The guttering light of a lonely candle filled the hall with shadows.

Guttering, just like the crooked old man that labored at the center of the hall. Gorren An-Tudok had no illusions about it. He was dying. He could feel it, the coldness in his bones seeping deeper and deeper, death approaching steadily like the sound of that damn clock in the other room.

But even if on death’s door, the old man wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. Lip curled to show stumps of teeth and blackened gums, Gorren labored feverishly over the lines of powder and paint covering the floor. The angry light of his milky eyes reflected the devouring hatred that burned inside of him.

For four hundred years he had walked the earth, four hundred years of magically-extended life almost entirely spent into unceasing work. Only one thing he had sought: to understand the nature of the Mana, the mystical energy from which life, intellect and magic sprung up, and that held together all of reality. To this single research, he had consecrated his life, sacrificing rest and any other comfort.

When he had first built his tower, Tianna was nothing but an empty plain covered with forests and traversed by a nameless network of rivers. After a century, a village had sprung up close by, a hundred dirty peasants bent on making money from lumber, fish and the good soil. He had ignored them at first, even as he slightly bristled. He had come there seeking solitude and now people came at him? Still, it was okay as long they didn’t bother him.

Fifty years later, the village had grown into a town and all the racket the peasants did had really started to get on his nerves. It turned out that the run-off of his experiments had seeped into the surrounding land, building into an exuberance of life. Crops ripened faster and gave better results, animals multiplied quickly, rivers abounded with fish, forests grew magnificent wood. He had actually balked at that. His ground-breaking Mana manipulation… used to grow turnips? He had disdainfully turned away from the pesky town and his ignorant dwellers. What could you expect from the riff-raff anyway?

He hadn’t noticed how used he got to the lively sounds of the town.

Fifty years later, the town had grown into a city, made rich by the magic-touched land and on the commerce of rare magical materials. Gorren had diverted a tiny bit of his attention toward sound-insulation and so all was good.

Then the first brigands had come.

They were a motley group of scumbags and good for nothing, come to see if the legend of the “immensely rich and benevolent wizard of the silent tower” was true and if it was true that he handed gold ingots to those that asked him. A few zapped backsides later, Gor had raised a nice and tight fence around his tower, put down a small army of “not disturb” signs and sent a formal complaint to the mayor.

Peace held for another twenty years or so before another annoyance, this time of a completely different form, came knocking on his door.

Tim was bluntly said a complete moron, lacking even a shred of the intellectual prowess needed to understand Advanced Mana Manipulation, let alone to become his disciple. But he had that look in his eyes, the one of someone ready to put in the effort and time that such a sacred discipline deserved, and he effectively needed someone to dust the shelves, cook and keep the place in order.

From there, things happened one after the other and sixty years later, his tower had transformed into the Venerable and Eminent First Academy of Mana Studies and Research of the great city of Truvia, with a sizable student body, a nationwide reputation for the quality of its education and the cutting edge of its research in all fields of magic, with the famed archmage Timothy Archibald Belirius as its chancellor and the revered Gorren An-Tudok as its Father Founder.

The precise HOW of all still eluded him to this day. The only thing he was truly certain of was that he was the one to choose the name.

Obviously, he never bothered in participating in the day-to-day activities of the University, let alone try to teach, abhor the thought, to gaggles of little pink goblins. He plainly didn’t care and had better things to do. Still, to have the flimsy help of more educated magicians was somewhat of a boon. Delegating research provided assistance to his endeavor, as well as having more minds on the same task. And… he guessed that he learned to somewhat get along with his fellow human beings and received … satisfaction from it. A weakness, no doubt about it, but one that he felt sweet to accept. At least, it helped him out of the fumes at seeing his tower now surrounded by the cityscape.

By that point, the once-little town had developed into a great city named Truvia, capital of a Duchy of the same name, part of a Kingdom which name had long ago become unimportant.

A century passed, a century of hard-work, leaps and bounds and broken barriers. He kept studying, researching and from time to time walking the corridors of the school while looking brooding and watchful. It helped morale, the teachers said.

