I would like to say that this work was inspired by a friend, who told me that the world needs to know my story - but I cannot. This text is purely for my own self satisfaction, and possibly self-promotion. That said, however, it is, at the very least, an odd story.

It begins in standard fashion - with a high schooler, who hates everything.

My name then was Theopholus - and I was convinced the state hated me. As a child of abnormal abilities, I was removed from my parents and placed in what you would call a group home; it was populated entirely by a few children like myself, and other children whose parents had convinced the state that the problems surrounding their raising would be better handled by the state itself in its grand wisdom and compassion. In other words - we were the castoffs. It didn't occur to me then to question the reasons for the similar treatment of the unwanted, troublesome children of the normal culture, and abnormal "gifted" children. All I knew was that in a terrible situation, I had the worst lot - you see, I was a warlock - well, a potential warlock. But even among these oddballs, I was a unique one. Unlike the extremely vast majority of others, I was unmarked by an element. When a child successfully tests as a warlock, he or she is branded by the element that they are most strongly attuned to. (Depending on what world you are from reader, you may have an assumption that this "element" is one of 4, or maybe 6. In truth, in this civilization, there were total of 251 recognized elements.) I will not include a description of all the elements and their powers - in truth, it would matter little to the rest of this story. I was the unknown - a brandless warlock. In all of the history of our people, not a single brandless warlock had managed to do anything of interest.

In short, I was the useless one in a class of people feared for their power. Other warlocks-to-be were bullied from time to time, but if they successfully pointed out to the other children that their power would be great one day, they earned a measure of safety. What if a fire mage remembered the boy who held his hand in the fire? One day that same warlock could burn the skin off of his former tormentor, and few would say anything. But myself? I was harmless - and small and scrawny to boot. Then, came the day of freedom! I started attending what you would call a high-school.

I won't discuss the first three years. You can fill in the blanks for the most part - I had hoped to escape from my tormentors at a new school, but unfortunately they simply found more followers to impose their will upon and through. In my senior year I had withdrawn nearly as far as possible internally - and had become so boring to the proto-gang that I didn't even get physically attacked more than a token once a week. I was a standard high-schooler besides that - the only warlock-esque ability I ever had developed was an ability to circulate my mana internally - a mist-type friend had taught me from his lessons for a week or so when I was younger, before she moved away to a warlock training academy. My hormones drew me ought of my shell enough to develop a hopeless crush on Seliena - the only girl in the class who would actually say "Good Morning" to me occasionally. To be honest, she wasn't particularly pretty, which may be why she was able to acknowledge my existence. My boredom and mild level anguish led me to hope in a bizarre way for something, anything, extraordinary to happen. I wasn't very hopeful it would be pleasantly extraordinary, but losing a finger to gangrene would at least be something other than bullying and inane lessons. Then, as you might have guessed, I got my wish. And yes, it was a her, and her name was Sanguine.

Sanguine was introduced to us as "Miss Atonia" - a inspector for educational stability and growth for the government. She was rather remarkable - I believe every boy in the school who gone through puberty was interested in governmental programs for the first time. As someone who always hid though, two things deeply disturbed me - the first being that Miss Atonia was clearly hiding something. As beautiful and remarkable as she was, I noticed the attempt to appear - well - smaller - than she actually was. I don't mean that in any obscene way, simply that the personality presented was incredibly less impactful than what was lurking behind it. Secondly, Miss Atonia terrified me by being interested in me. This also was not obvious - she treated me just like every other student, but for a child like myself, being treated as the same as the others was remarkable itself.

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I won't give you too many details - this is all introductory in nature - let's speed through the subsequent kidnapping. I learned that Miss Atonia's name was Sanguine simply because neither she nor any of the other kidnappers seemed to care at all about speaking in my presence. I knew enough to be beyond afraid at that point - I won't go into the details, but when they cut my clothes off of me, they were not longer clean in any sense. What I cannot attempt to do in any way is present myself as heroic through this - if my captors had asked me a question, any question, I would have answered as best as I could. Outside of killing for them, there was nothing they could have asked of me that would have made me hesitate, and if I am honest, I most likely would have killed for them as well. Instead, they continued ignoring me, and while they systematically removed pieces of my body and collected the blood, I heard something about a ritual between my screams. Their cold lack of any emotion towards me somehow honed my desire to understand something, anything, about why my life was drawn apart in this horrifying way.

Ignoring my screams, and not detailing how long it took, my fragmented mind understood one thing - that there existed something named a world seed, which was the source of being on this world, from simple existence to magic itself, and that my warlock ability was one that allowed for blood pacts; my blood, my body, it all would allow the very appropriately named, and dyed Sanguine to form a pact with the world seed of this world, and control it. I had one desire at this point - to fuck up their plans. I had been bullied my entire life, and the extent of pain I had suffered snapped some very important desire for self-preservation. My impending death could not matter less to me, except that it would help the sons of bitches that were ending me. This didn't matter much, however, as I was chained securely, and my tongue had been removed already - there was no chance of committing suicide by swallowing it. Finally, I realized that I was being moved - Sanguine herself was carrying my hulk down a tunnel. I cannot tell you where that tunnel was, or how long I was in it, but at the end I saw only a bright light - shining from within a diamond of extraordinary size. It was not polished uniformly, or even colored uniformly - it was huge and unfinished, except for a gleaming spike on the top of it - a spike that I was impaled on a moment later.

In my desire for revenge, I had been doing nothing but channeling mana inside myself for however long it was that I had been tortured, which is what saved me for a moment. Sanguine clearly had intended to pierce my heart with the spike, but instead my internal mana channels deflected it by merely an inch, and while the spike scratched the side of my heart, I was still tenuously alive, which is what saved me. My mana channel did not only deflect the spike, it also was pierced by the spike, and both my blood and my mana were liberally flowing down the diamond world seed as a whole; Sanguine, in her ecstatically anticipatory spellcasting, did not notice, and what was an entire litany of words, thoughts, and mana creations for her was as simple as a desire for me. On some nearly purely instinctual level I felt Sanguine attempting to connect to some ability within myself, and I felt more than heard or learned that it was binding magic. I knew that my warlock binding was what had made me the target for this madness, and that it must enable a connection to this world seed, so I wished - may I be bound to this seed.

The brightness of the flash overwhelmed everything; I could not tell whether it was within my mind or within the cave, or simply it illuminated the world as a whole. I heard the softest of whispers as I faded - "you must tell me what you wish..."

I wish to not be alone, I wish to live, I wish to find something beautiful.

The next flash left no doubt - everything I sensed, everything I knew, everything around me burned away.