@Leo: At first, the training was survival more than anything else. The creatures that took him didn’t speak in any language he could understand—at least not at the beginning. They communicated through gestures, pressure in the air, and strange pulses that felt like thoughts pressed against his skull. Leo learned quickly that hesitation meant injury, and confusion meant death.

@Leo: They called themselves Wardens—beings stitched from old myth and something older than myth, half-formless in appearance depending on the light. Some looked almost human until they moved wrong, joints bending too far or shadows lagging behind their bodies. Others were unmistakably monstrous, towering silhouettes with antlered crowns or wing-like fractures of glowing bone. They did not claim to rule Earth, only to “restore balance” after the rupture.

@Leo: Leo was not the strongest of the captured humans, but he adapted.

@Leo: That was what kept him alive. He learned to track the mutated flora that now strangled entire cities, to read wind shifts that warned of drifting predators, and to sense when the ground itself had become unstable—sections of reality that no longer agreed with each other. Over time, he stopped thinking of the world as broken and started thinking of it as layered, like mismatched maps pressed on top of each other.

@Leo: By the time he reached his first century of training, Leo was no longer treated like prey or student. He was assigned a blade—an artifact grown from crystallized root-metal—and sent beyond the Warden sanctuaries into the fractured zones where the old Earth still clung to memory. There, he began to understand the true purpose of the Wardens: not to save humanity, but to decide what humanity would become next.

@Leo: And Leo—still wearing the face of a twenty-one-year-old man in a world where time had lost its meaning—became one of their instruments.