Prologue:
Congratulations dear reader.
By opening this book, you have taken your first step to understanding magic. This will also be your last step. Unless you can do magic. Then you are a prick for buying this book.
Magic cannot be understood. It is simple as that. As one of the top magical researchers in the world, I can tell you that magic is neither a science nor a form of technology. It is the complete opposite. Science and technology forces us to obey the universe’s rules. In magic, the opposite happens.
We break the rules of nature, and the universe is forced to comply with our whims. It cannot be understood through conventional ways like reading a book.
Then what exactly will this book teach you?
Rest assured, despite not knowing how it works, and never being able to use it, there is still much to learn about magic. Through this book, you will learn about Merlin’s Circle of magic, the most recognized magic classification system. You will read about the different races, the Edenists, Nihiles and humans. You will understand Heaven’s and the Constellation’s role in the universe, and the timeline of the world(s) from Genesis to Exodus. You will know all things related to magic, from Mystic Artifacts like Excalibur to Mystic Beasts like Minotaurs.
No one knows why God created magic, or why he hasn’t wiped out the Nihiles. Nobody has seen him since Exodus. Maybe he died. It is no secret that 3 of 8 Apostles died as well. It doesn’t really matter though. Heaven has refused to interfere with mortal matters since Genesis… sort of. But we will get to that later.
Whatever the case, the important thing is that you have made me 20 credits richer. And I have made you much more knowledgeable of the world or rather, worlds that we live in. Magic is confusing, unpredictable and sometimes downright random. How it works is completely dependent on the user. That’s the first thing and most important thing that you must understand.
Prologue from A Mundane Human’s Understanding of Magic: what’s Hocus and what’s Pocus
By Dr. Mithras Aubade
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Exodus: The event in which the dimension of Eden was completely destroyed and following a Nihile invasion, causing hundreds of millions of Edenists to flee to the human inhabited world of Sol. This event marks the first time the Apostles made a public appearance since Genesis, with the circumstances allowing the Apostles to ignore their Vow of Observance and aid their escape.
Chapter 1: Half Century Power Nap
Death flexes his fingers and he watches in fascination as they dance. It has been far too long since he’s had a body. 50 years is a long time to spend in Limbo.
Floating around in the nothingness was very, very boring.
He had hoped that Magic or Nature would be there, seeing how they had perished earlier, but it seems that Limbo is an every-man-to-himself kind of affair. With no one to pass the time with, he had spent that 50 years thinking. And mourning.
50 years is a long time to spend just on thinking. And mourning.
So he thought about everything. He thought about his time hiding in Sol. He thought about the battles of Genesis. But he spent the most amount of time thinking about God. Recalling every sagely piece of advice and cryptic yet wise words God had given him before the Nihile invasion of Eden.
“Why I made them so weak?” The man smiles in a fatherly fashion, “They are strong my friend, just that they possess a different strength from you. You should watch them more; maybe spend more time with them, before you can understand their potential.”
He silently snorts. He spent two thousand years amongst them. There is nothing strong about humans. Weak, fragile, short-lived. He fails to see the potential in them in which God did.
And that is his problem. He does not want to believe God was wrong. But he has spent eons watching them from Heaven. He has spent two thousand years on Earth living with them, hiding from Heaven. And they have only made mistake after mistake. They slaughter their own kind and erode their home. They enslave their fellow human beings and torture them for sport. Truly, their bigotry knows no bounds. Even the Edenists, with their petty squabbling between each other, kept intra-race fighting to a minimum. They are a short-sighted species, and what lessons they learn from their mistakes are mostly forgotten when the next generation of humans take over. They are in short, unimpressive.
Yet they have survived over 3000 years. There is something within them, something that He saw. The potential He had spoken of. He is determined to find out what it is before deciding his next course of action.
He looks at the reflection in front of him. The eyes that stare back are cold, empty, devoid of life. The body is scrawny and thin, betraying the monstrous power that is an Apostle that inhabited it.
“I am an Apostle no more.”
Was.
Was an Apostle.
He winces as he remembers the venomous words he hurled at Him and the others.
He has renounced that title, thrown it back into the face of the One that had bestowed it upon him.
He had left Him. He had walked out on his Creator, his Father, and had abandoned the closest thing he had to a family. He remembers the face He wore when he had repaid His patience and love with betrayal. The normally stoic yet kind face was twisted with sadness and disappointment. The pain in God’s eyes when he slammed the doors of the Throne Room behind his back and walked out the Pearl Gates.
