Language of Survival

Survival, Kael learned with a painful, gnawing clarity, was a universal language. His stomach, a hollow and aching void, spoke it fluently. For two days, he was a ghost haunting the grimy, bustling streets of Ashvale. He drifted through the crowds, a phantom in strange clothes, his senses on high alert. He learned by watching, by listening, his cynical mind working overtime, sifting through the torrent of alien information for anything that could help him last another hour.

On the first day, the lesson was currency. He watched from the shadow of an awning as a woman bought a skewer of sizzling, unfamiliar meat from a street vendor. She handed over a few small, dull-brown coins. Later, he saw a man in a leather apron trade a larger, silver-colored coin for a whole sack of flour. The coins were called ‘cirens’, he eventually picked up from the chatter. Bronze, silver, and gold. A simple, tiered system not unlike the one he knew. Simple, yes, he thought, the hunger twisting his insides into a knot. But I have zero. Less than zero. My old bank account is a universe away, and it was in the red anyway.

On the second day, the lesson was magic. He saw a portly merchant light his pipe not with a match, but with a casual snap of his fingers, a tiny flicker of flame dancing to life on his thumb before vanishing. He watched a young mother flick her wrist, sending a focused gust of wind to dry a piece of laundry hanging from her windowsill. They called it ‘mana’. It was an energy that seemed to be everywhere, a force as common and vital to these people as the air they breathed. Mages, he overheard two guards saying, could shape it into fire, wind, water, and more. It was a casual, everyday magic, used for the most mundane tasks. The sight left him with a profound sense of inadequacy, like a man born blind suddenly being told the world was filled with color.

His modern clothes, which were already worn and unremarkable in his old world, made him stick out like a sore thumb here. The synthetic blend of his jacket, the machine-perfect stitching of his jeans—they were subtly, jarringly wrong. People gave him sideways glances. Children pointed. He needed to blend in if he wanted to stop being a curiosity.

Opportunity came in the form of a shrewd-looking textiles merchant with eyes that missed nothing. The man’s gaze lingered on Kael’s jacket, his expression calculating.

"Unusual fabric, traveler," the merchant said, rubbing the sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. "Never seen a weave quite like it. Waterproof, is it?"

"Mostly," Kael replied, his voice raspy from disuse.

The merchant hummed, a low, greedy sound. "I'll give you ten bronze cirens and spare clothes for it."

Kael's first instinct, the ingrained habit of a consumer, was to haggle. But the hunger clawed at him, overriding everything else. Ten bronze coins sounded like a king's ransom. He simply nodded, shrugging off the last physical piece of his former life without a shred of ceremony. The man handed over the small, surprisingly heavy coins, and Kael’s hand closed around them. They were real. Solid.

The transaction bought him a loaf of dense, hard bread and a thick wedge of moldy, salty cheese. He retreated to a secluded alleyway to eat, tearing into the food with a desperation that bordered on savagery. It wasn't gourmet. The bread was coarse and the cheese was oily, but as he chewed, a wave of relief so powerful it almost brought him to his knees washed over him. It was, without exaggeration, the single best meal he had ever tasted in his entire life.

He spent his nights in the abandoned, fire-gutted shell of a stable on the edge of town. The scent of old hay, damp earth, and lingering ash was a meager comfort against the biting night air, especially without his jacket. During the day, he observed. He started piecing together the structure of this new society: the stern-faced City Guard with their spears and dented armor, the boisterous merchants whose voices were the lifeblood of the market, the ragged beggars who knew the art of being invisible, and another group entirely.

They were men and women clad in mismatched pieces of leather and steel, who carried swords, axes, and staves not for decoration, but for use. They walked with a swagger, a dangerous confidence that separated them from the civilians. They were the adventurers.

They all seemed to congregate at a large, noisy building in the center of town. Above its heavy oak doors hung a large, carved wooden sign in the shape of a crossed sword and a magic staff: The Gilded Gryphon. It was clearly the local Adventurer's Guild. A hub for misfits, mercenaries, and sellswords. A place where a person's past didn't matter half as much as the strength of their sword arm. It was, Kael realized with a grim, ironic smirk, a violent meritocracy. And for a man with no connections, no history, and no other skills, it was the only path forward he could see.

On his third day, perched on a low stone wall and methodically chewing the last of his bread to make it last, the world stopped.

It began with a shadow. It fell over the entire street, vast and unnaturally swift, plunging the bright morning into a sudden twilight. Everyone froze. Mules brayed nervously. Conversations died in the middle of a word. A collective gasp, a sound of pure shock and fear, swept through the crowd as every face turned to the sky. Kael followed their gaze, his heart beginning to pound a nervous rhythm against his ribs.

High above, soaring with an impossible, terrifying grace against the backdrop of the twin moons, was a dragon.

This wasn't the clumsy, overweight beast from fairy tales. This was a predator, an apex creature of breathtaking power. Its scales were the color of polished obsidian, catching the pale moonlight in a million sharp, black glints. Its wings, vast and leathery like a bat's, beat the air with a force he could feel in his bones—a deep, resonant WHUMP-WHUMP that echoed off the buildings. A thin trail of emerald-green smoke, like a toxic vapour, trickled from its flared nostrils.

Kael's breath caught in his throat. The cynic, the observer, the broken man from another world—all the pieces of his identity fell away, replaced by pure, primal awe. His mind, which had been desperately trying to rationalize everything he’d seen, simply gave up. It sputtered and died. This wasn't a hallucination. This wasn't a coma-dream. It was real. A monster from myth was a living, breathing part of this world's ecosystem.

The dragon paid the city of tiny mortals below no mind. It was simply passing over, a king surveying its domain, before it banked gracefully and disappeared behind the distant, jagged peaks of the mountains.

Slowly, shakily, the city came back to life. People let out breaths they didn't know they were holding. They resumed their conversations in hushed, nervous tones, but the energy of the street had fundamentally shifted. The dragon was a reminder of the world’s true nature: beautiful, magical, and capable of killing you in an instant.

For Kael, it was the final, irrefutable proof. His old life wasn't just gone; it was utterly, laughably irrelevant. The rules he had lived by were meaningless here. Crushing debt, a broken heart, the soul-destroying grind of a corporate job—what were those pathetic anxieties compared to a sky that held dragons?

The sight didn't give him hope. Hope was a luxury he couldn't afford yet. But it gave him something far more valuable: clarity. Fear was a distraction. Despair was a dead end. Survival was the only game in town.

He stood up, his jaw set with a resolve he hadn't felt in years. The last crumbs of his bread fell from his lap, unnoticed. His path was no longer a question mark. It was a grim, unavoidable reality. He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath of the dragon-touched air, and began walking. His steps were firm and deliberate, aimed directly at the boisterous, intimidating doors of the Gilded Gryphon. He needed work, and that was the only place in this entire, impossible world that would ask for his strength instead of his name.