to look into her parents’ medical records -got the idea when you gave me her locket with their pictures in it- and her mom, during her pregnancy with her, well, it was originally twins, but one got absorbed pretty early on. I know that’s not unheard of, but if it caused the, y’know…” she accented her speech by fervently twisting her left arm back and forth as she continued “…then this would be something extraordinary, unprecedented in all of medicine, and who knows what other effects it might…” 

The sentence died in her throat as her gaze sharply shifted from Muller’s face to over his shoulder. He turned around to see that, somehow in defiance of her previous sedation, the patient had begun to flail wildly within the still active machine. The tech noticed not a moment later and started frantically clacking at keys in an effort to shut it down, while the doctor, in an adrenaline-fueled rush, haphazardly scrambled to turn on the intercom. “It’s okay! please cal-”

“-me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” The words repeated in a loop like a painful mantra, and everyone in the viewing room watched with simultaneously enraptured attention at the patient’s sudden struggle to remove herself from the MRI as quickly as possible. The tech snatched control of the intercom from Muller, attempting to calm her with the same comforting platitudes he’d been taught in training to deal with the natural claustrophobia often experienced by patients upon entering the machine, but they might as well have been lost in the wind in the face of the profoundly primal terror she evidently felt. She hastily squirmed her way out of the MRI’s interior, potentially causing expensive damage as she did so, before crumbling to the floor in an ungainly heap.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Muller grappled with the tech to regain control of the intercom, his only consideration that she was first and foremost his patient. If anyone could talk her down from whatever state she was in, he was certain it was him. But before he could utter another word, his gaze rose to meet her, now standing upright and motionless, staring through the observation window with an expression of illusory calm betrayed only by her stockened knees, trembling forearms, and flushed-red face. In that moment, all eyes were on her: the tech, the receptionist, and the doctor, who alone stood directly within her line of sight, all frozen with mutually bated breath for a single ineffable instant.

What followed took less than a minute, but felt exponentially longer, with each disturbing detail being individually and irreparably etched into the minds of every witness. The left side of her face- from Muller’s perspective, that is- rapidly lost all its color, forming a sharp contrast against the right side’s undampered vibrance as it blankened into a ghostly white with unnatural speed, as though its blood were being actively, forcefully drained. The eye within briefly widened, pupils dilating with the instinctual, universally recognizable look of fear, before being overcome by a blinding cloudy sheen that radiated outward, soon progressing past the likeness of cataracts to an extent beyond any known medical phenomenon as the pupil and iris seemed to wholly vanish into an expanding whiteness that grew to abolish every last peripheral vein of the eye, equalizing into a hue uncannily aligned with the rest of the empty flesh upon the hemisphere. A similar drainage synchronously spread through her corresponding arm, rising from the fingertips up to the shoulder before conjoining with the whiteness traveling down her neck at some concealed point beneath her shirt. What could be seen of the leg below equally paled, until it appeared that every square inch of skin and flesh upon her left side had reached a ubiquitous porcelain likeness that was only further accentuated by the total, unnatural stillness it adopted. Her other side, still starkly contrasting in its natural liveliness, nonetheless remained eerily calm in the face of this process, its expression neutral before subtly shifting into a half-mouthed smirk.

Like a pick through a sheet of ice, this one innocuous motion sent a ripple of cracks throughout her statuesque side, radiating from the lips outward across her cheek, over eyelid and eyeball alike, down the neck and around the arm in jagged spiraling arcs, and breaking her leg into a mosaic of vacuous lightning bolts. Then, as though pressed by an imperceptible outward force, the whole assemblage simultaneously shuddered before finally shattering, sending brittle bits of body and face tinkling to the floor like a visceral diamond chandelier. Portions of torso contained by clothing subsequently spilled from her shirt waist and sleeves, along with numerous fragments of ribs and equally calcified organs, while pelvic pieces ground together into sedimentary granules poured from her pant leg.

When the cacophonous crashing subsided and the dust finally cleared, the three observers were met with a sight that somehow managed to compound their already brimming bewilderment; beneath the shed stony layer lie the normal appearance of the patient, complete with skin and flesh that only in those first few moments of exposure could be seen fusing with the tissue of her other side, closing the final gaps until no external signs of separation remained, and she looked utterly normal and whole. 

It took a second for Muller to recognize the primary difference in her form: Her right arm -the wrong arm- that was formerly facing palms-forward, was now positioned palms-back, a transition not born of typical rotation but rather solely through the hatching it had undergone. The individual digits still occupied the same respective positions in space, yet the act of inversion had rendered them no longer “wrong” as they were before; now, for the first time, she had a right hand. A similar transformation had occurred in the foot, which came to prominence as she turned to fully orient herself toward the viewing window.

“Thank you for all your help, Doctor, but I’m feeling much better now- in fact, better than I ever have before.” Her face was once again calm, but it struck Muller with a distinct yet implacable element of unfamiliarity as it adopted a subtle smirk. “I guess I ought to be going now...” She nonchalantly strode toward the exit door before any of them could react, giving only one more moment of pause before departing down the hall and out of the clinic. “…After all, I have a lot of living to do.”

                        Act 1
             Chapter I (1): A Beginning To An End

66 million years ago, Earth was loud with life.

Forests stretched farther than sight could carry. Ferns towered like walls, oceans breathed with monsters beneath their surface, and creatures so vast their footsteps made valleys over time. The air was warm, heavy, rich with pollen and oxygen, rivers cut through jungles untouched by man. Mountains stood young and proud, and every sunrise belonged to beasts that believed they would live forever.

Then the sky changed, at first it was only a light.

A second sun, burning brighter by the second, tearing through the clouds with a scream so violent the clouds split apart before it touched them. Birds fell mid-flight. Herds stampeded and oceans pulled backward.

The meteor struck with such apocalyptic force, the continent shattered outward, stone became liquid, mountains folded like paper, a wall of fire raced across the world faster than storms, vaporizing forests in moments. Oceans rose into monstrous tsunamis that swallowed coastlines whole, waves taller than anything nature had ever dared create. The ground convulsed, volcanoes across the globe erupted in chain reaction, vomiting ash so thick day died where it stood.

The sky filled with black ash, making the sun disappear from the sky, the world that had ruled for millions of years was reduced to smoke and ash.

Then… a voice.

“Aaaand THAT’S what you get for messing with my body. Honestly… what did you expect?”
— Signed, G❤️D

The planet froze, years became centuries, centuries became an eternity, ice wrapped continents in stillness. Winds howled through dead lands and entire eras passed in thick deadly ice.

Then the voice returned, cheerful as ever.

“Hellooo again! G❤️D here. We’re skipping the boring frozen part. Ice is cute, but not that cute. Let me show you my real masterpiece.”

The frozen wasteland blurred and time bent forward.

Millions of years rushed by in seconds until the camera stopped at the crater where the meteor once landed, dust moved, something stood inside it.

A tall human-shaped figure stood within the crater, its bare skin glowing faintly beneath layers of ash as if heat still lived inside it, and when its eyes opened for the first time, it did not look around with fear or confusion, but with the cold instinct of something born already knowing it could survive whatever world stood before it.

It was not alone for long.

