For a few long, ringing seconds after the shaman’s proclamation, nobody moved.

  The cheering that had burst out when James appeared dwindled into an awkward, uneven murmur. A couple of people kept clapping a little longer than everyone else, realized they were alone, and let their hands fall with self-conscious pats. Somewhere in the back, a baby made a confused, wobbly noise like even it wasn’t sure what had just happened.

  James stood in the cooling ashes of the ritual circle and tried very hard not to look as useless as he felt.

  He had given presentations to rooms full of executives who could tank stock prices with a single email. He had handled clients who thought “urgent” meant “yesterday,” contractors who swore in three languages, and an inbox that spawned emails like hydras sprouted heads.

  This was worse.

  Executives, at least, never expected him to personally fix a bathroom roof by divine mandate.

  The old shaman, apparently satisfied with his own performance, lowered his arms with a series of popping and cracking sounds from somewhere in his shoulders and neck. He beamed up at James like a proud grandfather who had just finished wrapping a very enthusiastic accident in bright paper and called it a gift.

  “THERE HE IS!” he crowed again, this time dropping to what must have been his version of a conversational volume. It was still loud enough to make nearby villagers flinch. “TALLER THAN I IMAGINED! LESS ON FIRE, BUT WE CANNOT HAVE EVERYTHING.”

  A small orb of light hovered near James’s shoulder, bobbing once in the smoky air. Lumen’s glow pulsed faintly, bright-dim-bright, the light somehow conveying an impression of smug amusement without having anything as helpful as a face.

  “Is he always like this?” James muttered under his breath, not moving his lips much. The ritual circle still smelled like burnt herbs, acrid smoke, and something metallic that he tried not to think about too closely.

  “Yes,” Lumen replied, voice crisp and clear in his mind, as if they were standing alone in a quiet office and not in a muddy clearing in the middle of nowhere. “Since before his teeth fell out.”

  That didn’t narrow things down. At all.

  Around them, the villagers edged closer in small, cautious clusters, like nervous birds approaching an unfamiliar statue that might start moving if they breathed too loud. Most of them looked underfed; their cheeks were a bit hollow, arms and legs roped with wiry muscle rather than healthy bulk. Their clothes were made of rough cloth and leather, patched and re-patched until the original fabric was almost a rumor. Faces were lined beyond their years, skin tanned or wind-burned, hair bound back with strips of cloth or braided with whatever string they could find.

  They weren’t precisely what James’s brain filed under “fantasy tribe,” but they weren’t far off either. Less dramatic jewelry. More practical dirt.

  Whispers brushed across the clearing. The words slid into his head and made sense even though he knew, on some distant rational level, they shouldn’t. The translation just… happened, the way breathing happened.

  “Look at his clothes…”

  “Is that leather? No, not leather, something else...”

  “Are all sky-men so pale?”

  “He doesn’t look like a warrior.”

  “He doesn’t look like anything. He looks tired.”

  That last one stung only because it was completely, painfully accurate.

  James became acutely aware of every smudge on his jeans, every speck of ash on his T-shirt, the way his sneakers sank slightly into the damp earth. He hadn’t exactly dressed for interdimensional travel. He had dressed for a normal, slightly miserable workday. A meeting. A commute. A commute that had ended with a glowing door handle and a storm of light and...

  He pulled his thoughts away from the memory before his stomach could flip.

  The shaman spun around on the edge of the ritual circle, nearly tripping over his own robe. The garment had once been some dignified color, maybe, but now it was the shade of “I have sat on every surface in this village and fallen in at least two puddles.”

  “MAKE WAY!” he ordered, thumping his staff into the dirt. “THE SAVIOR MUST GREET HIS PEOPLE! NO SHOVING! NO BITING! WE WILL HAVE AN ORDERLY REVERENCE!”

  A child yelped as someone stepped on their foot. Somewhere in the second row, someone definitely bit someone else.

  “Please don’t say ‘his people,’” James said weakly.

  “Too late,” Lumen told him. The orb’s light flickered with dry satisfaction. “They heard the first version.”

  A handful of villagers were nudged and prodded from behind, pushed forward like sacrificial offerings to the socially awkward god of Introductions. James realized, belatedly and with a sinking feeling, that this was the part where he was supposed to say something. Friendly. Inspiring. Competent.

  Public speaking. In another language. In another world.

  No pressure.

  He cleared his throat. People in the front row straightened a little, as if expecting thunder.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Glorious opening.

  A few expressions flickered. Confusion. Curiosity. At least no one burst into tears.

  “My name is James. Uh… Wright.” He winced internally at the little hitch. “And I’m… not a god. Or anything. Just so we’re clear.”

  The villagers exchanged looks. Several brows furrowed. One or two people actually looked disappointed, which would have been funny if it weren’t about whether or not he was a deity.

