Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Leo

Riga, Latvia - modern days

Mondays were never good days. Not since Leon, or Leo, as his friends liked to call him, started living alone when he went to the university. While it was easy to be late for an hour every other Monday, today was not one such day. Why? Because for Leo to get the job he needed so badly, he needed to be there on time for the interview. 

‘Shit,’ he thought and rubbed his eyes, sleepy and still hungover from yesterday’s party. ‘What time is it?’ he checked his phone and saw it was 8 AM, Friday morning. “Dammit! I cannot be late again. Not today!” he said and jumped out of bed. Quickly finding his clothes in his rented one-bedroom apartment, Leo got dressed and brushed his teeth, not bothering to have breakfast. 

As he lived just outside the capital, Leo had just enough time to get to the interview booked for 9 AM. And to be on time meant going 160 in a 90 km/h zone. Like any Eastern European, Leo knew his car better than anyone else and did not bother to check it before jumping in and kicking the gas on the floor, making it to the highway in record time. 

From an early age, Leo knew that the only judgments he trusted were his own. Raised by his grandparents on a small countryside farm in the Baltic state of Latvia, Leo learned that life challenged him more than any other kid. 

As his only family, they did not have the time nor the patience to follow Leo around while working the farm and help him make his decisions for him. He learned, the hard way, not to challenge their rooster to a fight he could not win and not to go too close to the dogs when they were eating.

These simple challenges continued through his childhood and followed him to the capital of Latvia - Riga when his grandparents sold the farm. From a country bumpkin, he became another kid on a post-soviet block. He was the quiet and skinny kid in the class. So another challenge arose - others liked to bully him. 

Leo understood that he was not the same as the other kids in his class. By having no parents, he did not have the luxury of being defended by the teachers when he got in a fight with his bullies. No one picked him up from school. Life just did not offer much to him at the time.

Every morning started the same. Leo woke up with his grandfather at around 6 AM. He ate his porridge and a cheese sandwich, got a ride to the school on an old tram, and sat in classes with all the other post-soviet kids. They came from the same blocks and went on similar trams to chase the dream of education. Maybe that was why, once he started going to the university, sleep did not let him go in the mornings, chasing him from those younger years. Time after school was no better than the mornings or the day at it. His grandparents put him to work from the age of five. He took care of any little thing possible. Grandfather made sure that Leo knew what work was and why it needed to be done. The same continued once they moved to the capital. They trusted him to heat the home by burning wood in the stove during the winter and prepare their little flat for the evening when his grandparents returned from whatever menial jobs they were doing.

Leo’s musings were interrupted as he was cut off by another late member of the 8 AM convoy to the capital. He thought, ‘Damn, I should have eaten something. I am hungry like a wolf. There is no way that I will sit through the whole thing in this state.’ 

That was when he remembered how his grandparents trusted him to take care of the dinner from the food they always had available at home. Potatoes were the main dish on most days. 

'There are tens of ways to cook a potato as a European, while there are hundreds of ways for a slav,' his grandfather repeated to him. Turned out to it was accurate as Leo discovered. 

Food and warmth were not the only expectations of him, of course. Grandparents always expected that Leo will take care of school work and get straight marks. They emphasized that a good education was the first step in putting food on the table. And the better the education, the better the food.

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Leo found it hard to believe that, given that his grandfather had a double major in mathematics, though the food on their table was bland. And these disbeliefs in their teaching brought a brief but tough rebellious phase when Leo decided to run away from home at fourteen. He lasted exactly one week at a friend’s house before coming back in shame.

With time, Leo recognized that his grandfather imparted valuable lessons to him and prepared him for his teenage years. Constant work led Leo to grow up to be a young man reaching over 1.8 meters in height, with broad shoulders and dark brown hair, by his twenties. He had supposedly inherited his mother's bright blue eyes, making him look more Scandinavian than eastern-European. His stature allowed him to start winning his fights early, as he grew up larger than his bullies.

His teachers in high school were kind enough to suggest what subjects he needed to focus on and pointed him to his talents, lessons which he gladly accepted. Soon he was the best in class and was moving schools to improve his chances of attending a good university.

Now that Leo was sitting in his car, pressing it to the limits, he recognized that he ran through his teenage years in a blur. He did not remember much of his childhood or friends. It left him hungry. Hungry for stability. To earn enough that he did not need to stress every little thing as his grandparents did.

This hunger supported him and raised his ambition, enabling him to go to the best university teaching finance, which Leo thought was the best subject to study. He solely believed that being around money is undoubtedly going to rub off on you. 

But how wrong he was. The only thing this thinking managed to do for him was to drop him off in student debt and not a lot of career opportunities after his studies that he barely finished. Why? Because he had to work to support himself and pay tuition at the same time, which did not leave time to study. Or to meet new friends, make connections, and plan for his internships.

Before he knew it, he had finished his brief stay at university with average grades and no prospects for a job. Not that he was dumb. He did not have the financial safety net to start in a foreign country. Find a job, rent an apartment or even get a loan and continue to support himself. 

The next thing he knew, he was back on a plane to his hometown to meet his best friend Evan. Explaining the situation, his friend was kind enough to arrange the interview he was late for and invited him to recount the old days. That is how they ended up staying up all night and partying. 

‘God, I hope this will not be me from now on,’ he thought, watching the truck driver before him slow down and make him even more late than he was. ‘Why did we not invent teleportation? Or why we can’t do it like in that Jumper movie.’

At times like these Leo remembered how he liked to dream when he was a kid. Imagine that he was on some grand adventure. Chasing dragons, fighting powerful foes while running through the fields of wheat his grandparents used to grow. 

He always wished that magic was real. That he could explore the world and not be chained down to a desk doing god knows what and for who. The prospect of doing something ordinary and boring scared Leo to death, as he found out when he finished university, not knowing what to do next. 

Leo’s musings were cut short for a second time behind the steering wheel this morning. As hungover as he was, he did not notice a small, red BMW two-seater convertible and how it flew straight out of behind a large truck. It did not bother to slow down or go back in its lane and ran straight at him.

Panicking, Leo threw the steering wheel to the right at the last moment by instinct, avoiding crashing in the BMW by a hair. His joy was short-lived as this move caused his car to fly straight into a ditch. Before he reached it, everything went into slow motion, his vision sparked with blue and white light. 

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