(General P.O.V)
A couple billion years ago, a powerful Comet smashed onto a small planet, just a few of hundred million years old. The planet orbited a relatively mature star. It's yellow light providing enough sustenance to have the potential for evolution of life from single celled organisms to multicellular organisms. Yet that was not as easy as it seemed.
The planet lacked something. An essence to push that potential into state. An essence that was present in its closest neighbor.
There were no dinosaurs, or other pre-historic animals as one might expect when hearing about the age of the planet. It wasn't even the only planet orbiting the star system. It was the fourth. On that point, just like earth.
This Fourth planet that would come to be known as Mars supported the potential of sentient life. Single celled organisms was just the start. However its potential for evolution, as stated before fell short. It was not as strong as it's neighbor. It seemed that life would end at single celled organisms. Through some natural constraints, it would not jump the first hurdle. The first great filter.
This planet was even more nondescript and not really noteworthy, when compared to the scale of the large universe.
It was just...basic. But then, through the starlit canvas of the cosmos, a grey comet that had initially started out as something bigger than the very solar system, was streaking through space towards our unimportant planet.
The meteor that smashed onto that small planet changed everything. The impact was an explosion of such high magnitude that every single trace of life on the surface of the planet was destroyed by the heat and pressure. The planet lost a third of it's body, which were stones and rocks that would hover around it, revolving for years before forming into Mars' first moon.
And those changes would shift a very important thing while strangely enough, as if fighting to keep it's prewritten fate, nothing much else.
The core of the meteor managed to dig deep into the crust of the planet, making it all the way to the core as a pulsing huge boulder the size of a bus, only to eventually settle near the dense and hot core of the barren rock orbiting around the sun. Healing.
A couple million years would go by and caused by an esoteric energy wave not native to this universe, life would begin anew. Single celled organisms would sprout and thrive, this time not on the surface of the planet but deep in it, on a self sustained environment around the core.
Roiling and twisting elemental energy gave rise to liquid water, oxygen, and everything else that could support life.
A few hundred million years later and the first of the multicellular organisms would appear. Aquatic animals inside the water pools on near the core. The heat and gravitational force from it was nullified by a very weird phenomenal. Mystical energy. Magic. It seemed that the conditions for life had only been a side effect of this. The conditions were very similar to those found on earth.
A few more hundred million years would see the eventual evolution from aquatic animals to land walking beasts. A true split had occured.
Another billion years would pass and whether it was by fluke or planned by some higher power, the environment would enter the dinosaur age. And the first phase lasted over 300 million years, the second a little over 500 million years.
During that time, the third planet, earth had similarly evolved and realized it's potential for sentient and then sapient life. The surface of Mars on the other hand was barren and dry. Seen from space or even on the planet itself, the soil was red and lifeless. Wind storms buffeted the landscape constantly. It was uninhabitable.
But someone knew that to not be true. A powerful being noticed the energy signature coming off the planet. Modern day scientists would term this energy as dark matter, not really having a good explanation for what this detected energy was.
The Sorcerer Supreme of the time, Agamotto part of the triumvirate known as the Vishanti would use his prodigious mystical abilities to construct a dense energy shield around the core of the planet. Having sensed the alien quality of what was contained in the core, he knew the dangers and opportunity it presented.
He would regularly come to check on the binding spell. Regularly update and maintain it, fixing matters such as energy containment which was the prevalent issue. And Agamotto would meditate upon the mysteries contained in the energy. He would learn not to harness it but to guide it using his own spirit.
Agamotto would spread these teachings to the sorcerers under him, instructing them upon the two main branches of this energy that they could connect to just as easily as dimensional powers. Yet this energy was much more powerful and seemed to possess no limits aside from the user's own ability to handle the strain on their souls.
The mystic Power branches were thus split into, dimensional energies, personal energies, universal energies and the Avatarian practices.
The two main branches developed from this new branch of magic called Avatarism, were Elemental magic and Anti-natural Mystic energy. The first was self explanatory. They could connect to any of the main branches of the elements, Wind, Fire, Water and Earth. Earth however seemed to be weaker. There were many theories about this but the main one was the one proposed by Agamotto.
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He thought that maybe earth magic was weaker because of the elder goddess Gaea limiting control over the element. This led to those who agreed with this theory to also propose that the reason why Gaea would do that was perhaps because Avatarism came from a god. Just like how gods granted special humans powers maybe they were blessed by a god to wield this gift. Maybe Avatarism came from the Avatar. That unpopular belief would see the very first split between the sorcerers.
Staunch practitioners of Avatarism abandoned dimensional and universal energies to focus on Avatarian practices. They walked with the world and became known as Druids.
The field of elemental magic was further developed when druids and sorcerers discovered they could use Sub-skills related to the four elements. Fire had lightning, combustion, plasma, heat and many others.
