Sometimes it feels as if the darkness will swallow you whole.

It assimilates you in the vacuum of its dark silence, gradually wrapping around your every being. Your breath sputters out in gasps, the black cloth at your throat squeezing ever so slightly yet wringing out the lifeblood indiscriminately with the clouded oil. The lack of blood freezes your thoughts in place while bringing a vague enlightenment to the situation at hand. That is when you escape the blackness, shredding the hands from your body in fits of fear and panic. However, when you finally stand alone, you still bear the traces of dark stains cohered to your skin. The void has not left, you know, it lingers in the back of your mind waiting for another bout of weakness when it may return. Such pestilence can drive an individual mad and reduce him to a blubbering fool. The world has no place for those tainted souls; thus, they are crumpled up and dumped into the world's trash can. They have no chance to pass their warning on to the fresher souls; and so, the cycle continues.

I will not allow myself to become this way.

I have spent thirty-two years in a cloth-covered cage, faintly being able to see the outside world. The grass was not greener, I realize now, yet it had seemed that way to my young deprived mind. A utopia existed beyond my prison, perfection where one could think what they wished without hindrance. To be unstitched from invisible chains. it was inconceivable! Until the second war, my ignorance and self-assurances plagued me. When my eyes finally opened unmasked by immaturity, I viewed the horrors of battle for what they were. At that point, the revelation came to me: none of us were free at all. Those damnable fates played with us as if we were pieces in a friendly chess game amongst the gods. My tolerance thinned with the frequency of gullible people tossing around the word "destiny" as if it were a household item.

I was no one else's dog, regardless of what my rune insisted, nor would I allow the rest of humanity to be treated the same.

The moment I returned to Magician's Island, I sought out my master and spat my disapproval of this quest. "Stars of Destiny, you say? I don't care what you call the game, I want no part of it!"

No more of these inane crusades, I would be party to a greater purpose no longer.

"What will you do, my child," the seer had asked me one day.

I then halted my sweeping, holding onto the broomstick thoughtfully for a moment before I responded simply, "Whatever must be done."

"Don't be mistaken," she whispered, "everyone has the power to change his or her destiny. We are not bound by fate."

I scowled at her with my russet eyes and resumed my chores, unconvinced yet without reason enough to continue arguing.

My stubbornness would pay off soon enough, awakening my senses to the previously unseen. Since as far back as I could remember, fragments of images and faint nightmares haunted my mind yet were too vague for me to interpret. With each day that passed, however, these visions came to me clearer and clearer as if a fog had lifted in my head. I was not able to process the information I was receiving until it arrived to me whole during my slumber.

I dreamt a world devoid of scent, color, sound and movement, not quite dead but not nearly alive. It was existence in its purest form.

I was on Magician's Island, it seemed, as there in front of me was the tower and on the path around me was the towering columns weathered and worn. Nevertheless, I did not believe it... The island had never been this dead with the absence of spring bird's songs and the crashing of water upon the pebble-strewn shores. My true rune explained the war between dharma and chaos and labeled this horror the "absolute world."

The apprentice of Leknaat died that night and Luc awoke the next morning. Now I had the justification for change--no, revolution--and only needed to devise a plan to save humanity.