This is a story of adventure my dear friends, a story of wonders both strange and beautiful. Alas with my oh so clever naming sense, you may have guessed it will not be the kind of tale you are used to. A deviation from the expected you could say. This tale is one of monsters, menace, and might. There is magic, yes, and heroes, and dragons, and whatever else you can dream up, my dear friends. There are demons and angels, those who believe themselves to be gods, and those that almost are. Despite all the majesty and wonder, it's important that you know one can not go adventuring in these lands without enticing death. It is the way of this world known as Fracture. This tale, like many of its ilk, begins with a boy.

A boy who, at the current moment, was running like hell, away from a different hell through hellish terrain, at a breakneck pace. The hellish terrain could be more accurately described as a rugged overgrown forest. Now that didn’t make it innate hellish, though that I suppose that would depend on your feelings towards plants in general, dear friends. No this forest was hellish for various reasons, the most relevant was the generations of folklore this boy had heard about the place. It was said, in the village that this boy hailed from, that everything from the bucks to the bees preferred the taste of humans. Even the trees would bind you up in their roots if you stayed put long enough. This special forest is delightfully referred to as the Lost Woods. Though this boy had heard stories of the Lost Woods he was blissfully unaware of how accurate the name was and what true horrors lay within. It was because of this ignorance that he deemed it a safer solution than waiting in a burning crater.

Only two words race through the boy’s minds faster than his feet. Far, and away. Far from a smoking crater that just so happened to be the former site of this boy’s home town. Away from the memories conflicting in his young mind. Well really he wasn't that young, nor was he truly a boy at least not by his age and village custom. He was fifteen, and technically a man, but this man still had a boyish look to him. A small weak frame born from malnutrition, and long working hours. He had worked on a farm his whole life and unfortunately had far too many siblings for them all to get enough food. So this boy-man often went without food to give his younger siblings more, which helped for a while until the plants stopped growing and earth turned to dust. After that they all went without much food, and his once large family began to shrink. First in weight, and then in members. As his many siblings became fewer the boy began to feel less and less like a boy. So despite all appearances, he was a "man", and he was trying to do something that many had sought to do before, and many would continue to do after. He was trying to get lost, and in turn he hoped to leave behind his loss.

The catastrophe that kicked off this boy’s flight into the woods began in Helendale, the small village where this man-boy spent most of his life.Well in Helendale it wasn't uncommon for the ruffians, commonly known as adventurers, to fight. Most of the time they were pointless dick measuring contests, including one actual dick measuring contest between a gnome and an orc. As an aside if you ever meet a gnome with the nickname “Meat Club” it would be best not to ask about it.However this fight didn’t simply cripple the pride of an orc warrior. No, this fight was the worst that anyone Helendale had ever seen. It resulted in two very different, but equally catastrophic things. The first being that one adventurer vaporized half the town when he blew himself up, having not fully understood the words self-actualizing internal cascading combustion. Remember this, dear friends, deals with Gods shouldn’t be taken lightly nor should the powers they offer in said deals.

If the boy’s family had been staying at their farm they would have been fine. However, they had been staying with their cousins in town having just sold their farm in an attempt to make a fresh start. The remains of his once large family were caught up in the explosion, the boy had been smart enough to try and flee when the fighting started. Well smart isn’t necessarily the right word, cowardly is more apt. The boy got a good look at one of the combatants. A bug the size of a man, it sent chills up and down his spine, and when the boy saw the thing race across the tavern to attack someone he bolted. He raced down the street, but the fight quickly destroyed the tavern, so he ran all the way out town. Unfortunately, he was still close enough to see the explosion and the subsequent crater it left.

The blast should have killed the boy, honestly I'm not entirely sure how he survived. Yet he did, and pure dread filled the boy as he saw the complete absence of the home his family had been staying in. Rushing to the crater the boy began to dig through the ash and rumble. Only wanting to somehow find his family alive. His fingernails cracked and bled, his hands burned but still he dug. Refusing to believe that they could be wiped away, in a blink. It was unfair, the boy had lost plenty of family before, but this was something else. They had died without any proof that they had ever lived. As those they had never existed at all.

As the evening became night the boy began to sob and sob knowing that he would never find his family alive or dead. Eventually he could no longer muster any force of will to move. Gazing blankly into the barren pure black night sky covered in ash, his own blood, and tears in his eyes the sky blurred. In that moment when the boy had nothing left, a memory surfaced of a very different sky. A sky filled with stars, a memory from another life. That is when the second catastrophic event of the evening occurred. That is when this young man’s fragile young mind broke.

