The rain was a cold, insistent drizzle that turned the city’s dust into a thin layer of grime. I stood on the corner of the thoroughfare, shivering in a shirt that had more holes than fabric.

  “Please… spare a credit? I’m so hungry…”

  My voice was a dry rasp, barely audible over the rhythmic clack-clack of heels on the pavement. The people passing by were just like my mother—physically present, but hollowed out. They moved with a mechanical precision, eyes fixed forward, their lives a series of repetitive motions that didn't include looking down at the dirt.

  A few feet away, a young boy in a warm jacket tossed the remains of a thick sandwich toward a bin. It bounced off the rim and landed in a puddle. I lunged for it, my stomach cramping with a violent, sudden hope, but I froze. A sleek family dog, draped in a waterproof vest, snapped its jaws at the bread at the same time. I felt my arm reach out, trembling, and then I pulled it back.

  Why hope for scraps when I’m worse than the trash they rest on? Even the dog had a better place in this world than I did.

  I didn’t know my father. To hear my mother tell it—when she was far enough into the bottle to be delusional—he was a titan of the Path. She’d describe him as a man who could turn the moons with a flick of his finger, a warrior who could plunge into the most terrifying rifts and slay monsters just to bring her the jewels and luxury she craved.

  And then she’d look at me. Her 'parasite.' The useless, hungry mistake she’d never wanted, a bitter, living reminder of the life she thought she deserved.

  “Hey, you okay, kid?”

  The voice was soft, breaking through the white noise of the rain. I looked up to see an older gentleman standing over me.

  “Here, have a bottle of water and a granola bar. Not the tast—”

  I didn't let him finish. I snatched both from his hands before he could change his mind. Food. Oh, sweet Ascenders, actual food. It wasn't the moldy, rock-hard heels of bread I usually found at home. The water wasn't the fetid, metallic-tasting liquid I had to scoop from the rusted pipes in the cellar. I tore the wrapper with my teeth and inhaled the bar. It was dry and oats-heavy, but it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

  The man didn't leave. He waited for me to finish, then settled down on the damp curb next to me. He wore clean, simple clothes—the kind of clothes that looked 'normal' to the people walking by, but felt like high fashion compared to my rags.

  “What’s your name, kid? Although judging from your appearance, you’ve lived a lot more life than me,” he said, his voice carrying a strange, gentle weight.

  “Wren. I’m… I’m Wren,” I managed, nearly choking on a gulp of water.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Wren, why are you out here begging for credits and food rather than being in school?”

  I looked down at the empty wrapper in my hand, my heart sinking back into its usual hollow ache. I shook my head.

  “My… mother can’t afford to send me. She can’t afford to clothe or feed me, either. So I beg for the evening meal.”

  I didn't say the rest. I didn't tell him that I was the one who had to make sure there was something on the table, because if I didn't, my mother wouldn't even notice I was starving until I stopped moving.

  “Wren, you know you need to be in school, right?” the man asked, his brow furrowing as he looked me over. “How old are you? Nine?”

  I let out a heavy sigh, the sound more weary than a child’s should be. I was small for my age—stunted, thin, and easily overlooked. I knew it, and I knew why.

  “Twelve,” I said, trying to inject as much apathy as I could into the word to hide the sting of his guess. “I turn thirteen in... a few weeks? I think. I don’t know. When was the last time the carnival came through, Mister...?”

  “Braum. You may call me Mr. Braum, Wren.” He paused, a look of genuine regret softening his features. “You’re remarkably polite, despite your current standings. Forgive me for assuming you were younger. I simply thought, given your size, that...”

  “I know. I’m not getting what I need to grow,” I interrupted flatly. There was no point in dancing around it. Hunger wasn't a secret you could hide when your ribs were the most prominent thing about you. “Books may be expensive, but the library is free... at least, it is when they actually let me in. It’s been a while since that happened.”

