— Outline
Cadryn slips deeper into the narrow corridors of the bookshop, weaving between tall shelves that creak faintly as though listening. Titles catch his eye as he walks. One jumps out at him. “Basic Flux Incantations.” He does a double take but keeps on walking. This is no time to loiter. He attempts to muffle his presence within the flux, but the act feels clumsy—Earth’s altered magic resists his hand, moving with a different rhythm than he remembers.
He pauses, testing the currents. The flux coils strangely around the building, warping in ways that make no intuitive sense. It behaves more like a living organism than an elemental field—breathing, responding, curling away from him in faint ripples. Something in the world is watching, though he cannot yet tell whether it is hostile or merely curious.
Cian’s presence strengthens beyond the front door, precise and predatory. Rather than panic, Cadryn studies the flux signature again. Threads in it are wrong—familiar, yet threaded with a sharpness that never belonged to Cian. It hints that the hunter has changed… or that something on Earth is changing him.
Cadryn moves toward the back of the shop, where Art’s hidden reading room once sat. The passage feels off. Books he remembers are gone. Sitting on a table are pieces of pottery. Artifacts? He can feel the flux flow into and out of them. No time to spend. He reaches out and grabs one putting it in his pocket. A shelf that should lead to a cramped alcove now feels deeper, as though the architecture itself has subtly rearranged. Earth has always been mundane, but now its physical spaces bend in ways too precise to be accidental.
He reaches the back of the shop and discovers a faint residue of flux—old, human, mismatched with anything he recalls from this world. Someone here has touched magic. Recently. Perhaps more than one person. The more he studies the residue, the more he suspects that Earth’s flux isn’t merely different—it has been awakened.
The hunter’s aura sharpens again. Cadryn realizes he has only moments. He considers using the back exit, but the flux behind the building churns with an even stranger turbulence, like a storm forming in miniature.
The shop seems to press closer around him, urging him toward something unseen. He senses a choice forming: slip into the altered flux and risk its unknown rules, remain and confront Cian, or attempt to flee into a world that no longer behaves predictably.
Cadryn draws in a slow breath, weighing these paths, and acknowledging for the first time that Earth may no longer be the safe refuge he believed it to be—but rather the first place where the deeper truth of the flux will reveal itself.
Ridgewalker's Notebook 