The pen finished writing. Gold script hung in the air beside his reflection, each letter burning with that same soft hiss, and Ivan stood there dripping bathwater and blood onto cold stone while he read his own soul like a damn character sheet.

  

Ivan Tepes

  Race:

  Pen:

  Heart:Horn:Soul:

  "Okay." He swallowed. "Okay, so… status screen. I've got a status screen. That's... fucking awesome!"

  He lifted his hand toward

  "Come on. Come on, give me something. Expand. Details. Help menu. Tutorial. Anything."

  He tried saying "menu" out loud. He tried saying "options," "settings," "inventory," "help," "open sesame." He clapped his hands together, he snapped his fingers… he stared at the pen and thought——as hard as he could until his vision blurred.

  The Fly Catcher bobbed in the air beside his shoulder. Its wings twitched.

  "Gah! There’s no fucking way…" Ivan shouted, dragging his hands down his face, smearing watered-down blood across his cheeks.

  “So you’re telling me I get isekai'd into a fantasy world, soulbound to a fucking magical pen, I get a whole RPG status screen, and there's no goddamn tutorial? No quest log? No… no helpful NPC beauty standing in the corner going 'Welcome, great hero, let me explain the basics to you'?"

  “And what's with the three empty sockets huh? Where is my overpowered protagonist ability?”

  He went back to the bathroom, he found the blade and rinsed it in the bathwater, which was disgusting, and dried it on the towel. He then finished cleaning himself up with the same towel, scrubbing the blood from his forearms, his chest, his face.

  He pulled on a plain shirt and pants from the wardrobe, and tucked the silver dagger into his waistband where the coat would cover it. The Fly Catcher drifted along beside him as he moved.

  "You and me, huh." Ivan said to the pen, then blew out the candle and fell onto the mattress face-first. Ivan closed his eyes and let exhaustion take him.

  ***

  The Fly Catcher was hovering above the pillow where his head had been, its wings folded, its ruby nib pointed at the ceiling.

  "Morning little guy."

  Tossing on his coat, he walked out into a narrow hallway that had wooden floors. There were two other closed doors, and a staircase at the far end of the hallway leading down

  Ivan walked down the stairs to what turned out to be a common room. He stood at the bottom of the stairs for a full ten seconds, the Fly Catcher floating beside his head... hovering there in plain sight. A serving woman walked past him and didn't even give him a second look. Either the pen was invisible to everyone else, or these people had seen weirder things before breakfast.

  Ivan walked through the room and out the front door, and was met by a wide uneven stone road. There were buildings on both sides. Window boxes spilling over with flowers, purple and red and gold only the stems were the gold part. Instead signs hung above doorways, and were painted with pictures showcasing what type of shop they were.The smell of bread, meat and weird animal shit was overwhelming.

  The street opened into a massive plaza the size of a football field, surrounded by buildings that had high arches and columns with balconies draped in colored cloth. And the center of the plaza was filled with stalls, selling everything from meat to bolts of fabric to caged birds with multi-colored feathers.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  There was a thick crowd that Ivan had to push his way through.

  There were two performers standing on a raised platform in the middle of the square. A man and a woman, both young, both dressed in loose white clothes. The man held his hands out, palms up, and between them he formed a bird, made entirely of light, its wings spreading wider as he pushed his hands apart. The light-bird opened its beak and sang, a single clear note that cut through the market noise and hung in the air. And the crowd cheered.

  The woman stepped forward and drew her hands through the air, flowers of light danced around her, pink and gold, spinning slowly in the air. She flicked her wrist and the flowers scattered outward over the crowd, dissolving into sparks. Ivan watched small children jump and grabbed at them, laughing.

  Ivan stood at the edge of the audience with his mouth open and his hands hanging at his sides. The light was warm on his face. He could feel it… actual warmth, radiating from the magical display. This was magic… Real magic. The crowd treated it the way a crowd back home would treat a street musician.

  He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slow.

  "Alright." Quiet. To himself. "Alright, Ivan. You're here. You're alive. Figure the rest out later."

