3/14/54

ALEXANDER GALDUR

“Git back here ya damn, f’ck’n v’rmin!”

The yell of the hefty chef resounded down the putrid, dark alleyway. The target of the man’s rage was a fifteen year old boy with pale skin, long, black hair, and small, black eyes named Alexander Galdur. That boy is me; I’m Alexander Galdur.

As I ran, the harsh sound of his slightly slurred roars grated against my ears. Each pump of my legs had my feet pound against the sticky asphalt, pushing me farther as the wind rushed through my cloak. The man continued yelling curses, chasing after me as I took a tight turn to the right. As I rounded the corner, a pipe blocked my ever-shortening path. One quick jump later, and the obstacle was long behind me.

As the hefty chef turned the corner, the man tripped, hitting his face into the rough asphalt of the poorly paved road. Quickly rising, his forehead smeared with blood, he continued yelling. His voice had become nasally, however, and his nose had bent at an odd, unsettling angle. Blood drained from the man’s nose as he yelled, “Ya damn brat, mah nose is brok’n because of ya!”

The ever growing anger in the hefty chef’s eyes fueled his rage to rise back to his feet and stick out his calloused left hand. The man’s brown eyes suddenly glowed a deep green, followed soon after by his stuck-out palm. A rumble emerged from the ground as the black material that formed the roads of the alley cracked ever so slightly. The crack continued to expand and open and extend, accompanied by a thorny wooden spike growing and shooting from the crack and promptly racing towards my escaping back.

Stumbling, my body leaning over just enough for the attack to stab over me. My unbalanced body kept tilting, leading to my face rapidly approaching the ground. Hands instinctively caught myself and pushed me back along my path, soon followed by the man letting out a roar of frustrated anger, expressing his fury at his missed magic. In addition to his attack not managing to land, he was required to stop to initiate the spell, so the distance became uncrossable from him to me, at least based on his physical capabilities compared to my own.

I turned another corner, this time to my left, and I hid myself by ducking into a small nook. My breath stopped as I stood still, as still as I could, while waiting for the chef to rush by, and eventually, the lumbering man passed me. Waiting another few seconds after he ran by, listening to his quieting but heavy footsteps traverse further into the distance, I let out a sigh of relief. I squeezed back out of the crack and looked down at my slightly bloodied palms. Earlier when catching myself, I felt the skin being scratched, ripped up by the course ground below, and now, the intense stinging of pain seemingly radiated through the entirety of my arms.

Letting out my audible displeasure with a wince of pain, I reached into my black, shoddy cloak and pulled out a bundle of bandages and a bottle of disinfectant. I cleaned and wrapped my damaged hands, feeling the burning of alcohol on my wounds. Reaching back into my cloak, I exchanged the medical supplies for a warm, cooked link of sausages and a plastic bottle of water. It seemed my most recent crime was a success.

My starving stomach growled greedily as I brought the sausages to my lips. With a bite resembling a crocodile’s more than a human’s, the savory meat slid down my throat with only a few moments of chewing beforehand to make sure I didn’t choke. I scrambled to untwist the cap of the cheap bottle in my other hand and hastily guzzled the water. Letting the bottle leave my lips with a satisfied gasp, I went back to devouring my decidedly sad meal.

After filling my stomach to the amount I knew I wouldn’t throw up at because of the sudden increase of food and water from nothing, my mind could only wander back to the unfortunate circumstances that brought me here. At the age of four, my parents died because of another act of terrorism amongst many made by the Arcana Rights Organization or ARO. Being heavily concussed and hurt, I spent half a year in the hospital, doing my best to recover both mentally and physically.

By five, I was in the Tulare Orphanage; a simple and unimportant orphanage in the lesser-known and unimportant city of Tulare. In the media, California is depicted as a place for all sorts of drama, but those have been quite dramatized. My life was mostly normal from then, or at least until my sixth birthday. Ever since that day, I’ve noticed strange occurrences begin to emerge around me. Light seemed to suddenly pop into existence every now and again in my presence, and shadows around me would bubble and ripple when I was near. I saw these happenings, and one day I stuck out my hand out of some instinctual knowledge and focused on the phenomena.

I did this for both the dark and the light, and the same thing happened for both: supernatural occurrences of light suddenly materializing and shadows distorting occurred. Between the ages of five and eight, one will most likely awaken their magical attributes, and it appears I was both a light magician and a dark magician. Of course, I naturally freaked out. Awakening one’s magical attribute was common, with only some people not awakening any attribute at all. However, awakening more than one magical property was rare, and in my own case, extremely rare and worrying.

While light magic was celebrated and loved and seen as the embodiment of good, dark magic was shamed and loathed and seen as the embodiment of bad. These two were contradictory magic attributes, and the chances of awakening them together was astronomically low. In my case, even lower. Like genes, magic was most likely to be inherited from one’s parents. Usually when a contradicting magicians have a child, they would be born with either one of the elements or none as they canceled each other out. Though, like genes, magic could also rarely emerge as a mutation.

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Only my father had magic, light magic to be specific. My mother was one of the rare cases of no magical attributes emerging in a child, so the fact that I must have mutated dark magic and also inherited light magic was truly improbable. Either way though, it was bad. While light magic was seen as good, holy even, the fear and hatred of dark magic far outweighed the peoples’ love. Even with my limited mental capabilities as a child, I knew I’d need to keep my magic a secret.

