Dillon Travis's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dillon Travis pressed a bruised silver fruit and watched it rot in his palm. He had crossed half the Void to find it. He wanted to cook it into a stew that mended broken bones. Instead it dripped through his fingers, gray and dead. That was his third ruined ingredient today. A cook without a kitchen was just a man holding spoiled food. He crouched on a slab of floating stone, alone in the gray nothing. He had the dream clear in his head. A warm restaurant where travelers ate healing meals and left whole. But dreams needed walls. Dreams needed cold storage. He had neither. He had a sack of dying groceries and a temper rising fast in his chest. His wolf landed beside him, wings folding across her blue-striped back. She dropped a bundle at his boots. More ingredients. Fresh ones she had hunted from every corner of the Void. Her pale eyes watched him, waiting. "They'll spoil too," Dillon said. He gripped the stone until his knuckles went white. "I've got nowhere to put any of it." The wolf nudged the bundle, then nudged his knee. She trotted a few steps and looked back. She wanted him to follow. He almost snapped at her. Then he saw what she circled. A stretch of stone wider than the rest. Steady. Not drifting like everything else. Dillon stood. He tested it with his weight. Solid. It did not tilt or sink. For the first time in weeks, the ground held him. He knelt and touched the surface, and something loosened in his chest. "This is it," he said. "This is the spot." He worked without stopping. His arms were built for this. He hauled beams the wolf helped him drag from a drifting canopy tree, and he raised them into walls. He fit wooden panels. He hung a sign he had carved months ago and never had a place to hang. By the time the frame stood, sweat soaked his tank top and his beard. The cottage was small and warm. Round window in the front. Tidy tables inside. But a kitchen still needed one thing, and Dillon had saved it for last. He built a great chest against the back wall, sturdy and sealed tight. He crafted it to hold cold and keep food alive. When he lowered the wolf's fresh bundle inside and closed the lid, he waited. He opened it an hour later. The silver fruit still gleamed. Firm. Perfect. Dillon laughed out loud. He finally had a fixed spot, a kitchen, and a way to keep every ingredient fresh. The wolf pressed against his leg, and he scratched her ears. Then a bell he had not installed rang at the door. He turned. A stranger leaned in the doorway, wounded and gray-faced, one hand pressed to a bleeding side. "Heard you cook," the stranger said. "Heard it heals." Dillon reached for his knife. His first customer had arrived, and the man was dying.