Common, Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Epic, Legendary. Seven tiers. Seven ‘stars’, or levels to each tier. Whether people knew it or not, these words and numbers combined together to form the backbone of not only the core-worlds of Tesson, but the worlds above us in the Material Realm. These words encapsulated the real soul of what it meant to be a mage, or ability holder, in a world that had dropped to the depths of the grand nebula. Tier identified quality of strength, and ultimate potential.

Stars, or levels, determine the quantity of strength. Thus one couldn’t really tell if someone was strong or not just on tier alone, but someone of a higher tier with a lower star-rating, might handily beat someone of a lower tier with a higher star-rating, assuming the levels were close enough, or the tiers far enough. It should go without saying that I was an existence at the Legendary-tier. Whether in this life, or my last one, I was anything ‘but’ common, and my original mother, the Crimson Empress had all but ensured that my caliber of existence was honed to the very limit of what it could be.

Fast Forward to the present, I’d finally left the sea of chaotic lights that separated the core-worlds from the material plane. A fair amount of time has passed since I joined the Wandering Circus. I’ve never really paid so much attention to the passage of mere months and years before. The culture of the Endless Red Empire was largely made up of vampires, ghosts, true-dragons, demons, fae, spirits, fallen angels, machines, and other immortal beings. Even our more “mortal” citizenry could live for several millennia before seeing the end of their lifespan. Thus the Empire’s calendars only “technically” acknowledged time that passed in batches smaller than ten years, as a thing. And as for me, I was in no position to pay attention to those passing decades. I was too busy going from ordeal to ordeal, and convalescing in the moments in between.

Yet in this new life every few years seemed to bring something new and momentous. No wonder the short-lived races can romanticize the very fact that their lives end so quickly. A sufficiently well-written mini-series, can put mediocre long running syndications to shame. Though then again…shows don’t often run forever, without at least “some” redeeming traits. So I think I’d rather stay long-lived, if that’s okay. I might have once wished that death was a thing I could experience…But in this life, I find myself viewing my interminable nature as something of a gift…There’s so much I’ll be able to see and do, given enough time…And I can’t help but look forward to all of it.

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It’s been five years since I formally joined the Circus of Arcadia. I am now 23 years of age. In those five years, the Blackcrests have thankfully made no moves against my family, so I guess that’s mission completed. Though maybe it’s a bit soon to call out the jury on that one.

In the five years since I joined the Wandering Circus, I’ve unexpectedly managed to climb to the status of Order Elder…Or “Ringmaster”. Painted-Page, Painted-Squire, Painted-Knight, Masked-Knight, Ring-Master Lord, Ring-Master King, Masked Sage, Masked Saint. All told, I’d managed to leapfrog five ranks in the Circus’ internal hierarchy.

Don’t be too impressed. It was a total fluke…A result of the Circus’ traditions not having contemplated the existence of someone like me. Simply put, the Circus has a certain rite that they have all new entrants go through before they get their faces painted for the first time. They have to fight one of the masked members to attempt to get their mask, and forgo getting our faces painted. The thing I didn’t know at the time was that it was meant to be an impossible challenge.

I didn’t really understand what was going on at the time, but in hindsight, now that I understand the Circus better, I can roughly guess that this was simultaneously meant to be a sort of test of courage, as a well as, a means of impressing the order’s strength on new entrants. A way of cementing the loose, yet firm, hierarchy that the Circus had set in place.

Of course, I didn’t know that back then. What they told us was that we’d be given an opportunity to test into a higher standing, and avoid tedious training requirements, by winning the spar. I took their words at face value, and actually tried to win. It was like going to a theme restaurant, and they’d essentially sat me down for one of those food challenges where you end up having to eat multiple pounds of something. Unaware that I was a bottomless pit, in many senses of the word.

It would have been bad enough if I’d merely beaten a masked-knight, but then I learned it was a ringmaster I’d beaten. A masked-lord. A fairly notorious one at that. So…things between the Circus and myself ended up becoming a bit awkward. Fortunately, the Circus’ nature worked in my favor. Their laissez-faire, chaotic-good nature meant that even if the people in the middle felt threatened, the Kings, Saints, and Sage, just thought it, a fairly good joke.

That kept my hopes of building a future in the Circus from being dashed, but it did mean that my fellow lords looked at me as an upstart. However, that was fine. When I joined the Circus, I was just looking for a place to work, and a faction to join. I already had a family that I visited whenever I had time off.

Avoiding the awkwardness caused by my sudden promotion to Ringmaster was a simple matter of choosing assignments that would take me far from the Circus headquarters and generally staying away. Fortunately, I was only a regular Ringmaster, so I didn’t have to worry too much about getting swept up in the order’s internal politics, or having people turn to me for decisions.

