We are born to die. It is a truth that has been forgotten in modern times. We turn our backs on the boneyard and look onto the endless reaches of eternity and we dare to assume that we can talk those paths in person. We do not see the hungry maw until it is too late, until the merciless fangs grind us and we fall screaming into the gullet of the void, beyond sight and memory of the living world. Some leave enough in their passing to be remembered, to be consigned to myth and legend, until the desert that is time erodes even that.

I will not be one of them. I was nothing, and in the final hours of my life, I have made peace with the fact that I will be rendered down to nothing. I do not walk to my death with my head bowed and meek, a lamb for the slaughter. I will not scream defiance and unending hate, a fury that while it boils and burns, is but a flash in the pan. No, as I look to the past, I know how I will meet my end, or at least, I have the desire.

I will meet my end with a blade in hand and song on my lips. I will fight until I fall, until I am overwhelmed as I charge at the very gates of Hell, where my death may every well not be the end of things. I will die, that the others have longer to live, that the invaders can be thrown back. It is a slim hope, but at the end of everything, what else does a man really have, but that most ethereal of treasures? Of that bright bauble of which even the gods fear and envy in equal measure?

I do not know. Still, battle calls. Its funny you know. I always wanted to be Hulk or Wolverine, to be some near undying juggernaut, to be in some sense a living force of war. And now that I have a taste for war, in all its horror, in all its glory? I shake my head, as I bury the regrets of my past. I was a foolish youth, and I will die a slightly wiser man. Which really, aside from losing my virginity, is all I could reasonably hope for. Alas, can't have everything in life, sad as it is.

At the dawn of the age of Magic came the great invasion, reshaping the Earth and wiping away the bulk of the old worlds nations and power structures. While humanity would eventually recover, its days of standing as the sole power in the world were gone. Indeed, the number of realms where a human rules are the exceptions, rather than the rule. Indeed, pureblooded humans are a rarity, in no small part due to women seeing the writing on the wall and defecting enmass to the invaders, surviving using their ages old advantages.

Yet, the arrival of magic into the world jumpstarted the native's natural talent. Some of the invaders were eager to see just what kind of arcane talent would be awoken among humanity (in no small part due to the fact that they would be able to use it as justification to their superiors in order to stage larger invasions to decisively claim the Earth and its population for their own empires), though with the years, they grew disappointed, and just mildly annoyed that it seemed that humanities gift was merely that of extreme compatibility, with a record setting number of mixed species children being born.

While somewhat useful, it lacked the additional longevity or arcane powers of the elves, and so humanity was slated to spend the next two hundred years on their backs. It was not until a bored noble discovered old literature involving the Xainxia genre that the great experiment was conducted and it was revealed that humanity could make use of and incorporate foreign mana in nearly unprecedented ways. News spread, even as the noble performed a scrying, to make sure he would be able to take credit for being the first to raise humanity to its new station.

Alas, his scrying attempts lead him far to the north, into the former land of Canada and into the Bloodsnow Wastes. There, there was an open, but unusually quiet, gate to the Abyssal planes. So, it was with annoyance and rage that he went north, into the cold, to try and preserve what he saw as his monopoly on his subjects future. It was there that he would meet someone who had begun cultivating entirely by accident and followed a path of unending war.

Then again, he was going after someone who lived inside a wasteland whose very essence was formed of winter and the spilled blood of demons. What came next was predictable.

Now that I had time to consider the plan, I would be able, in the privacy of ,my own mind, to admit that I likely did not think things through. To be sure, I was correct in that the native was a brutal thug who lacked any form of grace, sophistication or elegance. There was additionally no care at all for his proper place in the world (at least human women were more realistic that way, to say nothing of more biddable), but I really should have considered a few small facts.

Firstly, this was a human that had been fighting demons for the last two hundred years with nearly nothing in terms of rest or respite. He had gotten a great deal of experience not only in not dying, but killing in quick and brutal ways. No hesitation, no warning, no killing intent oddly enough. Which, all things being honest was likely the most terrifying thing. Besides of course the singing. The booming song of how the afterlife was calling and that death was coming at last. The disappointment when neither I nor my troops could really hurt it may also contribute.

But, I shall employ the grand and mighty strategy of the Wigglebloom line! He who flees lives to hire proxies another day!