Orphaned Seed
Copyright© 2026 by Fantasylover11
Chapter 1: The Overlay
The riverwalk was the only place in Marrowick that didn’t demand a version of him.
In the dark the benches emptied, the little plaques about donor families went unread, and the water did what it always did: shoved itself toward the ocean with a low, steady insistence. Noah ran along the cracked asphalt path with his hood up and his earbuds dead, because he liked the way the world sounded when it had to fill its own silence.
His shoes slapped damp grit. His lungs burned the way they were supposed to. His brain—usually a crowded room—went blank in short, clean stretches.
He’d been invisible for so long it felt like a law of physics.
He pushed harder anyway.
The streetlights were spaced too far apart. One of them had been flickering for months, the town’s version of a promise to fix it later. Noah hit the pool of light, shadow, light again—
—and something translucent slid into the center of his vision.
It didn’t float like a hallucination. It clicked into place like a window being dragged onto the screen.
White lines. Clean font. A faint grid he could see and also somehow feel, the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm.
He stumbled. His foot skated on a wet patch and he windmilled his arms, catching himself on instinct.
The overlay stayed.
Noah stopped under the next lamp, bent over with his hands on his knees, and looked down the empty path like it might explain itself.
He blinked hard.
The overlay didn’t smear. It didn’t drift. It waited.
His heart hammered a few beats too fast, not from the run.
He lifted his head.
The air tasted like salt and old leaves. Somewhere up the hill a screen door slammed. The town stayed a town.
The overlay stayed, too.
He looked straight at it.
INTERFACE // AWAKENING
Below it, boxes and numbers aligned with a kind of insultingly calm precision.
LVL 1
MYT 5 GRC 5 VIG 5 WIT 5 RSV 5 PRS 5
The moment he focused on the letters, a smaller line appeared beneath them, like a tooltip.
HELP: MYT—strength GRC—speed VIG—stamina WIT—learning RSV—will PRS—presence
It wasn’t a dream version of a video game. It was too plain for that. Too confident.
Noah raised a hand and swiped at the air.
Nothing.
He pinched the inside of his wrist hard enough to sting. Still there.
The pressure in his ears thickened, like he’d stepped a foot deeper underwater.
He walked to the edge of the path where the river dropped away into dark ripples and looked down.
For a second, the water seemed wrong. Not the water itself—the way it moved, the way moonlight caught in the chop—but the sense that there was a second layer to it, just under the surface. A shape he couldn’t name.
Then the feeling shifted and he was just staring at a river.
He swallowed, throat tight.
On the overlay, a new line appeared.
SKILL (PASSIVE): AETHER SENSE (R1)
He didn’t know what “Aether” was supposed to mean. He’d never been in a fantasy novel. He’d never even been good at pretending he belonged in one.
He turned away from the water and started walking, because standing still felt like agreeing to something.
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