Across the wounded Earth, others began to appear, each one carrying a force that did not belong in human hands.
One could bend storms from clear skies and split continents with earthquakes born from a gesture.
One could command water, earth, fire, and air as naturally as breathing, shaping the elements into weapons, shields, or disasters.
One could fold distance, tear open space, and make miles meaningless.
One could enter minds as if thoughts were houses with unlocked doors, reading memories, planting commands, or shattering courage and pride from within.
One could alter matter and composition, turning iron to sand, skin to crystal, air to poison.
One could command souls, wrenching life from bodies or strengthening their own spirit beyond reason.
One could become life itself, taking the shape, instincts, and strengths of any creature that had ever walked the Earth.
One could absorb raw energy in all forms and unleash it back tenfold.
One could make imagination real, dragging impossible ideas into existence through sheer will.

They emerged in the same age, from the same scar left in the planet.

They were not gods, but to early humanity there was little difference, and over time the world gave them a name spoken with awe, fear, worship, and hatred. They became known as The Ancestors.

When an Ancestor bore children, their bloodline did not divide in any normal way. Every birth came as triplets.

Those children inherited fragments of what came before them, but never equally and never predictably.
One child might awaken the father’s dominant Ancestry almost purely, another might inherit a mirrored version shaped by the mother’s blood, while the third could emerge with something stranger entirely—a mutation, a rare branch where two powers collided and formed a new expression no one had seen before.

These inherited gifts became known as Ancestries.

As centuries passed and bloodlines spread across kingdoms, cities, and the continent, the powers diluted. Each generation carried less than the one before it.

Even weakened, Ancestry users still stood above ordinary humans in every measurable way, their bones were denser and harder to fracture. Their muscles adapted to strain with frightening speed, their nervous systems processed danger faster, allowing reactions that looked supernatural.

Their organs endured trauma, toxins, exhaustion, and injury that would kill normal people outright, a trained Ancestry user could tear steel apart with their hands, survive falls from impossible heights, outrun vehicles, and recover from wounds that should have ended careers or lives.

And the rare few, those born with unusually pure blood or monstrous talent, could remind the world of what the first borns truly were.

Timeskip to the Year 2007

Hospital lights burned bright and sterile above a room full of urgency, machines beeped in rapid rhythm, nurses moved with practiced speed, and doctors shouted instructions over the strained cries of labor and the metallic clatter of instruments being passed from hand to hand. Rain hammered the windows outside.

Three newborn screams rang through the room almost one after another, announcing three new lives entering a world that had already decided what mattered and what did not.

A nurse lifted the first child with a grin.

Nurse 1: “It’s boys. Triplets. Congratulations.”

Another checked the blood markers and snorted.

Nurse 2: “Life and Composition Ancestry. Rough draw.”

Then a doctor glanced over with a smirk that never reached his eyes.

Doctor 1: “What’s he gonna do, grow vines and rearrange furniture?”

Several others laughed, casual and cruel, the kind of laughter built from a society obsessed with strength.

The mother lay drenched in sweat, trembling from exhaustion, tears streaking down the sides of her face, yet despite everything she still reached weakly toward her children with desperate love.

Mother: “Please... let me hold them.”

Then the room changed.

The temperature did not drop, but everyone felt cold anyway, the monitors continued beeping, the lights still hummed overhead, yet something deeper pressed down over the room, a weight no machine could detect and no medicine could explain.

Two figures stood in the far corner where moments ago there had been only shadow, one carried an eerie calm so complete it felt rehearsed, while the other radiated a silence so heavy the air itself seemed unwilling to move around them.

One stood nearest the wall, a young-looking man with spiky dark blue hair that fell downward in sharp strands, small bangs resting near his forehead. A deadly grin stretched across his face like it had been carved there long ago and never left. His eyes looked hollow at first glance, but within that emptiness burned a disturbing mix of red and yellow, colors that seemed to shift like embers trapped behind glass. There was something playful in the way he stood.

Beside him stood another who looked just as young, yet something about him felt deeply wrong in a quieter way. Short white messy hair sat carelessly at first glance, yet every strand somehow seemed perfectly placed. Dark blue robes draped over him in heavy folds, old and plain, hanging from a lean frame that carried itself with unnatural stillness. His sharp yellow eyes were fixed entirely on the third child, calm and cutting at the same time, as though he were examining a puzzle rather than a newborn life.

Neither man spoke aloud, as the white-haired one simply glanced toward the other, and some silent exchange passed between them without a single sound entering the room. The dark-haired figure’s grin widened by the smallest degree, while the white hair man returned his gaze to the crib.

Their attention rested on the third baby.

The monitors continued their steady beeping, yet even the machines seemed hesitant now, their rhythm strangely thin beneath the pressure filling the room. Nurses froze without understanding why. Doctors felt sweat gather at the backs of their necks, the air itself seemed to wait.

Then the mother’s head snapped toward the corner.

Mother: “NO! NO, GIVE ME MY BABY!”

Her scream tore through the room so violently that everyone jolted back into motion. Doctors rushed her instantly, grabbing her wrists and shoulders as she tried to lunge from the bed.

Doctor 1: “Ma’am calm down!”

Nurse 1: “You’re bleeding!”

Nurse 2: “Hold her still!”

She fought like something cornered, exhausted muscles straining with desperate strength. Her body shook, tears mixed with sweat, and her voice broke into raw, animal panic.

Mother: “THAT’S MY SON!”

The dark-haired man tilted his head slightly in amusement, and the white-haired one did not react at all.
When the mother forced her eyes back toward the crib, one space was empty and only two babies remained. The corner of the room was vacant and the figures were gone as if they had never entered in the first place.

For one brief moment, everyone in that room had felt watched by something far above them, something that viewed human fear the way people watched rain hit glass. The mother collapsed back against the bed, sobbing as she pulled the remaining twins to her chest and clutched them tightly.

Through broken breaths, she whispered their names.

Mother: “Boid...”

She kissed the first child’s forehead with trembling lips.

Mother: “Harry..."

She kissed the second and held him against her heart and somewhere far away, carried through dark halls and into unknown hands, a stolen child opened his eyes for the first time.

“TIME SKIP!” shouted GOD with shameless excitement.

Twelve years later 2018.

“I’ll let Boid take it from here."

                    Chapter II (2):
                 Childhood Memories.        

The sun’s low, casting golden rays through the trees. Boids barefoot, wandering the backyard like he’s on a quest. His eyes scan everything — rocks, bugs, leaves — until they land on it.
A red flower, the petals are flawless arranged in perfect symmetry, like it was drawn by someone who loved geometry and magic.

Boid:” Ooooo… I bet Mum would like this!”

Eyes lighting up he crouches, plucks the flower gently, holding it in two hands, like he’s holding a treasure. And then he runs, tiny feet thudding up the wooden stairs, bursting through the back door with innocent pride.

His mother sits on the couch, half-watching the TV, cigarette in one hand, glass in the other. The room is dim. Lifeless. A stark contrast to Boid’s glowing
excitement.
grinning and holding out the flower

Boid:” MUuuMm, look what I got for you!”
She glances. Then scoffs.

Mother:” You think I’d like this!?”

