If anyone had asked Hiro Brihrest how he became a hero, he would have squinted up from his modest turnip field, scratched his unruly hair, and muttered something between a hiccup and a philosophical shrug.
He was a farm boy. That much had always been true. Born in the wind-wrinkled village of Thaylen, on the skirts of the Aetherweald forest where the trees whispered in too many languages, Hiro's greatest ambition at the time was to win the village harvest festival's soup contest. Preferably with fewer burns than last year.
But fate, as it often does in these stories, was bored.
And boredom, as it turns out, is where legends are born.
Hiro's story begins not with a bang, nor a prologue of glorious ancestry, but with a shoe. Specifically, a left boot two sizes too big, tied with a piece of turnip string, which caused him to trip face-first into the hollow den of a dying god.
Literally.
"I don't even own this boot," Hiro mumbled into the soft moss floor as he stared at a pair of bone-white fangs inches from his nose.
The cave pulsed like a wounded heart. Faint light slithered along the walls like nervous veins. All around him, obsidian feathers drifted in slow motion, suspended as though afraid of touching the ground. In the center, sprawled across a shrine made of rib bones and starlight, was the Nightmare Devil. Or, what remained of it.
Massive. Coiled. Dead.
And yet—
It opened one eye.
It was not supposed to open an eye.
Hiro screamed. The Nightmare Devil sneezed.
That would've been the end of him, if not for two factors. One, Hiro was stupidly, cosmically lucky. Two, the Nightmare Devil had been dying for precisely two thousand years and was very, very bored.
"So this is what the world sends me as a final memory," it said in a voice like teeth dragging across harp strings. "A boy in one boot, with the smell of soup."
"I—it's turnip-based," Hiro stammered.
"Excellent. I shall consume you slowly."
"Wait what."
But before the Nightmare Devil could act on its clearly stated intentions, something shifted in Hiro's blood. A pulse. A wrongness. The kind of twist in the fabric of fate that only happens when a very large cosmic scriptwriter sneezes into their own parchment.
Because, you see, the Nightmare Devil was cursed. Its death was prophesied to come at the hands of one with no destiny. No prophecy. No thread.
Hiro had never learned magic. Never heard the word 'threadweaving.' He was, by all observable accounts, completely and utterly unimportant.
And yet.
The Nightmare Devil lunged.
Hiro fell backwards—tripping, again—on the exact spot where the god's heart-thread had frayed. His fall yanked that fragile filament through the Devil's own core, unmaking it with the absurd innocence of someone who just didn't know better.
There was a flash of light. A terrible silence.
And when Hiro woke, the cave had collapsed.
The world was different.
He bled light. His soul burned. His blood held whispers.
He was cursed with immortality by the very creature he had killed.
Weeks later, Hiro was found by a pair of traveling witches arguing about the metaphysics of love spells versus breakfast curses. They took one look at him and screamed. Not because of his injuries, but because of what shimmered behind his eyes.
"You're stitched with nightmare blood," one said.
"He'll go mad in days," the other declared.
"Do you want some tea?" Hiro asked, because that's what you do when strangers scream at you in a crater.
They didn't answer. But they did start calling him "hero."
And that's when the word entered the language.
It spread across the region like wildfire. The boy who had no destiny. The One Who Slew the Devil. The Immortal Turnip Farmer. People couldn't decide what to call him, so they shortened it.
Hero.
Hiro.
It stuck.
Years passed.
Hiro wandered. He never stayed too long. Sometimes because the nightmares leaking from his blood made animals cry. Sometimes because he would dream someone else's memories. Sometimes because he woke up glowing.
He helped where he could. Saved villages. Stopped a flood by punching a tree. Reunited a lost cat with a moon spirit.
But always, he remained an accidental legend. Kind. Confused. Cursed.
It was during one of these wanderings that he met Dee Megus.
Dee Megus was not what Hiro expected when he heard rumors of a man who could "tie lightning to silence."
He expected a wizard. A tall one. With robes. Possibly glowing.
What he got was a man in a flour-stained apron yelling at a sentient kettle.
"I told you not to whistle when you're boiling sentience!" Dee shouted.
The kettle burbled back in protest.
Hiro, who had just been fleeing from a river that had begun screaming in binary code, was too tired to question it.
"I like your house," he said.
Dee turned, startled. Then squinted. "Why are you bleeding stars?"
"Long story."
They became friends instantly.
That night, while Hiro sipped a tea that occasionally blinked, Dee explained his theory of Threads.
"Everything is made of them," he said, weaving a glowing line between his fingers. "Reality. Magic. Even time. I call them Threads. And I—accidentally—weave them. Or unweave them."
"So… threadweaving?" Hiro asked.
Dee blinked. "...That's a better name than what I had. I was calling it 'noodling.'"
And just like that, magic gained a name.
They were joined a month later by Vampher Darquez.
Which is to say: Hiro accidentally knocked over Dee's spell jar during a thunderstorm, which crackled through a forgotten graveyard and woke up a dead baby that had been accidentally wrapped in a discarded immortality glyph.
The baby became a man overnight.
The man became a vampire.
The vampire opened a bar in a volcano.
But that's Chapter Two.
All you need to know is this:
The world was stitched. Patched. Improvised.
And at the center of it stood three friends:
A hero who never meant to be,
A magician who never wanted to be,
And a vampire who just wanted to try human food.
The Threads had been pulled.
And the Loom was beginning to stir.