Timothy went the way all human beings must go, and, to his own surprise, he wept for him. That was when he understood to have stumbled into a trap, probably the greatest of them all. He had allowed himself to open to the world, and now the world had his claws on him. Students, colleagues, friends, a word that he thought to never utter, they were all there, damn them, ready to stab him with their growing wrinkles and empty chairs.

He even found love, once. He could still see her, always just behind the horizon of his mind. She had called him a coward, he had called her a fool. Eventually, he had to bury her with his hands and try to reassure himself to have chosen the right path. Still trying to.

Each loss chipped at his heart, but in time he had learned to accept it. Even with all the power in the world, there were some laws you still had to bow to. What it mattered, in the end, it wasn’t that it ended, but that it had happened, even with all its mistakes, always with all of its beauty. It was a good lesson to keep at heart, he felt.

Time passed, and the Kingdom shifted and crashed. The crown fell and was picked up by the duke of Truvia, now the King of Truvia. The city prospered as never before.

All seemed well, but shadows gathered unseen.

The first time Gorren heard of the Flaming Light, it was on passing. A new religion, they said, that propagandized hatred for magic and all magicians. Its devouts declared that the Mana was a gift of their God, and that trying to manipulate it was blasphemy and would only bring disaster. A great misfortune had befallen a distant Kingdom in the east, they said, and it would befall this land too if their teachings weren’t followed.

Gorren had quickly discarded it. Fanatics’ ramblings. Never in his research, he had found any reason as to why mana manipulation could be opposed by the Gods. Regarding the Gods’ existence, that was obviously true. Any practitioner of magic worth his salt could feel and prove their existence, but that just proved his points. The Gods never opposed magic as long it wasn’t harmful to the greater order of things. Magic in itself was but a tool, only the intention behind its use could be qualified as good or evil. As long as humans kept a restraining hand upon their actions, there was nothing to fear. That over-blown religion would go out by itself.

True to his prediction, the Flaming Light never managed to establish much of a foothold in the Kingdom. Sure, there were those amidst the poor and the distraught that embraced its teachings, if only to have an outlet for their frustrations, but they never amounted to much. Truvia was too much based upon magic to actually stand against it.

Until the Disaster struck.

To that day, Gorren stubbornly refused that a God could have struck against the material plane. It simply didn’t make any sense. Why a god would punish humanity for the use of magic? And why only then? No, something different had happened, he felt it, he knew it.

But whatever it was, Truvia fell to panic. A massive cataclysm had struck the great city of Bagravion, to the close south, wiping it off the map. Courier after courier rushed to court, bringing the same message: some kind of magic eruption and the world collapsing upon itself. Barely the first impact had been heard than a series of similar incidents ravaged across all of Truvia. Devastating explosions tore cities and towns, especially targeting places where mages gathered in greater numbers; and the aftereffects just kept on spreading. Skies were darkened by tainted clouds, the rivers polluted, the land burned with unnatural fires.

The people searched for help from their sovereign, but nothing could be given; all mages were baffled by what was happening, even him. With no means to stop the destruction, Truvia collapsed. Chaos enveloped the land and the priests of the Flaming Light stepped forward. They declared that to be the punishment of their God upon humanity for their reliance over magic. They promised deliverance, but only if humankind threw down the King and banished any form of magic.

Desperate, terrified, the people accepted.

The castle was stormed, the king and his family killed. Gorren’s tower, his university, his beloved home followed suit.

The old man felt his guts burn with rage at the memory. He had fought, of course, but then the invaders presented him with hostages, his students, and he couldn’t do anything but surrender. He had been forced to watch his home being ransacked and destroyed, centuries of work and tradition lost as cinders to the wind.

His students, his colleagues, his friends, they had killed them all, forced him to watch as each and every one of them was fed to the chopping blocks. But they hadn’t dared to kill him, the Founder, the immortal mage. Him they had caged instead, imprisoning him deep down into the earth while the Flaming Light rebuilt the world in their image.

Gorren forced his skeletal frame to stand up, letting out a bitter laughter. To the end they had feared him, the savages, the defilers, the ignorant and destroyers, damn them, curse them! Curse them to hell!

The pot of paint smashed against the wall, flying into pieces, its contents scattering all around.

Arm outstretched, Gorren panted, his bony frame trembling. His forces left him and his shoulders slumped.

