A/N: First and foremost, Happy New Year. I really hyped myself up for this fic and I'm really excited to be uploading this, even if it is just the first chapter. It is a magic A/U that is loosely based on one of my favorite video game franchises, the God of War franchise. I'm not gonna sit here and babble, I'm just gonna get right into it. Enjoy.

Side Note: I use dub and sub names in my fics. Some fics I'll write "Joey, Téa, Tristan, etc." some fics I'll write "Jounouchi, Anzu, Honda, etc." and some fics I'll mix them; however, I am consistent in whichever names I use. If you don't like what I call someone, oh well. Get over it.

Disclaimer: I do not own YuGiOh! Or the God of War franchise. This much should be very obvious.

To Télos Archízei*

They were beaten up, bruised, and bloodied, but they were almost there. They had to be almost there; why else would an upwards of more than ten duel monsters at a time ambush them in hopes of preventing them from ascending up the stairs of the castle's North Tower. And they knew even though they were this close, it was far from being over. They knew that once they'd managed to get up the stairs and into wherever he was hiding their abducted loved ones, something much, much bigger and much, much more deadly was awaiting them. There was no way that he would just let them win simply because they'd made it there; if the yamis and the hikaris truly wanted to be the heroes they were trying to be, then they would have to defeat the man himself. Not just some monsters he pulled out of the shadow realm. The problem was that in order to at least stand somewhat of a chance they all would need to be healthy, and none of them were close. Injury had plagued them before they'd even gotten to the island, and now each of the three lights were handicapped in some way and their yamis not at a hundred percent with injuries of their own.

Ryou's concussion had the room spinning every five minutes and his only aid in relief was a pair of sunglasses to prevent the light from making his head hurt worse than it already did. Bakura was certain that a couple of his fingers were broken, and all he had was a glove to put on and a piece of string to splint them with – on top of his head throbbing and the faint dizziness from his lighter half. Malik had no idea what the hell was wrong with his right leg other than it felt like someone was taking a hammer and nails to his shin, and when he wasn't leaning against something or someone for support he was sitting on the ground because he couldn't put any weight on it. Mariku was gimpy from his other half's leg injury, barely able to stand and very slow when it came to walking, and he had no use of his left forearm – possibly due to a break or a hairline fracture. Joey and Seto were not yami and hikari; however, the two of them did possess some type of bond and Seto did possess the ability to manipulate shadows. Needless to say, Seto could feel some pain in his left ankle and Joey could feel some pain in his right side around his ribcage. Yuugi, like Mariku, had completely lost the use of one of his arms, but unlike the insane yami, Yuugi's was due to a dislocation; and though his shoulder had been popped back into place, he had his jacked tied around him as a makeshift sling to prevent any excess movement. Yami's arm was sore – and if he moved it too fast, the pain would shoot through his body and temporarily immobilize him – and he was spitting out blood every few minutes. All of those injuries on top of the cuts, welts, gashes, and burns that each of them bore…

Giving up was sounding better and better. There was no way that in their current condition they would be able to fight for their loved ones (and actually win); but submitting was not an option that they could take.

Two Months Earlier, in Domino City, California…

Puzzles were his calling; it didn't matter what type. Jigsaw puzzles, word puzzles, numerical puzzles – hell even Rubik's cubes were no match for him, he could solve them in under a minute – seemed to bring out a more daring and determined side of him. So, it was no surprise that when his grandfather brought the puzzle back from one of his digs in Egypt, Yuugi immediately began working on it. For the first few weeks that he had it, he would allot himself a specific amount of time to go over the pieces – which were well over a few hundred – and kind of test things out; fitting perhaps a couple of pieces together in a sitting and then set those pieces aside from the rest of the puzzle. It was extremely difficult at first, seeing that he didn't even have a clue as to what the finished product was supposed to look like, but as the weeks went by and he began to pair pieces, things got easier.

Currently, he was over at his friend Ryou's apartment, where himself, his white haired friend, Malik, and Joey were supposed to be studying for an upcoming test. Keywords, supposed to be. Of course, none of them were doing what they were supposed to be doing; Yuugi was on the couch with his puzzle fragments spread out over the coffee table, Malik and Joey were on the other side of the couch causing mischief, and Ryou was next to Yuugi with his attention split between the novel in his hands and his two blonde friends.

