1 Prologue - a little bit of background story

Valerie was standing in her room, although the word room implied that she was here voluntary, prison cell would be more accurate and looked through her window to see the first ray of sunshine shining through the city skyline. "It's going to be a wonderful day out there. " Vali thought. "A nice day to die."

"Today, 20 years ago;" Valerie mused " I was found on the steps of a church in britain with only a letter that said my name is Valerie." No last name, no birthday, no birthplace, nothing.

One of her first memories was about freezing outside the orphanage. The female caretaker locked her outside because she couldn't meet her daily money quota which she earned by begging outside on the streets.

On Terra for the people magic was as normal as breathing and they used it frequently. Magic was used in every aspect of people's life. Magic without an element would fall in the category neutral or common magic. Magic was a vast field with many subcategories such as alchemy, magical smithing, runes, enchantments, transformations, wards and many more. Magic knowledge was so vast that it was normally impossible to learn all magic in one's lifetime. Every magician would learn the basics in elementary school and would then pick a specialty to focus on and learn the spells that belonged to said category. Of course the more intelligent you were, the more spells you could learn and practice and maybe learn one or two more subcategories than the average human being. Another factor was the magical core, every magic core varied in size on birth. It was possible to train your magic core like a muscle, so it got bigger with training. And then there were those who were born with a magic ability never seen before. They were so rare that they were labeled as a myth.

Vali was one of those human beings - she was born with the ability to manipulate space. She didn't know that this ability of hers was special. In her little world, only the orphanage and the caretakers existed. If the caretakes looked favorably on her than she could sleep in a bed and she would get something to eat. So her three-year-old brain thought that if she was special she would get better treatment. It did not go as she hoped and dreamed. As soon as the caretakers found out about her ability to manipulate space she was sold to the UK government. There she was trained as a magical assassin until she was twelve years old. In training, it was soon apparent that she was a genius with an eidetic memory. She only needed to read a spell once and then train it once or twice to get the result she wanted whereas the average magician had to train for weeks to learn and perfect one spell. So her trainers forced her to learn most magic they seemed fit or they deemed useful in combat.

Between the age of twelve and eighteen, Vali had to fight in a war she didn't believe in but had to particibate because the government-owned her. all around the world existed people with magic and people without. the world government decided it was time to get rid of those people who would not or could not be a part of the magical world. So a war was unavoidable.

After a loveless and bloody childhood, she met two people who were going to be a big part of her life. Dina and Thomas were both child soldiers and were sold to the government because of their large magical cores. She was lucky to meet them because they brought new emotions in her life, she didn't know before. The government trained her as an assassin and her trainers deemed emotions as unnecessary, so she was an unfeeling killing machine. Dina and Tom taught her the feeling of love, camaraderie, and hope. They tried to protect each other and made plans to open up a cafe as soon as they could escape the government.

At the age of sixteen, she fell in love with one of her comrades. Because the government was afraid to lose the war, Vali was thaught all kinds of forbidden magic on top of her already inhumanly big knowledge about magic. Her lover and her two best friends died during the last battle. She lost the three most important people in her life all in one day. After the war, the government declared her to be too dangerous. So they waited until she was vulnerable, out of her mind with grieve and distracted with crying. During the funeral of her loved ones, they sedated her and shipped her off to a research facility to be a human experiment. They installed a little device that acted like a bomb and an electro shocker inside her brain which could be triggered to explode remotely, so she couldn't escape.

The scientist never let her be awake long enough to find out where precisely the device was because if she knew, Valerie would be able to teleport the device out of her brain. Without the exact knowledge where it was, the chances were high that she would lobotomize herself. So she bid her time and waited, hoping against hope that some of her old comrades would try to free her. But they never came.

The scientist liked to talk to each other during their experiments. So she knew they tried to make her immortal and invent a new art of magic: runic tattooing. They tattooed her with magical infused ink with the tiniest runes they could possibly make. The downside of this project was that the process of tattooing those magical runes was so painful three other people before she died. After they finished with the runes that should prevent aging, they started to experiment with other runes such as an auto repair function for said runes so that they could repair themselves if the runes were damaged. They tattooed the repair runes onto her bones. The next runes the scientist tried were for a bigger magical core, easier magical casting, greater health recovery, superhuman speed, and unbreakable bones. The finished project looked like huge black wings on her back, only if you looked close enough you could see the thousands of runes the wings were made off.

Yesterday one of the scientists let it slip that the government decided to get rid of her because they were finished with her and they didn't want to keep loose ends.

Vali was successful in keeping two secrets throughout her entire life. Her space ability wasn't limited to only teleporting her to the place she was picturing in her mind, no she could create a separate space and link it to a specific item. In essence, she could create storage rings. The first time she found out about this ability of hers, she was seven years old and she already knew enough to not reveal this aspect of her ability to anyone. Since then she stored every book, jewelry, gold, weapons, clothing, potions, ingredients and everything else which looked useful inside her ring. She didn't know why but the ring is the only thing the scientists didn't take from her.

The other ability she kept secret was, that she is able to create portals to other dimensions. The negative side of this is that she was relatively sure she couldn't find her way back to this dimension. So she hesitated and she waited because she was afraid of the unknown like the saying: better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

She couldn't use magic because in her cell were magic sensors who would pick up on the smallest magical energies. If magical energies were detected inside her cell then they would first start to punish her with electric shocks from the box inside her brain. This was a risk she had to take because if they didn't start with punishing her with electrical shocks, then they would kill her immediately. On the other hand, if they started with shocks Vali had enough time to jump through her portal.

Valerie looked one last time outside her cell window to the beautiful, sunny and cloud-free sky, said her goodbyes mentally and opened the portal to an unknown dimension. She didn't hesitate after two years of torture everything was better than this even death. Almost instantly she felt the electrical shocks running through her body, with two shaky running steps she threw herself through the portal.