Live Wire

LIVE WIRE

Leo Cameron is forty-two years old, divorced, and good at a dangerous job. For seventeen years he's worked the high-voltage lines in the Scottish Highlands — up the pylons in the wind and the rain, where one careless moment is your last. He has a daughter he loves, a Friday night routine, and a life that's small but his.

Then, seventy feet up a transmission tower on an ordinary grey morning, something passes through him. A weapon older than mankind — a shot fired in a war that ended before humanity ever began, drifting through the dark of space for longer than there have been people to forget it — finds him by pure, blind chance.

He wakes on Earth. But it isn't his Earth. Here, humanity never happened. The world is a vast, untouched wilderness, a protected reserve at the forgotten edge of a kingdom that spans the stars — a kingdom that runs on mana and magic, on power bonded and earned, and on towering war-machines piloted by a rare and powerful few. Strength here isn't simply given. It's cultivated slowly, paid for in effort, and forged through hardship. And the only people who find Leo, half-dead and freezing, are three working-class souls illegally digging for fortune where they were never meant to be.

Leo has no power. No mana, no allies, no way home, and a grief he can barely carry. What he does have is a lifetime of hard-won competence, a clear-eyed understanding of how dangerous the world can be, and a stubborn refusal to be used by a universe that would happily chew up a man with nothing.

This is the story of a middle-aged tradesman starting again from absolutely nothing — learning that magic is just another tool, that it won't fix everything, and that a tool is only ever as good as the hands that hold it. It's about grief and starting over, about found family in unlikely places, and about clawing your way up the hard road, through effort and setback, when no one's handing you anything.

A note from the author: this is my first ever writing project — something I've wanted to try for a long time and finally took the plunge on. I'm learning as I go, and I genuinely want to get better at it, so any and all feedback is hugely welcome. If something's working, if something isn't, if a character grabs you or a scene falls flat — please tell me. I'd rather hear it and improve than not. Thank you for giving Leo's story a read. It means more than you know.