By seven, one day, I watched as one of the other children of my orphanage ran into the road, a car rapidly approaching them, and I stupidly used my magic to save them. I used light magic to blind the driver, slowing them down just enough that I had time to focus my power into dark magic. A thin tentacle of darkness emerged from the shadows and shot out at the kid in the road. Pulling them back with as much force as my weak magical abilities would allow, they were saved and safely away from the speeding cars.

The child wept and cried as they had landed with an audible thud, however, the director, who had come with us outside, was too busy staring at me with an unsettling eye. He watched me with a twisted expression of repulsion, but came out of his stupor with a startle. Though, even when helping the crying child, he kept a wary, watchful watch on me.

We went back to the orphanage because of the incident and were told to just rest for the rest of the day. In the night though, I heard the director talking over the phone, “Hello, Department of Magical Enforcement? A child in my orphanage has both a light magical affinity and a dark magical affinity! Mhm… Of course. Yes, we’re at 2301, Avenue 192, Tulare, California.”

As I eavesdropped on the worried adult, I knew that I had to leave. The Department of Magical Enforcement or DME handled all magical related issues. They would arrest magical criminals, deal with magical laws, and eliminate magical threats. Unfortunately for me, I was considered a magical threat because of my attribute. The NMSA viewed dark magic as dangerous and those that wielded it were also seen as threatening. To be fair, dark magicians did have a tendency for violence and evil, but there was still too much prejudice against dark magicians as some were genuinely good and kind people that tried to help others.

In the end though, it didn’t matter as I was a target to be eliminated by the DME. With this knowledge, I snuck out of the orphanage in the dead of night, and was forced to survive on the streets, all the while being threatened with the looming presence of the DME and starvation. I kept my magic use to a minimum, both light and dark being I didn’t want to stand out. Everyone around me seemed dangerous, threatening, and untrustworthy. I found that trusting others wouldn’t - no, couldn’t even happen anymore, thinking that everyone around was out to get me.

That leads us here as I live my life as a starving alley rat, stealing and scamming to get by. Life has been real shitty, but at very least, I was still alive. My thoughts reined back in, realizing there wasn’t the time to let my mind wander. My focus came back to the dark, musty alleys and the deep blue light of the flames of magical lamps—being all too familiar and trauma inducing—illuminating the creepy passageways of the city. Then, from the silence of the night, a panicked shrill reverberated through the dark.

I startled, dropping the recently stolen sausages that were still in my hand. The meat slapped against the ground, and my face shifted a little in disappointment at the lost meal. I shook my head, realizing there was someone that could be in danger nearby. Even though my trust for others has hit rock-bottom, my own moral compass still guided me towards good, despite how idiotic that moral compass was. While I stole from others, and I knew this was arguably bad, it was for my own survival—everyone needed whatever advantage they could get in this society. Despite all that, I still wanted to help those I could.

I bolted through the narrow passageways, following the sound of the occasional grunt and yelp of people. From what I could tell, it was a man and a woman. The man’s voice was the original shrill, so most likely, the woman was the one who was doing the attacking. This was also clearly not the voices of two people getting busy—the voices were too panicked and aggressive. The man’s voice didn’t actually sound like a man’s; it was young, closer akin to a boy my age. The woman, however, was clearly that of an adult being more matured than someone younger.

My suspicions were confirmed as I turned a corner to the right. The boy dodged attack after attack of spears formed from metal that materialized out of the ground. He seemed to appear and disappear, with doubles of him popping into existence to divert the woman’s attention. The boy tripped and hit the ground, ending up on his bottom, and all of his doubles dissipated into blue smoke. The woman stood over his body, a flash of blue from the lights around them reflecting off of the metal spear she held in her right hand; she eerily said with an ominous smile, “Goodbye, little boy.”

She pulled back her hand, readying to impale her target, but a tendril of darkness shot from behind her and wrapped around her mouth. She panicked and dropped her magically-made spear, and it vanished from existence with a dim flash after it hit the asphalt with a clang and rolled across the ground. She used her free hand to reach and grab at the tendril of darkness that covered her mouth and nose. She struggled and struggled, coming to her knees, but eventually passed out because of the lack of air.

After a moment, I walked from around the corner, paler than normal with beads of sweat traveling down my skin. A quick glance of the woman revealed a silver-blue torus on her wrist, the symbol of the ARO. A flash of disgust appeared on my face, but promptly disappeared before anyone could notice. I turned my head to face the boy on the ground, staring up at me in shock and an unhidden expression of disgust.

A glance at the boy revealed that he was definitely close to my age despite looking much taller. His almond skin glistened in sweat, deep brown freckles dotting his handsome face, contrasting his blonde hair with aqua-colored tips. His large, brown eyes stared at me in a twist of many, many negative emotions, confusion, and the barest hint of gratitude. An examination of his clothes revealed he wore quite the expensive and fancy outfit. He had an elaborate white suit top with golden cuffs, a white tie, a black shirt underneath, simple, pale brown khakis, and black, shining slip-on shoes. A look at the area where his left pecs would be, revealed a golden emblem with the number twenty. Underneath the twenty held the words “scout” and “illusion magician.”

The meaning of this combination of seemingly unrelated things made my heart drop as this meant the boy was a rank twenty, illusion magician, scout of the DME: the people after me.