It haunts him now. For two thousand years, he drifted and hid from the world, blending in as a human, hiding from the eyes of Heaven, while he endlessly tried to make up for the wrong Heaven had done against the Terrans. In the end, he broke one of the few rules God had given him, and he had been more than willing to pay the price.
“The dead. They were not meant to live again.”
He had sinned. But how could he not?
The regrets. The wails of anguish. The memories of the damned. He had fallen into temptation and read the lives of the souls that had ventured into his domain. When he read, he became.
He became the millions upon millions of Terrans, slaughtered by the other Edenists. He became the Girl who had watched her younger brother and parents beheaded right in front of her. Before being violated, then killed by the same perpetrators.
He became the Soldier, who had watched his best friend and lover die in his arms, whose sorrow had driven him to suicide seconds later.
He became the Chancellor, who had watched the mighty Terran nation he had been chosen to lead brought down to its knees in matter of weeks. He had wept, kneeling in deference and gratefulness, as he had thanked the Apostle of Life for smuggling the ten thousand babies and the rest of the Arcana into Sol. He had felt that last burst of pride and hope as he watched the Horoscope and the Big Dipper on it take off into the atmosphere, holding a bloodied sword in his hand, and a vampire head in the other. Then things went black as he looked down and saw a spear pierce through his torso.
How could he not have given them a second chance? To enjoy the simple pleasures that life never gave them. That was what Sanctum was. It was a place, the afterlife, where souls could enjoy and exist to the fullest without the need for survival. It was a world of abundance, solely hedonistic in nature, to let the souls enjoy the happiness that life had robbed them. It was meant as a haven for the victims of life. The Wronged. Where souls could come to together and share about their past lives, and watch their descendants live the life they had been deprived of. It had cost him all his Apostle powers except for the Scythe, but to him, it was a small sacrifice.
For two thousand years, he hid from the eyes of Heaven and Him, trying to build Sanctum and make it as perfect as he could. For two thousand years the Apostle of Death didn’t claim a single soul. At least not until the end. When he had been forced to bring down his blade onto the very One that had created him. In that moment, as Death stared into the Creator’s dying eyes, he realized. He realized why he was created.
He understood that his one true purpose was to kill. The Scythe had been built to kill anything it touched. Nihiles, Edenists or humans. Even God Himself. There would come a time, God knew, where His death would be needed for the sake of the worlds’ survival.
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That time came when the Nihiles had attacked Eden, and had somehow overtaken God’s own body.
It had been a trap, under the pretense of a peace treaty, the Nihile Lords were allowed into Eden to meet with God and the Apostles.
Once again, he took up the mantle of responsibility that had been his since Creation and returned to the rest of his brethren and his Creator to greet their old enemies. He had returned God’s open arms with silence and a refusal to acknowledge Him.
Then the Nihiles acted, taking advantage of God’s kindness and naivety to claim his body as their own.
It had been a complete massacre. A war on a scale the worlds had never seen since the days of Genesis. It made the Terran Purge look like a water balloon fight.
Millions of Nihiles had rushed into Eden through the Gates, bringing down civilizations millions of years old. They had claimed Eden as their own, destroying nations, capturing lives and turning them into slaves. They had destroyed millions of years of labor in manner of hours.
They had no choice but to intervene, no one else could. So Death fought again. He remembered when he called upon his Reapers to aid the fight, the awe and shock that appeared on the faces of the other Apostles. It quickly turned into disapproval and anger when they realized what he had done.
“You broke the rule.”
But there was nothing that could be done against it, not when they were fighting against the 7 Sins and the creator of the Universe Himself.
It proved to be fruitless, even with thousands of the history’s strongest under his command.
Nature had died, trying to protect the fleeing Edenists, and Magic had led the counterattack, only to be struck down by the One that had created him. Fate was incapacitated, unable to use whatever future knowledge he had foreseen to aid their efforts. The rest were spent, all their energy and powers channeled into the portal that brought the Edenists to Sol in the evacuation.
There was no point in doing so when the Nihiles would head there next.
“Use the Scythe”
In the end, it had been God’s strength that had saved them all once again. It was Him that was strong enough to momentarily break through whatever mental and spiritual barrier he was trapped in. It was Him that had seen what had needed to be done.
It was Him that had asked for his own death.
And he had given it to Him.
Immediately.
He had been so angry. Angry at God for not lifting a finger during the atrocity known as the Terran Purge. Angry at Him for being such a naïve fool who believed the lies of the Nihiles even after he’d left them. Genesis had been the result of that. And then this.
