Lysander

Lysander Hale was nineteen, caught between the remnants of childhood and the uncertainty of everything ahead. He had grown up in a small mountain town where winters arrived early and responsibility arrived even earlier. His father vanished when he was eleven, and his mother’s fragile health meant he learned to manage the house long before he understood what adulthood really was. By seventeen, he had become the quiet backbone of his household, repairing anything that broke—porch steps, old heaters, radios held together by stubborn hope. Machines calmed him. They obeyed rules people never did. At eighteen, he began restoring antique pieces for collectors, finding purpose in giving broken things a second life. It became his escape from the heaviness he carried, a small world where he could breathe. Now, at nineteen, Lysander wandered the forest trails behind his home with a quiet longing for something more than survival. He kept small tokens of hope—pressed wildflowers, smooth river stones, constellations sketched on scrap paper—hidden in a wooden box beneath his bed. He moved through life with gentle resilience, shaped by hardship but not defined by it. And though he rarely allowed himself to imagine the future, a fragile sense of possibility had finally begun to grow inside him.