Kaelen does not remember dying, but he remembers everything before it. In his old world he was a dockworker and, when the money ran thin, a smuggler's muscle—a man who knew which crates to inspect and which to wave through, who understood that every port has two ledgers: the one the harbormaster keeps and the one that actually runs the city. He was never cruel in the trade, but he was never clean either, and he told himself the coin he moved fed families in the tenements even as it lined worse pockets.
That moral grayness followed him through the summoning, and it is why the Lattice branded him with a Criminal's instincts: sharp eyes, quiet steps, and a contact in the underworld who still passes him messages in a code he somehow still reads.
He woke on the wet cobblestones of Brinewatch during the Tidefall Festival, gasping in a body that was his and not his—a shark demi-human's frame, stronger and stranger than the one he'd left behind. A translucent panel flickered: 'Welcome, Lattice-Bound. Status: Unranked.' Around him, animal-eared festival-goers danced while fireworks burst over the harbor, and far above the storm clouds, something vast watched. He has not spoken of the eye to anyone. He is not sure it would help.
What the Lattice gave him, he intends to use. The summoning branded a sliver of raw arcane power into his blood—Lattice Spark, the interface calls it—and golden flame gathers at his fingertips when he wills it, a Fire Bolt drawn from the Lattice itself. It unsettles him. A fighter should trust steel, not sorcery, yet the spark answers him more readily than any weapon he has carried, and at the edge of his understanding he senses it could grow into something far greater.
Old Marrow, the scarred barkeep of the Drowned Rat, hinted that the Lattice grants power to those it marks for a reason. Kaelen intends to find out whether that reason is a gift or a leash.
His path crossed with a cheetah demi-human, another Lattice-Bound stranger fumbling through the same alien body and the same glowing interface, and the two fell into an easy rhythm: Kaelen the wall, the cheetah the wind. When Lira, a trembling mouse demi-human, begged them to find her vanished brother, Kaelen did not hesitate. He has seen what happens to the powerless in ports like Brinewatch—in every port—and he refuses to watch it happen again. The trail of golden key amulets leads down into the Undercity, toward a Magistrate who smiles too easily and a ritual that drinks the life of the chained.
Kaelen's goals are simple and stubborn: protect the people who cannot protect themselves, uncover why the Lattice pulled him across worlds, and never again be the man who looked away from a disappearing stranger. If the Lattice is a cage, as the whispers of the Hollow Archivist claim, he means to learn who built it—and whether breaking it would drown the world or free it. Until then, he fights with greatsword, bite, and borrowed fire, a shark out of deep water learning to walk on land.
