Luckborn

The road to Drowmere was less a road and more a decaying path, where the stench of damp earth and rot hung heavy in the air. Rain pooled in uneven ruts, soaking through Riven's boots and darkening the frayed hem of his coat. He didn't bother adjusting course. He walked straight through the deepest patches, each step squelching in the mire with slow, inevitable purpose.

The fog had rolled in with the dawn—thick, low, and clinging. It swallowed the tops of the old pine trees and bled into the eaves of the squat village houses, making them look like ruins abandoned mid-collapse. That hadn't changed. Drowmere always looked half-forgotten.

Nothing had changed. Except him.

He passed the same leaning milestone where, once, he'd been knocked down and kicked until he couldn't breathe. Moss grew on the top, half covering the words inscribed on it. People didn't visit Drowmere, so no one cared.

The tooth that got chipped that day was still sharp against his tongue, a bitter reminder of the cruelty he'd suffered. People had watched that happen. He remembered their faces—peeking out from doorways, from between drawn curtains. Watching Jakor pin him to the ground and drive his heel into Riven's ribs. One blow. Two. Five. He remembered trying not to cry. That only made it worse.

No one had stopped it. Not the butcher sharpening his knives. Not the stablemaster with sons of his own. Not even the healer who treated the bruises afterward and said, kindly, "Boys scuffle. Better to let it pass."

Let it pass. Of course he had. What was he going to do about it? He was a weakling. Thin and frail. His mother was dead. His father was too drunk most days to have a coherent conversation.

Riven kept walking. His coat was thin. Unlined. The clasp on the front had broken last week, and he hadn't fixed it. Some habits die hard, and maintaining his belongings was something he never learned to do.

In Drowmere, people cared about three things: warm bread, strong ale, and hard coin. If you didn't fit into that rhythm—if you were loud when you should've been quiet, strange where you should've been simple—they looked right past you. Or worse. Sometimes they looked through you, like you were a window into something they didn't want to see.

He'd never even been the worst troublemaker. He didn't light barns on fire or steal from carts or get drunk and fight in the square. He just... didn't belong. But that was enough. That was always enough.

So when the bruises came, when the tools went missing and he got blamed, when the schoolmaster snapped his chalk in half and said "Try being less difficult, Riven"—he learned.

He learned what they expected: silence.

He learned what they feared: disruption.

And now, the System had given him something built for exactly that.

He still remembered the moment the notification came through. A flicker across his wrisplay while he was foraging outside the ruins north of Calwick—a half-second of static, then a single phrase etched across the screen like a scar:

New Class Available. Choose Your Class.

Available Classes: Kaos Touched

At first, he thought it was a glitch. There was no such Class. Not that he knew of, but when he swiped for more details a description appeared.

Description

From the fractures in reality where reason frays and patterns die, the Kaos Touched emerge. Marked by exposure to the raw entropy of the Kaosborn, they are not consumed—but changed. Their power is not granted by pact or prayer, but by survival through madness and the System's cold recognition of utility. Magic unspools in their hands without certainty or symmetry; effects shift, surge, and spiral beyond intent.

They do not seek control so much as communion—with instability, with corruption, with creation undone. Whispers speak of deeper truths buried in the bones of the world, of a balance not between order and disorder, but born from their collision. Where logic fails and certainty crumbles, the Kaos Touched walk—a warning, a weapon, a will unbound.

He didn't know what half of that meant. And he didn't really care. A Class meant power. He didn't read any more. He found the Accept button and tapped it.

The world didn't shake. There were no screams in the sky. But something inside him... realigned.

He felt his breath stutter. Felt his veins buzz, his mind stretch. It wasn't enlightenment. It wasn't clarity. But it was potential—unanchored and wild.

He didn't go home afterward. He'd spent the last few weeks out in the wilds, exploring his new abilities.

It was hard to make sense of them at first. Much of the System notifications read like gibberish to him. Fractured Presence. Chaotic Pulse. These were completely alien concepts to Riven. But he'd also gained the ability to cast spells. Sort of. He'd immediately been granted three spells:

Fluxfield- Create a shimmering 5-ft zone of shifting energy. Creatures entering the space must succeed on a DEX save or be slightly shifted in time halving their movement until the start of their next turn.

Flickerflash- Your form glitches for a second. Until the start of your next turn, the first attack against you is made at disadvantage. Leaves behind afterimages.

Minor Hallucination- Create a small illusion complete with visual and auditory effects in the mind of one target. The target must make a WIS save or lose their action on their next turn.

Riven saw their utility immediately. Tools for misdirection. For evasion. For confusion. Not power in the blunt, obvious way. But edge. Tools no one would expect.

