Prologue

Close your eyes and try to let your mind go and just imagine. It’s quiet, so very quiet. You can’t see anything; just inky blackness dissolving into more darkness, there is nothing. You feel as though you are being swallowed up by the nothingness. Every sense is heightened, but it is useless, there is nothing to see, smell, touch, hear, taste, nothing, just darkness. Time stands still, you could be floating there for merely a second, or it could be an entire lifetime, there’s no way of telling.

Then, in the distance something moves, it’s small insignificant even, but in the emptiness of this space it is everything and anything that will ever exist. It is the greatest creator and destroyer that your world will ever know. It is magic and it lives for eternal.

In the beginning there was magic, so tiny, yet so wondrous, it came from nothing, and from it came everything. In the first moments of its existence it created the whole of the universe and everything that lived within it. Perhaps most important of all its creations was Earth, the strange little planet that you and I call home.

Now, open your eyes and sit tight while I tell you a story, it is a story of light and darkness, of good and bad. It is the story of everything.

In ancient times there were great tales of demons and magic, those tales gradually faded from common knowledge, and, in time they turned to myth and legend. The truths they held fell into obscurity and they were written off as ancient explanations for things that could not be understood by primitive humans, nothing more than ‘old superstitions’ or ‘ways things were explained before science’. We forgot the importance of these stories, and when we forgot we stopped protecting ourselves against the monsters that lurked in the dark, and most importantly, those that walked in the light.

When the world was young, great magic existed and for billions of years it thrived; and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye it vanished, it would be nearly 500 million years before it reappeared. When it returned it brought with it a great meteor and enough darkness to blot out the sun for weeks. The magic settled in once again, and it flourished, and from it horrible things were borne, demons, monsters, and us, for we humans are also borne of darkness and magic.

Our ancient societies understood and respected the magic; they tried their hardest to live in harmony with the magic and to embrace everything that came from it. However the monsters and demons could not be tamed, so it became necessary to harness the magic and use it against the demons, so that they may defeat them wherever they appeared. However not all demons were so easily defeated, some cleverer demons wrapped themselves in magic and made themselves gods. Worshipped by the humans they created obedient armies of the humans and used them as they wished, even inciting them to wars.

Eventually a group of humans discovered the demons deceit and worked for years until they could seal away the magic, and with the magic the demons and monsters, leaving only the humans untouched. However banishing the magic was a great task that claimed the lives of all those who sealed it away. The bodies of those great magicians were never found, and lost along with them was the secrets of magic that they intended to leave behind for humanity, so that, should the magic ever come back humans could once again defeat it.

With the magic sealed away humanity progressed, and all thoughts of magic were driven from their minds. Science overtook old ‘superstition’, and we thrived, until science went too far and caused the greatest catastrophe in recorded history. We ventured to the stars, ever farther, until we came across it. A massive void in space, our experimentation on it opened it up, and it was then we realized what it truly was. It was a prison, where all that had been banished was being held. But once we realized what it was it was too late, it had been opened and terror had been unleashed.

Now that you’ve heard this story, perhaps mine will make sense.