New York CityDecember 4th, 1999Hell's Kitchen – Behind St. Gabriel's Church
The air is cold enough to bite. Snow drifts between brick alley walls, melting only when it lands on steam rising from the rusted grates. A flickering streetlamp buzzes above, casting sickly light on a shadowed figure kneeling in the alley. Her coat is torn. Her breaths come ragged and shallow.
A newborn's cry splits the silence.
She doesn't scream. Not once. She wraps the infant in her coat, then pulls something—an old military jacket—from a plastic bag and layers it gently around him. Her fingers tremble as she places the bundle behind a row of garbage bins, next to the church's red-brick wall.
She whispers in a British accent, soft as snow:
"You'll live… They'll find you. You're meant for more than this..."
Then she disappears into the shadows.
📟 [SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
The infant lies still beneath the stars, blue eyes blinking up at a world he doesn't yet know.
But within him… something awakens.
A glowing screen only he can see flickers into existence behind his closed eyes.
☼ WARCRAFT REALIZATION PROTOCOL ENGAGED ☼Soul ID Confirmed: [Orphaned Earthborn]Genetic Anchor: HUMAN (Default)Initializing Class System…
A carousel of glowing glyphs spins before him—twelve radiant icons, each etched in elemental energy.
Suddenly, they stop. One icon pulses, glowing brighter than the rest.
🔷 CLASS ASSIGNED: SHAMAN
"You are the voice of the storm. The hand of the earth. The fire in stillness.""All that was forgotten… you will remember."
✅ Class Set: SHAMAN✅ Race Locked: HUMAN✅ Base Access: Not Yet Available⚠️ First Building Unlocked Upon Awareness (Age ≥ 9)⚠️ Mana Stream Detected: Dormant Leyline Beneath – Location Saved
The glow fades. The snow continues to fall.
A church bell chimes midnight. A priest inside hears the cry and rushes out, finding a baby bundled in worn coats… blue-eyed, golden-haired, silent now.
In his hand, the child clutches nothing.But in his soul, the first building is waiting to be born.
Bronx, New York — Winter 2000St. Vincent's Home for FoundlingsAge: 1 year
The basement nursery groaned with the weight of its years.Cracks spread like roots across the ceiling, brown water stains blooming out from them like bruises. The lightbulb overhead flickered erratically, not with power surges—but as if it were afraid of the dark pressing in around it.
Twelve metal cribs lined the walls, each rusted at the feet, each swaddled in chipped white paint that flaked away like dead skin. Plastic mobiles dangled overhead, dusty from neglect, turning slow circles when the pipes hissed and clanged above.
The heat hadn't come on in two days.
Babies wailed. Their cries mixed into a single chaotic lullaby of hunger, colic, and confusion. Sister Genevieve moved among them in her gray habit and weary eyes, her mouth set in a thin, bitten line.
She did her best. She always said that.But "her best" never seemed to stretch far enough for the thirteenth crib.
In the far-right corner, half-shrouded in shadow, was the boy with golden hair.
He never cried.
He watched.
Eyes too blue. Skin too pale. A halo of light hair that glowed faintly even in the dimness.
They'd named him "Gabriel" on paper, after the archangel whose statue watched from above the churchyard. But no one called him that. They called him "the quiet one", or just… him.
At first, they said he was perfect—an angel left by heaven.
But the warmth turned cold after the first few months.
There was the night the lights burst in his room—every bulb at once, shattering in a chorus of tiny screams, just as he looked up at them with wide eyes.
There was the day Sister Agnes picked him up during morning prayer, and her hand went numb. She dropped him like she'd touched fire. They said it was nerve damage, but she never came back.
And then there was the time they found him standing in his crib, silently staring at the chapel window—his eyes fixed on the crucifix outside—while the goldfish in the baptismal bowl floated belly-up, one by one.
He was six months old.
Now, in the cold of winter, he lay beneath a moth-bitten blanket, wide awake.
The other babies cried, kicked, rolled over.But he lay still.
His tiny hands gripped the bars of the crib like a prisoner in a cage far older than he could ever understand. He didn't feel fear. Or confusion. Not the way the others did.
He simply knew he was not like them.
The world pressed against him like wet cloth—heavy, muffled, suffocating. The air carried whispers only he could hear. Not voices. Not exactly. Just… meanings. Shapes of feeling. Like the rhythm of something ancient knocking against the inside of his chest.
Then, footsteps.
Soft. Slippered.
The boy turned his head, eyes tracking the girl who approached—not a nun, not an orphan.
Primrose.
Eight years old. Hair like honey. Skin the color of baked clay. She was the janitor's granddaughter, always quiet, always humming as she helped mop the halls after school.
He'd seen her before, but this was the first time she came close.
She crouched beside his crib and placed her chin on the mattress.
