Gaiuel is only one of an unlimited number of worlds that exist in the domains of the Universe. Planes-wise, it is rather far from Earth’s dimension, where our friend Ennette would one day come from. It isn’t impossible to reach without the power of the Universe, but it would take a very strong caster with dimensional affinity to hop so many planes at once without getting completely and entirely lost, and even if they were to hop a few at a time, they might still take a decade to reach their destination.
The people of Gaiuel aren’t all that inherently different from Earth humans, either. They have two hands and two feet, ten fingers and ten toes. They have two eyes and two ears and a mouth and a nose. They also, however, have various skin colors and biological features that set one race apart from another—some being far more varied and distinctive than their Earth counterparts.
The biggest difference is that while only some residents of Earth are blessed with the power of magic, all of the residents of Gaiuel can wield magic. Magic is everything to the people and creatures of Gaiuel—yet it is nothing, as is the way it is for most things that exist in abundance. It is only the exceptional that stands out among the crowd.
When it became clear to the fallen Kreeth Dukedom that their youngest child, Maziar, had omni-affinity with a magic potential that could one day surpass the Grand Magus of Alvoron, a great celebration was held throughout the kingdom. It didn’t mean much to have the natural abilities of any kind of caster—even common slaves and servants have some amount of magical ability—but when you started getting into the higher echelons of caster hierarchy within any given society, only then was it worth something.
Maziar Kreeth wasn’t simply exceptional. He was exceptional.
Thrilled, Duke Kreeth wrote to the king immediately after the testing magician had taken his leave. In his letter, he told the king of his son’s guaranteed success and their family’s continued value to the kingdom even after years of producing lackluster heirs. It was all thanks to the blood of the duke, of course, and nothing to do with his wizard mother, who had run off to be some caster tower’s worthless lackey.
Almost as soon as the king received that letter, he and all the high nobles of the land came one after the other to dote on the duke and the confused little boy—who would really have liked to have all those old men go back to wherever they came from and leave him and his family alone, thank you very much—hiding behind his older sister’s skirt.
Little Maziar couldn’t say any of that, of course; he knew how important his powers were to his family and what they meant to them. He liked his father’s attention if nothing else, and he enjoyed being useful—but more than that, he loved his sister, Mira, far more than any of them. He'd been patting himself on the back after being told that his rise in fame and power had already canceled a union that would have sent her away forever.
For a boy so young, however, the pressure was too much, and for the first time, Maziar ran.
Right out the back door, Maziar’s little legs carried him as far and fast as they could—which was neither very far nor very fast at all, given that he was hardly nine years of age. He only just made it to the stables along the back of the manor where they lived. Huffing and puffing, Maziar slipped into what was supposed to be an empty stall to hide.
Rather than throwing himself into the hay as he planned, however, he stood having what could only be described as a staring contest with a massive black stallion. It was as big a horse as he’d ever seen, with long, wavy black hair and shining, blood-red eyes staring back at him.
Sniffing, the horse said, “Puny creature, do you have an apple?”
Maziar did have an apple, as luck would have it. He’d brought several as emergency rations in case he needed to hide out in the stall for the next week or so (he was never the sharpest pencil in the box, but in this case, he had also never gone hungry before and had no concept of either the passage of time or just how much he actually ate in a day.) Maziar took one of the apples he’d crammed into his jacket and offered it slowly to the horse.
“Very kind of you,” the horse spoke again and took the offered apple.
This time, Maziar fell back, for as young as he was, he knew that horses were not prone to speaking. Not only this, but he’d also never seen this horse before in his father’s stables—and he was certain he’d notice those eyes.
Running off screaming as if his life depended on it, little Maziar fled to the stable master to tell him all about the strange horse in his father’s stables, but the stable master had no idea what he was talking about and told the boy he must have fallen asleep and had a scary dream.
“Oh,” Maziar said, accepting this explanation—though he would later recall an itch in the back of his mind that told him that was wrong and that he knew far better than the stable master.
With that misadventure behind him, he went on to have dozens more, as learning just how many tricks he could play on those old men with his magic became far, far more interesting than a talking horse that he might have dreamed about.
It was when the king came to visit that Maziar first met Prince Rhaltz. At fourteen, Rhaltz was just a couple of years older than Maziar, and, like Maziar, he enjoyed fencing, horseback riding, and playing with the family's dogs—and, of course, magic.
They grew up together as good friends, with many of the manor staff taking bets as to who would be the worst of the troublemakers. But while Maziar continued to excel in his studies, hoping to earn an even greater amount of respect for his family and the right for Mira to have her choice of spouses, Rhaltz squandered his talents. To the prince, trying to keep up with Maziar’s talents was like a turtle trying to outrun a deer. Genetics alone dictated the impossibility, and instead of trying to keep up with the deer, the turtle found other waters to wade in.
Caught up in his own life, Maziar never bothered to look behind him until he walked in on his good friend Rhaltz doing unspeakable things with his sister.
He would never forget her disgusted, hopeless, tear-stained face when his eyes met hers across Rhaltz’s back, nor forgive himself for believing that the bruises on her arms were really from her falling down the stairs.
She pressed a finger to her lips, asking for his silence, and he wasn’t lost as to why.
Maziar could bring the castle to the ground, destroy the surrounding lands, or simply turn the man who hurt his sister inside out—but the only ones who would really be hurt would be the family Kreeth.