Prank calling was by far the most childish activity that two nearly eighteen-year-old boys could do, but Malik and Joey were well known for their pettiness and antics. It was like their role in the foursome: the two blondes were the goofy, fun friends that didn't mind looking ridiculous or getting in trouble so long as they got their friends to laugh, Ryou was the quiet, intelligent friend who was far too polite for his own good, and Yuugi was a mix between the three; he could be just as foolish as Malik and Joey but also just as quiet as Ryou, and he had the type of innocent appearance – and only his appearance – that could make people fold to his will. At one point – a few seconds after he had opened his math textbook and mentally said "fuck that" – Malik got one of Ryou's phone books and brought it back into the living room before flipping it to a random page and pulling out his cell phone. Joey had quickly caught on, read off a number, and now they were listening to the sound of dialing on speaker.

"I think they're too busy to come to the phone," Joey said after they'd spent a good minute or two listening to the phone ring.

"Good. Then this will be even funnier when they get pissed and hang up on us," Malik responded as he set the phone down on his lap.

Rolling his eyes and flipping the page in his book, Ryou asked, "You two dialed star sixty-seven before calling right?" Though he usually didn't act like it, he loved when Malik and Joey did something completely senseless to cause himself and Yuugi to laugh, but he didn't like them getting in trouble for it. Prank calling was a federal offense and while they were his two best friends, he was not bailing them out of jail. Damn that.

"Of course we did Ryou. How dumb to ya think we are?"

Choosing not to answer that question – mostly because Joey would break his neck if he heard what his friend had to say – the white-haired boy looked back down at the pages before him.

Eventually, after roughly five minutes of ringing, the call was answered and an annoyed woman seemingly snapped, "Thank you for calling Papa John's in Domino City. This delivery our carry-out?"

"Delivery," The tanned boy said with a grin plastered over his face. "But I have a question."

The woman on the other end sighed, and made absolutely no effort to hide it. It was almost like she wanted the two to know they were busy and she had no time for nonsense.

But nonsense was their specialty. "Do you deliver in bulk?" After Malik said this, his grin turned into a full blown smile and his muscles tensed as he tried to keep from laughing. He looked over at Joey, who had a hand clamped over his mouth and had turned a bright shade of pink from the same effort.

"Pardon?" The woman asked.

The two nearly cracked up and Malik was surprised that his voice didn't crack when he responded, "Bulk. Like large quantities of a specific item. Do you guys deliver in bulk?"

There was a moment of silence on the woman's end and briefly the two though that she had figured out what they were doing and hung up, but then she responded with, "It honestly depends. Where are you located?"

"Hawaii," He stated.

The sound of a click sent the two boys into a short fit of laughter before they switched items with Joey holding the phone and Malik reading off another number. This time, the phone only rang for a few seconds before a male answered, "Thank you for calling Domino's, will this be dine-in, delivery, or carry out?"

"Delivery," Joey said.

"Alrighty." A brief pause, and then, "What would you like to order?"

"Could I get a large pepperoni pizza?"

"Is that all?"

The blonde smirked and bit his lip to stifle a giggle before answering, "Actually, no. For that pizza, could I have it with no sauce and no bread?"

A squeak escaped Malik before he held both hands over his mouth and looked at Joey, who gave him a glare and mouthed, 'Shut the fuck up.'

"Sir, are you saying 'no bread' as in no garlic sticks with your order –?"

"No, I mean no bread as in no crust on the pizza. I just want a box with the toppings in it. Ya know, while we're on the subject of bread, could I actually get some garlic sticks with my pizza, but no garlic on them?"

Immediately after Joey's ludicrous interruption, the man hung up and the two friends began hooting once more, significantly harder than the previous time. Ryou watched the two from over his novel and shook his head, a small grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. His friends were nuts. Unfortunately for the boy, he made eye contact with Malik and the tall blonde shoved his phone into his friend's face before saying, "Your turn."

Ryou shook his head. "No thank you. Prank calls aren't my idea of a fun activity, and I'm not funny. Why not ask him?" He jerked a finger at Yuugi, who was busily working away at the mess of pieces on the table. While Yuugi didn't really do anything to get himself in trouble or wreak humorous havoc like his two blonde friends, Ryou knew that his smaller friend had a silly side that could be much better than his own in this situation.

Malik shook his head, still trying to give his phone to his thin friend. "No way. He gets pissed when people mess with him while he's putting that thing together." Now, Yuugi being upset was about as intimidating as an angry puppy, and if anything it was funny, but his friends didn't enjoy angering him. No matter how amusing it was. And he always got them back in the future. "Just do one call. It's not all that hard; dial the number, say something dumb, and don't laugh until they hang up. Come on Ryou, don't be an old sponge with hair hanging off of it."

