Chapter 00 - Prologue

Wrapped tight in his cloak of stardust and screams, Midarian moved through the Margins with great haste. The place between realities was like a second home to the rogue Magi but even he knew the dangers of loitering.

“Mustn’t wake the Old Gods,” he muttered to himself as red starlight streamed around him. Broken civilizations long-since-razed, blurred and rebuilt to glory then quickly crumbled once more as he passed. “Cranky when awoken,” he added before he slipped into a stream of incoherent rambling divorced from any sane thought.

To any of the otherworldly observers that made the Margins their hunting ground, the strange creature that walked in their midst was impossible to catch.

The few that managed the feat, soon wished they hadn’t.

Cloak of stardust and screams pulled tight, Midarian continued his rambling. Words fell like fog from the red hood that hid his face below the shimmering immaterial nature of his favorite cloak. They gathered in his footsteps, red canvas sneakers kicking up eddying currents of insanity.

The protective fog of madness rolled up his legs, past the slim jeans and his signature jean jacket – sleeves rolled up past his elbows, of course - over a red hoodie that glittered with starlight. A girl he was quite fond of had once described him as an 80’s boy band reject.

He rather liked the compliment.

With one fingerless gloved hand clutching the immaterial cloak that flickered in and out of view with a piercing cascade of screams, his other drew esoteric symbols in the air. The symbols left behind traceries that burned and coruscated in the Margins.

Magic of any kind always left its indelible mark upon this place. And that always brought out the looky-loos.

But Midarian was confident in his cloak and the constant stream of insanity that flowed from his chapped lips. Any Old Ones that sensed the sharp acrid spike of magic would be hard-pressed to find its source amid the twin layers of obscurity.

Deep in his cocoon of madness, Midarian grinned to himself and let a conscious thought thread itself through the tapestry of madness about him. The Old Ones are so easy to con. So sure in their supremacy they never doubt their senses.

Readying himself to Dive, the Cinder of his powerful magic flowing around him like golden embers, Midarian heard a voice. A voice that immediately forced him to abandon the spell and begin anew, regardless of the dangers.

He was now officially loitering.

Erastus’s voice came clear to Midarian over the countless realms that shared the thin borderlands known as the Margins. His old, rasping voice grated against the Magi’s very bones.

If he could hear his voice, it meant that the god’s protections had waned. A thin crack in the perfect armor of Aldren’s reality that had routinely stymied Midarian’s attempts to make good on his promise of revenge to the corrupt deity.

The Margins came alive. 

Thin black cracks in reality split the air, warping the space like a funhouse mirror. This was the polite way of the many denizens of the Margins telling Midarian that he had overstayed his welcome.

Midarian whipped the cloak from his shoulders and stuffed the flickering, screaming thing away into a pocket. He would need both hands if he was going to capitalize on Erastus’s moment of weakness. 

Back on Aldren, the god would have already noticed the fragmentary lapse in protection. But that split second was enough for Midarian to act. And he intended to wrench that chink in the grumpy old god’s armor wide open.

The air roared and shattered. The cracks yawned wide, spilling out the Horrors within. Great beasts of incomprehensible nightmare flowed out, all tentacles and teeth from the airless, lightless void even he didn’t dare trespass.

Midarian dropped the babbling flow of insanity. “Jig’s up, I suppose,” he chuckled to himself. “Come one, come all. Gather ‘round now! Don’t be shy. Yes, you! Little girl with the pigtails and hundred gaping maws, come on down!”

Splitting his mind into four pieces, Midarian went to work.

One part directed his left hand and the massive flow of magic that coursed through his veins, creating a veritable blizzard of Cinder. The second part of his mind directed his right hand in perfect harmony with his left.

The magic he commanded was enough that even the thousands of creatures that poured forth, eager to glut themselves on an easy kill, were starstruck by the display.

Mana, magic, aether, force, authority, breath, ki, chakra, source, essence, sunset blood, whatever name you called it, Midarian made it dance with a skill second-to-none. He made it sing, and even the overwhelming forces piling out of the infinitely deep black cracks began to have second thoughts.

But Midarian cared nothing for them. While the third fragment of his mind focused on his Alethiomancy, the fourth splintered under the immense force of the crystallizing magic that sparked all around him.

