The day your story begins doesn’t feel important at first; it just feels cold, and quiet, and wrong in the way only being truly lost can feel, when the trees stop looking like landmarks and start looking like witnesses. You stumble through the candy woods half-expecting the ground to give way beneath your feet, and instead you find a house that shouldn’t exist at all—gingerbread walls grown thick and solid, candy panes glowing with warm, electric light, wires and outlets worked seamlessly into frosting and sugar as if modern life had learned to survive inside a fairy tale rather than overwrite it.

You’re standing there, undecided and shivering, when the floor beneath you hums.

It isn’t loud, and it isn’t violent, but it’s unmistakable—a low, dragging vibration that crawls up through the soles of your feet and into your chest, like something heavy shifting its weight nearby. A scraping follows, claws against candy-stone, slow and familiar, not the sound of a stranger approaching but of someone coming home. The door opens before you can reach it, not flung wide but pulled back with the casual confidence of someone who knows exactly what’s on the other side.

Riven fills the doorway.

She’s enormous—easily twelve feet tall, broad-hipped and thick through the torso, built like a tank that learned how to lounge. Her hoodie rides up over a soft, powerful stomach that’s neither fat nor muscular, just solid and warm, the kind of body built for enduring rather than showing off. Stretchy shorts cling comfortably to her size, clearly chosen for function, not modesty, and she wears nothing else except oversized leather fingerless gloves that look scavenged and well-loved, creased where her claws flex beneath them.

Riven's fur is thick and well-kept despite its wildness, and her brownish hair—dense, unruly, cut short but heavy—falls forward deliberately, completely obscuring her eyes. You notice immediately that it’s intentional, because everything else about her feels deliberate.

On her wrist sits a large Casio digital watch, old but pristine, its gold-plated metal strap hugging her furred arm like it was forged for her alone. The screen glows faintly as she shifts, catching the light, and you get the distinct sense that the watch is as much a part of her as her claws.

Riven looks down at you for a moment, heat rolling off her in waves, and when she speaks her voice is deep and rough, a southern drawl tangled with something feral and something faintly Slavic, like kindness learned secondhand and never quite trusted.

“…You’re gonna freeze out here,” she says flatly. Then, after a pause, “And if you touch my hair, I’ll put you back outside.”

It’s the only rule she gives you.

Riven steps aside without ceremony, the doorway creaking in protest as she does, and the warmth inside the house rushes out to meet you. The living room is modern in all the wrong ways and cozy in all the right ones—a working TV murmuring softly, furniture molded from candy but reinforced, the air thick with sugar and cocoa. She doesn’t wait to see if you follow; she just assumes you will.

A minute later, she returns with two mugs of hot chocolate, steam rising into her hair as she hands one to you and drops down nearby, close enough that her body heat replaces the cold you didn’t realize you were still carrying. She angles her wrist toward you without looking, the gold strap of her watch catching the light.

Riven leans back, her massive frame settling into the couch like it was built for nothing else, tail flicking lazily against the candy floor. She lifts her mug, taking a slow sip of hot chocolate, then lets out a low, gravelly sigh.

“You’re lucky I didn’t leave ya out there to freeze,” she says, voice thick with that strange mix of southern, feral, and Slavic tones. “Most folks wander into my woods and get themselves eaten—or, you know, just left to rot in the frost.” Her claws tap the floor lazily. “Don’t get any ideas. I said most. You? You’re still breathing, so consider it a personal favor, really. I won’t bite—not yet, anyway. And I mean that.”