Children of Mind and Magic
Prologue
The air was thick and heady. A sweltering mass of stale heat hung stagnantly in the small underground chamber. It had once been a boiler room, belonging many years ago to the ancient building above. Life hadn't visited these halls in decades. None, that is, except for his. Despite the inactivity of a no-longer functional household, heat still saturated the little dive he called home. It was stifling, suffocating, and it never ended. If only it wasn't just the heat. The constant battle of internal wits was exhausting. There were days where he often wondered what the point of all this…aloneness was. What was the purpose of surviving when he had nothing and no one; nothing but a dingy, overheated cavern in the depths of what felt like hell itself. He had been holed up in his safe zone for longer than he cared to remember; holding onto nearly invisible threads of hope that one day things would be better, that he could make things right, the way things should have been. It was these threads that kept the panic at bay, kept the loneliness from overwhelming him into a numbness he wouldn't be able to come back from. The time to act was coming; he could feel it stirring within his subliminal mind, slowly rising to the surface of his consciousness. Hold on. He just had to hold on. Just a little longer.