Prologue

This is a story of adventure, my dear friends, but alas it will not be the kind of tale you are used to. This tale is one of monsters, menace, and might. There is magic, yes, and heroes, and dragons, and whatever else you can dream up, my dear friends.There are demons and angels, those who believe themselves to be gods, and those that almost are. Despite all the majesty and wonder, it's important that you know one can not go adventuring in these lands without enticing death. It is the way of this world known as Fracture. This tale like many of its ilk, begins with a boy.

A boy who, at the current moment, was running at a breakneck pace through the Lost Woods. Though he was blissfully unaware of what the Lost Woods really were, he deemed it a grand idea to do as the name suggested and get lost in them. You see dear friends, this boy wasn't running towards anything. Just running away. Away from the crater that used to be this boy's town. Well really he wasn't a boy, at least by his age he wasn't. He was fifteen, and technically a man by his societies standards, but this man still had a boyish look to him and a small stature due to malnutrition. He had worked on a farm his whole life and unfortunately had far too many siblings for them all to get enough food. So this boy-man often went without food to give his younger siblings more, which helped for a while until the plants stopped growing and earth turned to dust. After that they all went without much food, and his many siblings became fewer. So this "man" was trying to do something that many had sought to do before, and many would continue to do after, in these specific woods, which was to get lost. In turn he hoped to leave behind his loss.

In Helendale, where this man-boy spent most of his life, it wasn't uncommon for adventurers to fight. Most of the time they were pointless dick measuring contests, including one actual dick measuring contest. This fight, however, was the worst that the almost-man named Leon had ever seen. Worse than any he had ever heard of. It resulted in two very different, but equally catastrophic things. The first being that one adventurer vaporized half the town when he blew himself up trying to kill his rival. Leon's family had been staying with their cousins in town because they just sold the farm in an attempt to make a fresh start. His whole family was caught up in the explosion, Leon had been smart enough to try and flee when the fighting started. Unfortunately, he was still close enough to see the explosion and the subsequent crater it left. Pure dread filled the boy as he saw the complete absence of the home his family had been staying in. It was late in the evening and the only reason he wasn't with them was because he had been working in the tavern. Rushing to the crater, Leon wanted to dig through to find his family alive or dead, but he couldn't muster any force of will to move. That is when the second catastrophic event of the evening occurred. That is when Leon's tiny young mind broken.

Normally this would have been the end of his story, but when his peasant mind shattered, it also broke the mental block that held back the memories from his old life on Earth. Leon cried in both relief and pain as the daggers of his broken mind pierced his original mind. The pain was deep, but the trauma short lived. He was able to put light years, or rather eighteen Earth years between the death of his fantasy family and his real life on Earth. Well in this scenario "real" is a bit of a misnomer, but alas poor Yorick, his life on Earth was far more real even if he knew it to be a lie. If Leon admitted to himself that earth was the lie and this was the real world then his mind would have broken more, but for the sake of moving forward Leon lied to himself.

Leon ran until his malnourished legs gave out and he collapsed under the bows of a great oak. He had brown eyes, brown hair and tan skin. He had feet caked in dirt, and if you guessed that he was wearing a brown shirt and trousers, then you win the prize. Overall he had a very brown appearance. It was the unfortunate nature of poverty, that one had to take what was given, but that would change soon. The only two things on his whole person that were not brown were; his teeth, and a cracked blue stone no bigger than his thumbnail. This stone would change everything. This cracked blue stone was the whole reason he was in such a rush. Well Leon was also trying to outrun his past, but he told himself that the stone was the reason he ran.

Being no expert on such things as glowing rocks, Leon wasn't sure what exactly it was. The way it glowed with a dim light, and the tingle that shot through him gave him a feeling of satisfaction and relief. This made him believe that this was his ticket to the magic that he had wanted- no, craved- so bad when he agreed to be reincarnated. Leon's life on Earth had ended abruptly, though the consolation was that everyone else died with him. That however, is nothing, but a minor detail.

Finally catching his breath, the boyish-man stared intently at the stone, trying what the fictional heroes from his world would do. He tried to push his mind into the stone... And he tried, and he tried. When he was just about to give up, he noticed that his arm holding the stone had begun to tingle. Unbound joy swept through his mind and began to radiate through his whole being. In fact his whole body began to tingle, and Leon began to laugh and cry because it was the most pleasant thing he had ever experienced. He had wasted fifteen years of his life plowing fields and harvesting crops, and finally he was getting what he wanted- no, what he needed to feel alive. Just as the tingling reached its zenith, and Leon was choking back sobs of relief, he collapsed in a heap on the forest floor. His strings cut, and dear friends, Leon was dead.

Any expert could have told Leon that blue amber like gem, that was about the size of a thumbnail, was not in fact a stone of any sort. It was a crystalisk for an Aväk "queen", and while a rock sounds suspiciously like Aväk, they had next to nothing in common. Leon would have likely been informed that the blue glow the stone gave off was a sign that it was feeding off of him, and if he held on to it for much longer his body would go numb and he would very shortly meet his end after that. Which as you know, my dear friends, is exactly what happened.

However, Leon didn't know any of this, my dear friends, and the thing that had burrowed up his arm and then ate his brain stem, however, was very much alive. Though it's crystalisk was damaged and the magic in Leon was insufficient for a colony to be established. It was still more than enough for a singular Aväk larvae to thrive and grow to maturity. Nourished by the malnourished boy trying to escape his past, and in a morbid way Leon had finally escaped it all.