  The shaman gasped theatrically, clutching at his chest.

  “MODESTY!” he cried. “A TRUE SIGN OF GREATNESS!”

  “That’s not what I...” James started.

  “LOOK HOW HE DENIES HIS OWN GLORY!” The shaman thundered, rounding on the crowd as if James weren’t even there. “HE IS TOO HUMBLE TO ACCEPT HIS OWN LEGEND. THIS ALONE PROVES HE IS WORTHY.”

  A few villagers nodded vigorously, grateful to have a script for how to feel. Someone started clapping again out of sheer reflex.

  James shut his mouth. Arguing with that felt like trying to shout down a hurricane using a rolled-up memo. Or standing in front of a collapsing scaffold and insisting politely that gravity reconsider.

  “If it helps,” Lumen said, voice wry, “they’re used to him.”

  “It doesn’t help,” James murmured. “But thanks for the attempt.”

  One of the villagers stepped forward, not pushed but stepping on his own. He was broader across the shoulders than most of the others and had forearms like tree trunks. His beard looked permanently caught between “growing out” and “lost a fight with a whetstone,” uneven in a way that somehow suited him. His tunic had at least three visible patches, each in a slightly different color, and a scar curved across one forearm like something with teeth had tried to take a chunk out of him and failed.

  He studied James in silence for several heartbeats, eyes steady, then gave a short, awkward nod.

  “Welcome,” he said. His voice was rough, like gravel under a cartwheel, but not unfriendly. “You came from the fire and the shouting. That… seems like a lot.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” James said. His tongue felt thick, brain juggling exhaustion, disbelief, and a distant urge to laugh hysterically. “And you are…?”

  The man blinked, as if the question surprised him. As if no one usually needed his name, only his labor.

  “Rogan,” he said at last. “Hunter.” He paused, the word sitting oddly in his mouth. “Well. I will be, if we live that long.”

  There was no drama in it. No attempt to wring pathos out of the sentence. Just a flat, simple truth laid down like a piece of wood on a workbench.

  James followed his gaze out toward the tree line. The forest loomed close, a wall of trunks and shadow, the canopy dense enough that the light above them caught in layers of green before it ever reached the ground. It felt too near, like buildings erected too tight along a narrow alley. No buffer. No margin for error.

  He looked back at Rogan. “Nice to meet you.”

  Rogan’s mouth twitched, as if the phrase was familiar but not often applied to him.

  “Nice… to meet you,” he repeated carefully. Then added, more earnestly, “We are glad you came. Even if you didn’t want to.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  James opened his mouth to deny that, to say something noble and selfless and entirely untrue, then stopped. There was absolutely no point lying to the man who had greeted him with practical honesty. Rogan was not demanding anything from him with that sentence. He was just naming what everyone already knew.

  He let the truth sit between them instead.

  Another figure stepped forward before he could respond, shouldering her way neatly into the little space that had formed at the front.

  She was shorter than Rogan, but then most people were. Dark hair was pulled back into a knot that meant business. Her sleeves were rolled past her elbows, exposing strong forearms dusted with flour and scarred from years of kitchen burns. The apron tied around her waist might once have been white, but at this point, it had achieved the color of “I cook for too many people with not enough food and no time to soak anything.”

  A round-cheeked toddler perched on one hip, balanced with the effortless stability of long practice. There was a smear of something, dough? Ash? across the woman’s cheek. Her eyes, however, were clear and sharp, assessing him the way James had seen senior engineers assess blueprints: looking for where things would fail.

  “This is him?” she asked, giving him a slow up-and-down that made him feel about as solid as cardboard. “The one we were promised?”

  “Yes!” The shaman said before anyone else could breathe. “THE DESTROYER OF WEEKENDS!”

  James blinked. “That’s not...”

  “THE FIXER OF ROOFS!” the old man continued triumphantly, riding right over him.

  The woman closed her eyes briefly like she was sending up a quick, exhausted prayer to whatever powers had dropped this situation in her lap. “Spirits save us,” she muttered.

  She shifted the baby slightly and stuck out her free hand. Her grip looked like it could crush walnuts.

  “I’m Marla,” she said. “I cook. If you’re planning to stick around, you’ll be eating what I make, so for the sake of honesty between us: there isn’t much of it.”

  Her bluntness was almost comforting. It sounded like home, like the unapologetic truth of a schedule that couldn’t be argued with.

  James blinked down at her hand, then reached out and took it. Her fingers were warm, callused, and entirely real in a way nothing else in his day had been.

  “James,” he said again. “And I’d never insult the cook. That seems like a shortcut to an early grave.”

  Marla’s mouth twitched. For a moment, amusement cracked through the fatigue, a tiny light in the heaviness settled around her shoulders.

