This is an AU where something went wrong, and the history of Etheria happened very differently. It was inspired in part by the Cardfight Vanguard and Yugioh Zexal anime series. I do not own either of those, or Mage Wars.
________________
Mage Wars: Avatar of the Soul
Prologue
Long ago, the universe was whole. It didn't stay that way for long. Many of the great outer planes that overlapped and underlayed the universe were incompatible with each other. Because of this, the universe split into many realms soon after its “birth”, separated from each other by some sort of barrier or veil. Many of them were eventually populated with sentient lifeforms.
Today I speak of just a few of those realms, including Aether, the Realm of Mana and Aereth, the Realm of Quanta.
For a long time, the Realms of Aether and Aereth were entirely unaware of each other.
Until now.
The Gate. Was it really a gate? It led somewhere horrible. However, something was calling to him beyond it. Something in pain.
He stopped, and stared at the door in confusion.
I must be dreaming.
And yet something seemed terribly ominous about that gate. He blinked, and instead of seeing the gate he saw a titanic dark hole staring back at him from the center of the whole universe.
This was weird. Well it was just a dream, right?
And then a voice of infinite intersections, of ratios and countless little dots connecting spoke to him. Which should have been impossible, since dots that tiny should have been too small to perceive by any sense.
The voice you are hearing is an approximation of a small fraction of the points emitted from the edge of your realm, manipulated from outside.
What?
The gate will open regardless of what you do.
How did it, or the “outside” manipulating those “points” even know that!?
You have a choice to make. You can either open the gate and unleash the darkness beyond early, but also gain the aid of powerful allies who know the nature of that darkness and can help you fight it.
Or you can choose not to open the gate, thereby having more time to live and prepare if you can, but risk losing those powerful allies forever. Choose wisely.
He gulped, and thought for a moment. His immediate reaction was to think,
Well of course I should open the gate now. Otherwise those powerful allies will be lost forever, and if that means what I think it means...not to mention they might be able to explain what's beyond the gate and how dangerous it really is. Since I really don't know how dangerous it is, for all I know it could cause an extinction event, or just something that could hurt or kill whoever opens the gate.
Then again, I also don't know whether that weird voice was telling the truth. Could it be trusted?
He didn't have any information other than the freaky gate and the weird voice and what it said. Even if it couldn't be trusted, he didn't have anything else to go off of.
If the voice was telling the truth, then the smartest, most responsible thing to do was open the gate now. But if it was not telling the truth, then the consequences of opening the gate could be anything.
And there was also the chance that it really was just a dream. For some reason he couldn't bring himself to assign a greater than 50% probability to that.
And he had no idea how to go about discerning whether that voice was telling the truth or not.
He was paralyzed and didn't know what to do. HE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
Calm down. Think. You don't really know anything. Not the probabilities nor the states. All you have is that weird voice's word for it. So ignore what the voice said.
Could he really just ignore such an ominous warning, though? What if there were terrible consequences for ignoring it?
He looked at the gate. It was closed, but there was no lock. If this wasn't just a dream, then whatever was beyond that gate could make its way through on its own.
Then why hadn't it already?
Maybe because it was just his imagination?
The gate flickered, revealing a titanic dark hole again before reappearing.
It could still be a dream, although he had a strong gut feeling that it wasn't just a dream.
Gut feelings could often be very deceptive, though.
Regardless, he couldn't take chances. There had to be a reason for that gut feeling, and either it was his own real gut feeling or something else somehow planted it there, or he wasn't thinking clearly because he was dreaming. All things considered, he was thinking very clearly, and none of his dreams were EVER this lucid. That meant that the probability that this was just a dream was really low.
The longer he stood there, thinking, the more afraid he became. The fear festered and grew, grew and grew, until it was unbearable.
Slowly, hesitantly, he approached the gate, all the while his thoughts were screaming at him,
Are you crazy!? You're privileging one hypothesis that's based on pure hearsay from an unknown source over every other possible explanation of what's going on here? What if you're wrong? You have no idea why you're even so f***ing scared right now! That fear could be artificial, implanted in you somehow to trick you into making the wrong decision!
He stopped in front of the gate for a moment, and shivered.
The fear was too much. More afraid than he'd ever been afraid in his entire life, perhaps more afraid than any person had ever been.
PAIN. DARKNESS. DEATH.
The fear was too much, and he was compelled to act on it, TO DO SOMETHING, lest something terrible happened. He had to stop it, and there was only one way he could think to do that.
He opened the gate.
_________________