He cast Fluxfield on a hawk overhead just to see what would happen. The bird's flight stuttered mid-air—its wings slowed, like swimming through syrup—then it snapped out of the field and bolted into the sky.

He grinned, alone.

The other two spells were harder to test.

He tried Flickerflash, but couldn't tell if anything had happened. There was no one there to see him blur. Minor Hallucination required a mind—not just a rabbit or a tree.

It wasn't until his second test of Fluxfield—this time on a squirrel—that he learned what made his magic different. As soon as he completed the casting, he felt a surge of energy course through him—a pulling, sucking sensation in his core—and he suddenly found himself hovering five feet off the ground.

He dropped a few seconds later with a hard thud and scrambled to his feet, heart hammering. His hands trembled. His vision swam for a few seconds before it cleared.

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When he finally checked his wrisplay, his mana pool was bone-dry.

That was the first time he understood Wildcasting. His spells didn't just cast—they surged. They pulled unpredictable side effects from some deeper instability woven into his Class.

Spellcasting is risky, he thought. Not always reliable. That's important to know. But the power was real.

It wasn't until he encountered a group of three kaoslings picking through the remains of a burned out wagon, that he realized the true potential of his new Class.

***

The forest thinned just ahead.

Riven moved carefully through a patch of scrub, brushing aside wet ferns with the back of his hand. The air was heavier here—thick with the scent of burned wood.

The clearing opened abruptly—an uneven oval ringed with bent trees and clawed soil. Blackened debris smoldered in low piles, busted crates and splintered wood scattered like shrapnel from an explosion. A wagon lay on its side, wheels shattered. Its canvas tarp was torn through, slashed in wide arcs.

He heard the low chittering before he saw them. Three figures, hunched and pacing near the wreckage. Kaoslings—a type of kaosborn, only semi-intelligent. They were small, bipedal things. No more than four feet tall, scaled like lizards and covered in patchy plating. Their claws twitched at odd intervals, like puppets with tangled strings. Smoke curled from their nostrils, and one of them had a jaw that split unevenly when it breathed.

Riven froze. Adrenaline flooded his veins.

He had never seen one up close before.

The air around them shimmered faintly—faint swirls of color that didn't match the trees behind them. They looked... out of place. Like they belonged in a painting that kept bleeding.

He took a step back, carefully.

One of them turned.

Riven tensed—ready to bolt or cast or scream—

But it didn't move toward him. It just looked. It's head tilted. Eyes narrowed, unblinking. A low trill escaped its throat, somewhere between a whistle and a hum.

Then the others turned. All three stared at him.

He prepared to cast Flickerflash but hesitated. They didn't advance. They just stood there watching.

He felt something new spring to life inside him. A resonance. Like a lute string extending from his soul and connecting to the creatures has just been plucked. His spine tingled. His skin prickled.

His wrisplay buzzed.

Fractured Presence: Active

He hadn't meant to activate it. It just happened.

The Kaoslings blinked at him in slow, unsynchronized movements. One of them yawned. Another picked through a box of ashes with casual disinterest, pulling out a burnt leather strap and letting it fall again.

Riven didn't move. His fear—sharp, thready, electric—began to fray at the edges.

They weren't attacking.

One of them hissed lazily and waddled a few feet away to dig in the dirt. It didn't even glance back at him.

He stood just twenty feet from them, hands still slightly raised. Everything he'd ever heard about Kaosborn said they were vicious, blood-thirsty beasts that attacked all living things on sight. And yet, these ignored him.

Why? And for how long? How far could he push this? How close could he get? It was an insane thought and he felt his fear rise again, but now it was intwined with something else. Curiosity. He had to know.

He took another step forward. They didn't react. Another. He was ten feet away before he got any kind of reaction. One of them paused in its scrounging, made eye contact, and hissed.

Riven stopped. There was aggression in that hiss, but not open hostility. It was a warning. He was close enough.

He crouched slowly and whispered, "We're connected, aren't we?"

***

As he made his way into Drowmere proper, he noted the small shops with their drab facades, their rotting siding, and crumbling foundations. He sneered in contempt. He couldn't believe he had so desperately craved the acceptance of these people only a few weeks ago.

He used to wonder what they thought of him, whether they'd ever change their minds. Whether, if he just tried hard enough, he could force a place for himself among them.

Now he saw the village for what it was: a slow rot pretending to be a community.

He crossed the town square. It was empty this early, just cracked stones and a dry fountain that hadn't worked since he was a child. Someone had left a pair of muddy boots sitting by the basin. A few curtains twitched in upper windows as he passed, just wide enough to catch a glimpse of his shape.

He didn't slow. He didn't wave.

Let them look. Let them wonder.