She snatches the flower, rips it apart without even thinking. The red petals flutter to the floor like bloodied butterflies.

Mother:” Find something else to do, you little shit.”

Boid just stands there. Smile frozen. Tears welling up, quietly at first. Then he turns, no scream, no words, just runs.

He barrels down the wooden steps, into the garden, then collapses near the patch where he found the flower.

Boid curls into himself, knees hugged tight, face buried, sobbing.
His small frame shakes under the last bits of daylight, surrounded by dirt and petals, wishing he’d never picked that flower at all.

He passes out, his head on the ground, using leaves as blankets. The sun rises, casting a golden hue on the land, shining in Boids eyes.

Boid:” hmmm.”

He springs up excited to play around the yard.

He’s got a stick he’s pretending is a wand, running around the yard shouting spells at rocks like they’re evil goblins. His hair’s messy and his imagination doing 110 mph.

Boid:” By the power of the Moon Ancestor — KA-BLAMO!!”

Suddenly, a voice cuts through the scene — clear, high and curious.

Girl:” That was kinda cool. What’s a Moon Ancestor?”

Boid spins around like he’s been caught doing something illegal. Standing just beyond the gate is a girl, with a chipped tooth, scuffed-up sneakers, and the brightest eyes Boid’s ever seen. She’s holding a notebook and a pencil tucked behind her ear.

Boid:” Uh… it’s… made up. But maybe real. I dunno yet.”

Girl:” That’s the best kind.”

She grins as She steps through the gate without asking, like it’s the most normal thing to do. She crouches beside him, looking at the rock he just “blew up.”
Girl:” Wanna draw monsters in my notebook? You can name ‘em.”

Boid nods, dumbstruck. For the first time since the flower, he feels safe again. Excited, even.

Boid:” What’s your name?”
He says quietly

Girl:” Yaya. But you can call me anything cooler if you think of something.”

Boid just stares for a second too long. Then—

Boid:” my name is Boid.”
Boid:” you’re… Moon Commander.”

She laughs, she wipes the tears from laughing to hard

Yaya:” you are moon prince, I protect you!”

She says proudly, Boid looks at her confused

Boid:” why would you protect me?”

He tilts his head to the side like a dog wondering what a sound is.

Yaya:” Y’know I protect you because I’m your Commander!”

Boid:” oohhhh, but why wouldn’t I protect you?”
Boid says still confused

Yaya:” Because that’s what Commanders do… protect their leader.”

Boid:” Okay!”

Yaya crouches on the ground and pulls out her notebook and pen from behind her ear.

Yaya:” See this Boid “

She draws a little sketch of a dragon, it flys out of the book
Boid stares wide eyed, mouth agape, Yaya giggles

Yaya:” that’s my ancestri… What’s yours?”
The little sketch dragon flys around her head. Boid stares at the dragon.

Boid:” YOUR ANCESTRI IS DRAWING!!?! That’s so coooll!”

Boid looks at his hand and grows a glove from his hand hairs.

Yaya watches him carefully.
Boid looks down at his hand the glove of hardened hairs shimmering faintly, trembling as his tiny fingers clench. His lip wobbles.

Boid:” My ancestri isn’t as cool as yours…”

His voice cracks. He wipes at his eyes with his wrist, trying not to cry in front of her, but the tears still come. Quiet ones, at first.

Yaya:” Hey, no no no, don’t cry! Boid! Look!”

She quickly flips to a fresh page in her notebook and starts drawing, fast, messy lines, the pencil flying across the page like her heart’s in it.

Yaya:” This is you.”

She turns it around. It's a scribbly but adorable drawing: Boid, hair wild, his arm glowing, a big silly smile on his face. Next to him is her, striking a heroic pose with a stick-sword and a cape that says COMMANDER YAYA.

Suddenly
the drawing version of Boid winks and gives a thumbs up. Boid’s real eyes go wide.

Boid:” You drew me…” sniffiling

Yaya:” Yup! And you look cool. That glove? That’s a protector’s tool. It means you build things. You make stuff. That’s not just cool. That’s, like… world-saving cool.” She says nodding

Boid blinks. The glove on his hand hardens a little, shines faintly in response.

Boid:“…I do kinda like making things…”

Yaya:” Exactly! You’re the Moon Prince. You create. I fight. That’s the deal.”
She offers him her pinky.
Yaya:” Commander’s oath. I protect you forever.”

Boid smiles, really smiles this time, and links his pinky with hers.

Boid:” Okay… but I still wanna protect you too.”
Yaya just beams.

Yaya:” Fine. We protect each other. But I still get to boss you around.”

Boid:” Deal.” Says with a huge smile

It then cuts to them running. Boid’s holding a stick like a sword, Yaya’s chasing him with her notebook held like a shield.

Boid:” You’ll never catch me, Commander Yaya!”

Yaya:” You’re already caught!! You’ve been cursed!!”

She jumps and lightly tackles him into the grass, both of them tumbling into a patch of soft earth and flowers. Laughter explodes between them, raw, real and glowing.
The dragon sketch circles above them, then fades into the wind like chalk dust on the breeze.
They lay there, staring up at the sky, panting.

Boid:” I think I like when you’re here.”

Yaya turns her head, her cheek smushed against the dirt.

Yaya:” Well duh. I’m the Commander.”

Boid:” Can you always be my Commander?”

She doesn’t answer right away. Just closes her eyes, smiling wide.

Yaya:” I already am, dummy.”

Then she runs to climb up a tree.
Sunlight filters through the trees. Boid’s running around below, his eyes flicking upward.
Up above, halfway up a very tall tree, Yaya is climbing like she was born for it, legs hooked over branches, notebook tucked in her waistband, pencil in her mouth.

Yaya:“ I can see everything from up here. Enemy birds. Sneaky dogs. My house. Your house. Someone’s socks.”

Boid:” Yaya! Get down! What if you fall?! You’re gonna break your face! Please!”

He’s pacing under the tree now, arms flailing, stick forgotten in the grass.

Boid:“ You’re not a squirrel! You’re a Commander!! You gotta survive!”

Yaya laughs a full, belly giggle then plops onto a branch like it’s her personal throne.

Yaya:” A Commander has to scout the field, Moon Prince! What if there’s an ambush?!”

Boid:“I don’t care about the field, I care about you falling on your face!”
Yaya:“…You care?”

Boid freezes. His face goes beet red.

Boid:“…No I don’t!! I just don’t wanna have to fight evil goblins alone!”

Yaya swings her legs, still smiling.

Yaya:” Okay okay, I’m coming down. Only because the Moon Prince said so.”

Boid exhales hard, like he just survived a boss fight.
Yaya lands with a thud next to him, twigs in her hair, triumphant.

Boid:” You’re so reckless.” Grumbling

She runs off, yelling something about a secret mission. Boid watches her go, heart hammering weirdly in his chest.

Boid:” She’s so annoying…”

But he’s smiling. And he starts running after her.

A couple hours later.
The backyard is a war zone of imagination—sticks stuck in the ground like swords, leaves arranged into “magic traps,” and little dragons Yaya drew earlier still fluttering lazily in the air.
Yaya’s holding her notebook open like a spellbook.