But most of all, he had been angry at himself, for being so weak and not standing up for what he felt was right. He had silently watched the Terran Purge from the sidelines while Life had smuggled the survivors out. He had done nothing during the countless human tragedies during his two thousand years on Earth. He could’ve helped. But he didn’t. He was angry, not at his lack of strength and power, but his overabundance of it, that he was too weak to use it. The fact that he was so apprehensive to use it, that he was constantly afraid. What if he was wrong? Wisdom was about knowing when not to use one’s power, rather than the contrary.
He could just as easily destroy the world as he could save it.
“Use the Scythe”
He had heard it as an order and in the heat of the battle and drowned in his rage, he followed it to the letter.
It was only when he held God’s dissolving form, that he had realized what he had done, God’s death slowing the swirling typhoon of emotions in his mind.
He had killed Him.
His Mentor, his Father, his Friend. He had slain the very One that had breathed life into him and almost everything else in the universe. He would have stayed there for an eternity, clinging on to the prone form of the Heavenly Father, if it weren’t for the last words that were uttered out of his mouth.
“Take care of them, will you? Just like you did for the dead. All of my children, and my brethren”
The fading form of God placed an increasingly transparent hand on his chest, “… I wish you all the best… Candidate.”
And then his soul completely disappeared, vanquished by the cursed Scythe, the weapon that only destroyed souls. His weapon that had been given to him by the One he had just slain.
Everything went white after that.
It is said it was the subsequent release of energy that had completely destroyed Eden.
With no soul to tether it, whatever energy and power God had within Him was released in an instant, and the whole world of Eden had been engulfed in an instant.
The next thing he knew, he was in Limbo.
Alone.
God’s last words kept ringing in his mind, and compounded by the weight of his actions, he had been in mental disarray for days. The sudden influx of emotions that kept on crushing him with its weight did not help in the organizing process.
It was probably a few days later, that he managed to process what had happened.
1. He had killed God.
2. God had called him ‘Candidate’ afterwards.
He had no idea what a Candidate was. But God had evidently found out about Sanctum, and that was troubling.
Take care of them, will you? Just like you did for the dead.
It troubled him more that God seemed to approve. Why would He? He had broken one of His Commandments.
Slowly, he had reached deep into the recesses of his soul, and deep within, he found his forbidden creation. He had heaved a sigh of relief.
Sanctum. It was still there.
But something still felt… off.
He remembered reaching deeper, feeling the metaphysical construct, and found that its entire nature had been changed. Before, the construct had been rooted completely within his soul, a creation of his power and mind. But the new feeling he received was something much more… grand.
Sanctum had been tempered at its very core.
By whom?
Only he knew of its nature, along with Fate and…God.
Only one person could have done such a thing. And he had just killed Him.
Then he realized that this was something God had left for him, and only him. God’s legacy to him.
When had He done it? In the middle of the battle? Or while he was taking his last few breaths?
He had been filled with trepidation when he began to access it.
What would he find?
The cold bloodied souls of the dead that had once lived here?
A vast area of nothingness?
“The dead. They were not meant to live again.”
Instead, he found a whole new world.
He shakes his head, clearing his thoughts.
He has mourned enough. Wallowing in the past would do no good. There is much to be done in the present.
The time in Limbo has taken its toll on his mind, and he is mentally and emotionally drained.
He looks at the reflection again, casting the naked body staring at him a look of doubt. God had called him Candidate. He looks at the white urinals lined up behind him in the mirror, and is painfully reminded of the columns of Angels that had done the same when he was still an Apostle. But he had renounced that title, and God gave him a new one. Candidate.
He’s never heard of it, yet he knows the title holds much more than it seems to. The moment he heard it, he had felt as if the World had hiccupped, and a weird feeling had passed through him. But he is weak, and he has made far too many mistakes for a title like that. He knows he is not worthy of the title. Yet.
He smiles, but for now, he supposes it wouldn’t hurt to reclaim the title of Apostle.
“Take care of them, will you? Just like you did for the dead. All of my children, and my brethren... I wish you all the best, Candidate”
God had put His faith in him. He had seen it when he accessed Sanctum, and he prays to whatever powers that be after His passing, that God’s last decision would be as wise as His previous ones.
Whatever the case, he will fulfill His dying request. He will believe in humanity as He did, and he will protect them, along with the Edenists.
Looking around the dirty bathroom however, then back at the bare reflection in the mirror, Death frowns. It would be best to find a place for him to get settled first.
As well as find some clothes.