They had taken everything from him, he thought with furious bitterness. His life’s work, the research he had dedicated all of his life to. Everything had been destroyed, down to the last shred of paper. His friends, his students, his colleagues, the institution they had built together, even the nation they had helped to build. Gone forever and soon, with his death, even the memory of it would disappear. Everything he had worked for, everything he had accomplished would cease to exist. It would be like he had never existed in the first place. A mark in the sand, swallowed by the sea.

It wasn’t happening. He wouldn’t let it happen.

Trembling, he took back a somewhat straight posture. Hoarse laughter shook his frame.

Fools, all of them! He was no immortal. His body was fed by mana, his life extended by magic, but he would die like all humans. They could have killed him at any moment, but he had cursed them, swore that he would return to take his revenge. And so in their fear and ignorance, they hadn’t killed him, but only imprisoned him, hoping that the immortal would remain forever sealed and harmless.

He cackled with dark glee. Fools! Imprisoning him, they only gave him the time he needed to prepare his revenge! And now the time had come!

His laughter turned into a fit of coughing. When it stopped, Gorren was on his last leg. He could feel his life ebb away. He had to act quickly.

He straightened up, swallowing on a dry throat. Amusement fizzled through him. He had had a strange life. From a misanthrope to a teacher to a Founder to a patriarch. He wouldn’t have ever thought, not even in his wildest dreams, that a day would come that he was ready to take revenge over all the world for anything else than his research. That was there, of course, he wouldn’t allow for it to go lost just as he wouldn’t allow for the sun to disappear from the sky. But now, if he was about to do what he was about to do, it was also for Tim and everybody that had come after him, all the sages, fools, companions and friends, students and headaches. They had shared the work with him, found a place in his heart and he wouldn’t allow for all the knowledge they had found to disappear into the mist of times. He would have made sure that it survived, and that revenge was met also for all of them.

“Focus is strength. Division of intent is weakness.” The old maxim that his master had passed over him an eternity ago felt as strong as always. But it had been a weakness he had decided was worthy to have. Thousand times worthy.

With a last shudder, he banished those thoughts and turned to his work. Time was of the essence now.

The glyph was massive, covering the floor and walls with a complicated tangle of lines and smaller symbols. It was a thing of massive complexity, each inch of it having required an enormous expenditure of time, energy and precision.

The prison the Flaming Light had imprisoned him into was built with Arcadium, a mineral that repelled magic so that he couldn’t use his powers to escape. But Arcadium maintained its property only with a sufficient mass. Someone with much time and an iron tenacity could have scraped out the mineral, flake by flake, particle of dust after particle of dust, and obtained inert dust that could be used, with the proper enchantments, to produce magically-charged paint. Any mage could have seen that, but not ignorant zealots scared even by their shadows.

Gorren had labored for forty years into his prison to prepare that glyph, each failure to draw the perfect alignments that he required only fueling his determination. He had always been stubborn and now the result was something to behold. Each line of the glyph radiated an otherwordly perfection that made the shadows twist and waver. The conjunction points were so charged that one could see their radiance even through closed eyelids. But it was nothing before the center of the glyph, where the lines collapsed into a spiral that seemed to drill into infinity. It was enough to glance at that point to have your head start to pound.

Gorren laughed. This work, of all those he had done, got closer to the Flaming Light’s narrow thought of “demoniac magic”. They wouldn’t understand, the fools. But it was ironic that it had come into being as a consequence of their actions, they that said to act against all magic.

He felt ripples course along his skin, setting his hair on end. From the moment he had completed the glyph, the air was steadily getting charged with magical energy. It buzzed and tingled like the greatest thunder was boiling just out of sight.

The clock in the other room, the damn clock the fools had left to torment him into his supposedly eternal prison steadily signed the time. Gorren chuckled. It didn’t feel as obnoxious as before now. Now, it measured the time for his greatest triumph.

The old mage raised a bony hand, calling for the rising energy to obey him. It was like trying to have a wild horse to lick your hand. The Mana bristled at his command, refusing to obey. He was weak from food and water deprivation, magic could sustain you only to a point, and from the steadily advancing hand of death, but his will was hot iron. He grasped at the mana with anger and the expertise of centuries, forcing it to obey. The Mana shook once but then obediently fell in line, becoming a tool for him to wield.