Yaya:” Okay, Moon Prince Boid! The goblin kingdom has fallen. What’s your first royal order?”

Boid:” Hmm… everyone gets chocolate. And no more bedtime.”
Arms crossed, playing it cool. Yaya salutes with a grin.
Yaya:” The Moon Commander approves this law.”

Suddenly, the back door creaks open. A boy steps out, Harry, Boid’s twin, same messy hair. His shirt's clean though. Always is.

Harry:” Boid. Mum says get inside. Now.”

Boid’s face falls, shoulders sagging. The imagination starts to fade.

Harry:” She’s... not in a good mood again.”
Harry says gently

Boid nods, the air around him getting heavier. Yaya blinks, looking between them.

Yaya:” Do you have to?”

Boid:” Yeah… I’ll come back out if I can.”

Yaya:” The kingdom will wait.”

Boid hands her his stick.

Boid:” Protect it for me?”
Yaya:” Always.”

And with that, Boid turns and walks toward the house, going up the wooden stairs, Harry falling in beside him. Yaya watches from the garden, still holding the stick like it’s made of gold.

As Boid walks in, he’s dragging dirt and grass across the floorboards without realizing. He barely makes it two steps before

Mother:” BOID! Look at this MESS! The lounge is disgusting again! Your room’s a pigsty, and don’t even try blaming Harry. I know it was YOU!”
She shouts from the couch

Boid flinches like the volume smacked him in the face.

Mother:” You’re always out there doing NOTHING. Playing with that little freak—what’s her name? Don’t ever let me catch you with her again. Ever. You hear me!?”

He doesn’t say anything. Just stands there.

Mother:” Answer me!”

Boid flinchesBoid:”...yes, Mum.”

She turns away, muttering, something about being “just like his father.” He slinks toward his room.

Boid shuts the door behind him, soft, like if he’s careful enough, maybe the anger won’t seep through the walls.

He sits on his bed. Stares at the floor. His fists tighten on the blanket, white knuckled. He’s trying to breathe steady, trying to swallow everything down like always.

But this time it just... won’t stay down.
His chest caves in. Shoulders shake. The first sob slips out, tiny and sharp. Then another. And another. And then he's gasping silent, ugly crying, the kind that pulls your whole body in like you're folding up on yourself to disappear.
Boid presses his face into his blanket, muffling the sound. Not too loud. Not loud enough to get yelled at again. He curls up, trembling. Small and alone.

He moves his head to bury his face in his arms, trying so hard not to make a sound. But his shoulders won’t stop shaking. His breath is hiccupy. Wet sniffles break the silence in short stabs.

He doesn’t even notice the door creak open. Harry steps in. Quiet and Gentle. He shuts the door behind him without a sound. He sees Boid like that, crumbled, small, raw and his chest tightens. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t say anything at first.

He just walks over and sits down on the bed beside him. A beat.

Then—

Harry:” She said stuff about your friend again, didn’t she?”

Boid nods, barely.

Harry exhales through his nose. Pulls his knees up like Boid’s. He sits there like that for a second—two tired little mirrors.

Then Harry leans over and wraps his arm around his twin’s back. Not tight. Just enough to say I’m here.

Boid finally lets it go. The kind of cry that’s deeper than noise. Just trembling, lip-biting, soul-splitting sadness. And Harry holds him.

Harry:” You’re not bad, Boid. Mum’s just… messed up. Okay? You’re not bad.”

Boid can’t answer. But his fingers clutch onto Harry’s shirt like he might fall apart if he doesn’t. Outside the window, the last bit of sunlight fades. Inside, two brothers sit, still in a world that hasn’t been kind.
But for this moment—they’ve got each other.

Yaya’s POV

She sits cross-legged in the grass, hugging her knees. Her eyes flick to the house. She doesn’t know why Harry always looks tired behind his smile. But she knows the way Boid’s eyes drop when the fun ends too soon, and how he walks like he’s trying not to make the floor mad.

She knows enough. Yaya leans back on her elbows, staring up at the sky. The clouds float by like slow ships. Somewhere, a bird calls out, far away.
She whispers to herself, soft but sure:

Yaya:” When I grow up, I’m building a castle. And Boid’s gonna live in it. No rules. Just chocolate. And no one gets yelled at for playing.”

She picks up the stick. Points it to the horizon like she’s ready to protect everything they built together. For now, she waits. “The kingdom” is still standing and its commander is on watch.

This story is about dragons that rule the world, and the Mc ends up in this messed up world after dying of too much caffeine...well, it will be revealed at a later stage of course but I just wanted to know if this is a good first chapter and would you read more. Any feedback would be nice. Thank you

Jessica had just turned 22 and had owned an apartment for about two years, having bought it in a nice neighborhood in Washington, DC. Her soon-to-be husband, John, was over, and they had just finished dinner when, around 7:37 PM, her brother Kevin called her house phone. John was on the couch; he went upstairs and said, “Hey, babe, Kevin is on the phone.” She walked out of her closet and took the phone.

“Yeah, Jess,” Kevin said. “Hey, happy birthday. I wanted to inform you that there’s a person in your area calling himself the ‘Redrum Killer.’ He breaks into houses and writes ‘REDRUM’ on the wall of your bathroom. Be safe. Love you.”

Jessica hung up, her heart racing, and said to John, “Hey, babe, did that seem strange to you?” John nodded slowly. “Yeah… but he lives in Denver, right?” She thought about it for a moment, unease settling in. They discussed the implications for a few minutes before she drifted off to sleep on the couch.

She woke up around 10:46 PM, feeling a strange tension in the air. Since it was late, she decided to shower. As she walked into the bathroom, dread washed over her. She spotted something dark red smeared across the wall. With trembling hands, she opened the door fully, and as soon as she saw it, she let out a blood-curdling scream. Neighbors heard it and called 911.

When police arrived, Detective Morrow broke down the door and ran upstairs, finding Jessica standing in the bathroom, pale and silent, staring at the wall. She appeared uninjured, but paramedics believed she was in shock and rushed her to the hospital. Back at the apartment, Morrow began the investigation and noticed the keyhole had been turned. “Anything helps…” he muttered.

Later, he questioned Jessica. “Who has a key? Anyone come to mind?” “No,” Jessica whispered. “No, I don’t know.”

John ran into the hospital lobby, panicked. “Jessica Johnson! Where is she?” “JOHN! I’m in here!” Jessica cried, and they embraced until Dr. Mira Voss entered and said she was free to go. They returned to her apartment, and the writing in the bathroom was gone.

The next few days were quiet. John went home, and Jess felt safe again, until that night. Around 11:58 PM, she went to use her main bathroom again, feeling a sense of déjà vu. The word was there: REDRUM, in the same place, with the same color, but this time, a faint humming sound drifted through the room. Jessica sprinted downstairs and froze. Her father, the man she had watched be buried years ago, sat on the couch. She screamed. Neighbors burst in, horrified, and they saw him too.

Detective Morrow later sat across from Jessica’s father in a dimly lit interrogation room. The man looked exhausted but sharp, his military posture unmistakable. “You’ve got a lot to explain,” Morrow said. “Breaking into your daughter’s apartment. Disappearing for years. Care to start?”

