Long before she became known across portions of Aethelgard as "Red," Lynn Abbrin was simply another wandering opportunist moving through the unstable trade routes of the medieval world. Unlike knights, priests, or scholars, Lynn belonged to the older category of people history rarely records clearly: smugglers, thieves, scouts, couriers, tavern regulars, information brokers, and travelers who survived through charm, nerve, improvisation, and movement.

She followed opportunity instinctively.

Even terrible opportunities.

The surviving fragments place Lynn somewhere near the eastern Mediterranean during the later Crusade period: ports crowded with soldiers, relic traders, mercenaries, wandering pilgrims, criminal syndicates, occult scavengers, and hidden immortal interests operating beneath the surface chaos of the age. She had no understanding of vampires, Genies, Aethelgard, or larger cosmological structures.

She was simply chasing something valuable.

The details vary wildly depending on the source. Some accounts claim Lynn stole the wrong artifact from the wrong merchant. Others insist she accepted courier work without asking enough questions. A few suggest she deliberately followed rumors of hidden magical contraband believing she could sell it later for absurd profit.

Every version agrees on one point:

Lynn crossed a line she did not realize existed.

Unlike Alyera's violent crossing, Lynn's transition into Aethelgard happened fast, messy, and almost absurdly unceremoniously. One moment she was running through crowded streets avoiding armed men she had probably cheated recently. The next, reality simply failed to continue behaving correctly. Alleys unfolded into impossible geometry. Lantern light bent sideways. Sounds echoed too long. The ground vanished beneath her entirely.

Then she hit stone.

Lynn arrived directly into one of Aethelgard's lower bazaar spheres: crowded, noisy, layered, alive, and filled with exactly the kind of dangerous social chaos she instinctively understood best. Traders shouted across hanging bridges. Strange lights drifted overhead. Floating islands hung impossibly across the Ether beyond the city edges. Nothing made sense.

Lynn adapted in under five minutes.

Most arrivals panicked.

Lynn started asking where the nearest tavern was.

The landing was not elegant. It was a flailing, chaotic tumble that ended with a painful, bone-jarring thud on a surface that felt like polished stone but looked like captured starlight. Lynn lay there for a second, the wind knocked out of her, her head spinning. The world was a cacophony of impossible sights and sounds: shouting in languages she'd never heard, the smell of spices that made her mouth water and her eyes water, the sight of floating islands in a sky that wasn't a sky at all.

A normal person would have screamed. Or fainted. Or prayed. Lynn did the one thing she'd always done when faced with an impossible situation: she got up, brushed herself off, and immediately looked for the angle. She saw a creature made of swirling light and mist staring at her. She saw a vendor hawking what looked like bottled starlight. She saw a dozen different species of beings haggling, fighting, and laughing.

And she saw a mark. A portly, jewel-encrusted being so distracted by the spectacle that his coin purse, heavy and swinging from his belt, was practically begging to be liberated. Lynn didn't think. She acted. She pushed through the crowd, a muttered "pardon me" on her lips, and a second later, the coin purse was in her hand, and she was melting back into the chaos, her heart pounding not with fear, but with the exhilarating thrill of the hustle. This place? It wasn't a nightmare. It was the biggest, craziest port city in all of creation. And she had just found her new home.

Her first hour was a masterclass in survival. She didn't waste time trying to understand the cosmology. She learned the rhythm. The way the crowd flowed. The gestures that meant "come closer" versus the ones that meant "back off." She filched a piece of fruit that tasted like sunshine and regret. She swiped a cup of something that burned all the way down and cleared her head. She was a sponge, soaking up information, not with her mind, but with her instincts.

By the time the sun—whatever it was—began to set, Lynn had a pocket full of strange coins, a belly full of exotic food, and a grin that had half the bazaar smiling back at her. She had already made three friends, two enemies, and one very lucrative, very dangerous contact. She didn't know what Aethelgard was. She didn't need to. She knew how it *lived*. And that was all that mattered.