Gorren repressed the burst of satisfaction to focus on the glyph. The center appeared to his mind’s eye like a hollow into space. Forming the mana into tendrils, he sent it towards it, seeking for weak points. It was hard work, like trying to find the eye of a fly with a needle, and the rising Mana rallied against his control. Many times the incredibly delicate tendrils of power snagged or snapped, forcing him to start all over again.

Time stretched into minutes and minutes stretched into hours. Beads of cold sweat covered Gorren’s forehead, but the old man doggedly persisted, ignoring his fading body.

Eventually, his efforts were rewarded. The tendrils met the lip of an infinitely small crack and clung to it. With a triumphant shout, Gorren sent the Mana streaming into it. The depression of space curved and twisted then gave way with a sound that felt like a thousand bars of tortured glass breaking apart at the same time. The central point of the glyph disappeared into impossible darkness, so thick and black that the shadows around it seemed like light in comparison.

Gorren didn’t lose time to rejoice. He pushed more and more tendrils into the breach, seeking to enlarge it. What he was doing was beyond the abilities of all mages that had ever lived before him. He was breaching the veil that separated the material plane from the astral plane, he was poking a hole through dimensions.

During his lifelong research, he had sought to understand the nature and rules of Mana and managed to reach where nobody ever before had. He had plumbed the depths of the mysteries of magic and found countless hidden truths, but one had been groundbreaking: Mana wasn’t the fundamental energy. Another, more powerful and pure resided under it. As its discoverer, Gorren had called it the Crux, the fount of existence.

The Crux flowed like a river through everything and anything, holding reality together like mortar in a wall. Ever-shifting, ethereal, potential given form, it was arcane energy whose true essence human mind was powerless to fully grasp. Mana was a product of it, born by the confluence of the Flux with the material plane and as such closer to human understanding. When magicians declared that Mana held reality and life together, they saw only the skin of existence. The bones, the muscles, the blood, there the Crux flowed, unreachable and fathomless.

Not even his most close colleagues knew of it. He had hoarded that knowledge, fearful that someone could misuse it, or worse, waste it.

That discovery had led to an all-new realm of possibilities, one that Gorren had plumbed obsessively. He had discovered that the Crux went beyond the material realm, flowing into another dimension that he had called the Astral Plane. There, reality as humans knew it crumbled down, with only the Crux remaining in its pure form. It was a dimension of raw potential, pristine and untouched. If someone could find a way to tap into it, to harness its power, there was no saying to what could be accomplished.

Unfortunately, all of his attempts to do so had all spectacularly failed. The Crux was simply too beyond for the clumsy human minds and skills to be able to harness it. Gorren had cursed the limitations of his nature. It was clear that his research could advance no further, not if he didn’t want to risk destruction, a fate that a particularly daring attempt to tap into the Crux had almost consigned him to.

He had to change his angle of approach. He couldn’t draw the Crux into the Material Plane, his own limitations as a human stopped him from doing it, but that didn’t stop him from studying it. That he had done, extensively, obsessively, for decades.

And then he had found it. The solution.

If he couldn’t draw the Crux in, he could go to the Crux.

It wouldn’t have been easy by any stretch of the imagination. Human flesh was too flimsy to resist the interplane jump, let alone the unbridled energy of the Crux. A body would be simply turned to nothingness by the sheer creative power. But if one was to shed it…

He had studied extensively the nature of souls during his centuries of research. They were… different from any other existing substance, it rankled at his student nature to use such a vague term, but it was so. Even the Crux didn’t quite match their peculiarity. But, differently, by that fathomless essence, they could be interacted with and more importantly, extracted.

Gorren barked a burst of harsh laughter. It was the darkest of magic, forbidden to him by his own master, and he himself had put the most severe prohibitions on its use. Only necromancers and the worst warlocks touched that branch of magic. There had been grand trials on transgressors and all of them had been sentenced to death, no exception. It was a bitter irony that he had to make use of it now.

Flashes of energies crackled into the air, that shimmered in patches there and then. The Mana was reaching dangerous density.