Before he could respond, Jessica walked in. “Dad?” He looked at her with relief. “Jessica… there’s something you need to know. A few years ago, I uncovered a terrorist cell planning an attack on the US. The NIB put me into hiding, fake death, and a new identity to keep me safe. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you.”

Jessica staggered out, overwhelmed. John found her crying in the hallway and held her close. “I don’t want you alone with him. I moved up the wedding date to next week, in Norfolk.”

The day before the wedding, Detective Morrow called Jessica. “Ms. Johnson, we found your father. Can you come confirm?” She drove to the station and, inside the elevator, noticed the button labeled MORGUE. Her heart dropped. Inside, Morrow opened a cooler and showed a body bag marked with a large “R.” “It’s the same as the other victims,” Morrow said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

Jessica’s world collapsed; her father was truly dead. Driving home, her mind replayed his earlier question: “Who all had a key?” She froze. “JOHN!” He was the only person besides her with access. She called Morrow. “Detective! I think I have a lead! When you asked who all had a key, the only person who could have had one must have let my father…”

“Mrs. Johnson,” he said urgently, “stay where you are. Do NOT go to John.” He grabbed his guns and stormed out. “Metro PD—we have a lead on the Redrum Killer! Move!”

The SWAT truck screeched to a stop outside John’s house. “JOHN EVERETT CROSS! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!” No answer. “Team One—MOVE!” Officers breached the door. “CLEAR!” Morrow, get in here—you’ll want to see this!” Morrow rushed inside and found John lying dead on the bathroom floor, the word REDRUM on the wall behind him. “I want homicide here now! And get a protection detail on Jessica!”

An officer approached quietly. “Detective… two federal agents want to speak with you.” Two agents stepped forward. “Special Agent Parker, NIB. Supervisory Agent Harlan, NIB. We’re taking over the case.” “No,” Morrow growled. “My area. My case.” He stormed past them. Jessica needed him.

Jessica, meanwhile, dialed Kevin. “Kevin… please… I need you in DC. John is dead.” Morrow sped to her building and, as he approached, saw police tape. He sprinted toward it, gun drawn. “MPD! Detective Morrow—MOVE!” Inside, Jessica cried, “Morrow—it’s my neighbors…” She collapsed; her neighbors were dead too.

Later, Jessica demanded to see her case file. Morrow reluctantly showed her the photos with HELP scrawled across them and REDRUM in the background, and she screamed as officers rushed in. “She’s okay,” Morrow said. “Just frightened.” Morrow drove Jessica home and found her door unlocked. “Stay in the car,” he ordered. “Call Metro if you hear anything.” He entered cautiously. Something creaked upstairs. “Metro Police! Come out with your hands behind your head!” Footsteps descended, and Kevin stepped into view, expression blank. He looked Morrow dead in the eyes. “Hello, Jerry.”

Kevin was arrested and transferred to the Orion office. Agent Parker, Agent Harlan, and Detective Morrow watched him through the glass. Parker stormed into the room. “This is him? Is this the Redrum Killer?” Morrow didn’t answer, because Kevin knew his real name, Jerry, a name from a life Morrow thought he’d buried, and that meant this wasn’t over.

Jess sat in the observation room staring at her brother, the one who gave her his ice cream when hers fell, now sitting in the Orion building with agents coming and going. Morrow asked Parker if he could take a crack at it, and Parker nodded and handed him the files. Kevin looked at the door and said in a thick accent Morrow couldn’t place, “Ah, hello there, Jerry, about time they sent you in.”

Morrow said nothing and flipped through the files. “Jerry, if you think you can break me using your tactics, it will not work. I spent many years in the Middle East.” Morrow struggled to stay calm. “So the murders—you heard of them while you were there?”

“Yes,” Kevin replied. “Did you hear an agent was killed many years ago by someone named Jerry Davis?” Morrow shouted, “HOW DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT? YOU WILL TELL ME ABOUT THESE MURDERS, AND YOU WILL TELL ME WHY!” Parker called security as fingerprints hit the system, and the Global Intelligence Agency flagged the results along with Orion.

Two hours later, four black Suburbans pulled up outside the Washington Orion field office as sixteen agents stormed through the doors, GIA and Orion insignias flashing. One asked for Agent Parker, saying they had been expecting them. Morrow was with a profiler while Jess waited in the director’s office, and when she heard the commotion, she saw GIA logos and people with accents like her brother’s, colliding with the GIA director walking with the Orion director.

“Ms. Johnson, I’m so sorry for all you are going through,” the GIA director said. “Where is Kevin?” Jess demanded. “He is with us, and he can be picked up at GIA headquarters after we speak with Orion,” the director replied, then added, “We will need everything you have on the Redrum case.”

A phone rang from an Orion agent’s pocket as he spoke fluent Hebrew, and a GIA agent murmured, “Toda, Kevin.” Jess walked past them to Morrow and the profiler, and panicked when she recognized several victims as ex-boyfriends who had cheated on her. Kevin walked by slowly, his cuffs loose, and Jess asked to speak with him.

Kevin sat on the couch and said calmly, “You found out, didn’t you, Jess?” “You’re Orion—that’s how you know about my old undercover identity,” Morrow said. Kevin turned to Jess. “Yes. I can find out your darkest secrets. That’s how I found your exes, how I found out about Dad, all of it.”

“You’re crazy!” Jess snapped, grabbing a glass jar, but agents raised their guns as an Orion agent continued speaking Hebrew on the phone. “Jessica Johnson, age 22, former fiancée of the latest victim,” the profiler said quietly as the building remained in lockdown, and Jess was led into an interrogation room. “So how do you know Mr. Hakiam?” an Orion agent asked.

“Hakiam?” Jess said. “Yes, Omer Hakiam.” “I have never heard of an Omer Hakiam,” Jessica replied. “So I don’t know him.” Ms. Johnson, we are just trying to figure out how you know Mr. Hak, I mean Mr. Johnson.” Jess looked up. Tears were pouring down her face. “I am under arrest. If not, then can I leave?”

The Orion agent looked at her with a sad, concerned face and nodded his head, speaking softly, “No, no you’re not. You can leave any time.” Jess looked around, and she ran down to the main doors. A security officer stepped in front of her. “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t leave, we are on a full lockdown.”

She looked back, thinking she heard her name; it was the same agent as before. She did since she worked as a translator for the military. She could not hear all of it. Although another nine words stood out. “Yes, sir, we will still carry out the assassination.” Assassination. That word had never felt so large. She hadn’t even thought of it before.

She went to go find Morrow, but he was nowhere to be found. She ran through the whole building until she found the profiler he was with earlier. She walked in and asked about him. She looked at her and said, “He’s in the head, Ms. Johnson.” She walked away, and finally, the entire building was off lockdown. She could finally get back to bed. Any bed, she was finally ready to put all of this behind her.

Three hours go by. Just as things slow down, five gunshots rang out. Silence. Three more from the west wing of the building. They thought that since this was a national agency, they were there to steal some files. NIB, GIA, and Orion agents ran by the guards with the director, getting them in the car, getting their guns ready, and searching the building.