Wind was cloud magic, which was extensively used to control the weather and cause rain to fall on arid areas, and it's other subsets like sound. Water too had its own Sub-skills, though the users struggled to access it's Sub-skills apart from mist, ice and healing.
Earth element only saw marginal success. However after a few hundred years, the druids and sorcerers who remained persistent and stubborn were able to cultivate Sub-skills such as magma magic, gravity manipulation for unassisted flight, crystal magic which was highly sought after and even plant magic.
Onto the second category, the Anti-natural Mystic practices were magical disciplines that worked directly to oppose or significantly alter a natural phenomenon. There were 2 categories in this practice, Chaos and Order mystical energy.
A power that had no limit. 10 sorcerers could use Order to cast a planet wide spell and change anything from laws of nature that governed the continued existence of life to the life the planet itself contained. They could make themselves gods.
Like wise, 10 sorcerers of sufficient strength could destroy an entire planet, submerge it in darkness by using Chaos mystical energy freely.
This was the true golden age of Sorcerers. Even powerful eldritch abominations seeking dominion over the earth were not too challenging for them. They fought with skill and power, The practices of the Avatarism, the name coined by Agamotto enabling them to stand on par with a young Odin fresh off his conquest of the nine realms.
But such power often breeds greediness and just before Agamotto's ascension, one of his students decided to take over forcefully. He wanted to fuse Order and Chaos Magicka and become the most powerful sorcerer to ever walk the earth. Not even Agamotto could combine the two.
They were opposing sides, two extremes that clashed heavily. There was no way to safely get them working together. Agamotto had tried it over his thousands of years of existence but each time he ended up with failure. His student was just as determined as Agamotto had been and far less nice about it.
Death raged across the whole world as his student, the very first sorcerer termed as a dark mage, tried everything from the dregs of divinity from evil realm lord's such as Dormammu and Chthon, to contracts with demons.
He learned the teachings of the Dao from the Eastern side of the globe and supplemented these teachings with the shamanism from Africa and North America. He became a very experienced Druid, able to use all four elements easily. He waged a campaign of death all in a bid to surpass his master and become the one true mage.
But Agamotto was far stronger, far more experienced and after giving him countless chances to redeem, far more merciless. The conflict culminated in a legendary battle that caused the oceans to boil, land to crack and the whole planet to tremble.
Agamotto finally won.
And after that he realized the dangers of the Anti-natural Mystic energy and added another spell to the core of mars.
The spell restricted any magical practitioner from ever accessing both Magicka. He made sure to pass down the role of monitoring the spell work and ensuring it did not break to his successor. Agamotto ascended and a new Sorcerer Supreme took charge.
Years passed, the sorcerer supreme title had been passed down over 3 times by now. A group of powerful beings created by an even more powerful group of beings known as the Celestials arrived on Earth. This new group was humanoid and possessed powers that were different from conventional power systems like dimensional energies, personal energies like chi and Avatarism. They were known as the Eternals.
They were directly empowered by their creators with something called cosmic energy and were charged with one specific objective. The destruction of alien creatures preying on the young human race, called Deviants. They carried out this mission almost religiously, taking over humankind's development and increasing it by decades while hunting down large concentrations of Deviants and ending them.
Some of the astute ones noticed the absolutely staggering energy pulsing from Mars, the fourth planet on the solar system and they all decided to inform their master, a Celestial known as Arishem. He ordered them to maintain a strict observation on the planet but not do anything else.
The Sorcerers, Druids and this new group of beings called the Eternals understood each other and continued on with their separate but similar missions. The eternals learned a lot about Humanity. How fickle and selfless they could be. There was as much potential for good in them as bad. They settled among them learning their ways.
They became hailed as gods. And that caused them to lose sight as they grew to love humans. Then tragedy struck and nothing was ever the same. A huge war sprang up that claimed the lives of countless humans. They had used the gifts of science gifted to them to wage war.
The Eternals split up and retreated to different parts of the world.
More years passed. Empires like Rome and Ottoman rose up and fell. Nations sprang up as democracy became a thing and the globe became more connected. The industrial era arrived and brought with it new ways of doing things. Men braved the seas in long voyages to distant lands. World war 1 begun and passed.
World war 2 begun and brought with it more death and more advance in science. Humanity's creation, an atomic bomb claimed the lives of a lot of people, destroying cities and leaving behind biological defects in the survivors and their descendants.
The year 2000 arrived.
Deep within the core of mars, something stilled. Something ancient and incomprehensible. The Vishanti felt it in their dimension. The All-father Odin immediately went on a long Odin's sleep in preparation.
Arishem gave the Eternals new orders and the time for their reunion grew closer. The mad Titan Thanos started having nightmares and dreams that made no sense.
The ancient one opened her eyes from where she was meditating. On a barren red soiled planet that housed the very thing she had been using to keep herself alive. She gazed down and felt her heart skip a beat.
He was waking up.