He was a tornado of Cinder, gold coruscating embers whipped about into a twisting tower of magic half a mile high – if such measures of distance held sway in the Margins (they didn’t) – and despite their trepidation, the Horrors could not resist the lure of such a fine meal.

Midarian swept the fourth part of his mind, shattered by the force of his own magic, back into himself and finished the casting. Space and time were fluid in the Margins. Alethiomancy allowed him to make hardened reality as pliable as chewing gum on hot asphalt.

In the Margins, his Alethiomancy was truly a devastating sight to behold. 

The fraction of a second that Erastus had erred was enough for Midarian to pinpoint and wrench open a door across the multiverse.

As the door of flaking red paint appeared before him, Midarian turned to face his adoring public. The tingle of power still trembled in his fingers and while he could have walked through the door before the nearest creature came upon him, he had a reputation to uphold.

He faced the closest cluster of roiling tumorous tentacles and fanged mouths. It jabbered incoherently, reaching one questing tentacle that was meant to siphon the potent magic from his body.

Midarian gripped his glittering red hood and yanked it back, revealing infinity itself captured within. Countless stars flooded across the creature and every pinprick of light burned a dime-sized portion of the creature’s body.

The countless bits of starlight flowed on in an ever-widening stream, incinerating the nearest wave of creatures. A cheap parlor trick compared to his deeper magicks but the fans had come for a show. 

And a show he would give them.

In the blink of an eye, the Horrors were burned to nothingness. Hundreds of creatures older than most civilizations gone in a puff of disintegrating ash.

It wasn’t enough to halt the horde of claws and teeth that descended upon him but it was enough to leave a lasting memory. And that’s what mattered.

Midarian stepped into the door and kicked it shut behind him.

He was prepared for the shift before it happened. Aldren had stats. Actually, every world had stats but most of them were hidden and far from the consciousness of the denizens. 

Aldren and its ilk were different and though his home had been Earth, the nature of places like Aldren and Telsara were not unknown to Midarian.

A series of mental commands brushed away the distracting prompts and windows. He knew what he was about and needed no list of his spells. 

Alethiomancy was not of this world and he had no intention of teaching it to anybody here. His time on Aldren would be short and any stat-geeking he indulged in would be useless. Besides, he already knew he was more than a match for the useless god.

Erastus stood with his back to Midarian atop a wide argent dais, the telltale signs of a portal spell taking shape in the air in front of him. He was pulling some poor soul from the world between sleep and waking.

What a lot of people didn’t realize was that those myoclonic jerks that feel like you’re falling right when you’re about to fall asleep are usually attempts at planar travel.

They’re mostly misfires. Latent magic. But in the right circumstances and with enough juice, you could effectively shunt a person subconsciously attempting to Dive through a portal and to the destination of your choosing.

Of course, that’s a pretty shitty thing to do. 

It didn’t surprise Midarian that Erastus was behind it. The poor guy the god had honed in on would go to sleep in his bed and wake up somewhere else entirely.

Not that he needed it but Midarian welcomed another reason to murder the god. 

Killing a god had been on his bucket list for a long time. God-killer just had such a nice ring to it. So many of the worlds Midarian visited had silent gods or gods that had gone to the corner store for a pack of smokes and never came back. 

The realms that did have active gods were mostly assholes. Which meant that they were heavily guarded. There was a level of self-awareness among gods. Not enough to change their ways – who would stop them anyway? – but enough to guard themselves against the likes of Midarian.

So when he finally, finally, managed to get through Erastus’s protections, he was ecstatic.

Midarian arrived several seconds before the god had made his fatal mistake. A simple enough trick to perform from the Margins and it satisfied his most important tenet that had kept the rogue Magi alive all these long years: never arrive when and where you are expected. 

Seeing the spell taking shape, Midarian understood the source of the flaw. 

Portals were leaky, messy things. They always made cracks and fissures in reality. It was in their nature.

Any good spellweaver would be able to cover the flaw immediately. And indeed the foolish god had done just that. Too little, too late. Unlike a mortal spellweaver, a god had more juice to swing. He had pulled back the veil of time over the flaw in a bid to entrap Midarian as soon as he exploited the flaw.

Unfortunately for Erastus, Midarian had moved the moment of the flaw precious seconds prior to its appearance. And he was there in the god’s chamber before he was ready for Midarian.

The poor soul Erastus had targeted appeared in the black abyss of the portal and fell with a meaty thump onto the marble flooring. Dazed but surprisingly quick to recover, the man pushed to his feet. His brown eyes were wide with confusion.