Gorren snarled when a flash seared his left side but he kept working. The tendrils he had sent to the other side of the breach kept fracturing with incredible speed. He needed all of his concentration just to maintain the vertiginous flow of energy needed to stop them from falling apart completely. He could feel the Crux on the other side, an otherwordly presence that dug into his mind. It dissolved the Mana like acid, trying to push the breach close. Gorren knew that if he let it, he wouldn’t get another chance. The funny thing was that he wouldn’t get another chance even if he succeeded. That journey was one-way only. Once started, there was no turning back.

Was it dangerous what he was doing? It was preposterously, maddeningly dangerous! All of his studies on the Crux had been limited to observation and theory, with the barest attempts to actual control!

His studies had shown him that, in theory, a soul unfettered from a body could enter the Astral Plane and once there learn to harness the might of the Crux. In theory.

To open a temporary portal was a resource-intensive and taxing endeavor if a possible one, but once inside there was no means to say what would happen. The soul could have been rebuffed by the Crux into the Material Plane, ripped apart, sent adrift into the currents of energies. The possible fates ranged from success to angering the Gods to disappearance into the ether. But his favorite was the off-chance that a portal of sufficient extension would start to widen on its own. The Material Plane would have been swallowed completely by the Crux, reduced to its basic components by the swirling chaos.

Maybe in other moments, Gorren would have cared. At that moment, to death’s door, with no other path to go to, with his mind broken by grief, loss and starvation, he simply didn’t.

He would escape to the Astral Plane, weather whatever happened to his soul there and then find a way to return, the power of the Crux at his fingertips. And then…

That was his crazy plan, and he cackled with dark glee at the sheer madness of it. He wouldn’t have attempted such a thing earlier, but they had left him no other choice. He wouldn’t allow for his life to be extinguished in such a meaningless way, for his knowledge and memory to go lost. No, he would survive, continue his research into the workings of reality and vengeance would be his. His!

“Mine!” He screeched, tearing with all of his will at the fabric of space.

Resistance gave way with an unholy crunch. The floor and the walls broke into pieces in several places. The debris flew and stopped mid-air as glowing fragments of Crux streamed into the chamber. They appeared to Gorren’s weak human eyes as points of non-sensations, blanks into space that his senses couldn’t perceive. His flesh crumbled where they touched him, but the agony was nothing before the feeling of triumph.

The breach yawned wide before his feverish gaze, a ragged fissure into space large enough for a man to step in. Beyond, he couldn’t see but a chaotic mass of impossible colors that set his brain aflame.

It was time.

Gorren spread his arms, an ecstatic smile on his face. His crumbling flesh opposed only the flimsiest of resistance before giving up. The skeletal body of the old mage crumbled into a heap, leaving a featureless phantom in its place.

Gorren took a moment to take in his new existence. The countless aches of age were gone, replaced by a sensation of boundless freedom. It was exhilarating, but he lacked the time to inspect it. An unshackled soul could survive only a few moments into the material plane before disappearing.

He turned to the fissure. It hadn’t increased into size, and that was comforting, but the Mana into the air was reaching critical mass. The air trembled, fizzled and popped, releasing discharges of energy that made pieces of rocks fly from walls and floor. Handfuls of dust fell to the rumbling that had taken the hall, only to stop mid-air or be consumed by the unleashed Crux.

Gorren relished the growing chaos as it meant the impending destruction of his prison. If it kept going at this pace, he predicted that by the time the portal closed the energy accumulated would be enough to make a big boom indeed. He chuckled at the thought.

But enough hesitations.

He focused on the portal, willing his non-body to move towards it. The spiraling forces inside were mesmerizing, not only because they belonged to another dimension, one of magic and power, but also because they were the way to his freedom, be it death or a new life.

Gorren stood there for a moment, memories of the past swimming through his mind. Then he entered the portal.

After being shocked by an earthquake for hours, the Iron Mountain, the prison that the Flaming Light had chosen for the Immortal Heretic to rot forever into, exploded with a cataclysmic blast that obscured the sky and sent rocks showering for miles around. It was the greatest eruption in recorded history and one that sparked much concern into the new masters of the now-dead Kingdom of Truvia. Many thought that their God had visited his last punishment on the First and Greatest Blasphemer. Others brooded and held back their opinions, preferring not to spread alarmism now that their victory had been secured.

Only time would show who was right.