The Awakening
In a dark alley off of a dark street in the middle of a dark city a deadly rhythm pounds through the air. The rhythm that only the beating of unresisting flesh can make, a dull resonance that is swallowed by the night as soon as it coalesces in the hungry air. Eerie shadows make grotesque caricatures of the rise and fall of bats clenched in grimy hands. Three figures crowd over a bleeding young man playing their visceral melody on his unconscious flesh. Until just as it seems that the muffled thudding has always been the cadence of the reality; it stops.
"Fuckin' punk that'll show him what happens when you fuck with us."
"He ain't getting' back up man, we gotta get the fuck out!"
"Shut up puss, we're out!"
And just like that they are, but left behind is a thin young man with broken angular features laying in an ever widening pool of his own life's blood. Swelling blue and purple splotches on his pale malnourished flesh rise up as blood pools beneath his skin. Bones piercing flesh show only the surface of splintered skeleton shrapnel that cuts deeper into his muscles and viscera with every pained spasm. And still more blood pools around him, flowing around the sides of his face and through his ragged dirty hair like an oozing tide of filth washing his profile. One eye opens; the other is hidden beneath the puffy black flaps of his ruined eyelids.
But that one eye is terrible. Staring out at the world a black orb, pure black, sitting in his face it mirrors oblivion. No shine, no reflection of the jaundiced lamplight, just a dull black sphere in a ruined face. Then like the heating element of a stove, a flaming red circle burns into life centered in that dark dimensionless orb. Laughing pierces the air. Joyful pure laughter made terrifying by the contrast of the scene of carnage it fills. The air shimmers as if it were shifted through a crystalline prism. Bruises change color like rotting vegetation, swelling recedes, bones set, lacerations close, and blood turns brown then black. The ruined features twist beneath flesh and reset into a perfect face, angelic. The black blood cracks and flutters in the air like evil snow as the young man stands, and then flames flare into existence an all-consuming and insatiable corona. The blood caking his body, his clothes, and the dingy debris of the alley all go up in wisps of smokes as if they never existed. From the ashes like some mythical bird a new young man strides forward from the shadows into the street. Naked as we all are our first day, naked with fiery scars criss-crossing his savagely vital form, he steps blazing from the asphalt womb. Two black orbs with perfect rings of fire widen as his face contorts with an exultant shout, "I AM REBORN!" And he is; reality is clay and he its sculptor. A mage is born.