Erastus spread his arms out like some tent revivalist preacher. His long billowing sleeves swung down and kissed the floor. Midarian imagined the god thought he looked impressive. But he just looked like a silk-winged bat.

Midarian drew two daggers and approached his quarry. Daydream in his left hand, gold as the first sunset of summer, and Nightmare in his right, black as the deepest moonless night in the dead of winter.

The time of the god’s trap drew near. Any second now Erastus would be expecting Midarian to come through the Margins and walk straight into his waiting trap. Midarian didn’t need to see his face to know the savage grin that would mar the deity’s eternally youthful boyish features.

Midarian stayed his hand long enough to time his strike at the exact moment the god’s trap would have caught him, had he not arrived seconds earlier. At the moment of the god’s appointed victory, Midarian drove Daydream into his spine.

Before Erastus knew he had erred deeper than he could ever fear, Nightmare dove down like the beak of a hungry raven into the vulnerable space between neck and shoulder.

A gout of golden ichor sprayed from the wounds. Midarian sawed Daydream through the spine and ripped Nightmare down. Either wound would have proven fatal on their own. But Midarian had a score to settle and the wily old cretin had slipped past his fingers far too many times for him to do anything halfway.

Flickers of cannon fire erupted from the wounds as Midarian pulled his daggers out, the last of the god’s essence faded in those bursts of light and thick gold blood. Midarian planted a boot into his white-robed back and pushed the god forward. He didn’t want to see his disturbingly innocent face.

The golden ichor that flowed from the wounds slowed, puddling about the god. It didn’t stain his robes, merely flowed over them like mercury leaving no trace on the fabric.

As the last dregs of stubborn life fled the god, the ichor began to change. Midarian, ever the opportunist, scooped up some of it into a vial while it was still gold. He slipped the daggers back into their sheaths that had appeared at the small of his back and pulled his red stardusted hood over his head. 

Eventually, the gold gave way to mythril-green, then shimmering silver before it hardened and began to solidify into a dark iron in both form and color. As magic fled the ichor, the hardened blood rippled from iron to burnished copper, completing its transmutation.

Midarian was halfway through the incantation for another door, ready to Dive back into the Margins, when he realized the young man was staring open-mouthed at him. He had just witnessed Midarian kill a god, though he doubted the man understood the significance.

More importantly, Erastus’s portal was still open.

He turned, studying the magic – not terribly complex by his standards, but then Erastus earned his station like all the elite and influential did; by the circumstance of his birth – and decided that he would not consign the young man to whatever plans Erastus had for him.

Erastus had already pulled him from his particular brand of Earth. Midarian couldn’t send him back, and quite honestly wouldn’t have wanted to. Aldren offered adventure and true growth that anybody would kill for.

Many had.

Midarian stepped to the side of Erastus’s dais, not willing to share the same platform as the dead creature. He summoned a gilded throne, appropriately gaudy and bedazzled not with precious gems uncountable but with cheap plastic costume jewelry.

He took a seat, acclimatizing himself to the ebb and flow of the weave upon Aldren. Once he had, he shifted the portal to another location. Wherever Erastus had meant to send the boy looked positively villainous.

Midarian didn’t know the world of Aldren well but he figured depositing the guy in a stretch of woods at the foot of the mountains was a better destination than a barracks full of soldiers wielding cruel-looking black blades.

Crossing one leg over the other, Midarian watched the man with a curious twinkle to his glowing eyes. He didn’t scream or run. That was a good sign. But he also wasn’t being sucked up into the portal as Midarian had expected.

His attention span waning, he looked back over the weave of the magic Erastus had set into motion. 

Aha, you gods and your marks. He snorted and rose from his throne. “C’mere,” he called to the young man.

***

The last thing Hal recalled was passing out at 3 AM on his couch. He had just spent the last several hours catching late-night surge fares and then cleaning all the vomit from the back of his car.

He had expected to wake up a few hours later, stumble blindly to the bathroom, then do the adult thing and go sleep on his bed full of unfolded clothes he had been putting off for the last three days.

Instead, he jerked awake and fell into darkness. The terrible nightmare hadn’t ended there, falling dreams weren’t that uncommon considering his near-phobia of heights.