  I trailed off, looking at the grey water rushing toward the storm drain. I didn't need him to tell me why the librarians turned me away. I knew I smelled like the rotting refuse that choked the alleyway behind our house. I knew I hadn't had a proper bath in... well, I couldn't remember ever having a 'proper' bath with warm water and real soap.

  When it rained like this, I did what I could. I’d stand under a heavy drip from a rusted gutter and scrub my skin with an old, discarded oil rag I’d salvaged from a nearby workshop meant for cleaning industrial blades. It was rough, and it smelled of machine grease, but it was the only way to get the top layer of street grime off.

  “I try to keep clean,” I muttered, more to the puddle than to him, clutching the empty water bottle. “But the rain only does so much.”

  Mr. Braum didn't recoil. He didn't make a face or shift away from the smell of wet rags and poverty. He just stayed there, a solid presence in the middle of a world that usually treated me like a ghost.

  “The library is a good place for a mind to grow, even if the body is having a harder time of it,” Braum said softly. “What were you reading, before they stopped letting you in?”

  “I read the Guides to the Beginner Delver and Common Delver Law,” I told him, the titles rolling off my tongue like a litany. “And Alfred and the Hydra. That one’s my favorite.”

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  A small spark of something—maybe pride, maybe just the memory of a warmer place—flickered in my chest. “Everyone else wants to be a hero with a sword, but Alfred... he refused to cut off a single head, even though the Hydra was eating beasts and people alike. He knew they’d just grow back. Instead, he used a flail to beat the Hydra into submission, forcing it to admit its crimes before the High Court. He didn't just kill it; he made it follow the rules.”

  I looked at my hands, the knuckles raw from the cold. “I watch the movies, too, when I can stand near the display windows of the tech shops. I liked The Scribbling. Watching the Ascender Titan—Quill, he was called then—make a big show of those new runes... it looked so easy. Like the world was just something you could write on.”

  My voice trailed off. “Now, though... now I just try to stay out of the wind.”

  Mr. Braum didn't look pitying. He just smiled, a small, knowing expression, and turned his gaze toward the narrow gap between the towering hab-blocks above us.

  “Wren,” he said quietly, “have you ever thought about a frog in a well?”

  I blinked, the question catching me off guard. “No, Mr. Braum. Why would a frog be in a well? That sounds like a terrible place to live.”

  “Frogs are amphibious creatures; they require both land and water to thrive,” he explained, his voice taking on the cadence of a storyteller. “A well is wet and dry at the same time, providing a strange sort of balance. A frog might jump down there seeking safety from the hawks or the heat. To that first frog, the well is a sanctuary. But for the children—the ones who are born there and grow up within those stone walls—that safety becomes a prison.”

  I looked at the grey walls of the alley, the damp stone closing in on us. It didn't take much imagination to feel the moss and the cold.

  “Those frogs will never know the true depth of our seven lakes,” Braum continued. “They will never know the endless expanse of the marshlands or the feel of the sun on a lily pad. They are trapped in a circle of stone, living on whatever insects happen to fall from the rim. But do you know what they do see, Wren?”

  I looked up, following his gaze. The rain was still falling, but past the smog and the hovering transit-lines, there was a sliver of something infinite.

  “What do they see, Mr. Braum?”

  “They see the vastness of the sky,” he whispered. “In that small, perfect circle, they see the only thing in the world that isn't a wall. And because they have nothing else to look at, they understand the stars better than the creatures who have the whole world to wander.”

  He turned back to me, his eyes searching mine. “You’ve spent thirteen years in the well, Wren. You know the walls better than anyone. But are you tired of looking at the sky, or are you ready to climb toward it?”

  “How do I climb toward the sky, Mr. Braum?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper against the rain. It felt like a trick question. You can’t climb something that has no handholds, and my world was made of smooth, cold stone.

  “First,” he said, his voice losing its storyteller lilt and becoming something sharper, more clinical. “You ask for help. And then, you answer me honestly. Is your mother abusing you?”