"You're the weird one, huh?" she said, peering through the bars. "They say you never cry. That's scary, you know."
He blinked.
"My abuela says babies are supposed to cry. It's how they talk to the world."
She glanced at the bottle left on the counter—cold, untouched. Then reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a soft purple fruit. A crushed berry.
"Here."
She smeared the juice on her finger and slipped it through the bars.
He didn't hesitate. His lips parted. He tasted the sweetness—and for a moment, his eyes softened.
Prim grinned.
"See? Not so scary."
She sat there a while longer, humming under her breath, whispering nonsense songs about flowers and cats and clouds.
The lights flickered above again—but steadied this time.
And for the first time since his arrival, the golden-haired boy closed his eyes while someone watched over him.
Outside, snow continued to fall. Inside, something ancient stirred behind his stillness—a waiting thunder no one else could hear.
Location: Orphanage basement rec roomYear: 2004Age: 4
The floor was hard, the kind that echoed when you stomped—concrete laced with old chewing gum and chalk lines for games no one played anymore. The walls, once painted in faded sea animals, were now scuffed with age and the claw marks of bored children.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, flickering slightly—always slightly. As if unsure whether to give up completely or keep pretending they worked.
In the corner, behind an old foosball table with two broken rods, stood the golden-haired boy.
He wasn't hiding. He didn't hide.
But he didn't move either.
He stood with his back to the wall, arms hanging loose by his sides, blue eyes fixed on the group of boys closing in.
Victor Delgado was the tallest of them. Six years old. Broad for his age. Sharp eyes. Already the kind of kid who could make adults laugh and then steal from them the moment they turned around. He ruled the orphanage kids like a dog rules a pack—by bite.
He walked with the swagger of someone who believed he'd never be punished.
Beside him was Kin, round-faced, already heavyset, his buzzed scalp gleaming with sweat. He wasn't smart, but he was loyal. He laughed when Victor laughed.
"C'mon freak," Victor said, bouncing a wooden alphabet block in one hand. "Why don't you talk?"
The boy said nothing.
Victor tossed the block lazily in the air, caught it, and stepped closer. The circle tightened. A few kids watched from behind toy bins, peeking out like mice from holes.
"What are you? Mute?" he continued. "Or just stupid?"
The golden-haired boy didn't blink.
Victor frowned, lips curling.
"Maybe he thinks he's better than us."
He threw the block.
It hit the boy square in the shoulder with a hollow thunk and clattered to the floor. The boy didn't flinch. His eyes remained on Victor's face—not with hate, or fear, but with the empty stillness of an unbroken mirror.
The room went quiet.
Even Kin stopped laughing.
Victor's nostrils flared. He stepped closer.
"You think you're better? I saw you the other day. You scraped your leg bad on the stairs. Bled all over. Didn't make a sound. That's not normal. That's—"
"Freak," Kin muttered, a little softer now.
Victor nodded. Grinning.
"Yeah. Freaks get put in freezers. Maybe we should put him in the freezer."
Someone giggled—nervous and high-pitched. The room pulsed with that awful energy kids get when something's about to go too far but no one wants to be the first to say stop.
Victor stepped forward again.
That's when it happened.
A sharp voice cracked the air like a whip:
"Touch him again, and I'll break your teeth."
Everyone turned.
Alyssa Carter. Five years old. Blonde, scrappy, eyes that could set gasoline on fire. She held a mop in both hands like it was a spear.
She walked forward, steady and straight, and jabbed the mophead onto the floor between Victor and the boy.
"You want to pick on someone, pick on me."
Victor smirked, but took a step back. Alyssa had kicked him in the shin once. Sister Joan still hadn't fixed the hole in the hallway wall from the fight.
She turned to the boy.
"Say something," she snapped. "Why don't you ever talk?"
He looked at her. Blinked once.
Then spoke.
"The rain is coming."
The words were soft—barely above a whisper—but they were clear. Calm. As though they came from far away and deep beneath, like the voice of an old well.
Everyone stared at him.
And then—BOOM.
A single clap of thunder rumbled through the building. Not a rolling storm—but a sharp, sudden crack, as if the sky itself had been startled.
The lights flickered again.
A few kids screamed.
Kin backed up and slipped on a loose Lego, falling on his butt with a grunt.
Victor looked up at the ceiling, then back at the boy, who was now walking past him without a word—through the space between him and Alyssa, as if nothing had happened at all.
No one tried to stop him.
Not then.
Alyssa followed him with her eyes, mop still in hand. She didn't speak. Just stared.
And for the rest of the day, no one dared speak the word "freak" again.
Not out loud, anyway.
🎨 Scene 3: Prim and the Rooftop Garden
Location: Rooftop of St. Vincent's OrphanageYear: 2006Age: 7
The rooftop was off-limits.