  “Good. You’re not completely useless then,” she said. She bounced the toddler once absently on her hip. “This one is Peb. Pebble, if she’s being stubborn, which is always. The other monster’s hiding behind the big log over there.”

  James followed her gaze.

  A scrawny child peeked around the side of a fallen tree, hair sticking up in at least four different directions. The moment their eyes met, the kid vanished behind the log again as if yanked by an invisible string.

  “He’s shy,” Marla said.

  “He’s terrified,” Lumen whispered privately into James’s mind. “Your arrival was… visually dramatic.”

  James couldn’t exactly argue. Being called through a portal made of fire and smoke probably had not been a soothing spectacle.

  “Nice to meet you, Pebble,” James told the toddler, feeling faintly ridiculous. Pebble stared at him with unnervingly solemn eyes, as if assessing a long-term investment and finding the numbers questionable.

  More villagers drifted closer, gravity pulling them in now that the first few had survived the experience of standing near the supposed savior without being smote or set ablaze. A young woman with tightly braided hair and an armful of firewood stopped on the edge of the group, hugging the logs to her chest like a shield. A man around his age stepped forward into a better view, setting the carcass of a small deer on the ground. Two teenagers lurked together near one of the lopsided huts, elbows bumping, whispering fiercely while pretending not to stare and failing completely.

  “Do I need to introduce myself to all of them?” James asked under his breath.

  “Eventually,” Lumen said. “But not all at once. They are as overwhelmed as you are, in their own way.”

  “You’re assuming I’m not completely falling apart.”

  “You are vertical,” the Lumen replied. “That is a strong start.”

  It was a low bar, but today James was grateful for low bars.

  The shaman, apparently unable to tolerate being out of the center of attention for more than ten seconds, hobbled forward again until he was squarely between James and the nearest group of villagers. He planted his staff in the dirt with a faint squelch.

  “I,” he announced, as though no one had noticed him previously, “AM ELDER WICKSNAP. SHAMAN. SPIRIT-SPEAKER. KEEPER OF TRADITIONS. WATCHER OF GOATS.”

  “Watcher of… goats?” James repeated before his brain could catch up and flag the phrase as unsafe.

  Wicksnap nodded gravely. “I watch them,” he said. “So they do not eat the village again.”

  A ripple of poorly suppressed snorts ran through the crowd. Someone outright laughed, then clapped a hand over their mouth.

  James frowned. “Again?”

  “Do not ask about the goat,” Lumen whispered hastily. “It is a long story and mostly screaming.”

  “Right,” James said aloud. “Nice to meet you, Elder Wicksnap.”

  The title lit the old man up like someone had poured oil on an already blazing fire. He glowed under it, standing a little straighter.

  “AH! HE ACKNOWLEDGES MY WISDOM!” Wicksnap bellowed. “THE BOND BETWEEN SAVIOR AND SHAMAN IS COMPLETE!”

  “I just said hello,” James protested.

  “It is enough!” Wicksnap assured him, with the supreme confidence of someone who had never let reality interfere with a good narrative.

  Marla rolled her eyes so hard that if eye-rolling were a spell, the village might have been warded on the spot. “Ignore half of what he says,” she told James. “The other half is… also not useful, but at least entertaining.”

  “The spirits speak through me!” Wicksnap insisted.

  “The spirits tell you when it’s going to rain after you step in a puddle,” she shot back.

  A few chuckles escaped the villagers more freely this time. The tension that had held their shoulders hunched and their hands clenched eased, just a fraction, like a knot loosening under careful fingers.

  Something inside James loosened too.

  He hadn’t realized how tight his own shoulders were until that tiny wave of shared amusement rolled through the group. His heart was still pounding. His brain still wanted to list all the things that were wrong with this picture, starting with “not Earth” and ending somewhere around “everyone thinks I’m here to save them,” but under all of that, something quieter hummed.

  They were afraid. They were trying to laugh around the edges of it. They were tired and hungry and still, somehow, making jokes about goats.

  Not so different from late nights at the office. Just with more mud and fewer coffee machines.

  James forced himself to step out of the safety of the ritual circle and into the slightly trampled grass of the clearing proper. The ground squelched under his shoe. Cold air brushed against his face, carrying the scents of smoke, damp earth, and the sharper resin of the surrounding pines. Overhead, the sky was streaked with faint, shimmering lines of color, like someone had taken an aurora and tangled it into threads, weaving it through the heavens. Leylines, Lumen had called them. Rivers of mana.

  “Take a look,” Lumen murmured, picking up on his shifted focus. “Not just at the people.”

  He did.

  The huts that ringed the clearing looked even worse up close. What his brain had first classified as “rough but serviceable” now registered as “accidents waiting to happen.” Mud walls, cracked and flaking, slumped between crooked support posts. Roofs had been patched with whatever was at hand, branches woven with dead grasses, strips of hide nailed down in crooked lines, salvaged chunks of thatch sagging under their own weight.

