>><>---<><|CHAPTER 1|><>---<><< 

<<>>|PROLOGUE|<<>> 

Kane was a tired man, a man who was having an awful day. At first, it began with him waking up in the morning; the morning being 3 AM as opposed to his usual 6 AM morning, and for some inexplicable reason he was completely unable to fall back asleep in the haven that was his bed, forcing him to do things other than rest at this ungodly hour. 

Those other things included him taking a shower, getting ready for work hours before his shift even began, and mindlessly watching television for hours on end. 

The next thing that etched itself into Kane’s day was a cockroach that scuttled its putrid body across the T.V. screen. Nothing that a slipper couldn’t fix, but he knew that when there was one, there were always more to come. Damn thing must have come from his neighbor below his apartment, Daryl was never known to be a clean man. 

When the time came, Kane set off to take the bus off to work. This is where the third event began. Kane was forced to sit next to an old woman who for the life of her just could not figure out how to cover her mouth when she coughed, which was frequently. At least the bus wasn’t late. 

After a 30-minute commute, he had arrived at work. A Subway, wedged right in between a hair parlor and another place he didn’t know the name of, but always reeked of terrible perfume. This is where his painful day decided to flare up even more, like salt to an open wound.  

Apparently, according to his boss, he was an hour late. Despite arriving at the time he arrived at every day ever since he had started working here, he was late. He was told then that he had been sent an email a week ago about his new hours, despite him never receiving one. He relayed this to his boss, and she just told him to get to work. He remembered the last time someone was tardy; they were fired not even a week later for something “unrelated”. His boss really hated those who weren’t on the dot, and he highly doubted his excuse of never getting it would help him. Maybe it was sent into his spam folder, or she forgot to send it? 

Despite his terrible day and the looming threat of losing his job, he found some peace during work as it was thankfully a slow day. Every day was a slow day here, but today especially so. When he wasn't making sandwiches for customers or cleaning dishes, he would be sketching his little fantasies into an equally little pocket notebook. Ranging from fantastical creatures to simple buildings, this was one of the few things in life that helped keep him together. It's amazing what one can do with only paper and pencil. 

So, imagine his anguish when, as he was walking to his bus stop to get back home, he dropped it into a sewer grate after tripping on a coke bottle. After fumbling about and trying to retrieve it for an embarrassingly long time, he gave up and decided to cut his losses. Guess that’s why people don’t draw and walk at the same time. He would buy another one when he scrounged up the money. 

He almost missed the bus, but was able to get there just before it was to depart. He silently thanked his high school self for taking track. 

Finally, he stood before his door, utterly exhausted and wanting nothing more than to stuff his head into a pile of pillows and sleep for a thousand years like a dragon hibernating on their mountain of treasures. 

Once he entered and closed the door, this is where disaster struck for the final time. After a long day, Kane had only wanted peace, and yet, he was only given more to worry about. 

His power was out. 

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Or at least, that’s what he thought happened, but the cold in the air, the smell of moss, and the drips of water and the echoes that accompanied them made the hairs stand up on his neck. 

Something was wrong. 

This could not be his home. 

With a shuddering breath, he picked his phone from his pocket and turned on the flashlight. 

What he saw confirmed his worries. 

“Oh, what in the actual hell.” 

Instead of the yellowish white plaster of his apartment walls, he saw gray stone bricks, aged and worn from water droplets forming and falling from the ceiling for God knows how long. The room he was in wasn’t big, but in some sort of cosmic bout of humor it was bigger than his apartment two times over, which wasn’t hard to accomplish, but it still tickled at Kane. To his right he saw a door, its oak rotten and its iron rusted, it looked like a good kick could send it off its hinges. To his left, he saw a desk and chair, both in the same state as the door. There were a few old looking books and an oil lamp, bereft both of oil and flame. In the chair sat a person, their head resting on the table, dressed in odd robes, which were in the same state as everything else here. Behind Kane, there was a bed, chest, and several bookshelves lining the wall, all filled with their namesake. 

Kane was totally stunned, unable to form a single word or coherent thought. If there was a single word that could completely sum up his thoughts, it would be, ‘What?’. 

After the storm in his head settled, Kane decided to try and wake the person in the chair. Maybe they could give him some kind of explanation? 

Despite his goal to wake the person up, he tiptoed his way over to the desk. But after getting a good look at them, he realized there was no chance of waking them up. 

The person must have been dead for a long, long time, being nothing but bones and dust at this point. Kane thought he would be panicking far more than he was at seeing a dead body, but he guessed bones were much easier on the eyes and mind than rotting flesh. 

At a loss for what to do other than opening the door and hoping he would wake up from this awful dream, he began to pick at the things on the table. 

The books were in a language he could not read, nor were they in any language he had ever seen. The oil lamp was intricate, though any specific details to its design were lost to time. At the edge of the table sat a small sack, no bigger than his fist. When he looked inside of it, he saw some small, odd triangle shaped trinkets of varying colors. In the middle of all of them was a small triangle shaped hole. Was this currency? No, that’s stupid. This is real life; nobody uses funny green metal triangles for money! 

Kane sighed, wishing to wake up just so he could go back to bed and have a dreamless sleep. Even in this dream he felt tired.  

Just as he was going to check the rest of the room, something caught his eye. Within the skeleton’s grasp on the table was a book unlike the others. Instead of the swirling lines that made up the words of the other books, this one had strange geometric lines and shapes, as if a particularly advanced geometry class had thrown up onto the paper. These shapes were drawn to make up vague outlines of what he could almost discern as pictures or drawings, but there was no pattern he could make out, the shapes and lines flowed and bent in ways that almost hurt his head as he tried to understand it. He took a metaphorical step back and instead of trying to look at bits and pieces of it, he looked over the whole thing equally. 

He didn’t know why, but there was something drawing him to it. His eyes kept veering to the center of the page, some unknowable part of him telling him that everything started there. He let this odd instinct guide his eyes, following the unseen flow of the scripture. To his shock, he could understand something about it. Unlike with words, which were formations of letters with concepts and sounds behind them to give them meaning, it felt like he was reading some kind of intent, an intent that gave him bits and pieces of soundless concepts to help him understand what it wanted to tell him, and what it wanted to tell him was that this book’s name was ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Magic’. 

Kane took another step back, physically this time, and took a deep, soothing breath, trying to slow his heart. Everything here just felt so strange to him. First he was sent to some kind of room that was certainly not his, finding the bones of a dead man and now reading some kind of not-language? And one about magic at that! 

Kane brushed his hair back. 

His day was going to be a lot longer, wasn’t it?