A voice, worn with love and laced with exasperation, echoed up the side of the sagging mansion.
"Liam! Get down from there before you break your neck!"
The boy, perched on the uneven tiles like a miniature conqueror surveying his domain, didn't even flinch.
Wrapped in a hand-stitched blanket that billowed behind him like a royal cape, he stood tall (or as tall as a five-year-old could manage), stick in hand and fire in his chest.
"Fear not, dear mother!" he declared, raising the stick toward the clouds."Legends do not perish from mere falls!"
"Liam."Her voice dropped to that no-nonsense tone only mothers possess."Legends still get smacked if they make their mothers worry."
With a sigh worthy of tragic ballads, Liam climbed down the loose vines beside the mansion window and dropped onto the cracked patio stones with practiced grace.
Waiting for him with arms folded and lips twitching from the effort of not smiling, stood his mother.
Avelyn, soft-faced but sharp-eyed, hair pulled into a loose braid, looked at her son like he was both the miracle and the headache of her life.
"What am I going to do with you?"
"Worship me, probably," Liam said with a grin, before being nudged in the head with her knuckles.
"Hush. You want to be useful, oh legendary one?"She handed him a basket."Go fetch the weaving threads from Aunt Dira's. And don't get distracted."
Liam straightened like he'd just been entrusted with a diplomatic mission.
"Your will is my law."
The Village of Greylot was a winding sprawl of cracked cobblestones and leaning homes, gardens bursting with weeds and stubborn color. It was a place where chickens had the right of way and everyone was someone's cousin, aunt, or in-law.
Liam marched through it like a prince. Or maybe a soldier. Or both.
"Liam!" old man Bruke called from his chair, pipe clamped between toothless gums."Off to save the world again?"
"Today it's thread," Liam said gravely. "But the world is next."
At Aunt Dira's, Liam accepted the threads with utmost seriousness, offering a formal salute that left the old woman cackling and muttering, "This boy's made of stories."
On the way back, he noticed the village well's crank jammed. Without hesitation, he set down the basket and started working it loose—knocking it with a stone, oiling the hinges from a nearby smith's barrel, and getting the water flowing again.
Several villagers gathered, murmuring in awe."That crank's been stuck for days.""Did he just—fix it? Just like that?"
Liam simply picked up his basket, nodded solemnly at the well like it had done a good job, and continued his journey.
Back home, Avelyn blinked as he returned.
"You're back already?"
"I follow instructions with unwavering excellence," he said, placing the basket before her.
She was about to thank him when someone else came running up the hill—a girl, maybe ten, dark-skinned and wide-eyed, clutching a watering jug.
"Is that the boy from the well?" she asked breathlessly."The one who fixed the crank? The villagers are all talking—he just... did it."
Avelyn turned to her son, brows lifted.
He shrugged. "It was jammed. So I unjammed it."
The girl looked at him like he'd grown wings."Who are you?"
"Sir Stringsworth," he said without missing a beat."Of House Blanket, First of My Name, Champion of Well Cranks, Slayer of Errands."
The girl blinked.
Avelyn laughed, shaking her head.
"Come," she said, guiding the girl to a shaded bench while Liam wandered off toward the village's outer edge, likely to narrate his next great mission to the chickens.
She poured the girl a cup of water.
"You're new here, I can tell."
The girl nodded. "We came from the hills. My dad wants to work in the brick kilns."
"You'll like it here," Avelyn said, watching her son in the distance."The roofs leak, the goats are annoying, and the laws are mostly 'don't spit near the corn.' But… there's magic in the cracks."
She paused, smile growing fonder.
"He was always like that, you know. Liam. Talking before he could crawl. He once tried to outlaw nap time in the house when he was two. Drew up a contract with a crayon and everything."
The girl laughed."He's weird."
"He's mine," Avelyn said, her eyes distant but warm."And someday, I think the world will call him more than weird. Maybe troublesome. Maybe terrifying. But me?"She sipped her tea."I'll always just call him mine."
The boy was halfway down the hill already, his little cloak billowing behind him like he thought himself a hero in a ballad.
The new girl—wide-eyed and still trying to piece together the last hour of her life—turned to Avelyn.
"Is he… always like that?"
Avelyn smiled, brushing a stray curl behind her ear as she watched her son disappear into the horizon.
"Like what? Confident? Ridiculous? Unshakably convinced the world spins on some invisible law only he can see?"
The girl gave her a look.
Avelyn chuckled.
"Yes. He's always been like that. Even as a baby."
She leaned against the porch rail, her voice drifting into something gentler. Almost proud. Almost resigned.
"He didn't cry much, you know. Just stared at people like he was judging their character. By six months he was holding spoons like royal scepters. By one, he was reading our grain ledgers. In Glenic, mind you—Glenic. I don't even know Glenic."
The girl blinked.
Avelyn went on, warming to the story.
"At two, he corrected Uncle Frain's grammar. Spoke in full sentences. Spelled out the word 'constitutional' in the mud when he was bored.""By three, he rewrote the pruning schedule for our orchard. Drew it up on a wooden slab and tacked it to the fence like it was a decree from the heavens. And the worst part?" She grinned.
"He was right."
The girl laughed, half in disbelief.
"That's not normal."
"Sweetheart," Avelyn said, her voice dropping to a mock whisper, "he once wrote a law for how to clean the goats' hooves."
She paused.
"The goats actually started behaving better. I don't know how he did that."
The girl shook her head slowly, looking off in the direction Liam had gone.
"He just fixed the well crank like it was a loose shoe buckle."
"And carved instructions into the stone after. Called it 'Emergency Mandate Four.'" Avelyn rolled her eyes lovingly."There weren't even one through three."
They both stood in silence for a moment.
Then the girl asked quietly, "Do you ever wonder… why he's like this?"