  One structure leaned at a worrying angle, its frame bowed. Another had a gap along the roofline wide enough that he could see straight through to the shadowed interior. There were no proper paths, just muddy tracks where feet had passed often enough to churn the earth. Rain had carved little gullies through the clearing, carrying ash and filth toward low spots where puddles collected, stagnant and gray.

  He saw where smoke had stained walls, where someone had shoved stones under a corner to keep a hut from sinking further, where a doorway had been widened with a rough, nervous hand and then left unfinished. He saw the places where they had tried. Where they had run out of time, or strength, or both.

  “Lumen?” he murmured.

  “Yes?”

  “How long have they been living like this?”

  For the first time since he’d arrived, the orb dimmed noticeably. The light went softer, as if someone had turned down a dimmer switch. It hovered closer to him, a small warmth at his shoulder.

  “Too long,” it said quietly. “Long enough that they think this is the best they can hope for.”

  James swallowed. His throat felt tight.

  Wicksnap was still talking somewhere behind him, voice rising and falling in dramatic swells as he told a wildly inaccurate story about the ritual. In this version, he had apparently single-handedly pushed James through “the Veil of Sparks” using only his willpower and “excellent posture,” while wrestling offended spirits and possibly a dragon. A couple of children sat in the dirt at his feet, listening with the wide-eyed belief reserved for adults who lied confidently enough and had sweets sometimes.

  Marla shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the motion automatic, baby on her hip, eyes narrowed in skeptical resignation. Rogan stood with his arms folded, gaze flicking between James and the tree line, measuring risk the way James measured load-bearing walls.

  Behind them, the other villagers lingered, pulled between wariness and hope. No one said the word, but it vibrated in the air anyway. Savior. Fixer. Answer.

  James took it all in. The huts. The faces. The mud. The thinness in people’s cheeks. The way the wind whistled through gaps in the roofs.

  He was exhausted. His brain felt cotton-swabbed and slightly off-center. Fear sat in his chest like a stone. He wanted a chair. He wanted a glass of water that did not taste like ash. He wanted his apartment, his bed, his very boring life back.

  He also knew, with the same bone-deep certainty he used when looking at a staircase with a cracked support beam, that if nothing changed here, if they kept going like this, this tribe was one bad storm or one hungry predator away from being a story someone else told around a different fire.

  And if he walked away, or failed, or froze, then that story would start with how the summoned savior arrived, took one look, and did nothing.

  His fingers curled and uncurled at his sides.

  “Okay,” he said quietly, mostly to himself.

  Lumen’s glow brightened a fraction. “Okay… what?”

  James exhaled slowly. Cold air burned his lungs.

  “I can at least look at the roof,” he said.

  It wasn’t a grand pledge. It wasn’t a promise to save their world, or defeat whatever monsters lurked in that too-close forest, or fix every problem stacked up in front of him like an overloaded spreadsheet.

  It was a start. One tangible thing.

  The Lumen’s light warmed at his shoulder, approval humming through their connection like a faint chord.

  “A reasonable first project,” it agreed.

  Wicksnap, who apparently had the hearing of a bat when it came to anything that supported his prophecies, whirled around so fast his robe flared. He flung both hands in the air again.

  “HE ACCEPTS THE ROOF QUEST!” he howled. “GLORIOUS BEGINNINGS!”

  This time, the laughter that followed was not nervous. It rolled through the villagers in small bursts, softer and warmer, like embers catching. Even Marla’s mouth curved upward, just a fraction. Rogan snorted under his breath. Someone in the back whooped.

  James rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the faintest pull of a smile at the corner of his mouth despite everything.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Glorious. We’ll see.”

  He looked up at the crooked line of huts, at the smoke curling lazily from their crude chimneys into a sky streaked with those faint, impossible mana-rivers. The leylines caught the rising smoke and made it glow faintly, like someone had painted fire over the air.

  Not an office. Not a skyscraper. Not the tidy, climate-controlled world of building codes and inspectors and permits.

  But it was still a place that needed building.

  And that, at least, was something he understood.

  “Welcome to your first site,” Lumen murmured, quiet now, as if they were standing at the edge of a new project plan.

  James took a slow breath of pine-scented air. It carried the sharpness of resin, the distant damp of the forest, the faint tang of cooking fires, and beneath all of it, the fragile, stubborn human smells of sweat and soap and too many people sharing too little space.

  He let the breath out again and nodded once, more to himself than anyone else.

  “Let’s try not to let it fall on anyone’s head,” he said.

  The words were dry, but they settled something inside him. For the first time since he had grabbed that glowing door handle back on Earth, since the world had dissolved into light and heat and chanting, he felt a thread of something like purpose slip through the fear.

  Not enough to banish it. Not yet.

  But enough to stand on.

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