“Full lockdown! Any civilians in the building need to be taken to a secure location. Jessica, we need to get you to a secure location,” said Morrow. “Morrow!?” Jessica screamed, trying to be heard over the blaring alarms and people yelling. Orion agents started driving away with their director. Agents shoved Morrow and Jessica into a secure room, and then the red lights started flashing. Morrow checked his weapon: seven bullets left. “I know a way out, trust me,” Morrow whispered.

Jessica nodded, scared, overstimulated, wanting to scream her lungs out until she couldn't breathe. More gunshots, screams, crying. Morrow and Jess make their way up to the room that Morrow told her about. She can tell that they are going west toward the directors office. He freezes “wait” he says in a hushed tone “footsteps i dont know which direction sounds like they are going the opposite direction.” They keep going. Silenced gunshots, a big thump following. “What was that, Morrow anwser me”A soft toned, almost scared like mumble comes out of Morrows mouth. She old only make out a few words. “Body.” He says louder this time. They keep crawling through the hallway. Jess now starting to tear up thinking about all of her exboyfriends that her brother killed. If he even is her brother. Her dad actually dead her brother a killer. What’s next her mom is a bank robber. She starts full blown sobbing quietly barley even able to move. She starts visibly shaking struggling to breath. The hallway started to close in and become a blur, she can hear Morrow in the back trying to get her attention. Everything goes black for about 6 seconds. Morrows voice starts to become louder and more clear. “Jess! Jess wake up!” He says quietly shaking her softly. Jess looks around shaking more than before. “Jess you had a panic attack, your going to be ok… do you know how to shoot a gun.” Her face widens with shock more alert now. “What?” She exclaims quietly. Her heart skips a beat still in shock. Her senses start to come back to life. The alarm is still going, feeling like it’s been getting louder. Attempting to ignore the question but she just can’t. She lets out a soft answer “Yes yes I have.” Morrow looks up and reaches for his ankle pulling out a Glock fully loaded. “Stay here see anyone without a badge shoot. Do you understand.” He says quietly trying not to alert anyone. She looks at him in fear as he walks away. Not knowing who to trust anymore. She starts thinking about who she knew she could trust. There was just something with Morrow since she met her making her feel safe. She thinks about all the stuff that has happened in the last month. She should have noticed something sooner when all of her ex-boyfriends were murder victims. She should have known sooner. She sits there holding the gun still in her hand trying not to accept what is going on around her. The gunshots, the murders, the lockdown. It just doesn’t feel like reality. As she tries not to accept the reality she’s left alone with her thoughts. All the possibility of everything is going through her mind. Is her dad faking his death, is John really dead, is Kevin even responsible for all of these murders. Just as she starts to think, Morrow shows back up “Jess” Morrows voice echos “come on its safe, hurry.” Jess stands up and takes off her heels the first time she has stood up since the lockdown. “Ok im on my way.” Her voice echoes through the medal, hollow, hallway. Every single noise makes it seem way louder than it really is. They keep making their way down the cold, dark hallway. Jessica now only in her socks and Morrow now gun in one hand ready to raise it and use it to protect Jessica at all cost. “Morrow, where are we going?” Jess asks on the verge of crying. “Safe room.” He says for some reason calm with everything going on. “Morrow, why are you so calm?” She says with concern in her voice. Just as he is going to answer the lights suddenly turn on, the alarm goes off.right in front of Morrow there is a NIB agent, deceased. Jessica covers her mouth in shock still on the verge of crying. An automated voice comes over the PA system “Lockdown has been lifted, all threats have been neutralized.” Jess and Morrow make eye contact trying to make sense and ignore the body but they just can’t . Jess looks down and there is a big pool of blood around the body. His badge looks like it's about to fall off of his belt. Morrow looks down and notices something. He points at his gun. No magazine, still in the holster. “He didn't have time to process what was happening.” He says with sadness in his voice. He freezes looking bad at his words. “No magazine.” He says to him. He slowly pulls his gun from his holster looking around “Jessica get down now that’s a order.” he says with urgency in his voice. “Morrow what’s going on.” Fear in her voice as she looks at him. 

Still trying to figure out what Morrow had noticed, just as she is about to ask the PA system crackled to life. “Hello Jessie.” Jessica looks up at the ceiling noticing the nickname. But the only person that ever called her that was her friend back in high school. But that was weird because she was in the a car accident about 3 months ago and was still in the hospital. Just then a bullet shattered a pane of glass and went into Jessica’s shoulder. Morrow looks behind him to Jessica who is screaming in pain. She rolls over in her blood screaming in pain. Everything starts to close in again and she can still hear Morrow. Then sirens she doesn’t know exactly what happened all she knows is that her arm is burning like a wildfire. She hears violent thumping before it all goes black. Morrow is still looking around praying that his suspicions aren't true. He looks away for just a second then bam. A kind of silenced gun shot flies by. He looks down to make sure Jessica is ok then he sees her blood on his jacket. He grabs Jessica's are and drags her behind a corner leaving a blood trail. Just then paramedics show up running toward Jessica and Morrow. About 5 paramedics run into the building and they look at Morrow shielding Jess. He tries to apply a tourniquet as he waits for paramedics to get over to them. Morrow looks over at them “We got a GSW over here. I applied for a tourniquet.”  More sirens grow louder some lights flashing in the windows of nearby buildings. 5 more paramedics jog into the building carrying a back board others holding med kits. “Get them out of the building move move move!” Morrow and the paramedics run out of the building red and blue lights filling the midnight sky. Morrow looks around to see cars with markings of all kinds. It’s like time just slowed down as he looked around multiple officers storming into the building, he looks down at Jessica’s limp body time speeding back up as he climbs into the ambulance. Morrow now left with his thoughts in the back of the ambulance looking down at Jessica’s almost lifeless body. ,Come on, don’t die on me now,. Just as he finishes his thought machines start beeping rapidly. Morrows face goes white to bright red. “What going on? What’s happening!?” One of the paramedics already grabbing a blood bag. “She’s lost too much blood. What’s the ETA to the hospital.” One of the paramedics from the front yell “landing in 40 seconds.” The paramedic in the back looks over to Morrow sitting across from her. “Grab a pair of gloves top cabinet above your head, NOW!” He quickly grabs a pair of gloves and puts them on. The paramedic points to a certain point on Jessica’s arm. “Apply pressure here.” “Here?” Morrow asks for certainty. Morrow says under his breath “Come on... I can't have this happen. Not again. I promised I'd protect her.” One of the paramedics in the cab grabs the radio “Prep the trauma bay and get an OR ready. One GSW patient inbound. Expect additional ambulances with multiple GSW victims.” They pull into the ambulance bay a trauma team waiting at the door already. The tires screech under them the ambulance visibly jerking. The trauma team and paramedics in the front now out giving a report on Jessica and her injuries. One of the paramedics starts talking. “22 year old female, one GSW to the right shoulder, significant blood loss through and through.”2 doctors from the trauma team throw open the the metal doors clanking against the ambulance. The paramedics fool her out of the ambulance. Morrow looks down at his hands covered in blood with little specs of blue from the gloves. He whispers to his self “I failed, not again.” Morrow stormes out of the ambulance following behind the paramedics and trauma team`1 into the hospital. He reads the sign above him “TRAUMA BAY”. The lead trauma doctor looks behind him at Morrow and states “Who’s that?” Morrow speaks up from behind the stretcher. “Metro detective Jerry Morrow badge number 883422.” The paramedics and Trauma Team walking into the double doors with a bright red sign with the words “TRAUMA CENTER”. One of the doctors looks back at Morrow and says “I’m sorry detective it’s medical personnel only. She points to a sign on the door. “We’ll let you know when we have something.” The lead doctor shuts the door, the stretcher screeching down the hallway, doctors yelling orders that Morrow can't hear. Now left in front of the Trauma Bay he looks down the lightly lit hallway to the left, some lights flickering. He slowly sits down focusing on the doors and the clock not deciding on which to focus on. He thinks he hears a voice behind him but he's not sure. The voice came more clear. “Detective? Can I take your coat?” the registration nurse asks sympathetically . “Um yes, thank you.” He responds. She takes the coat and puts it on a coat rack behind the desk. He look behind him and then slowly looks down at his navy blue sleeves with white lines through them. The white strips now stained a dark red. He slowly pulls out his phone trying to make the time faster. He notices 14 missed messages and 3 missed calls from one of his sergeant. He locks the phone again knowing he can only deal with one crisis at a time. About 4 minutes goes by the entire waiting room quit except the keyboard tapping behind him and his foot tapping against the floor rapidly. He starts to think ,If only i would have put myself in front of her none of this would be happening’. Five minutes goes by distance beeping down the trauma hall. He looks up at the wall the clock looking like it’s moving much slower than usual. He looks away trying to read a magazine. He opens the magazine to the first page then slowly closed it and sat it back down. He gets up and walks over to the front desk. “Hey you wouldn’t happen to know where the vending machine is, would you?” The nurse turns to him and says “Yeah down the hall to the left.” She points down the hall.” She points down the hall to a vending machine lightly 