To which Ryou rolled his eyes. His tan friend had an array of "don't be's" and they were all completely ridiculous and irrelevant in the context that he used them in. "Fine." And he took the phone, dialing the number that his friend read off to him. When a woman picked up, he could feel his heart pounding, as though it would beat right out of his chest. He wasn't good at these kinds of things.

"Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. Is this a delivery or a carry-out?"

"Um," Ryou began, his face turning a shade of red that would've put Crayola out of business. He really wasn't good at these things. "Actually, I just had a question."

"How can I help you?"

He racked his brain. Under this kind of pressure, even coming up with a stupid question was a difficult task. Eventually he settled on, "Could you give me the number to Domino's?"

There was a long period of silence and for a moment Ryou thought that he'd screwed up the prank call. But then the woman responded, "Yeah, just let me get it from your mom first." And then she hung up.

Ryou stared at the phone in disbelief while his two friends hollered with laughter. Of course his prank call would result in an insult.

"Yug', ya can't tell me that wasn't funny," Joey said as he got off of the floor and turned to his petite friend. During his fit of laughter, he'd fallen off of the couch, along with Malik who was still on the ground and clutching his sides.

But Yuugi didn't respond. In fact, he was so engrossed on the conundrum in before him that he hadn't even heard what was going on between his friends since they'd sat down. There was something about this puzzle; every time he touched it, he felt heat – which was very strange considering that each piece was made out of pure gold and should have been cool to the touch – though each sensation was brief. And then there was this feeling in his subconscious – he couldn't exactly put a name to it yet, but it was bizarre. Like there was some type of presence there, but what or who he couldn't exactly pinpoint. At this point, he'd paired all of the puzzle's pieces and had managed to get a good group of the pairs to fit with the other sets, forming a three-dimensional corner. Judging by this, he thought the final product to be a cube or some other type of tetrahedron; and based on the piece with a loop on it, this puzzle had the ability to hang on something.

Seeing that their friend had made some type of progress with what he was working on, the three opted to leave him be. While it was a little irritating that Yuugi was spending every second of his free time tinkering away with those minute golden fragments, they'd wanted to see the finished product about as badly as he did.

XxXx

This was the third time this week that Yami was late for work. Thankfully for him, he remembered to call in and tell his boss, or else he would probably be without a job. It all started a little less than a month ago, when he'd received the most arbitrary and severe cold flashes he'd ever felt in his life. They were so bad that he'd thought he'd come down with some type of illness; and for a few days, he stayed home from work and school just to avoid having a jarring shiver strike him in public. After those initial few days, however, the cold grew less intense. It was still there, as the goosebumps on his skin surely attested, but it didn't bother him to the extent that it had before. But today, just as he was getting dressed for work, one hit and it hit him hard.

It was like no matter what he did to warm his body, it wouldn't die down or go away. For about an hour, he lay on his bed wrapped in a blanket, shaking like a leaf in the wind; he felt like this irrational chill went far beyond the surface of his skin to where his bones were cold. He could even feel the cold in his head, where a headache was born; and while the chill went away after roughly an hour, the headache went absolutely nowhere. The strange thing about this was, while the sudden chills did alarm him, he recognized them. Back when he was a little boy, he'd had the ability to manipulate shadows, and whenever he played with the darkness the numbing cold would take him. Being only a child at the time, he stopped messing the shadows for fear that he might freeze to death if he continued. Then he'd heard the age-old tale of a pharaoh who sacrificed himself to save his kingdom and how he would be reincarnated to save the world again with the lighter half of his soul. Of course, this was an old legend and about nine times out of ten legends turned out to be overly exaggerated tales of some event that happened many years ago, and naturally he didn't believe it.

Until he looked into it more and read something on how the pharaoh and a few others could use shadow magic, which made him look into shadow magic and find out that its use did cause an unrealistic cold feeling. These findings made him wonder, was he the reincarnated pharaoh? Part of him wanted to ask his parents if they had any idea about this, but a much stronger and more reasonable part told him that if he even breathed a word of him having a past life his parents would throw him in an asylum faster than he could blink. Besides – while he was no coward or weakling in any way, shape, or form – saving the world wasn't really his kind of thing. This wasn't a comic and he wasn't batman. But as the familiar chills continued and sometimes intensified, he couldn't help but think about it more and more.