Avelyn's smile lingered. Soft. Thoughtful. Almost sad.
"Every day."
The village, in all its rustic charm and disarray, functioned like a pot perpetually on the edge of boiling over. Professions were a suggestion—roles, a whim. Today, the baker was off experimenting with pottery. The blacksmith had taken up herding chickens. And the man who swore he was born to be a carpenter was now, apparently, a "wandering inspirationist," which mostly involved sitting on rooftops and humming at furniture.
There was no order. No structure. No consistency. Only vibrant chaos.
Which, to many, was freedom.
To Liam?
It was infuriating.
Liam's Monologue (as he trudges uphill with a rope of goats trailing him like disobedient thoughts):
"No fixed professions, no assigned rotations, and don't even get me started on the concept of quotas—because they don't exist. One week we're drowning in turnips, the next we're trading pillows for cheese. This place runs on whimsy and blessed guesswork. We need... a ledger. A schedule. An actual system."
"Even the goats are tired of it. Look at them. Confused. Lost. Spiritually unmoored."
He stopped at the crest of the hill, hands on his hips, surveying the pasture below.
Yesterday, it had been a vision—lush, green, full of that soft grass the goats loved. Now?
Barren. Patchy. The color of tired straw.
Liam squinted in cold betrayal.
"We grazed here for two days. Two! The ground barely had time to breathe. This could've been prevented with rotational planning, or even a basic map of—no, no. Breathe, Strings. Breathe. This is not your war. Not yet."
He clicked his tongue, herding the goats onward in search of another place.
A little farther out, the land changed. The goats hesitated. The air shifted.
There it was: a grassland so wild and untouched, the blades towered above his head like verdant spears. It should have been perfect.
But Liam's frown deepened.
"Overgrown. Unmanaged. Dangerous. The grass is too tall. Can't see anything coming. What if there's a snake? Or a wildcat? Or worse—a rogue chicken."
"This is what happens without controlled usage. If just one adult had the foresight to draw boundaries, to implement rotational grazing plots, we wouldn't have this feast-or-famine field situation."
He turned, tugging the goats back toward the slope.
"No. Not worth the risk. Beauty without balance is just a trap. We'll double back to the creek-side. At least there's moss."
As the goats bleated behind him in loose rebellion, Liam's mind was already drafting a new chart in his head—a grazing cycle, mapped and color-coded by soil retention and grass recovery time.
Just as Liam turned his back on the overgrown field, tugging his reluctant goats away with the air of a man too burdened by the ignorance of society to suffer it a moment longer—
Something rustled.
At first, it sounded like wind. Then twigs snapped. A low growl echoed through the tall grass.
Liam froze mid-step.
"...No wind moves like that."
From the brush, it sprang—a blur of teeth, sinew, and gleaming eyes. A creature that might have once been mistaken for a raccoon… if raccoons had jagged, blackened fur, claws like carving knives, and eyes that shimmered with hunger instead of curiosity.
It was small. Fast. Vicious.
And it lunged straight for his throat.
Liam ducked with a gasp, the creature whizzing past his shoulder and tumbling into a tumbleweed of snarls.
"What in the lawful hells—?!"
The goats bleated in terror and scattered, trampling over each other in an effort to flee. Liam backed up, eyes wide, pulling a half-broken branch from the ground like it were a sword forged in the heat of sudden necessity.
The raccoon-thing circled him, twitching, teeth bared.
This wasn't a regular animal. No. It was feral. Predatory. And—
Liam's thoughts clicked into place.
"Monster. E-Rank. Carrion-class predator. Omnivorous... with a preference for humanoid flesh."
He gulped.
"Of course. Why wouldn't today be the day I meet one?"
Monsters and animals shared many traits. In fact, to the untrained eye, they were indistinguishable. The difference lay in their instincts—animals might fear men, but monsters hunted them.
And this one?
It looked hungry.
"Perfect. Just perfect. I try to keep goats from starving and I become the meat."
He swung the branch. The monster dodged. It leapt again—this time catching Liam's shoulder with a scratch that burned white-hot.
But before it could pounce again—
FWOOM.
A blinding flash of blue light exploded from Liam's feet. A ring of runes burst from the dirt beneath him, etching a glowing seal into the earth that threw the raccoon monster backward like it had been smacked by divine judgment.
Liam staggered, blinking at the mark now glowing beneath his boots. The ground hummed with latent power.
"...What. Was. That?"
The monster hissed, dazed but not defeated, rising shakily.
Then came a second crack, not of magic—but steel.
From the woods, an arrow zipped past Liam's ear and found the monster's eye. It shrieked once, collapsed, and didn't move again.
A trio of cloaked figures emerged—leather armor, longbows, and tired eyes.
Monster hunters.
"Kid!" one called out. "You alright?"
Liam blinked.
Then looked at the glowing mark still faintly sparking beneath his feet.
He stood straighter.
"Of course I'm alright," he muttered, brushing dirt off his tunic with shaking hands."Legendary artifacts don't crack under pressure."
One of the hunters knelt beside the corpse. "E-Rank. Separated from its pack. Poor thing must've gone half-feral from stress."
Another looked at Liam. "How'd you survive that? You don't look like you're carrying magic tools."
"I'm not."
"You cast a protection seal."
"I did what?"
The hunter narrowed his eyes. "You're untrained?"
Liam, now utterly composed again, gave a tight nod.
"Yes. And clearly, someone needs to start enforcing basic monster awareness laws near grazing fields."
The hunters stared.
One of them muttered, "What in the gods' names is wrong with this kid…"
Somewhere, deep in the tall grass, the remaining runes still flickered faintly. Old magic, hidden deep within Liam's soul—awakening.
Not planned. Not trained. Just instinct.
But soon… soon it would be more.