You wake up to the sound of birds.

Specifically, the sound of a bird that is sitting on your chest and pecking experimentally at the buckle of your belt, apparently under the impression that the shiny metal bit might be edible.

"Get off," you croak.

The bird — a fat, irritable-looking jay with one blind eye — regards you with the wounded dignity of a creature whose meal has rudely started talking, and flaps away.

You lie still for a long time.

Every part of you hurts. Your shoulder is a hot, throbbing knot of pain. Your hip protests when you shift your weight. The left side of your face feels tight and swollen — dried blood, you realize, when your fingers find the crusted line from your temple to your jaw. The tadpole's ichor, mixed with your own blood from branch scrapes.

But you're alive.

You sit up, slowly, and take stock. The forest canopy above you is shattered — a ragged column of broken branches marking your descent like a dotted line on a map. Shredded leaves and bark litter the ground around you. The kinetic cushion, whatever it was, absorbed enough of the impact to keep you from becoming a permanent feature of the landscape, but it clearly had limits.

Your pack is gone. Your belt pouch is gone. The only things you have are the clothes on your back — a linen shirt, leather vest, trousers, boots that have seen significantly better decades — and the dagger still strapped to your thigh, because the universe occasionally shows mercy in small, pointed ways.

"Right," you say to nobody. "Survived an alien abduction. Fell out of the sky. Currently lying in a forest with no food, no shelter, no map, and what feels like a cracked rib." You pause. Consider. "Could be worse. Could be raining."

It starts raining.

"That one's on me."

---

The first five days are about survival.

Not heroic, narrative survival — not the kind with montages and dramatic firestarting and meaningful stares into the middle distance. Messy survival. Stupid survival. The kind where you eat a berry that looks edible, spend two hours dry-heaving into a bush, and then carefully memorize the exact color, shape, and leaf pattern of that berry so you never make that particular mistake again.

Your body heals faster than it should. The shoulder is mobile by day two. The ribs stop screaming by day three. The bruises — massive, spectacular, spanning your entire left side in a watercolor palette of purple and green — fade at a rate that isn't normal but that you're not in a position to question. Your body has always done this. Healed fast, bounced back, shrugged off things that should've kept you down longer. You never thought much of it.

You think about it now.

Because something else is happening. Something new.

On the first morning, you reach for the dagger and it jumps into your hand. Not dramatically — not flying across the camp in a blaze of light. It twitches, lifts half an inch off the ground, and then settles into your palm like it was always going to be there. You stare at it. Stare at your hand. Flex your fingers.

Nothing happens.

You write it off as adrenaline.

On the second morning, a pinecone rolls off a rock and, for a fraction of a second, hovers. Just hangs there, spinning lazily in the air, about an inch off the moss. Then it drops. You stare at the spot where it hovered and feel a dull pulse behind your left eye — not quite a headache, more like a muscle you didn't know you had just flexed involuntarily.

You write it off as exhaustion.

On the third morning, you're crouched by a stream, washing the last of the dried blood from your face, when a fish leaps out of the water directly at your head. You flinch — hard, full-body — and the fish stops. Mid-air. Tail still flicking, mouth still gaping, suspended in a bubble of shimmering, purple-tinged distortion about six inches from your nose.

It hangs there for a full second. Then the distortion pops, the fish drops back into the stream with an indignant splash, and the headache that was lurking behind your eye blooms into a white-hot spike that drops you to your knees.

You do not write this off.

"Okay," you say, pressing the heels of your hands against your temples. "So that's a thing now."

---

You spend the next two days mapping the parameters.

Not scientifically — you're not a scholar, you don't have instruments, and your testing methodology consists primarily of sitting very still and thinking push at various objects until your nose bleeds. But you learn.

The Gravity Tic: When you're startled, small objects within arm's reach float for a split second. Pinecones, pebbles, leaves. Nothing heavy. Nothing intentional. It's a reflex — like flinching, but for reality.

The Focused Shove: If you plant your feet, fix your eyes on something, and push with your palms — not physically, but mentally, with a force that originates somewhere between the base of your skull and the root of your tongue — you can launch objects. A log-sized rock, roughly ten feet. A smaller rock, further. The headache afterward scales with the weight. A pebble: mild pressure. A log: blinding migraine that puts you on your back for twenty minutes.

The Shield: Once, when you're setting a snare and a branch snaps back toward your face, a wall of vibrating purple energy appears between you and the impact point. It's fast, instinctive, and it shatters the branch into splinters. The shield dissolves immediately afterward, and your vision goes dark at the edges for three seconds.

None of this is controllable. None of it is reliable. And all of it hurts.

"Lovely," you mutter, lying on your back in the moss after an overambitious attempt at shoving a boulder that nearly cost you consciousness. "I have magic powers and they're trying to kill me. Very on-brand."

---

You map your territory. A stream to the south — fresh water, edible crayfish if you're patient. A rocky outcropping to the west that provides shelter from rain. A meadow to the north with Balsam and Mugwort — you know herbs, or enough of them, from years of trekking and selling poultices to people who'd rather buy questionable medicine from a traveling stranger than walk to a proper healer.

You rig a trap at a narrow chokepoint between two boulders — a low-tech shale cascade that you can trigger by kicking out a wedge stone. It won't stop anything big, but it'll slow down anything medium, and medium is your current threat bracket.

On the fourth day, you find the dead traveler.

He's by the river — face-down, half-submerged, his pack torn open and his belongings scattered downstream. He's been dead at least a day. Animals have been at him. But the thing that catches your eye isn't the body — it's the brand.

Burned into the skin of his inner wrist, still raw-looking beneath the bloat: a circular symbol. An eye, wreathed in jagged lines. You've never seen it before, but something about it makes the hairs on the back of your neck prickle in a way that has nothing to do with the corpse.

You take his waterskin. His flint. A length of rope. A crumbling map, too water-damaged to read fully but clear enough to show that there's a road to the northeast and something labeled Druid Grove to the north.

You leave the brand alone.

That night, sitting by your fire, chewing a strip of crayfish jerky that tastes like creek mud and determination, you hear the sound.

Not a natural sound. Not wind, not animal, not the settling noises of a forest at night. A roar — deep, anguished, furious — that echoes through the trees and makes every nerve in your body ring like a struck bell. It's followed by a shriek — high, avian, edged with pain.

Something in the dark is fighting. Something in the dark is losing.

Every survival instinct you have says: Stay. Stay by the fire. Whatever that is, it's bigger than you and angrier than you and none of your business.

You bank the fire, check the dagger on your thigh, and walk toward the sound.

Because that's the kind of person you are. The kind who hears something suffering and walks toward it, because the alternative is lying in the dark knowing you could have done something and chose not to, and that particular flavor of regret is worse than anything the forest can throw at you.

If you're going to die of your own incompetence, you're doing it on your own terms.

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