What choice did he have but to quietly close the door and let it continue? Rhaltz was the prince of all the land, and Maziar was just a boy who might someday be a magus worthy of being given a respectable place in society with or without a title of his own.
Even if anyone believed what had happened, no one would care. Rhaltz was the prince, and in Varsal, the prince was above the law. All it would take was a word from him, and their family would be cast out onto the streets without a second thought.
It was the first time that Maziar had to face the reality that ‘power’ and ‘Power’ were very different animals, and genetics alone dictated that he would never be Rhaltz’s equal.
Maziar changed, then. He turned more reckless and foolish and stopped studying altogether—for what were all his efforts for? If he would never have the power to protect what he cared about, what was he doing it all for? Further and further, his thoughts spiraled until he realized that every problem in his life would have been solved if only he didn’t have magic to begin with.
It was a preposterous thought, but for Maziar, it was like a moment of clarity in his muddy pit of a life.
So he ran for a second time.
Maziar took a palfrey from the stable and galloped into the rainy night. He flew past all those places where he grew up playing with his friend and all those places where he spent days with his sister. He spurred his horse on until the horse would go no further, then crashed down onto his knees, the rain hiding his tears.
“It’s my fault,” he knew, as if he could fully take the blame for something that the Universe had ordained. As far as he was concerned, if it weren’t for him and his magic, Mira would have been sent someplace far away. He would never have seen her again, but at least she would have been safe from Rhaltz.
Looking at his hands, he thought quite seriously about cutting them off. It wouldn’t have done anything, of course—that’s not how magic works—but he suspected that it might just make him feel better.
“Tiny creature,” a smooth, deep voice said beside him. “Why are you in the mud?”
Swallowing, Maziar looked up to see the black horse from his childhood memory.
“It’s you,” he said. His voice was so raw he could hardly recognize it. Though his eyes were heavy and his vision hazy, his fifteen-year-old eyes could see what his nine-year-old ones couldn’t. “You…aren’t a horse, are you?”
“I am War,” said the horse.
“What are you?”
“Does it matter?”
Indeed, though he took on the appearance of a particularly handsome Friesian, War wasn’t a horse at all, and his true form was rather much more terrifying than Maziar could have imagined.
Planes are not simple things, nor are they entirely solid. It is easier, in fact, to think of them as a gas or a liquid that’s held in a sometimes-but-not-consistently-fluid container and then packed together like sardines in a can. This poor yet completely intentional design of the Universe—which they thought was extremely clever—meant that creatures with considerable magical ability (or that were in the wrong place at the wrong time) were not limited to their own plane where they might cause a balance upset. The Universe did not think so far ahead as to consider what those powerful beings might have done to other planes, but by the time they realized their error in that regard, they had already moved on to bigger and greater projects.
As different planes are stacked with different proximity to one another, the bleed of different worlds and planes are, by their very nature, different. A person from Earth might consider a ghost or a demonic spirit as being a more frequent occurrence than a unicorn or a dragon, for example. The Underworld is simply closer in proximity to them than the planes of others.
Casters had a penchant for breaking such rules, being not only able to open gates of dimensional travel but also being able to summon familiars from across the planes—given that they’ve studied enough not to muck it up—as was the case for War.
He’d been summoned nearly three hundred years prior from his plane and would really have rather gone home if he could, but his kind wasn’t suited to dimensional magics. It would be one thing if he could find a caster who could send him home or, at the very least, make a deal that would grant him permission to use a caster’s mana burst upon death, but after his first magus, Brineggan Kreeth, died by accidentally summoning a lightning bolt instead of his hat, every caster he’d run into had only wished to enslave him for their own selfish purpose.
And so War returned to the place he started, playing tricks and helping with harvests as he pleased, earning himself a legend and a place on the heraldry of House Kreeth—not that anyone still alive could have attributed that to him, nor did he care.
But as for the Kreeth boy looking at him with dead eyes, War was moved.
“You’re a strong brat,” War observed. “Could you free me?”
“Could you kill me?” Maziar asked.
“If you promise to free me, I’ll do better than that.”
“Can you take my magic away?”
“If that’s what you want,” War said. “But I could also help you get revenge.”
Revenge. The word sounded sweet to Maziar’s ears.
“What must I do?”
“To start, make a familiar contract with me,” War said, not one to pass up on an opportunity. “One with the promise that I am to be released to my homeworld at the end of your life. Bind the powers of the Sanctity of Deals, Bargains, and Bets with the powers of the Root of Gaiuel Magic, and there should be plenty of power to complete the deal.”
While Maziar wasn’t quite sure what all that meant, War gave him all the instructions he needed, and with a bit of blood and a promise, Maziar connected with his very first familiar and passed out.
When he came to, he was in a shabby hut of sticks and soil that smelled heavily of earth and herbs. A woman with curly brown hair and gray eyes hovered over him, dabbing his forehead with a wet towel. His body was hot and achy, and he couldn’t stop shivering, even with the weight of the blankets draped across his body.
“How’d I get here?” Maziar remembered asking through his fever.
“Your horse brought you,” said the woman.
“Who are you?”
“Who I am isn’t near as important as what I am,” she said with an oddly flat tone.
“What are you then?” Maizer changed his question.
“I’m a Soul Witch,” she told him. “And I hear you’re looking to give yours up in exchange for a wish.”
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