Brand, the self-proclaimed Archmage of the town of Riddleport sat at his desk, thinking of his life and post-life, all his experiences so far. Starting as his father, Blitz' apprentice. When he came of drinking age, he had accidentally and drunkenly killed an old man when trying to restore the ice in his water. This got him banished from his home village. Banishment was favorable to death for all, as everybody knew it was an accident.
Later, after being declined from the wizard collages of the land due to the murder of an old man. That as well as the fact that he was technically a sorcerer, not a wizard. He tried to return to his home to see if people were going to be forgiving. However, once he came to the clearing the town rested in he found that the village had been destroyed. Curiously, there was no trace of any magic being used in the destruction. His father was still alive. This is when Brand had decided to live an adventuring life. He knew that it would be the only way to learn magic without a teacher to locate or a school to turn to.
His adventure started, he obeyed the law to the extent that it was written. Although, he didn't force himself to do good or evil within his heart. At least for the time being, that is. He met his first true friend at the beginning, Phaedra. The two of them had found a poster asking for adventurous types, those who could protect somebody from the monsters that might attack on the way to the town of Riddleport. This is when the heart of darkness started to grow within him, he decided.
Trying to think of the details, all the lich could think of was the councilman who had stolen from him, his friend, and his employer once the three of them reached the inn they were going to stay in.
After his employer had set into the inn, the two had started to explore the town. This was their first encounter with the gang that he would come to own merely a year later, the Brand Sashes. At the time though, they were known as the Red Sashes. He remembers that he and his friend had won somehow, and had started to chase the one who had fled the fight. That weakling was how they had been introduced to Razer, the previous owner of the gang.
Soon after, he gained a few more comrades for adventuring with. But these people could not be called friends. The group found themselves investigating the disappearance of a locally important person, but Brand couldn't recall his name. He mustn't have been important after all. What was important though, was that there were hobos squatting in his home. There was a controlled fire in the living room. As punishment, he burned one of their faces with the fire and the other with some magic acid he conjured. He wanted to kill the third one with ice, but one of his adventuring group, Skasst, stopped him from doing so and turned Brand in to the local guards.
The crime boss, Mr. Zyncher, had noticed the crime himself and saw an opportunity for a torturers' assistant in him. Brand chuckled at the thought. Zyncher paid his bail, then hired him to destroy the guard station by the end of the day. Agreeing, Brand returned to the adventuring group. They had all found a hole that led somewhere and had a sturdy rope. He was going to go last, but he remembered the betrayal he felt from Skasst. After Skasst had nearly climbed halfway down, being the second to last to climb down, Brand had burned the rope to lock them all down there with no hope of getting out.
Leaving the hole, Brand made his way to the guard station and set it on fire using a flaming sphere, smiling as he did it. Crime and evil were starting to feel right to him. The top guard who had been causing trouble for Zyncher was standing in the fires. So, the spell was cast, magic missile. Causing the guard to die, Brand found his way back to the crime lord's house.
The wife of the crime lord had a different plan for Brand. She saw the swelling of magic within him. She sent him to the Devil's Elbow Island to find an artifact that could pull stars from the sky. But she knew that his adventuring group would soon be there as well and sent him with a hat that changed his appearance to whatever he wished. This was so that his group could be helpful to him once more.
The masquerade went on for some time. But after one combat, his hat fell off. He was found out after a few months and it was time for him to bribe them all with the deeds that he did alongside them as a different mage of the same caliber. He gave them his gold, his healing potions, and his bag of holding to compensate them for their anger. It was nearly easy for him to play them all for his puppets.
The group then got tangled into the war between demons and elves. Brand knew that his magical growth was abnormal at this point, slowly needing to kill more and more powerful beings to gain magic. Intervening in the war, his power turned the tides of every battle. It was time for him to overcome a test, he recalls. He was to go to the demon camp and rescue the elven council of divine magic. He went in with a grin. Not to save the council, but to gain more power from all the demons that were housed there.
Rather than needing to fight all the demons, he only needed to fight their strongest as the others watched. However, he wasn't ready for something with the power of a demigod and near immortality on its side. Nearly dying in the fight, Brand remembers having a surge of magic. It felt as though one of the true gods of magic pushed more power into him so he may live. He obliterated the body, leaving the head a heap of flesh and falling from the strain of overcharging his body the way he did.
Soon after rescuing the divine council, he and his group were charged with the task of saving the world. Saving the world from the dark elves that would pull stars from the sky to kill those who liked living on the surface. Brand knew at this point that only a person of Archmage level could attempt to do that, even with the artifact.
On their way to face this evil, Brand and the group found a group of dragons. He was turned into a dragon-kind while he negotiated with them for their lives. He even gained an ally in one of them, a redeemed black dragon who called himself McDaniels. Armed with the power of dragons, somehow now being able to channel a fraction of a god's power, and with the confidence of a man cheating in poker, Brand and his friends, sans McDaniels, went to fight the Archmage of dark elves.
