Chains of Divinity

After dinner, Jacob finally dragged himself back to his desk, determined to at least start his English final project. Ms. Winters had assigned a creative writing piece – students could choose either fiction or nonfiction – with the theme "Origins and Transformation." It was worth a quarter of their semester grade, due in two weeks, and he hadn't written a single word.

He opened his laptop, pulled up a blank document, and stared at the empty page.

Five minutes passed. Then ten. The cursor just kept blinking at him, mocking.

"Fuck this," he muttered, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes.

When he looked at the screen again, his fingers suddenly started moving. Words flowed out of him like someone else was controlling his hands.

The city was nothing special. Just another sprawl of concrete and glass where people lived and died without ever seeing what lay beyond the veil of reality. He was seventeen when they came, their armor gleaming like captured sunlight as they stepped out of thin air in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

They moved through crowds unseen, searching. Only he seemed to notice them—three figures too perfect to be human, their movements too fluid to be natural. The tallest one pointed at him with a finger that seemed to glow from within.

"This one has the strength," the being said, voice like thunder compressed into whispers. "He will serve."

That night, he packed a backpack with clothes and his phone, though something told him he wouldn't be able to use it where he was going. His mom was working late at the hospital, his dad at another business dinner. A normal Tuesday, except it would be the last time he'd ever see them.

At midnight, they returned. They didn't use his name. They simply appeared in his room and gestured for him to follow. What choice did he have?

As they led him down the empty street, he looked back one last time at the only life he'd ever known. The beings opened a doorway in the air itself, a tear in reality that led to somewhere too bright to look at directly.

"Step through," commanded the one with eyes like molten gold. "Your old life ends. Your service begins."

He hesitated at the threshold, suddenly aware of what he was leaving behind. Not just his family or his home—but his humanity itself.

"Does everyone you choose come willingly?" he asked, surprising himself with his boldness.

They exchanged looks. "Eventually," said the one with golden eyes. "Some simply require more... convincing than others."

With those ominous words hanging in the air, he stepped through the portal. The boy who entered would never return. In his place would emerge...

Jacob stared at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard. He couldn't think of a name. The character needed a name, but his mind went completely blank whenever he tried to come up with one.

He tried typing "John" but deleted it immediately. No, that wasn't right at all.

"Michael?" he said aloud, testing it. Nope, that felt wrong too.

"David? Alex? Brandon?" Each name felt more wrong than the last.

There was a name there, just at the edge of his thoughts. Four letters. Something short, powerful. But every time he reached for it, it slipped away like trying to grab smoke.

The frustration was driving him crazy. He'd never had writer's block this specific before. It was like his brain was actively fighting him, refusing to let him remember something he'd never known in the first place.

He tried typing "K" and stopped, fingers frozen over the keys. That felt right, but the rest wouldn't come.

"Fuck it," he muttered, highlighting the whole document. His finger hovered over the delete key. Maybe he should try something completely different for his project.

But he couldn't bring himself to erase it. Instead, he saved the file as "origins_draft.doc" and closed it. He'd come back to it later.

The name would come to him eventually. It had to.

As he closed his laptop, a sharp pain lanced behind his eyes again. For just a second, he thought he saw a face reflected in the dark screen—older, scarred, with eyes that had seen centuries.

Then it was gone, and he was alone in his room, wondering why a story about some nameless kid taken by strange beings felt more real than anything he'd ever written before.