Prologue

From the Desk of Soren Marlowe

Thursday, November 25th, 2123

Now we turn in my confessions to the first incident that would make the history books, the Tower Attack of 2050. Everything I have described up to now would have been, at best, a minor story buried in a social media news feed. I doubt many would read past the headline English Survivor Found Off the Cliffs of Dover as they scrolled by. A few more might have read Assassination Attempt on War Hero Asahi Maki Foiled by Nagoya Academy Students, given the fame of the so-called Divine Blade. “How nice,” they would have said after reading, and then gone back to being enraged by celebrity gossip or politics. I had picked up the moniker of Magpie Wizard, but I wasn’t yet a household name.

That was to my benefit, given the layers of schemes I had to navigate. I had gone from being an exiled devil spy to a triple agent. To the Grim Horde, demonic conquerors of the Earth, I was Captain Malthus the Younger. Well, the former Captain. I had been court martialed for stealing from General Girdan the Fair and seducing his daughter, Fera. For this, I was banished to the human realms. They called it a spy mission, but the powers that be meant it as a one-way trip. However, I had received word that I would be welcome back if I could strike a major blow against the hated Anti-Demonic League and their lackeys, the Wizard Corps.

That order had brought me into the service of Maggie Edwards, a teacher of spell casting at the school. She had her own secret, being a major player in the terrorist Holy Brotherhood of Mankind. The Anti-Demonic League, being made up of the surviving island nations of Earth after we drove them off the mainland, were no fan of my race. They only stopped nuking us because true blooded devils and our orc chattel are not overly bothered by radioactive fallout. Now meditate on what one would have to do and espouse to be driven underground for being too extreme for their tastes. That was the Holy Brotherhood in a nutshell: too Machiavellian for a humanity struggling with all her might to survive. To Ms. Edwards, I was simply the newest recruit, dedicated to advancing their cause of regaining legitimacy after their dismissal from the League’s political life.

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And to my lover, Kiyo Jones, and the friends I had made since arriving at the Nagoya Academy of Magic, I was Soren Marlowe, the strange British refugee with the long nose and Danish name. They called me Magpie, sometimes to annoy me, but also as a sign of affection. There was a part of me that wished they held my only loyalty. It was the foolish, soft part of me. Some might call it the inheritance of my human mother. Those who say that never met Aleksandra.

Regardless, if I looked at the situation rationally, they were at the bottom of my priority list. After all, they were all loyal Wizard cadets, training to fight me and my countrymen once they graduated. None of them would have spared me if they had a hint of my true self.

Maggie Edwards would have disposed of me just as quickly, but she believed that I was simply a demonkin, a traitor to humankind too interested in the ways of the Dark Lord and the Grim Horde. I had fought against them, but Maggie and I both knew things about the other that made us uneasy allies. Mutually assured destruction is a powerful tool to force peace, as the pre-Horde nation-states had discovered. She had a use for me, just as I had of her little club. We had a shared enemy, and I would use them as my ticket back into polite devil society.

My true loyalty ought to have been to the Grim Horde. Humanity had all but lost the war already. The fighting was all over but the crying, and I would be safest back home in the Horde’s capital, Pandemonium, with my military title and honor restored. If I played my cards right, I could have gotten a cushy job in the demonic bureaucracy and spent my days in debauchery and diversion.

Shame that I was never one to be rational.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The tale of the Tower Attack truly begins a month prior, on a day that no historian would recognize: the day Haru Obe awoke from his coma.