Connor Evans and The Binding Scrolls

Normal Day, Normal Week

It was a normal day, in a normal week, just like any other. Everything went as per standard throughout my morning, went out with my mom and spent some time on my computer, considered getting some food or taking a dip in the pool, but was interrupted with an unexpected knock on my door.

Now this, my friends, is something was absolutely not normal and the opposite of how I thought this day would go.

I pulled open the door, smiling wide at the stranger. She remained mostly still, her face was furrowed by seemed to lighten as she saw me, she was wearing black boots, a grey beanie and an old, dusty black jumper that could have once been a deep inky black, but now resembled old charcoal. She carried a muted grey side bag, coated in half-chipped buckles and filled with what looked like delicate wraps of ancient sheets of paper, in her arms was a thick, leather bound book with a deep, rich brown cover lined with golden coils that glimmered in the morning sunlight.

"Good morning!" I said simply, trying to decode who this girl is or what she might want.

There was a pause, as she tensed up and swallowed, "yeah, good morning. You're Connor, right?"

"...yeah?"

"Good, do you have a moment?"

"Why?"

"Just... Just come with me, for a second, okay?"

I gave her a weird look, I would've otherwise declined but my gut seemed to pull me out of my house towards wherever this strange girl wanted me to go. I obliged, quickly running back upstairs to fetch a jumper and my glasses.

We walked out onto the street, I was still adjusting my muted red sweater and fixing my dark brown hair, the darn thing refusing to look like anything except a b-tech live-action adaption of a 90s anime nobody wanted.

I was following the girl, who was significantly shorter than me, we both marched and with each step her short hair rocked from side to side, the dyed tips a little more rigid than the rest. From the eye, she couldn't have been older than 16 but I couldn't get the chance to ask her. She'd turn around every now and again, her browny-hazel eyes flitted carefully around us.

Was she being followed? Were we being followed?

Questions for later, the girl whirled around and pulled me into a small cove between two houses on the street, we were relatively blocked off by some light shrubbery but to an outsider we were just dumb kids being dumb.

She straightened her back and cleared her throat, furrowing her brow as she tried to maintain eye-contact with me. "My name is Stephanie, but I'd ask you call me Steph. I am very painfully aware that this looks really, really weird and am very appreciative of you not saying anything thus far."

I nodded slowly, she nodded with me as if to reassure herself that this was happening.

"You are the Chosen One."

Wait, what?

We both paused, I shot her a confused look as she stared blankly back at me. Steph swallowed, her pale face turning pink. "That came out weird, I had more to say before that, I just..."

She looked to her feet to think for a moment.

"There are these things called Scrolls, right? Like, Scrolls with a capital S because these are important enough to be proper nouns. These Scrolls are very, very ancient and contain very, very dangerous magic, like crazy world-ending magic or uh, magic that could stop the speaking of certain words that can level mountains and evaporate oceans and possibly contain evils as dangerous and ancient as the very Scrolls themselves. These things are so powerful they're almost sentient, one wrong move and they could turn us into paste, we don't even have to do anything, they could one decide that they don't like me and explode." She moved her arms up and down like a typewriter, staring me straight in the eye and taking heavy breaths.