Chapter 1
Chad blitzed through an open restaurant door and jumped over the food prep table, spilling vegetables and ingredients everywhere in his mad dash. He was not going to be late today. Jason, his surrogate father, had told him that he needed to make it back from school in under five minutes if he wanted to eat dinner that night. Unlike most parental figures, Jason had a unique approach to raising Chad. And a unique nickname to go along with it. He called Chad, little death. A macabre kind of humor. The nickname referred to the way Chad came into the world. It was an ugly birth and the mother did not survive.
Jason did not mean to be cruel with the nickname. He was one of those people that spent more time thinking about magic than thinking about how to conduct one’s self or the feelings of others. Comparing Jason’s and Chad’s facial features would show they could not be related by blood. However, Jason was the lover that stole the heart of Chad’s once young and beautiful mother. Taking her away from Chad’s father. Although, Jason was not by any means a nice man he could be viewed as kind. Well, if you drink enough alcohol and someone put you up to saying something other than insults about the man.
As Chad was completing his shortcut threw the restaurant in order to skip a few blocks that he would have had to travel to get home. He noticed a young girl around the same age as him helping the cooks. “What a cute girl to be working here”, he thought to himself. This momentary lack of focus caused him to slip on a floor-bound tomato sending him flying backward onto the ground in a true gentlemanly fashion. The girl that had drawn his attention took stock of him. Chuckling under her breath and darting her eyes away from the intruder of a young man.
With a face now redder than the tomato that fell him, he jumped up and returned to his mad dash back home determined not only to be on time but early. A small pocket watch with elaborate decoration was ticking away in the hand of Jason. He knew precisely when school was out for little death and had calculated the time it should take for the boy to make it back home. But this was not the time frame he had given the boy. Oh no, like an impossible-to-please drill Sargent, he used that time minus 1 minute to figure out what time was impossible to make and gave that to the boy.
If you set your standards high enough even little things can be impressive. “How will I teach the boy magic after his coming-of-age ceremony if he can’t make the impossible happen from the littlest of things’ Jason mused to himself. He knew deep down that wasn’t all the reason to set impossible goals for the boy. Chad had a way of figuring things out for himself. The boy loved a good challenge and would lose all motivation if he thought someone else was up for the task. It’s an excellent trait for a young mage. To only yearn for the path others have not yet tread. Far too many decrepit old men take magic into a more tried and true approach rather than exploring what could be. “The furtherment of magic and its refinement come in cyclical waves throughout the ages. This is the natural ebb and flow between maintaining the status quo and rashly seeking out new ways of using magic. For over 100 years we lived in a time of great magical advancement. Mages became bolder and bolder trying to be the first to a new discovery. but it was not to be forever. The young mage Bartholmus was the last and most devastating of a long line of reckless mages that ended the great enlightenment. His research told him that all things could be split into basic parts and these smaller parts made up everything from different combinations. Using a new kind of splitting magic Bartholmus went about cutting things in half to find what made up the world. No one is quite sure what happened but after a few years of little progress in his research, there was an explosion that destroyed the city his research lab was situated at. This is historically written as the end of that era and the beginning of the conservative era of magic. Red tape for everything magical and even special zoning areas for research.“, From a tabloid columnist of a popular magical magazine.