Hal pushed himself up from the hard, cold floor and lifted his gaze to the strange cherubic, blonde-haired boy’s face that sat so strangely on the robed body of a man. 

The robed man had his arms spread wide with a disturbingly rapturous expression. His long sleeves dragged across the marble floor, partially obscuring the figure behind him from Hal’s point of view.

Somebody was sneaking up behind him, though sneak wasn’t quite the right word. The jean-jacketed man sauntered toward the baby-faced man’s back, two daggers of opposing qualities pulled free and held out to the side in mockery of the robed man. 

His intent was crystal clear.

Maybe Hal should have called out a warning but something kept his mouth shut. This was something bigger than himself at play here. So he stood witness as a casual bystander and tried to wake himself up from this hellish dream.

The Assassin struck and took down Babyface with casual grace. Streams of golden fluid erupted from the wounds and flashes of light chased the blood as it splattered across the room. Miraculously, it soiled neither the Assassin’s clothes nor Babyface's. 

Hal watched the blood change color and harden into something that resembled cooled lava. It was then that he realized without a doubt that he was not dreaming. He would have suspected a bad acid trip if he had ever tried the stuff.

Hal’s brown eyes locked with the strange glowing eyes from deep within the dark confines of the Assassin’s red hood. He looked like no assassin Hal had ever seen or dreamed up in all his life. No black leather with dozens of hidden pockets. He wore a garish red hoodie beneath a jean jacket. 

Who still wore jean jackets? The Assassin looked like he wanted to be an extra on Stranger Things.

The Assassin casually rolled a free hand and summoned a golden throne out of the air. He looked at the body, then something in the air to Hal’s left. Hal followed his gaze but saw nothing except empty space.

The chamber was a dimly lit cavernous expanse, candelabras placed every ten or twenty feet casting flickering reflections on the gaudy marble flooring. The roof was held up by a series of fluted columns that vanished into the gloom overhead.

It was like somebody heard a story about the Greek gods of antiquity and attempted to model this place after them. Except the creator lacked even the most basic comprehension of ancient Greek architecture or aesthetics.

The whole thing was a caricature of ancient Greek style.

“C’mere,” called the Assassin as he rose and wandered over to the body. 

Hal found his legs answering the smooth voice without conscious thought. He stood beside the body within spitting distance of the Assassin who had turned all his attention from Hal on to the body.

The Assassin crouched and braceleted the corpse’s wrist with his own hand. The hand flopped about as he raised the arm. “I think there’s still some juice left in this thing. Give me your right – no – your left arm.” 

Hal resisted the urge to obey, unsure why he had come any closer to the killer. “I’m good, thanks,” Hal managed to say.

“Listen kid, I appreciate the brass ball routine as much as the next guy. But I’m kind of in a rush here. There’s a magical otter that will be very cross with me if I miss our date for tea. So give me your hand or so help me….” 

The lingering threat hung in the air a moment before Hal thrust out his left arm. He didn’t see any other recourse. He wasn’t a fighter and there didn’t seem to be any doors, so running was out.

The Assassin slapped the corpse’s still-warm hand upon Hal’s forearm. He nearly had a heart attack when the dead fingers locked tight upon his arm. Whatever trace of fear he had was washed away with the searing white-hot pain that bloomed on his forearm.

“Yeah,” the Assassin said distractedly. “You might feel a pinch.”

A scream broke free from Hal and echoed into the wide space around them.

The Assassin looked at him and chuckled. “Good acoustics in this place.”

Tears blurred Hal’s vision. Rich golden light spilled out between the dead god’s fingers. When it was over, Hal was on his knees. The iron-like grip of the corpse’s hand was beginning to cut off the circulation to his fingers.

The Assassin poked the corpse’s arm with his pinky and the fingers blasted backward with a sickening series of cracks. Hal cradled his arm and rose to his knees. The chubby corpse’s fingers were all bent backward at impossible angles.

“All done,” the Assassin said cheerily. “And just in time for tea.” He motioned over Hal’s shoulder, at the same place the man had been looking before. Following the gaze again, Hal could see a swirling mass of autumn colors ten or twenty feet back. It hovered a few feet above the ground and made an ominous sound.

“Mind the drop,” was all the Assassin said before Hal felt a strange wrenching in his guts and was yanked off the floor like a stuffed doll. The gaseous swirl of oranges, reds, and browns pulled him in and darkness closed in.