What he remembers most about the situation was that the demigod from before was there, laughing. The king of goblins, the chief of orc barbarians, and the Archmage were there. This was his greatest and final trial of his first adventure. He altered the minds of the goblin and the orc to fight the demigod with him as his friends tried to deal with the Archmage. The goblin and orc died swiftly to the demigod's power. He'd become stronger in the year since Brand killed him. Channeling the god's power, Brand killed the demigod again.
His friends had successfully slain the Archmage with great difficulty. Brand grabbed the artifact that would have pulled stars from the sky, saying that he'd keep it safe from the wrong hands. The body of the demigod moved, pulling all evil in the room towards it, sapping the artifact of its power. The head rose without the body, the eyes turning to crystalline gems, flesh falling off, evil radiating and the sound of laughter raging from the demilich demigod before them, it flew off into the dark sky above. Brand remembers passing out from that point. It was at this point that he knew he was beyond the power of most legends.
Word of his power got out to even this small town of Riddleport. Brand found and killed the councilman who robbed him a year before, changed himself into a lich and created a new plane of existence at the same time, causing the plane of existence to be his phylactery. He had it grow all components he could ever need for any spell, it would have factories making golems and clockwork dragons, colossi of magnificent quality. Over the next ten years, he perfected his magic. This was when he was called to his second adventure.
He remembers attending Phaedra's wedding. His wife was beautiful in nearly every respect. Brand just wished she wasn't so dumb or hard to talk to. But at least Phaedra was marrying into royalty. This is when a man claiming to be the king of magic appeared. Everybody laughed at him, saying that there is no true king of magic. He proved those people wrong by forcing two of the elven gods into the physical world and nearly slaying them. The clerics of those two deities lost their powers for some time. The king of magic he proved himself to be, but he only stared at Brand and laughed. There was something funny to this man and Brand still didn't know what it was.
The king of magic released a heavy fog that covered the elven capital in anti-magic particles, opened a cursed gateway to the demonic realm, and let demons pour loose. Not knowing how to react to the fog, Brand simply ran from the gate. Catching himself in a street with nobody in sight, he looks up from the sound of a baby's crying. Before his eyes, he saw abortions of magic. No, not just abortions of magic. These were gods that never lived. Gods slain in the wombs of their mothers! Brand shivers slightly at the memory.
He was barely able to kill one with his single-target magic. It was taxing to do in the fog that restrained his abilities. He heard more coming. He gathered his friends and pulled all things good and living to a place where he knew they would be safe. The frozen north, where one of his adventuring companions ended up after ten years. Brand remembers that he had gone to Riddleport to get the townspeople from there as well. It had started to rain fire in the distance, making a sight of a coming apocalypse. He used several teleportation circles to evacuate the town.
It wasn't before long that Brand, Phaedra, Skasst, and the rest of the old group had found each other in the north. It was only by going to the magnetic pole that they had found the Crystal Cathedral. It was there that they met an old god of magic, who taught them all how to tap into the magic that the so-called king of magic used. Brand then learned that this was the god that he was taking power from. It was how he could defeat the demigod so many times. It was at this point that Brand used this magic on the god himself. This nearly killed the god, as it nearly did with the elven gods before.
"Why?!" That was the sentence that Brand has engraved in his mind. Why did he try to kill the god that was helping him? He leaned back in his chair thinking about what all happened that day. The Crystal Cathedral, the old god of magic, the false betrayal… That was it! He needed to weaken the god to absorb him to save the world! Because no demigod, mortal, or god could plainly defy the king of magic!
What needed to happen was that Brand, the most powerful mortal, who had created a way of immortality for himself, needed to be flesh made god, as well as a god made flesh at the same time. It was so that he was not in between, but not one or the other. He simply was magic immortalized for a time. Now, he felt the laws of reality didn't matter to him. However, he knows to do what helps the most people.
Brand alone walked into the room where the king of magic sat, in his throne atop the stairway to the place where he kept deities as weak as they were, as pets. The battle between the two of them would have destroyed any other entities forever. The king of magic, stealing the strength of gods in a weakened state was fighting Brand, a mortal and a god of magic at the truest peak of power. After defeating the king of magic, the Crystal Cathedral vanished and the gods returned to full power.
This was when the old god of magic died within Brand. Brand erased the memories of the near-apocalypse from his friends, making him the only master of that magic the old god left behind. This was the second time he had saved the world. He knew it would be his last. Mostly because the world needs more heroes, so he needed to leave it.
Brand stands from his chair, walking around his desk. He knew he couldn't stay in this universe. But he also couldn't go to a universe without magic. He started to peer into the vast multiverse. He wanted to go to a place where people wouldn't want to simply kill him outright. Somewhere pleasant, where they have magic he doesn't have. His magic is within, not without. Some of it is without but not within. Very few spells are both within and without. Almost like reading a book, Brand flips through the pages of the multiverse and decided that he'd visit the world that called itself Earth Land. More specifically, the town of Magnolia, where the guild Fairy Tail resides.
"Hey, I'm going on a trip. Don't wait for me to get back because I might not come back. Got it?" Brand says through the world, telepathically. Some people are confused, most are scared, and very few are sad. But there is a group that knows that he's doing what he knows is right.