Despite being conscious there was nothing I could do to roll or move my body. All I could muster was the faint strength to shiver. My tiny lungs wheezed but fought for every last scrap of air. As the oxygen circulated my senses returned. To my left, I could hear spluttering and coughing. Crawling into my weak vision came a middle-aged man soaked through, he pulled my body close to his chest and hugged me tightly. It must have been the father to this child. Even through the cold drenched face, the man’s tears were clear. 

The man cleared his throat, took in some deep breaths and picked me from the ground, hugging me tightly to his breast. Together we hobbled away from the river and into a set of woods. The whole way the man muttered to himself but for the life of me, I could not understand his tongue. Despite the language being different, there was one unmistakable similarity from my old life, however, magic. The man holding me had the tell-tale signs of one belonging to the Arcane realm. He wasn’t very proficient or skilled but his body gradually heated itself to a point that his clothes dried far quicker than they should have. Like many of the Arcane Realm, element manipulation was common and sadly what was more common was the lack of innate ability. This man probably awakened to his Realm and never much grew it past bettering his internal temperature. If this universe has developed on the same building blocks as the prior then perhaps I won’t stay so helpless and might finally break this cycle of pain I find myself in.

As the man babbled on through tears and my body slowly warmed and loosened I recalled my realm awakening and my first steps in understanding mana and magic. I was the youngest awakener ever to have grown up in my orphanage and yet, after conducting the Guiding Ritual that is used to identify which realm an awakener belongs to, I was mercilessly beaten by not just the other children but the very adults who had sworn to protect me. I was born to the Entropic Realm. The Realm of death. 

I lived for months in a cupboard in the basement with only rats thrown into my hovel to be used as food. There was a debate on whether to simply kill me or not. Despite the entropic realm being considered a bad omen, there was a lot of deliberation on if killing me would lessen the omen or somehow make it worse and so they settled on locking me away hoping the universe or the rats would decide for them. Instead, I rationed the rats that were given me, subsisting on but one a week and using the rest to practice and grow my innate talents. On the final day of the month, I overran the Orphanage with a small cadre of soul-bound skeletal vermin whom I had built by combining the parts of several rats and animating them with their drained life force turning them into my small warriors. They blended in with the scraps on the floor of my cell till I deemed it time to strike. And thus began my journey into magic. It’s strange thinking back on that time now and feeling nothing. It used to be such a driving force of anger at my core and yet now… all I could feel was the warm embrace of this babbling man, it was the first comfort I had felt in millennia.