1.
The sound of footsteps running barefoot. A small child, his body scrawny compared to others his age was running away from his pursuers. He keeps running from alley to alley, hoping to shake them off but made a wrong turn somewhere along the way as he grew more frantic. He ran to a dead end.
In an alley where the rays of the morning sun couldn't reach because of the roofs blocking overhead, four big kids are surrounding a smaller kid. What they are doing is pretty much an everyday occurrence in the City of Aiduno. This lawless city is where the scums of humanity usually gather. You could hear the wimpers of the smaller child, begging them to stop as the bigger kids keep beating him into being half dead.
"Stupid little piece of fucking shit! Tell us where you hid your stash!"
"..please. stop-"
*smack
The small child pleaded as he cough blood in between his sentence. A little cracking sound could be heard as the leader of the group smacked the small kid with great force in the head. The small child lay in the alley floor almost unmoving except for a few twitch and two.
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"Let's get out of here and let the sweepers clean the corpse."
"Let's check the body first. There might be something on him."
"That would be miraculous. Hahahahaha!"
"Fuck you're right! Not a single thing!"
The group left before kicking the small child one last time, breaking a rib. The child felt pain all over his pitiful body. Half conscious his head hurt from the being smacked. The idea of him dying was a fact that popped in his head. Like all things fragile his mind broke. He laughed like a madman, even spewing blood as his sanity broke into pieces and in the process his head hurt like someone was splitting it in two but in the pain memories came flooding in.
He was a disgrace. The stain in the family's record. In this world everybody was born with magic. Born to tamper with the natural laws of the world but he was different. He too had magic like everybody else but his talent was below average. Lower than even a commoner but that wasn't what made him different. His body couldn't emit any magic. He couldn't even fire a basic fireball. He was no more than a worm, writhing and struggling in the dirt. He was disowned and left in the streets of this City to fend for himself where a wrong turn could lead to death.
But parallel to these, another set of memories came. A memory of another life. Though the information are broken and incomplete, just missing personal information. In his half dead and muddle headed state, he merely viewed them like someone who was reading a book. No new personalities, well not yet he thought as he spoke to himself with a manic grin.
He crawled slowly as he tried to breath in between pain. Trying to find a even a hole or dumpster to hide and avoid the sweepers that collects bodies in the streets and alleys at night and sell it to necromancers next door. Smh. After maybe 12 crawl distance, he found an empty trash bin just big enough for him to fit.
Night eventually came and if one is awake at this time, they would hear the sweepers scurrying about and looking for fresh corpse. Though the kid sleeping in a trash bin wouldn't know about this as he was sleeping like the dead which he would be if not for his body which he thought was the source of all his misfortune. His body while incapable of emiting magic has strong healing capabilities, the only saving grace. Maybe the gods haven't abandoned him after all, if they even exist.