The door at the top of the stairwell was locked—always had been. But the boy had long ago found a way around it. A cracked window. A rusty pipe. An old laundry vent no adult ever looked at. He moved like water, like shadow. He flowed where he needed to go.
And up here... he could breathe.
The city below was a beast. A constant growl of engines and shouts. But on the roof, things were slower. Softer. The sun, when it wasn't hiding behind gray smog, felt like something close to warmth.
But today, he wasn't alone.
She was already there.
Primrose—or Prim, as the younger kids called her—sat cross-legged on a sheet of cardboard near a cluster of salvaged flowerpots. Her long dark-blonde hair was tied with a faded green ribbon, and her fingers were gently pinching off browned basil leaves.
The moment she heard his feet on gravel, she didn't look up. Just said:
"You're not supposed to be here."
The boy didn't answer.
He stepped closer and sat beside her, knees folded neatly, hands on his lap. He didn't need to ask permission. She didn't seem to need to grant it.
A soft wind rustled the sunflowers in the corner. They were tall, lanky things—barely clinging to life in salvaged paint buckets filled with tired dirt.
"Neither are you," he said at last.
She smirked. Just a little.
"I'm special."
He looked at her.
"So am I."
That made her laugh. A light, dry laugh like wind in grass.
"You don't talk much."
"Words aren't quiet enough."
Prim turned to him now, green eyes narrowed slightly.
"You say weird stuff."
"It's true."
She studied him for a moment, like a cat deciding if something was edible or sacred.
"Everyone says you're weird," she said. "But they don't know you come up here."
"Neither do you," he replied.
She huffed and plucked a tiny strawberry from a vine barely hanging on to life. She held it up like a jewel.
"These took weeks. Too cold now. Won't grow right."
He reached out and touched the vine. Just a fingertip.
It glowed—soft, gold—just for a second.
The leaves didn't move, but the color deepened. The fruit looked... brighter. More alive.
Prim blinked. Looked at him.
"You did that."
"No."
"You did."
He stared at his finger, then at her.
"The plant wanted to grow. I just listened."
Her lips parted, but no words came.
After a long moment, she laid back on the cardboard, arms behind her head, staring at the clouds.
"I like you," she said simply.
He said nothing.
But he stayed.
They stayed until sundown.She hummed under her breath. He listened.No one came looking. No one ever did.
But up here, with the wind and the dying basil and the stubborn sunflowers, the boy felt something stir inside him that he didn't yet have a name for.
Not love.Not friendship.Something older.
Recognition.
Location: St. Vincent's Orphanage, Main Hall & DormitoryYear: 2007Age: 8
The snow that day didn't fall like most winter snow.
It came in sheets—thin, bitter flakes, hurled sideways by wind that clawed down alleyways and raked across stone walls like skeletal fingers. The storm had swallowed most of the city by noon. Subways were late. Radiators clanged desperately inside the orphanage, trying to pretend they were working.
That afternoon, the wooden doors of St. Vincent's groaned open again.
The new girl stood in the entryway like a porcelain sculpture misplaced among firewood. Her coat was tailored but soaked. Her boots—polished and expensive—dripped city mud onto the rubber mats. A social worker hovered behind her, coat unzipped, cheeks wind-burned.
"Her name is Claudine Westbrook," the woman announced with fake cheer. "Her… circumstances have changed. This will be her new placement."
The other children looked up from their board games, their crayons, their whispered arguments over broken plastic toys. They didn't move. Just stared.
The girl moved like a string being pulled—precise, mechanical, almost reluctant. She carried a small leather satchel over one shoulder. Her silver-white hair was braided perfectly, not a strand out of place, and her violet eyes held the same temperature as the snowstorm outside.
She didn't cry. She didn't smile.She didn't say thank you.
📚 Later That Day
The director put her in the "quiet dorm," a small side room with only two beds and peeling floral wallpaper.
The boy already lived there.
He sat on the lower bunk, cross-legged, reading a torn comic book someone had thrown away months ago. He didn't look up when she entered. He didn't have to.
He felt her before he saw her.
Something about her—like a blade, still sheathed but pressing against its confines. Not cruel. Not broken. Just sharp.
She set her satchel on the empty bed across the room and began unpacking without a word.
Books. Real books. Hardcovers with gold letters on the spine. A framed photo of a man in a military uniform. A cracked porcelain figurine of a swan.
She moved with ritual. Every item had a place.
"Don't stare," she said, still facing the wall.
"I wasn't," he replied.
"I can feel it."
He watched her for a moment longer, then turned a page of his comic.
"You don't belong here," he said, not as judgment—but as observation.
"Neither do you."
That made him look at her.
She finally turned. Their eyes met.
It was not connection. It was not hostility. It was… recognition. The kind you only feel when a mirror looks back at you and says yes, you're strange too.
🥣 Three Days Later – The Cafeteria
Victor had noticed her by then. Of course he had.