  There was a small girl standing beside him, she was tugging on the edge of his coat. She must have been around six years old. Her clothes were filthy, her dress was torn and tattered. Her hair hung in matted clumps around her face, she had sharp cheekbones and ghostly pale skin. Her feet were bare and full of grime..

  The color of her eyes made his stomach twist… they were dead and milky. Ivan’s skin crawled as he looked into them, he felt a cold prickling run up from his spine to his neck, his hand moved on instinct toward the small dagger.

  "Hey—" Ivan tried to step back. Her grip on his coat didn't break. Her fingers were stronger than they had any right to be. "Kid, let go. I don't have any money, I don't have—"

  The girl's grip tightened on his coat. Her head tilted up towards his face and she opened her mouth and spoke in a smooth cadence.

  "The seraphim Elune walked this world alone, as she protected it from evil." Her voice was like silk. "The Hermit found her weeping over the sins of man, and from her tears he forged the first Pen, and from that they birthed the first of the Pendragons."

  The crowd moved around them, oblivious, a man stepping past close enough that his elbow brushed Ivan's arm. Nobody looked at the girl. Nobody looked at him looking at the girl.

  The girl turned her head toward the performers. The colored light played across her dead eyes. "...The accord was kept by the Royal family…" The words dripped over him. "...Dead and gone… no more are we safe… no… a new age is upon us."

  Ivan crouched slowly, keeping his hand on the dagger but bringing his face level with hers. He could smell sour milk radiating off of her tiny body. "Who are you… who sent you to? Did you bring me he—"

  The girl's mouth snapped shut, cutting off his sentence… the whites of her eyes rippled and bubbled. A silence settled over them and lasted uncomfortably long, Ivan's jaw tightened. His heart rattled in his chest. The words she spoke were a whisper this time. But he heard clearly.

  "...The first… betrayer has returned… and with it the end of days." Her mouth moved around the words like they tasted of spoiled milk. "...the accord must be held… find—"

  The girl's mouth clicked shut, her head twisting sideways, cutting off her warning. The white of her eyes rippled and boiled. Her eyes were turning to liquid and running down her cheeks in thick white streams that left clean lines through the grime on her face. It looked like candle wax melting, pooling at the edges of her jaw and then dripping off of her face.

  The white liquid gathered in the air… a wobbling mass the size of a heart, suspended between them. Ivan was frozen. The sounds of the square washed away and left them in silence.

  The liquid began folding, creasing itself over and over again, tucking and bending like paper being worked into an origami figure. Thin veined wings expanded, catching the light of the performers through their pearlescent membranes. Then a delicate body molded into a butterfly, made from whatever had been the girl's eyes.

  It flexed its wings and then it lifted, rising in a slow spiral above their heads, catching a current of air that carried it up past the roofline and into the open sky above the market square. Ivan craned his neck back watching it fly towards the heavy clouds until it was just a white speck, and then nothing.

  He turned back to question the girl further, but she had gone. He could still feel her hand gripping the coat where she'd been holding. There on the cobblestones where her bare feet had stood, a single flower lay flat against the stone. Its petals, white as the milk of her eyes, in a star pattern that crowned the golden centerpiece. An orchid of some kind, though he'd never seen one like this in his life.

  Ivan stayed crouched, one hand on his dagger, the other hovering over the flower. The market noise poured back in around him. The clatter, the shouting, the music, the applause for the performers, all filling the space the girl's voice had left like water crashing into him.

  He picked it up. The petals were cool and hard like stone against his fingers.

  The pen stirred at his shoulder. But it didn't write. It hung there, wings half-spread, ruby nib pointed at the orchid in his hand. Still. For a full breath, then two, the pen did nothing at all.

  Then it moved. Slowly. The ruby tip dipped and touched the air beside the flower, and text burned itself into existence one letter at a time, each one hissing faintly as it took shape.

  The gold script hung in the air beside the flower, each letter burning with that same clean heat the pen always left behind.

  

Morningstar Orchid. Sacred flowers of the Obafemi bloodline. Carried only by those who serve the true heirs to the nation of Obafemi. It will bare light when in the presence of an heir.

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