The walk home was a long, shameful march. Every shadow seemed to hide a lurking cyclops, every night noise was the sound of her heavy footsteps. Paul felt like a fugitive, a deserter from forced affection. When he finally reached the door of his apartment above the bookstore, he sighed in relief. Safety. Silence. Blessed solitude.
He was about to put his key in the lock when he noticed something. Leaning against his door was a wicker basket. It wasn't unusual for him to receive deliveries—sometimes the other elves would send him rare seeds or books of poetry—but this basket was different. It was covered with a simple, rough wool blanket, and from beneath it came a faint, muffled whimper.
Paul froze, his heart leaping to his throat for an entirely new reason. He looked around. The street was deserted. The night fog enveloped everything in a muffled silence. Slowly, with the same caution he would use with an unstable magical artifact, he knelt and lifted a corner of the blanket.
Inside, wrapped in swaddling clothes, was a baby.
Paul flinched, pulling his hand back as if he had been burned. A baby? Here, on his doorstep? He looked again, more closely. He was tiny, incredibly small, with a rosy face and a tuft of thin, dark hair. But there was something odd about him. Something... alien.
His ears. They were small, rounded, almost glued to the sides of his head. Not pointed like an elf's, not wide like a goblin's, not hairy like a dwarf's. They were smooth, strangely simple. And his skin didn't have the pale elven sheen, nor the robust earth tone of the dwarves, nor the green tinge of the orcs. It was just... skin. Soft and vulnerable.
The baby opened his eyes. They weren't gold or silver, but a deep, ordinary brown. He stared up at Paul, and his whimper turned into a small sob. With trembling fingers, Paul reached out and touched the baby's cheek. It was warm. Real.
He noticed something glittering on the child's chest. It was a small metal locket, hanging from his neck on a leather cord. Paul gently took it between his fingers. A single word was engraved on it, in script he didn't entirely recognize, but managed to decipher: "Adam."
Adam. A name without history, without known lineage. Paul lifted the basket into his arms. It was light, but he felt the weight of an unimaginable mystery. Who was this child? Where did he come from? Why those bizarre ears? He seemed like a creature born without the distinctive traits of any known race. An incomplete being, almost. A... a baseline humanoid, he thought, not knowing a better word.
As he opened the door and stepped into his apartment, the outside world vanished. His escape from Angela, his humiliation with Liv, all seemed distant and insignificant. Now there was only the silence of his apartment, broken by the light breathing of this small creature. He held a life in his hands. A life that no one, judging by his appearance, would understand. And for the first time that night, the fear he felt wasn't for himself, but for the little bundle sleeping peacefully in his basket.