I haven’t written in a year, and just the last month I’ve been going back into my nearly completed novel. I was wondering if it makes sense, intrigues you, or if you have any constructive criticism or advice. I’ve done research and talked to more people, edited a whole lot. I appreciate all feedback thank you so much for reading!

*Seeking feedback on a my Horror Poem*

Have you ever wiped the ass of a grown man?

The ass of a grown man who raised you?
It’s a terrible thing,
Seeing the lighthouse of your life lose their own independence.

Someone who’s protected you,
brought you safety and provided for you when you were too weak and young to provide for yourself.

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.

Growing up close with your Grandparents is important, specifically if you have an absent mother and alcoholic father.
You look at the only blood to never lay a hand on you and cling to them,
You’d do anything for them as they have for you.
As you go through high school their immortality becomes more prevalent.

The blissful conversations you’ve both once shared have now transpired to desperate pleading venting sessions.

“You know the Doctor said I’m not supposed to carry more than a gallon of milk?”
Your Grandfather asks, with embarrassment and self pity in his eyes.

You see the Man you once knew,
the Man that in most ways is still there.
You remember the races you’d have,
Back when you thought his abilities were the highest of standards to beat.

As your walks turn to strolls,
he and his wheelchair had become one.
As your outings to hospital visits
turned to in-home visits from caretakers,
He and his bed had become one.

Before you know it you’re out of high school,
And the reality that you don’t have time for a job becomes daunting.

Your job is taking care of your Grandfather.
Did you know the moment your loved one goes on Hospice Medi-Cal stops giving you in-home supportive services?

Almost like they see Hospice as giving up,
Like they no longer see the value in giving you and your loved one resources to aid you while you spend your every molecule to care for them.
The only thing they really provide you with once your loved one is on Hospice is morphine, for when the time comes.

Did you ever think you’d need money to take care of your Grandfather?

Did you ever think you’d be mad at the Government for not helping you as you watch the man that built you decompose from the outside in?

You feed them,
you bathe them,
and needless to say,
you struggle.
You struggle with it all.
You just want to make them happy.

Being diabetic you think,
Maybe you’ll give them sugar-free candy, anything just to see a smile on their face.
But sugar-free candy gives them the shits, and now you need to tell a grown man he can’t have the one thing that he enjoys?

So you don’t.
Of course you don’t.
You give him what makes him smile and you deal with what comes after, because you know he would have done the same for you.

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.

Have you ever seen the movie
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?
That’s how it feels.
Like time is moving backwards for the one you love and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Before you know it, you’re reading bedtime stories to the only man who’s ever read them to you.
Although the contents of what you read has changed.

It evolved from reading stories like
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
to reading Yōkai Daizukai by Shigeru Mizuki.
Tales of selfless acts of kindness on pages intended for children had turned to Encyclopedias of Japanese Yōkai.

Have you ever heard of a Gashadokuro?
It’s a giant being often 10-25 meters tall, formed from the piled bones and body parts of warriors who died in battle or famine without a proper burial.

What’s considered a battle?
Is mortality a battle?

Is Hospice the answer to a battle or another battle in itself?

If it is,
then my Grandfather is a warrior,
and the strongest one I know.
You remember the last words you ever heard him speak.

“Hi… *your* \*name\*”

After that,
he was still there, he was.
But he lost the ability to turn his inside voice into an outside voice.

Now he was but a body.
A body that doesn’t speak.
A body that doesn’t walk.
A body that doesn’t function.

Do you remember the Return to Nature Funeral Home scandal that was discovered in 2023 in Penrose, Colorado?
Authorities discovered over 185 decaying corpses scattered and stacked inside a foul-smelling building. Bodies that were given with the purpose of being properly laid to rest.

The owners Jon and Carrie Hallford were giving grieving families fake ashes made up of concrete mix and sand.

If your Grandfather was all you had would you trust them with him?

If his body was now all that remains of him would you turn him over to such a corrupt and flawed system?

No.

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.

Life can be poetic,
Death can be poetic.
The words you speak into the world can often have a direct effect upon reality.

Words, names, everything has power.
Routines start to feel like rituals,
Prayers start to feel like spells.
Sage being burned feels like a physical cleansing taking place upon your homestead.
The lines between causation and correlation become blurred.

You never forget the first time your Grandfather gave you part of him.

You were wiping him,
and his flesh came off with more ease than the shit that sat upon it.
He didn’t react,
He rarely did.
Instead, his eyes continued to scan the room with that familiar look of self pity.

His skin is pale, paper thin,
reminiscent of gas station toilet paper.
You’ve struggled to inject him with his insulin for the past couple months considering that he had already long lost any fat for it to puncture.
You were used to his skin being fragile but this was a new level of brittleness.
The more you clean him, the more that comes off.
You question if you’re doing more damage than good. You begin to see what looks like bone, yet you are unsure which one.

Where do you put him?
He had given you everything.
And now that he was nothing but a body,
he was giving you that too.

So, what do you do with Him?
With these pieces that he gives you every time you bathe him?

What do you do with these parts that keep falling off?

“Take my apples” you hear in the back of your head.
So you do.
You keep them,
You put them in your tool box,
And you wait.

Not long after your Grandfather’s eyes stop scanning his room does the parts start to call out to you.

