Magnus Thorne 01

New novel, fresh out of the oven! It's still pending approval on RR, which means that it's going to be a while before it goes public. Also, worry not, releases of the other fic will not slow nor stop!

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The first time it happened I was about to die. I had been thirteen at the time, barely a year after the day of the Ceremony that forever changed my life. Chester, the biggest of the bullies in the little clique that had come to gravitate around him, was holding me by the neck.

They liked to prey on the weak, and that day I made the mistake of trying to stand up to them, to defend myself. Chester didn’t like what I said, and had decided that my weak, pathetic life was forfeit. In all fairness, I have done worse things than that later on in life, and I understand now how stupid I had been.

In this world, if you are too weak to defend yourself, you better shut up.

The world was receding into darkness, his strong fingers blocking the flow of blood to my brain. In a desperate final act of defiance, I yanked and kicked and screamed to pull myself free of his grip. The only thought in my mind was how much I wished Chester would just, you know…

Well, something happened within me right there. I could not tell what, not for a number of years, and even now the actual details of how my power came to manifest itself to me escape me. What I know is that suddenly his grip loosened, and I fell and the world spun.

Next thing I knew, Chester was lying on the floor, dead, and all the other teens were screaming and running and pointing at me. Meanwhile a warmth was spreading through my chest. Something I had never felt before. For a moment, perhaps a moment too long, all I could focus on was the strange sense of power coursing through my veins.

Then I was forcefully brought back to reality as offensive skills started raining on me. I knew, at that very moment, that my old life was over. I could not stay one second longer or I would be killed. So, I ran.

I ran and never returned. There was nothing for me in the little village where I had happened to be born, and there was no love that my family was willing to give me. They had barely tolerated my presence ever since the Ceremony showed them just how much of a disappointment I was. I did the sensible thing, and removed myself from their lives before they had a chance to do so themselves.

What followed were years of wandering around, meeting people, building my own power with the one single ability that I had been gifted with. The power to reshape things, in a way.

Thinking back about those times long gone fills me with nostalgia. They were good times. There were bad days, bad months even, but the times were good.

They all came to an end. Even I, the great Magnus Lazarus Thorne, failed to predict just how much people could hate something that was different from them. I was too dangerous, gaining too much power and influence, and the powers that ruled the world could not let it happen.

They caged me. They threw me at the bottom of the Meandering Crevasse. Then, for good measure, they rained siege-level skills on the mountain above the dungeon until it collapsed on itself, sealing the only way in and out of it forever.

Trapped in the cage they built for me, I had nothing else to do but think about the past. Almost nothing. Because, you see, there was a tiny crack in the framework of the binding spell that kept me there. It had been there from the beginning, but I could only see after I painstakingly dispelled the mind-numbing Mind Blank skill that had been inscribed in the innermost layer of the cage.

Once that was done, it took me barely a hundred more years of work on the crack, using the trickle of magic I had at my disposal like a precise chisel, until the hole was wide enough and the framework weak enough that all it took to break it was one more little push.

I fell to the ground in a heap. My muscles had not seen a shred of work in thousands of years, and they were not ready to support my weight. A little side note: there was no way to tell how much time I spent under Mind Blank. I assumed, at the time, it was thousands of years because I noticed that the stalactites and stalagmites on the walls, roof and floor of the cave had grown significantly.

I was no geologist, though, and calculating an exact time frame was not my priority. My priority was surviving now, no longer protected by the magic of the cage. The room I was in was dark, lit only by the glow of magic of the cage, and fortunately empty.

I knew for a fact that every single other room, corridor and even wall of the dungeon were not likely to be. They were, much more probably, teeming with monsters. Unless magic had taken a strange turn in the time I was away, of course. Also possible, but improbable.

Still lying on the ground, panting, hurting, I checked myself. Weak. Not a scrap of magic was left in me after being trapped for so long. The small trickle of mana that flowed when I was inside the cage had dried up the moment I used it to break free.

A smile blossomed on my face. Despite all the pain, despite my pitifully weak condition, I couldn’t help but smile. I was alive. It was all that mattered. Everything else could be rebuilt, with sufficient time and effort. I had done it once already, I could do it again.

I looked back at the cage that kept me prisoner for countless aeons, sapping away all my power and leaving me weakened and vulnerable. With a simple mental query, I checked whether the one thing that had allowed me to rise to the heaves once already was still there. With it, I could rebuild. Without it... I could rebuild anyway, theoretically. But in practice it was unlikely I would even make it to one of my hidden caches as a weak mortal.

Fortunately, the cage had taken everything from me but this.

[Power is available. 10 charges.]

Good. With the Power, anything was possible. I only had to dream big enough to make it happen.

“Counterfactual assertion. Magic is what powers the cage | I cannot absorb the cage’s magic.”

Some might say that my magic failed. Nothing appeared to change in my immediate environment, after all. I knew it was not the case, though.

Without hesitation I reached out with a hand towards the cage. It was made of concentric squares of glittering, glowing lines of golden energy. At its center, inscribed in the ineffable walls of a tesseract, runes now ruined beyond recognition had held me hostage for generations.

Now, it was all about to change. The moment my fingers touched the first of the lines, I felt the warmth of power rush inside of me, settling in the deepest recesses of my flesh and astral soul. I pulled more and more energy into me, watching the lines that made up the diabolical cage retreat and disappear at a noticeable pace.

I could absorb the magic, because it no longer powered the cage. You understand the Power now, right?

I kept absorbing until there was nothing left but the feeling of magic flowing through my veins and my astral soul. Just a hint of it, a shard of an atom compared to what used to be the amount I could command at the height of my reign. It didn’t matter, though. I had to start from somewhere after all.

[2 charges left.]

...so expensive. But worth it. Now I had a foundation of power I could use to grow. The charges would come back eventually, their amount and the speed with which they returned proportional to how much mana I had.

Finally it was time to explore the Meandering Crevasse and find a way back to the surface. Something told me that, despite how much time had passed, there were at least a couple of old geezers still alive from the time of my imprisonment.

If that were the case, then perhaps they might be convinced to answer a couple of questions I have been saving up for them for the last century or so. Who knows.