He turned down a narrow lane toward a house that leaned just slightly to the left. Calling it a house was generous. It was more of a hovel, propped up by stubbornness and four large stones. The porch sagged at the corners. Moss grew on the steps. One shutter hung half off its hinge like it had given up trying to stay upright.

Riven stopped at the foot of the steps.

He took a long, deliberate look with fresh eyes.

In years past, this place had loomed large in his mind's eye. A dark castle where a demon lived. A place he feared to venture close to.

But now? It was just sad. Pathetic. A limp excuse for shelter wrapped around a man—no, a boy—who mistook cruelty for strength.

He almost pitied the residents. Almost.

He stepped onto the porch. The boards creaked under his boots. He raised his fist and knocked. Sharp, deliberate. Three times.

Then he waited.

Fog curled at his heels. A single bird, ragged-sounding, called once from the trees.

The door opened, and Jakor Venn stood in the frame.

Jakor was thick through the chest. His eyes were small and mean, and his arms looked built to swing, not lift.

This was the boy who had once made Riven's ribs sing with pain. The one who laughed when he bled, when he cried, when he begged.

He had given Riven beatings by the marker stone, behind the storage sheds, in front of others who never stepped in. He had made a sport of humiliation.

And now here he was, blinking at a ghost that came knocking.

Jakor squinted. "What the hell—?"

It took a moment. Then recognition flickered across his face.

"…You."

Riven didn't smile. "Me."

Jakor leaned one arm on the doorframe and gave a lopsided smirk. "Didn't think you'd crawl back here. Figured you did the world a favor and died out there."

"I didn't come back," Riven said. "I came through."

Jakor snorted. "Still talking in riddles. Gods, you were always weird. What the hell do you want? Another ass kicking.

Riven didn't respond. Didn't blink. Something in his stillness made Jakor straighten just slightly. The smirk flattened. His stance shifted a hair toward defense.

"You've got two seconds to get off my porch."

"Make me."

Jakor smiled, then. His old, crooked smile.

He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, cracking his knuckles like punctuation. "You really want this again? You forget what it felt like last time?"

Riven didn't move.

He could think faster than Jakor could swing. That was all it took. A thought.

Kaotic Trigger.

A pulse of energy burst from Riven. Gravity warped around him. Jakor stumbled as the force pulling him toward the earth weakened for a split second, then increased threefold. Riven kicked out, connecting a solid blow, and Jakor lost his footing, crashing to the porch. A board shattered under his weight.

"What the—? What did you do, you little freak?!"

Riven watched him from above, unmoving.

Jakor scrambled upright with a curse, fists up now, chest heaving. "I don't know what garbage trick that was, but you think I'm scared of some parlor magic? You think—?"

Riven uttered a few words as he cast a spell.

Flickerflash.

Jakor lunged. For an instant, Riven's form shifted slightly to the right. Jakor corrected his aim and fist cut through one of the afterimages, missing entirely. His momentum carried him wide, off-balance

Riven pivoted and punched him hard in the kidney. Jakor lost his balance and tumbled down the step, landing hard on the ground.

Riven walked down the stairs after him.

Jakor scrambled up, already swinging again, wild now, less precision—more panic.

Riven didn't dodge. He ducked low and drove his elbow into Jakor's gut.

Jakor wheezed.

Then Riven rose fast, fist snapping up with mechanical calm, and caught Jakor full in the mouth. There was a crunch as something white flew past Riven's cheek.

Jakor collapsed to one knee, blood trailing down his chin. "What the hell—" he mumbled, slurring now. "What—are you—?"

Riven stood over him, breathing slow. Controlled. "You remember the milestone?" he asked. "By the fork in the road?"

Jakor didn't answer.

"You cracked my tooth there. Let's call it even."

Jakor spat something wet and red onto the grass. His hands shook. He rose again, but didn't attack. He just stood there staring in disbelief. "Y-you're not normal," he muttered. "This isn't right."

"No," Riven said. "It's not."

Then he cast again. Minor Hallucination. Riven raised a finger to the air—then gently pointed to Jakor's chest.

Jakor gasped, eyes widening. He flailed at something only he could see—arms up, voice breaking. "No—no, get off! Get off me!" He stumbled backward again, fell, clawing at his face. "Don't let it—! Please!"

Riven stood still, watching.

"Please. I'm sorry. I didn't—I didn't mean any of it—please make it stop!"

He curled in on himself. Bloody, shaking.

Begging.

Riven stepped forward until his boots touched Jakor's shoulder. He crouched slowly, his form casting fractured shadows over the man's face.

"I used to beg," Riven said. Voice flat. Quiet. Unmoved.

Jakor covered his eyes with both hands.

"No one ever listened." Riven stood and walked away. He didn't look back as the fog behind him closed like a curtain.