Aiden Foster was a man forged in the unforgiving fires of conflict, his forty-two years etched into a face that bore the scars of battles both seen and unseen. Tall and broad-shouldered, he stood at six feet two, his frame still carrying the lean muscle of a soldier honed by endless drills in the Canadian Armed Forces, though now softened slightly by the quiet desperation of civilian life. His hair, once a crisp military buzz of dark brown, had grown out into a unkempt mop streaked with premature gray, falling over a forehead perpetually furrowed in worry. Deep-set hazel eyes, shadowed by perpetual fatigue, flickered with a haunted vigilance, and a jagged scar ran from his left temple down to his jawline—a souvenir from a Kaiju skirmish in the shattered ruins of Vancouver, where colossal beasts had clawed their way from the Pacific depths to ravage the coast. He dressed simply, in faded jeans tucked into scuffed combat boots that he couldn't bring himself to replace, and a threadbare flannel shirt over a black t-shirt emblazoned with a faded maple leaf—remnants of the uniform that had once defined him. Around his neck hung a silver locket, containing a faded photo of his wife, Elena, her smile a ghost that both comforted and tormented him.

Aiden's life had unraveled like a frayed parachute after the Incident. A decorated sergeant in the joint task force against the monstrous incursions—those eldritch horrors that slithered from rifts in reality, tentacled abominations and towering behemoths that defied physics—he'd returned from deployment a shell of himself, riddled with PTSD that manifested in night terrors where he relived the screams of comrades crushed under chitinous feet. But worse was the empathy curse, a faint echo of Elena's reality-shifting gift that she'd unknowingly passed to him in their final embrace. It wasn't power, not really—just a cruel window into agony, letting him feel the government's experiments on her as if they were his own: the cold steel probes, the psychic vivisections that peeled away layers of her soul. She'd been taken one storm-lashed night, agents in unmarked vans spiriting her away for her abilities to bend time and space, abilities that could rewrite battlefields or unravel timelines. Aiden hadn't told their daughter, Lily, the truth; the girl, just twelve, believed her mother had abandoned them for a better life. Lily, with her own fractured powers inherited and amplified, struggled with ADHD that made her fidget like a caged storm, generalized anxiety that turned every shadow into a threat, panic attacks that left her gasping, and dyscalculia that turned numbers into enemies. Yet her gifts—shifting realities in bursts of unintended chaos, glimpsing futures in fractured visions—made her a beacon for predators.

What Aiden wanted more than breath itself was safety for Lily, a life unmarred by the horrors that stalked them: the giant monsters rampaging across the fractured world, the rogue military faction—splintered from his old unit, led by ambitious generals who saw her powers as the key to weaponizing time itself. They hunted with drones and black-ops teams, their intelligence sharp as a bayonet, twisted by a worldview that deemed extraordinary abilities as national assets to be seized, no matter the human cost. Aiden's mind teetered on the brink, his trauma a constant battle against dissociation, but he pushed on, whistling faint, off-key strains of 'O Canada' under his breath—a quirky tic from his barracks days, a way to ground himself when the world blurred into nightmare.

He'd fled their modest cabin in the British Columbia wilderness, teaching Lily to mask her shifts with breathing exercises stolen from his therapy sessions, fighting off lesser horrors with scavenged rifles and improvised traps. It worked because Aiden was no stranger to survival; his military cunning turned the land into an ally, using terrain to evade pursuers while his paternal ferocity ignited in defense of his girl. But the conflicts gnawed: the lie about Elena eroded his soul, Lily's disabilities amplified her vulnerabilities amid the powers she couldn't control, and his weakening empathy link whispered of his wife's fading light. It all crested when government officials pounded on their safehouse door, offering 'protection' that reeked of captivity. Aiden's decision—to fight or flee—hung like a guillotine, promising repercussions that could shatter realities or seal their doom, his arc bending from broken guardian to unyielding revolutionary, all while the monsters roared closer.