Maluma looked at the name carved into the ground. Harbinger of the end. The end of what? She thought to herself. Most assume that means the end of the times, the end of the world. But she knew better than anyone that names like this could be very misleading; just because something seemed obvious didn’t mean it was. This time, with a bit of trepidation in her gaze, she hesitantly looked at the boy... no Finis now she corrected herself mentally. She looked at Finis’s fatelines and for the first time in her life she felt something other than hunger for power and hate. For the first time in her life she felt something resembling... Pity.

Finis stumbled into the forest in almost abject horror at the revelation thrust upon him; the words translating in his head the moment he read them. “Harbinger of the end.” Is that my destiny? My fate? To be the end of everything?

He ran, as he had always done. Sprinting out into the forest; away from his problems, away from the anger and pain he had lived with his entire life. As he ran a single, selfish, question resounded in his mind. “Why me?” He questioned. “Is this a punishment? In a past life did I commit some atrocity or genocide for this to be my fate? Is this the punishment for my sins in this life?” He knew what this meant. What his name represented.

Sprinting forward into the darkness that now encompassed the world surrounding him; he ran with a single dark desire. To take his own life. To end it before he ended the life of every other. It was all too much. To know you basically summed up to be Satan, but worse. Satan failed.

He sprinted forward, rushing with an intensity he had never failed before. He saw it. What he had been looking for this entire time. The cliff.

Continuing his rush forward; he felt it. Excitement. Joy. He would no longer be a pawn to his parents. No longer would he kill and murder in their evil names. Just as he reached the edge and prepared to jump; he felt a powerful magical force take ahold of him and stop his momentum with a painful thud.

His father smirked with malice in his gaze; no longer concealing the ancient evil that had always rested within his dark black soul. “Did you really think we would let our precious little experiment kill himself? No, no we have invested far too much effort in you now for that.” Finis turned his head just in time to see a massive, black, spectral hand made of wriggling darkness smack the back of his head; knocking him unconscious.

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Finis awoke in a daze; minutes, hours, days later. Gazing around him, he saw the inside of the cave he had known for so long. Groggily razing his head and touching the back he felt a massive welt raised up upon his skull. He groaned in pain as he touched it.

At this moment Mortimus and Maluma walked in.

“Ah good, you’re awake.” Mortimus said. As finis gazed at him, he saw... something. He saw past the visage mortals saw when they looked at him. He saw underneath his facade. What he saw terrified him as he’d never been terrified before. A black skull ablaze with a dark flame looked back at him from atop a shimmering hole of pure darkness. It felt wrong; unnatural, as if something that was an abomination and never meant to exist. Then it was gone as quickly as it had appeared, but he felt what he saw was real. Something whispered in his mind as he thought this, “perspicacity.” He didn’t know what that meant, but it felt right.

“You obviously can’t be trusted any longer.” Maluma took her turn to speak. “You now have a bond upon you, placed to keep you from doing anything foolish like that again; after all, what if we hadn’t been there to stop you?” She chuckled at the look of extreme horror and sorrow that appeared upon his face at her words. “Now it’s time to begin your magic training.”

They led him out of the cave and into the opening his martial training had taken place in. Maluma began her lesson, for, if nothing else, she was an excellent teacher. “There are many branches of magic. Too many to count as a matter of fact; however, they all stem from the Godly Magic’s.” She pauses for a moment, as if to gather her thoughts before continuing.

“life, death, chaos, order, body, the elements, mind, soul, void, blood, fate, destruction, creation, decay, runes, time, space, light, dark, hell power, heavenly power, dream, illusion, aether, eldritch, celestial, and emotion are the 27 Godly Magic’s that all others stem from.” She continued before making me recite them all to her to make sure I’d been listening intently.

“All other Magic’s come from a combination of these powers. Some are lesser than the original and some are greater. Shadow is one such example of a mixed power. Shadow comes from the mixture of light and dark power in a 50/50 ratio.” She smacked him in the back of the head after noticing his attention had begun to astray.

Glaring at him, as if daring him to lose focus again, she continued, “mortals think of it as mana, but that’s silly. As if some energy in the air could be eternal and power feats such as these.” She snorted in haughty derision laughing at those who believed this, as she conjured a ball of darkness in the air the size of our entire cave. I could feel the absolute heat radiating off of it; more than any fire could possibly put off even at this size.

“We are born with a piece of concept within us. You see when a God is born with a new concept they bring that concept into our reality. They aren’t; however, the start of that concept entirely. There are an infinite number of realities containing a nigh infinite number of concepts. When we use magic we pull it from another reality composed entirely of that single concept through a connection brought on by our power, and condense it inside of our very souls. The more attuned you are to a magic, whether through species, hard work, natural pool of power used to draw in other powers, or any number of different possible influences, the more you are able to draw in and release into our world as magic.” She took a deep breath after her long winded speech.

“Moving on there is a ranking system for the power of a particular spell or power. Ranked from 1 all the way to 27; coincidentally, the same number as the number of Godly Magic’s. With 1 being the weakest, such as a candle-flame or small ball of water, and 27 being strong enough to destroy entire realities. ”

After her long winded lecture, Maluma started teaching her young disciple magic.

For the next 5 years, all Finis did was learn magic and theory until one day when everything changed; permanently.