In a way, that incident was actually a good thing. My position assured that there weren’t too many people above me, and I was pretty much out of the order’s internal rat-race. I was even freer than I’d hoped to be, after joining the Circus. I went where I wanted, I was paid well for my work, and I had enough privacy to continue building my strength and resources within this new life, without having to worry about being observed.

If you haven’t been paying attention, let me remind you once again, that there were many Tessons, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. As mentioned before, the extradimensional meteor shower that struck Tesson resulted in nearly all the Tessons within the multiverse being affected, and very few Tesson’s actually surviving, and pretty much no Tesson surviving untouched and unchanged.

The immortal powers-that-be then partially isolated the Tesson’s to reduce any negative effects they had on their native universes. They did so by basically sealing off large sections of those adjoining universes to create a kind of nested-world. Placing worlds within worlds. Partially fusing all the core-Tesson’s together in the process, while strengthening their ties to the auxiliary Tessons. It was a novel solution to a trick problem…Albeit, a slightly messy solution.

The core-worlds were sustained by the existence of the auxiliary worlds, that’s how the core-worlds had escaped the destructive and corruptive influence of the grand nebula all these eons. Materials from the auxiliary-worlds kept the mostly fictive core-worlds from experiencing a terminal cessation of existence.

The sorcerous orders and sects would routinely send people to the auxiliary-Tessons to accumulate resources and the material plane’s much more stable aether, for use in the core-worlds. Thus when a mage, or ability holder, joined a sect or order, they became what the auxiliary worlds called an “astral” , a being that traveled between the worlds, and could be summoned into the material plane, on various bases.

The world I was currently in was Tesson-Clay. Or “Clay” for short. One of many Clay classification Tessons, so named, because the meteor shower essentially beat them back into the dirt ages, even though they’d ultimately escaped being destroyed, or dragged down to the nebula. The incursion of unstable magical energy so great that their world had to adjust to a vastly different set of natural laws if they wished to progress technologically and societally.

With the result being that most clay age worlds had only recovered to the point of being somewhere bronze age and the middle ages. Though a few Clay worlds had stabilized enough to get their classification changed, as their societies progressed beyond this point, most hadn’t.

Thus Clay worlds remained Clay worlds. With the upshot being that the sheer amount of magical energy present in the Clay worlds assured that they were essentially all high-fantasy worlds, filled with all kinds of marvels.

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I currently sat in a tree watching a young woman ride down a road on horseback. As she got a certain distance away from the tree, I disappeared from the tree branch and appeared on the field alongside the road, in the form of a wolf. Running on all fours as I kept pace with the horse. Following that young woman was the assignment I’d chosen to take as a Masked-Lord of the Circus of Arcadia.

In this Clay world, there was once a certain wise man. A clever man. An exceedingly clever man. A man who wasn’t just intelligent, but was also smart, able to fully and effectively leverage his intelligence as he interacted with the world. A trait that I freely admit, I sadly sometimes find myself lacking. A man so clever that strikingly few people will ever know his name, because he took what wanted from life, and then shuffled out of view before something tedious could happen.

At a certain point, in the last few centuries, that man managed to save the life of a wandering clown. A lost spirit that would have faded into nothing without the man’s assistance. That clown happened to be one of the founding members of our order. Thus the Circus owed the man and his family a life debt.

That man could have asked for anything from the order, be it power, wealth, or fame. The order could have made him a king…but then again, based on the traces I could find of the man…Maybe he didn’t need our help for that…

The man’s cleverness was such that the man could have easily made himself immortal had he wanted…Unfortunately, being smart wasn’t enough to overcome cultural influences and socio-historical context, thus he’d been one of those people who believed death was something natural and inevitable. Instead of making a request for his own sake, the man asked that the order look after his family after he was gone. Checking in on them, every so often, and in the case where it seemed his lineage was in danger…Saving, or at least doing their reasonable best to save, his family at least 3 times.

This was the third time. It had been several centuries since that wise man had died. Now my first assignment as a Masked-Lord of the Circus was to play guardian angel for the last of the man’s descendants. The young woman who’d just gone galloping by on horseback. She was the last of the man’s line and preserving her life for at least a few decades' time would clear the Order’s obligation to the man.

For the most part, it was fairly easy work. I had only a few issues adapting my tech to the odd laws of this world, and there were no issues that I hadn’t been able to eventually resolve, thus I could easily use my red-cauldron to observe the target and the target’s surroundings at all times.

Most promisingly, despite her risky choice of career, the young woman seemed to have a good head on her shoulders, and she was proving to be moderately capable of taking care of herself. So I didn’t need to worry about constantly having to save the target from herself, and most external threats were dealt with by the target herself. I figured the next few decades would go by fairly smoothly.