Such tragedies are almost expected to break people, leaving them in horrid states months on end, if not years. If that had happened this would have been the end of this story. However when his peasant mind shattered, it also broke the mental block that held back the memories from his old life on Earth. Leon cried in both relief and pain as the daggers of his broken mind pierced his original mind. The pain was deep, but the trauma was short-lived. He was able to put light years, or rather eighteen Earth years between the death of his family and his life on Earth. Well in this scenario "life" is a bit of a misnomer, but alas that is what it was to Leon. His life on Earth was, and always will be real even if he knew it to be a lie. Longing to leave the agony of his grief behind, the boy left his old name behind too. Retaking his name from Earth. For the sake of moving forward Leon lied to himself, and played a bit of make believe. Imagining that he had just arrived from Earth or that this was a new hyper immersive video game. Of course he knew that it wasn’t a video game, but the idea sparked a thought. When two powerful enemies fight, there are bound to be at least two things at the outcome. Death and loot.

Leon ran until his malnourished legs gave out and he collapsed under the bows of a great oak. He had brown hair and tan skin. His feet caked in dirt, while the rest was a mix of ash, dirt, and blood. Overall he had the appearance of a skeleton caked in mud, streaked with ash. It was the unfortunate nature of poverty, that one had to take what was given, but that would change soon. There were only three things on his whole body that were not brown we’re; his teeth which were a rather unpleasant shade of yellow, his pale sky blue eyes, and a cracked blue stone no bigger than his thumbnail. This stone would change everything. This cracked blue stone was the whole reason he was in such a rush. Well, the further Leon ran the easier it became to pretend that this all was a game. Outrunning one's past is not as easy as it sounds, and it requires some damn good cardio to do it successfully. However, the cracked stone was an extra incentive.

Being no expert in things such as glowing rocks, Leon wasn't sure what exactly it was. However, the way it glowed with a dim light, and the tingle that shot through him gave him a feeling of satisfaction and relief. Also anything that could’ve survived that explosion had to be powerful. This made him believe that this was his ticket to the magic that he had wanted- no, craved- so bad when he agreed to be reincarnated here on this hellscape. Well it’s not like he had much choice in the matter, when Leon's life on Earth had ended abruptly, it wasn’t just him that bit the bullet. It was everyone, everywhere, the whole world gone in a flash. Everyone had been given the same choice, Be reborn into a world of magic, or be recycled into a new soul. It was a wonder to the young leon that a world could evaporate just like that. That however, is nothing, but a minor detail now and a mystery for later.

Finally catching his breath, the boyish-man stared intently at the stone, trying what the fictional heroes from his world would do. He tried to push his mind into the stone... And he tried, and he tried. Then he tried calling out to it, first mentally then verbal. Then he tried an incantation. “By the power of blue stone, I. HAVE. THE POWER!”

Leon tried many things each more desperate than the last. Finally when he was just about to give up, he noticed that his arm holding the stone had begun to tingle. Unbound joy swept through his mind and began to radiate through his whole being. Infact his whole body began to tingle, and Leon began to laugh and cry because it was the most pleasant thing he had ever experienced. He had wasted fifteen years of his life plowing fields and harvesting crops- and finally he was getting what he wanted- no, what he needed to feel alive. Just as the tingling reached its zenith, and Leon was choking back sobs of relief, he collapsed in a heap on the forest floor. His strings cut, and dear friends, Leon was dead.

Any expert could have told Leon that the blue Amber-like gem, that was about the size of a thumbnail, was not in fact a natural stone of any sort. It was a crystalisk, a form of crsytalized genetic storage medium that when separated from its progenitor it would latch on to a host. Shortly after latching on to a host the crystalisk would pull any available energies to produce offspring. These crystalisk were specific to one single race, the Aväk. So while ‘a-rock’ sounds suspiciously like ‘aväk’, they had next to nothing in common. If Leon had asked an expert, they would have likely informed him that the blue glow the stone gave off was a sign that it was feeding off of him, and if he held on to it for much longer he would go numb and very shortly thereafter, die. Which as you know, my dear friends, is exactly what happened.

Leon didn't know any of this, with him being dead and all. However, my dear friends, there was something still alive inside Leon. The aväk that had burrowed up his arm and then ate his brain stem, was very much alive. Though its crystalisk was damaged and the magic in Leon was insufficient for a colony to be established. It was still more than enough for a single aväk larva to thrive and grow to maturity. Nourished by the malnourished boy trying to escape his past, the aväk reached for the future, and in a morbid way Leon had finally escaped it all.