Prologue

From the Archives of the Artificial Intelligence known as Thor prior to dissociation.

Note 1: Records indicate this information was recovered from an Orb Of Knowledge upon querying the origin of the Adamantium ring.

Note 2: The Identity of the recorder of this information was not available.

Note 3: There is no way to verify the authenticity of this information.

In another time, another dimension, another place, a man could not wait to cast the spell he was preparing. He’d spent hundreds of years conducting research and sacrificed countless lives developing this spell. One sacrifice had required him to hire a group to breach the heavens to capture, kill and trap a soul. That soul was about to be used to power his spell for eternity. It had also been the most expensive component. Drawing out the final rune he knew the casting of this spell would elevate him into the realm of the divine within years, not decades or centuries.

Ensuring that all the glyphs and objects of power were within the correct configuration, Apolyn looked at his surroundings one more time. This area of the Dungeon, technically the beginnings of The Labyrinth, was sparse. The cavern he was in was empty and guarded by the rest of his party. They were outside of the room and down the corridor from the only entrance into the cave for their ‘safety’. After the casting, he wouldn’t see them again so wasn’t worried about what happened to them. Apolyn cast his first spell and successfully linked the Adamantium ring to the center of the glyph. Runes briefly flashed bright gold around the inside surface of the ring, then faded.

Picking up the ring, he placed it on his right ring finger. The first step of the casting was now complete, now for his safety measure. Casting another spell, he opened a portal to his home that he would step through once his third casting was complete. Now for the hard part. Taking a deep breath and focusing, he began casting the spell he had created.

Apolyn had learned that Dungeons existed and replenished themselves by gaining experience from those they killed and absorbed. He had also learned that as Dungeons became more experienced, they would magically connect to other dungeons and share that experience. His research had discovered that these connections were often referred to as The Labyrinth. He had devised a method of tapping into and transferring some of that experience from that network of connections. It had taken years to create the spell. After he’d finished his research, he’d learned that he’d need to capture the soul of an angel and find one of the rarest and most indestructible substances in the Universe to even have a chance of succeeding.

Apolyn worked for years on this project. He’d found the location of an angel, sent a group after it and had its soul captured, no easy feat. The substance, however, was another matter. The only one he’d been able to discover that came close to his requirements was Adamantium. He’d only been able to procure a very small amount because no new sources had been discovered in a very long time. That made it prohibitively expensive as crossing the people that did have the metal, well, that was just a bad idea. So, he’d paid their price and thought about what he would make with the amount he was able to buy.

A pendant had been his first thought, but he’d decided against it. Pendants sat on chains that could be easily removed. Then he thought about making it into a ring and realized that was the answer. Once the ring was crafted, he’d included a rune that would allow it to auto-size to the wearer. Another rune made it so only the wearer would ever be able to willingly remove it from their hand. He’d also included a soul-binding rune. Should he die somehow, the ring would follow his soul to a previously prepared body when his contingency spell to soul-transfer activated upon his death.

Returning his focus to the spell he was casting, words and gestures flowed from the Arch-Mage. Time passed without pause and with a final word of the power the spell was done. A delay of 3 seconds before activation had been added so the siphon would not begin until he was clear of the Dungeon. If the spell had failed he’d wanted to make sure he was nowhere near where he’d cast it. There was a lot of power being directed towards a single purpose. Apolyn stepped through his portal, felt a strange yanking sensation, and placed his foot onto a high desert plain next to a giant 100-foot tower. It was the last thing that Apolyn ever saw as a nanosecond later the entire area he had stepped onto was vaporized.

Unfortunately for Apolyn, The Labyrinth was much more than a connection network between dungeons. As Apolyn stepped through the portal, two things happened. First, his ritual activated 1,000 experience per second transfer to the wearer of the Adamantium ring. That surge of energy destabilized the portal and changed the target destination as Apolyn stepped through. Second, The Labyrinth, actually a sentient entity in its own right of arguably infinite size, noted the sudden loss of experience, which to it felt like a human getting a small splinter in their finger. It flexed its will to stop that experience loss. That flexing caused everything at the source of its “pain” to take a catastrophic negative modifier to their luck attribute.

As the ritual had already been activated and safely tucked outside time and space, it was unaffected. Apolyn, however, was affected by the modifier. As the portal destabilized things went weird because part of Apolyn’s spell had required a permanent change to time and space for the spell. That effect bled into the portal and cascaded out of control to change its configuration with two preset conditions dictated by flexing of the Labyrinth’s will. One, destroy whatever had hurt it. Two, make sure that it would be very hard for magic to be used to undo that destruction.

No one would ever know if an entity guided the destination the portal was directed to or if it was just dumb luck. The how did not matter; only the outcome did. At exactly 5:29 and 58 seconds local time, Apolyn stepped through the portal and exited next to a 100-foot tower at White Sands New Mexico on July 16th, 1945. One second later the portal disappeared and Apolyn realized His Personal Interface, magical items, spells, and links to his place of power went dead. Also, every spell he’d cast on himself stopped working. One second after that at exactly 5:30 a.m. Project Trinity successfully detonated a 25-kiloton device which instantly vaporized Apolyn who was standing exactly 100 feet below the device.

In the two seconds, the ring had been activated Apolyn stole 2000 experience from the Labyrinth. Having just made it to level 1,000 it would have taken another 16 minutes and 41 seconds to earn enough experience to break through the threshold needed to move into the Legendary rank class for Mages. Each category threshold increased the cost by ten times.

Once he’d died, Apolyn’s soul was pulled up and started rushing through space at a faster and faster pace. As he was moving, he was surprised to find that he could review his Personal Interface again. Checking the last few prompts, he realized that his soul was not rushing off to be transferred into a new body. Every spell that had been active had failed right before he received the prompt

YOU HAVE DIED!

Simply every ability, spell, and magical effect that had been active on him had ceased to function. He didn’t know what an atomic explosion was, but he was pretty sure fire was involved somehow. Before the portal had closed, he’d been completely immune to fire. Once the portal closed, he was not. Apolyn cursed the unfairness of what had happened while light in front of him bathed his soul as it traveled through space passing countless stars. That must be The Eye. As he passed through The Eye he suddenly found himself hurling through a viscous everchanging fluid. There were no landmarks, no focal points. He could not see more than five feet around himself as the substance blocked sight like a really thick fog. He saw a couple of other souls near him but felt that he was surrounded by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of souls as they all rushed through this fluid.

Suddenly, the milky substance he was traveling through cleared and Apolyn realized that the souls he was traveling with were flying past rows and rows of teeth that filled his vision. As they flew forward they increased in size until they were larger than he could describe. He found that he was rushing towards a tunnel that turned… no not a tunnel, a throat. Those were the last thoughts Apolyn had. As each soul crossed into the throat, they crossed a barrier that shredded and separated all the component parts of a soul, their memories. The Will that held those memories together lost coherence as the soul was consumed.

As Apolyn’s soul was consumed, The physical body of Apolyn was turned into particles that became part of the mushroom cloud rising into the sky. For the 2,000 experience points that the spell had stolen, Apolyn had been utterly destroyed and his body vaporized. If the Labyrinth had known the outcome it would have considered it a fair trade.

The Adamantium ring, however, was not atomized as the properties of Adamantium had been agreed upon by all the Divines from many of the Universes that made up the Multiverse. Instead of being destroyed, the nuclear blast had lifted and thrown the ring into a parabolic trajectory that caused it to plow into a white sandy dune near Oasis State Park, just west of Clovis NM.