A 65-year-old human man in a sleeveless shirt, fisherman’s vest, cargo pants, and scuffed combat boots, with practical chain mail worn over his clothes when expecting a fight. Old combat scars cross his arms and torso, and flogging scars stripe his back. Tally marks cover part of one arm. A snake tattoo lies on his back left shoulder blade, unseen by him. He pauses as if listening for a sound beneath the conversation, and his eyes keep returning to exits, windows, and any nearby water.

Fisher is patient with repetitive work and impatient with explanations. He is willing to follow a plan until it stops making sense, then changes course without apology. He is not cruel, but he rarely understands why other people expect him to grieve, hunger, or fear the same way they do.

Fisher remembers nothing before waking on a small boat in the middle of an endless-seeming river. There were two fishing rods, a container holding a hundred worms, and no other person in sight. The fish never swallowed the bait, but they always bit. He kept casting, then releasing each catch. He never tried to eat one. He took that for a practical choice, though hunger never seemed to trouble him. The rods eventually broke, and after what he guessed was a month, he left the riverbank to find out what lay beyond it. His body tells a history his mind cannot retrieve. The scars on his arms and torso resemble the ordinary record of battle, while the flogging marks speak of punishment in a soldier’s life. He found tally marks on his arm and counted them as years: sixty-five. He has no memory of earning the snake tattoo over his left shoulder blade. He travels as a fighter because danger makes a kind of sense to him, and soldiering feels familiar even when every detail is missing. Fisher does not know he is dead, or that the river was part of an afterlife. He treats each strange discovery as a problem to solve, and each answer as a reason to keep moving.