The first time I ever left my home, I held my mother's hand so tightly I think I might've bruised her fingers. She didn't say anything, though. She just squeezed back, guiding me over the mossy trail like it was no big deal.
But it wasn't. It was my first time seeing Morowind Haven, the town by the sea.
Even saying its name in my head felt like whispering something sacred. Morowind wasn't some massive capital or anything like the city ruins I had seen in old books. It was small, quiet and perched on the southern curve of the island where the sand met the warm jade sea. And to me, it felt like stepping into the pages of one of those fantasy adventure novels I used to dig out of dumpsters in my last life.
Only this wasn't fiction. This was the world now.
Technology hadn't worked here since the ABR. Once the rain fell, everything that ran on electricity either shorted out or rotted over time. Batteries melted. Screens became infected with a red moss-like growth that fed off signals. And worse, anything satellite-based just… died. Most of the world clung to scraps of pre-tech for decades, trying to reboot civilization.
But not here.
North New Island had gone dark and stayed dark.
No contact, no updates, no imports, no internet, no noise. The world forgot about us and we forgot about it. The people here had no choice but to return to the old ways, but they didn't return to the way they remembered. They leaned into something older and wilder. They turned to the land, the stars, and the forgotten threads of ancestral memory.
And over time, what emerged… wasn't the past, either.
It was fantasy. A survival-born, earth-bound, storm-battered way of life that somehow looked like the novels I used to cling to under bridges and broken roofs.
Morowind Haven was a fishing town but not just fishing nets and poles. The farmers here didn't use tractors or pesticides in the usual sense. The soil was cultivated by hand. It was more like tending to an ecosystem than farming. Crops were rotated based on moon cycles and animal migrations.
And somehow, through all this back-to-nature energy, they still wore modern clothes. The boots were stitched from cured animal leather, the pants were denim patched with thread, and most jackets looked like blends between armor and streetwear. My mother wore a loose, high-collared black coat with silver clasps that clinked as she walked.
Her scarf was made of bark-silk, a rare weave spun by the silkworms that lived in the high forest canopies. It was elegant, but warm, functional, but beautiful.
I wore a hand-me-down tunic and old sneakers. I didn't care, though. I had bigger things to worry about.
Like how everyone was staring at me.
It started the moment we passed the first stone arch marking the town's edge. A woman tending to woven fish traps looked up, paused, and her eyes locked on my head. A pair of kids sitting on a barrel pointed and whispered. A tall man carrying a goat over his shoulders outright stopped and stared, blinking like he wasn't sure I was real.
I tried to pretend I didn't notice. But my horns itched. They always did when people stared.
"Keep your head up," Bena, my mother, whispered.
She didn't let go of my hand but I could hear the words already spinning in their minds. I'd heard them before in whispers, but never this loud.
"That's the girl with the mark."
"No, no, she's cursed. She was born with the horns of a forest demon."
"I heard she doesn't bleed. They said her blood glows in the dark."
"She's a changeling, swapped at birth. No kid of Bena's would come out lookin' like that."
"I bet the Oracle knows what she is."
I tried not to react. I didn't want to. Doing so in front of them would just prove them right, that I wasn't strong enough to be here.
So I squeezed her hand and focused on the town.
The houses were made of stone and wood, roofs thatched with tiles. Bright fabric banners waved in the breeze, woven with dye. People didn't use money here. They bartered. Everything was about trade. You gave what you had, and got what you needed.
Needlework for salt. Dried kelp for honey. A day of helping in the orchard could earn you thread or a woven belt. If someone was good at storytelling or singing, that was worth things too. Entertainment was value. So was information. And everyone knew each other, so cheating wasn't just frowned upon. It was shameful. Reputation was your currency.
It made things fairer, in a weird way. No one went hungry if they were willing to offer something in return. Even the beggars carved driftwood art or caught wind-bugs in the summer to trade.
We stopped by the Crescent Seller's stall just as the sun pushed through the clouds. The seller was an old woman with eyes like sanded glass and hands that moved like clockwork. She was one of the few who didn't flinch when she saw me.
She just nodded and pulled out rolls of thread, some plain, some sparkling, others still humming with soft resonance. Bena picked one dyed with blue root. It shimmered like starlight caught in wool.
"Perfect for stitching into protection robes," the seller said. "Blessed during waning phase, just as you asked."
Mother offered her a woven satchel of cured mushrooms and a bottle of birch syrup. The seller nodded with no words. The trade was done.
"Now, to the Oracle," she whispered.
We turned up the hill path that curved along the cliffs. From here, I could see the whole of Morowind Haven, the docks lined with boats shaped like crescent moons, the smoke rising from cookfires, the windcatchers humming high above the rooftops. The sea shimmered in the distance, swallowing the sun like it did every day.
And yet, the whole time we walked, I could feel the eyes on me.
They saw a child with horns, glowing blue eyes and no scent like the others. They didn't know what I was. But I did.
And it was time to meet the oracle who ruined my life when I met her.