  The word yes hit the back of my throat like a physical weight, but it wouldn't come out. I wanted to scream it. I wanted to pull back my tattered shirt and show him the jagged lash marks from the nights she was ‘blissed’ on whatever powder she’d scored. I wanted to show him the white lines on my arms—nicks from the shards of glass that flew whenever she decided a bottle was more useful as a weapon than a drink.

  “I...” My voice cracked. I looked away, the shame hotter than the hunger.

  Mr. Braum didn’t press me. He just nodded, as if he were reading a report he’d already memorized. “We already know, Wren. You see, while you don’t know us, we know you. Or rather, we’ve observed you.”

  I froze. The idea of being watched—of being a 'specimen' in my own misery—made the alley feel even smaller.

  “We’ve been watching you come to this corner every day for the last seven months,” he continued calmly. “We’ve seen you beg for food and credits, only to go home and return the next morning looking no better—often worse. It doesn't take a Delver to see the math. Keep silent if this is true: she takes every credit you earn for herself, and she uses them to buy a white-golden powder. Is that right?”

  I wished I could refute him. I wished I could stand up and tell him he was wrong, that my mother was just sick, or that we were just unlucky. I wished my father’s ‘legend’ was real and he was coming to save us. But the silence stretched out between us, heavy and damning. My mother wasn't a victim of the well; she was one of the stones keeping me at the bottom.

  Seeing my silent acceptance, the tension in Mr. Braum’s shoulders seemed to shift. He didn't look disgusted. He looked like a man who had finally confirmed the location of a structural flaw.

  “The well isn't just the poverty, Wren,” he said, standing up and brushing the dampness from his coat. “It’s the people who would rather keep you at the bottom so they have a shoulder to step on. But the sky is still there. And I think it's time we pulled you out.”

  “If… If you’ve been watching me for that long,” I whispered, the granola bar suddenly feeling like lead in my stomach, “why didn’t you do anything until now? Why let me sit here for seven months?”

  Mr. Braum let out a sigh that seemed to rattle his entire frame. It wasn't the sigh of someone bored; it was the heavy, exhausted sound of a man who had been carrying a secret he didn't like.

  “I wanted to, Wren. I really did,” he said, looking at the rain-slicked pavement. “But that white-gold powder... it’s as much a weapon as it is a drug. To stop it, we couldn't just cut one thread. We needed to find who she was buying it from. Then we needed to find where the supplier was getting it from, and the source of that, and so on, and so forth. It was a trail of breadcrumbs made of misery.”

  He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hum. “I don’t think you realize, but we’ve actually been fueling your survival this entire time. On average, we’ve made sure about thirty-five credits reached your hand every single day. We’re the ones who left a loaf of bread on that crate every other Tuesday. Do you remember the kind older woman who would pat your head and say, ‘Go get yourself a sweet, dear’? Or the younger gentleman who muttered ‘I pity the poor bird’ as he dropped a heavy coin? That was us.”

  My mind raced, replaying those moments. I had thought they were miracles. I had thought the world was just occasionally less cruel than usual.

  “We’ve tried our best to sustain you, Wren. You are the biggest victim in all of this,” Braum continued, his eyes hardening with a flicker of professional steel. “Your mother is guilty of abuse and neglect. How much of that is the powder and how much is her own nature... we don't know. Perhaps you do, but you’ve been the frog at the bottom of the well for too long to give a fair answer. We did everything we could—aside from what I’m doing right now.”

  A new kind of cold washed over me. Not the chill of the rain, but the sharp, electric prickle of a life about to be torn apart.

  “What are… what are you doing now?”

  Braum stood up, offering me a hand that looked incredibly steady, incredibly strong.

  “Getting you ready to be cleaned up,” he said simply. “You’re coming into our care. We’re taking you out of the well, Wren. We have exactly two weeks and six days to get some meat on those bones and some peace in your head before you awaken.”

  I stared at his hand. Two weeks and six days. He said it with such clinical certainty, like he was reading a calendar that hadn't been printed yet. He didn't say if I would awaken to my talents. He said until.