She walked like she still owned something—dignity, maybe. Status. Her uniform didn't sag. Her back stayed straight. She didn't flinch when the food was half-frozen or the milk curdled.
He didn't like that.
"Hey, snow queen," Victor said as she walked past.
Claudine didn't stop.
"Hey, I'm talking to you. Where'd you get that coat? Your daddy buy it before he went to jail?"
Kin laughed. Alyssa tensed across the room.
The golden-haired boy watched from his bench—silent.
Victor reached out to yank Claudine's satchel from her shoulder.
She moved before his hand made contact.
One smooth step, one pivot, and bam—her elbow drove into his ribs. Hard. Not clumsy. Not wild. Trained.
Victor doubled over, wheezing.
"Touch me again," she said coldly, "and I'll remove your teeth one by one and alphabetize them."
The room froze.
Victor looked up, eyes watering, then sat back down—his pride more wounded than his side.
The golden-haired boy watched her return to her seat. No celebration. No gloating.
Just calm.
Later that evening, as she unpacked another book in the dormitory, she glanced at him without turning her head.
"Don't expect me to talk to you just because we're both strange."
He looked up from his comic.
"I don't want you to."
For the first time, just barely, she smiled.
Not because she liked him.
But because they understood each other.
Location: Beneath the Highbridge train yard, BronxYear: 2008Age: 9
It started with a dream.
Not the kind filled with color and talking animals. Not the kind children have.
It was cold in the dream—colder than any winter above. Stone surrounded him. Not carved, but grown—like ribs, ancient and forgotten, pressing in from every direction. There were markings on the walls—spirals, arrows, veins of glowing light. Faint chanting echoed in the distance, like a memory he was born too late to own.
Then, he heard it.
A voice made of stone and storm:
"Shaman…"
He woke gasping. The blankets on his cot soaked with sweat. The dormitory lights buzzed overhead, and Claudine stirred across the room.
But she didn't wake.
Only he heard it.
🌁 A Week Later – Under the Tracks
The train yard was fenced off with barbed wire and rusted "DO NOT ENTER" signs that had been ignored since the '70s. The kids called it "the metal graveyard"—a jungle of gutted subway cars, cracked concrete tunnels, and graffiti-covered containers no one dared claim.
But he went there anyway.
He always had.
That afternoon, the clouds rolled low, gray and heavy. Thunder grumbled somewhere over the river. The boy moved along the crumbling brick retaining wall behind a fuel shed, where the chain-link fence had sagged and snapped. He slipped inside like water through cracked stone.
A stray cat watched him from a broken axle.
He climbed across a pile of damp mattresses, descended into a sinkhole hidden behind a derailed car, and found himself in a service tunnel—one of the really old ones. The kind not on city records. The kind with air that tasted like copper and dust.
It was silent here.
Not empty.Just waiting.
🔘 Discovery
The tunnel sloped downward, one flickering bulb hanging from a cable like a dying star. Beneath it, a chamber opened—a small vault where the walls curled inward like a seashell.
And there, half-buried in rubble and dirt, was the stone.
Not a pillar. Not a pedestal. It was too smooth. Too deliberate. It pulsed faintly under the grime—pale blue light swirling beneath its surface like fog trapped in crystal.
He stepped closer.
The air grew thick. Not with heat. With meaning. It pressed against his skin like fingers. He reached out—and before he could even touch it, the light responded.
Symbols bloomed along its surface. The air hummed. The chamber vibrated.
And a voice—not thunder this time, but a soft, low tone, like rain hitting stone—spoke in his mind:
[☼ SYSTEM INTERFACE DETECTED ☼]CLASS: SHAMANRACE: HUMANSTATUS: AWAKEFIRST BASE: COMMAND HALL — MATERIAL REQUIREMENTS INCOMPLETEMANA STREAM FOUND — LEYLINE ACTIVITY: WEAK, STABLEINITIATE DOMAIN CLAIM? [YES/NO]
He didn't blink.
Didn't flinch.
"Yes," he said.
The pedestal glowed, lines of gold and sapphire stretching into the stone around him like roots drinking the earth. A faint tremor rolled through the floor. Dust rained from the ceiling. Somewhere behind him, the broken bulb shattered.
He stepped forward and touched the stone.
It was cold at first. Then warm. Then—
[WELCOME, SHAMAN.]
🌌 Afterwards
He sat there for hours.Not speaking. Not moving. Just listening.
Not to voices. Not to words.To everything else.
The hum of metal deep below. The trickle of groundwater running through cracks. The distant shudder of the city above—its lives, its pain, its heat, and traffic and television static—all bleeding downward like forgotten prayers.
The system pulsed beneath him, alive but slumbering.
"It's mine," he whispered.
No one heard him.
No one could.
Above, the Bronx roared on—loud, cruel, and blind.
But below… the first base was being born.