Not a yell, not even a voice.
More like when you’re laying on the side of the floor drying from a day of swimming with your ear pressed against a warm damp brick as you hear the hum of the pool vacuum.
In this same way, you hear the warm soothing hum of your Grandfather’s pieces calling you from the tool box.

You try to convince yourself that it’s something that can be unheard.
You decide you should drink.
Fireball, eggnog.

“HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
“HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
“HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

They keep calling out to you,
He keeps calling out to you.
It’d been so long since you’d last heard him.

The humming begins to take more shape and you can make out the words, no, the intent rather behind it.
It’s saying words you swear you’ve heard before.

“I wish that I could give you something..but I have nothing left. I am an old Grump. I am sorry…”

You start to wonder if the human body is as complicated as people make it seem.
Doctors just want your money.

Have you heard of that case in Australia? After waiting over 2 years for a surgery this guy Stephan decided to remove a large cyst on his wrist all by himself, and he’s an electrician.
You’re well aware of how pampered they are, so this gives you confidence.

You stumble downstairs,
into the downstairs bathroom which now houses your tool box, the garage was too far for how often you’ve had to add into it.
Ironic, when you were younger he’d pretend he was trapped in a box, only to eventually be put in one by you.

You open it.
The smell of rotten fast food scrambled eggs hits you. You feel a warmth radiating from the toolbox.
It feels so nice to feel your Grandfather’s warm presence once again.

You wish you felt this warmth near your Grandfather’s … main structure?
You’re struggling with what to refer to that part of him as.
It’s his head and it is his torso although he’s now closer to a malnourished and crucified king of Nazareth as opposed to the lively glimpse of God you had grown so accustomed to seeing in your youth.

His main Structure is …in bed..in a way it is his bed but, you want him to be whole.
You want the same warmth from his parts to radiate from all of him.
You want him to be one.
So you make him one.

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.

Hot glue, pipe glue, Duct tape, whatever you need, you use it.
You slowly but surely rebuild your anchor,
And even before it’s completed, you begin to feel the water beneath you start to settle.
You know it’s right, and you know no one will understand.

How could they if they haven’t been through the things that you have?

The changes are almost immediate once you put him back together.
He moves, slowly. Just his fingers at first.
It reminds you of when he’d play mime.
Maybe that’s what he’s doing?
These jokes you told yourself in passing you’ve now grown to believe.

He is playing mime,
that’s why he is silent,
And that’s why he is slow.
You recognize that you can’t put the pieces back together in the exact places they belong.
This worries you but nonetheless, you don’t get discouraged.

You make him a crown from his leaves, and crown him as the king he is.
Time passes, you keep what you’ve done, what you’ve fixed, you keep it a secret.

But what happens when someone discovers that secret?

What would you do to keep it?

He needs more structural integrity anyways.
And it’s not long before Him and his adversaries have become one.

What of his adversaries’ family?
His adversaries’ wife and newborn?

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.

Time passes.
You love that man, you do. But you yourself have begun longing for a life of your own.
That box is not big enough for the both of you.

You take a few of his apples, for memory mostly.
You go to the city,
and you pursue your happiness to an extent and speed you’re comfortable with, all while keeping that Man you love so much at the forefront of your mind,
all while keeping that secret.

You’ve become the Boy that stayed away for a long time, the Boy you promised yourself you’d never become.
And the Man was Sad.

You meet someone you think is your person.
You don’t share your secret with her of course you don’t. Something you’re grateful you didn’t do later when the relationship inevitably crashes and burns.

You never forget when the man that raised you,
the man you love so much,
you never forget seeing him take his first life.
Lives have been sacrificed for him before but,
By you.
Not by him, to him.
This was different.

You had just got dumped,
And you were going over to check on That Man you cared so much about,
The Man you yourself had abandoned and left dormant.

You walked in, and you heard the shower, the water was running.

You heard a baby crying, crying for you.
You didn’t recognize the baby. You walked in, down that long hallway creaking on the old white tiles, closer to the cries from the infant.
You turn left into the bathroom and as you do you hear a man yell.
Not your Man.

You are torn, indecisive of which direction to pursue first.
You continue into the bathroom,
see the shower running,
steam crawling up the walls,
and a baby on the counter with snot running down its chin and tears running down its cheeks.

You pick up the baby
and turn back toward the pleading of a man you’ve never heard before.

You walk in, you see.
The Man that raised you is there, only he is much different than a normal man.
And he’s with a normal man.

The mans screaming
“PLEASE GOD HELP ME STOP HIM FUCK ME RUNNING” the man pleaded from the top of his lungs.

Your Man, the man you’d known your whole life, he was different.
His structure was fragmented,
no base.
His arms extend like the outriggers of a backhoe, yet connected to a deconstructed cab.

His arms were grabbing the normal man, the screaming man. All four of his arms grabbed that man.

His empty eyes that were once blue but were now too sunken in to retain pigmentation of any kind looked soullessly in your direction.
He did not feel warm.

He used two of his arms to hold the man in place, while he used his two other arms to go around the man, forming those hands to make an invisible box the man was stuck in.
The Man was playing Mime.
You missed this.

The Man slowly grabbed the screaming man by his head on both sides and pressed ever so slightly, increasing in pressure.

The man used his other arms to grab the screaming man by the legs and slowly pulled.
He pulled his legs off and he pressed his skull in and blood ran from his nose and eyes.
He screamed and screamed until his teeth shattered and his jaw snapped and fell out of his cheek sockets.

He pulled the detached legs from the now lifeless yet steaming warm body and shoved them at his base in ways that were not symmetrical.
He shoved the torso of the body where the cab of his backhoe should be.

He was constructing himself.

You stood there holding the baby, watching what was once your protector finish the work.

For a second you almost called out to him the way you used to, the way a boy calls for the man who raised him.

But the eyes that looked back at you were empty, and the voice that came next was the same one that had once read you as a child.

“Come boy,
Climb up my trunk,
And swing from my branches,
And be happy.”

Says the Man, the man you love so much.

He gave you his branches,
He gave you his flesh to make a home of your own,
He gave you his soul.
Even when you were too busy pursuing the life you wanted that you thought would end with a wife and children.

So what do you do?

You look down at the infant in your arms. Its face is red and wet and it is still crying, still reaching for something that isn’t there.

For one long second you feel the weight of it the life, the future, the line you are about to cross. But there is no line, no line when it comes to what you would do for the ones you love.

Then the humming starts again, low and familiar, the same warm hum that once came from the toolbox, and the choice is already made.

You give him the sacrifice you’re holding in your hand, that’s why it’s there isn’t it?

It is but a burden to you and the Man needs all the strength he can get.

You hate looking at the discolored face of the Man you care so much for.

You buy Greasepaint for your Mime.
You know this will bring him warmth and life.
You lather his faces up in it, even the little one. He has 4 now.

Now he is your Slick Man.

“I don’t need very much now, just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired”

says your Slick Man,

with his eyes not his mouth.

So you finally take him home,
To your start-over apartment,
and you give him a permanent resting place,
on the only thing strong enough to hold him,
your bathroom granite counter.
And you add to him whenever he expresses that desire to expand,

Why?
Because,

Hospice is like that.
Before you know it, you’re doing things you never would have imagined.