In his "research" he also found that the pharaoh's "lighter half" was also the one to solve an item called the Millennium Puzzle, which was an upside-down pyramid with the eye of Ra in the middle of it. Archaeologists have proved the rumored Millennium items to exist in this time period, which meant that part of his enquiry had to be true, but at the same time there was no puzzle on the planet so hard that only one person could put it together. There couldn't be. There were also old drawings in stone slabs of said pharaoh and while these drawings had no color, Yami could see the resemblance of himself and the king. These similarities were rather uncanny, and while he wanted to think they were just crazy coincidences, he found himself believing more and more of it every day.

He gazed through the glass door of the employee entrance of the department store, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw that the one coming to unlock the door for him was not his manager. While he did inform his boss that he would be late, he knew that he was walking on thin ice and it would only be a matter of time before his boss lectured him about his habits, which was some shit that he was not trying to hear.

"You late?" Mariku asked, pushing the door open to let his friend and coworker into the building.

"A little bit," Was Yami's response as he stepped inside and then made his way into the back stockroom. His shift was supposed to start at three o'clock. It's currently a quarter until four, and he hasn't even clocked in yet.

Mariku locked the door back and then followed, soon catching up and walking in stride with his friend. "Boss man said you told him you were feeling sick again."

"I'm fine." Yami deadpanned right before an unforgiving chill caught him and he noticeably jerked. Great, the one thing he didn't want to happen in public and it happened at his fucking job. Thank God it was Mariku and not one of his other coworkers, or even his boss, that saw it.

"You sure about that?" The blonde asked as he pushed open the doors to the stockroom. "Looks like you had a miniature seizure for a second."

"I'm fine," The man stated for a second time as he made his way over to an unlocked computer and punched in. "I'm just cold."

"How? The air conditioning in here is broken and it's warm outside."

"I don't know." Yami shook his head before heading out to the dock, where Bakura could be seen walking out one of the doors and into the trailer of a truck. "I've just been getting these cold flashes for the past few weeks and it seems like every time they're going away they come back even stronger."

Yami figured that it would be okay for Mariku and Bakura to know what had been going on with him. After all they were his friends – no matter how much they argued and didn't get along – and none of them would think that he was crazy. Bakura was so troublesome and disturbing that Yami was surprised he even had a job – it seemed like in school the boy was in trouble every other day – and Mariku's elevator clearly didn't go all the way up to the top floor. He expected for Bakura to just ignore what he said and for Mariku to just laugh at his misfortune, but he was thrown for a loop when Bakura backed off of the truck to better hear their conversation and Mariku said, "That's been happening to me too."

If the man could've fainted he would have, but he settled for giving Mariku an odd expression, almost as though he didn't believe him but he was relieved that he wasn't the only one going through this. "What?"

The taller boy nodded. "Yeah. It started a couple of weeks ago. I would get this random, bone chilling sensation that wouldn't go away no matter what I tried."

By this time, Bakura had made his way over to them, and had an expression on his face that was the exact opposite of what Yami had expected. Instead of appearing to be condescending and judgmental, his friend's look was intrigued. "You guys have been getting the shakes too?"

The two nodded. Even Bakura was experiencing this? This was most definitely strange. Yami debated whether or not he should tell them the story about the pharaoh, his light, and the Millennium Items. There was a possibility that if the three of them were experiencing the same thing, which was the presence of shadows, then they could possibly be aware of the legend. However, before he could open his mouth to ask the question, Mariku beat him to it.

"You guys think it has something to do with the Millennium items?"

"You know about…?" Yami couldn't even finish the question. Here he was terrified to let on even just a little bit that he had his beliefs about the legend and Mariku had known about the shit for God knows how long.

"Yeah. We both do." Mariku gestured to himself and Bakura. "I looked into it the second these cold flashes started happening. We think it means that the lights are close to the Rod and the Ring. Maybe yours means that your light is putting together the puzzle."

Yami couldn't believe his ears. Either the tale about ancient Egypt was true, or the three of them were just crazy, and he was hoping that it was the latter. Because if the tale was true, it meant that they were going to have to save the world from something or someone, and that was too tall an order for him.

A/N: I've never done any type of Magic A/U before, so I'm excited to see how this story will turn out. I've also read plenty of magic A/Us, which always seem to turn out very similar, and that's exactly why I'm sort of theming it like God of War. No, I'm not taking the characters and thrusting them into the God of War plot, but because what I'm actually gonna do is so hard to explain, you guys are just gonna have to wait until we get into the duel monsters and the shadow magic. In the meantime, please review. Feedback, both positive and negative (but no flames) is appreciated.

*To Télos Archízei is translated to "The End Begins"