I smile at my father as we walk down the hallway. In front of us is a man dressed in military fatigues. My father gives me a slap on the back and I stumble forward. My shoulder is left sore.

My father isn’t a large man, he still possesses the unnatural strength inherent in the majority of top level mages. And my father is a mage of the highest order. One of the rare few to get a license to practice magecraft without being part of the military.

“Don’t worry squat.” My father calls me by that outrageous nickname. “You’ll be just fine.”

My blue hair is ruffled. I’m far too old for this and for reasons like this I can’t stand my father. His general sliminess I could tolerate but this repeated humiliation is nearly beyond my ability to cope. That’s why I’d turned my hair blue. It’s one of the few forms of token defiance I can take without him absolutely going to town on my ass. I can’t curse, I can’t go out after ten, I can’t play video games, I can’t do this, and I can’t do that. I can only stay in my room, do my homework, and practice the art.

“I know dad.” I give him a frown to show my displeasure, but this too doesn’t do anything. He just laughs at me. “I’m not a kid anymore. I’m already seventeen.”

I chew my lower lip as he lets out a snort and begins chatting with the soldier in front. Not even my pops can practice with impunity. He needs to go through government channels to get permission for any large scale ritual and if they sense any major magecraft being conducted without prior authorization then my pops can get in some major trouble.

He got thrown into jail for three whole months a couple years back. Man was he furious after that. I shudder when I remember what he did to the judge that had sentenced him. The media had had a heyday talking about it.

“Oi, sunny! Show your old man that color trick you do!”

“No way.” I’m not some dog who’ll do tricks at your command old fart.

“What was that?” He looks at me and I’m reminded of the basement. Jollywoods is right. All evil is held within the basement. “I’ve grown a little hard of hearing as of late.”

“Yes, dad.” I nod my head in compliance and he lets out a sound of satisfaction.

“That’s what I thought.” The man laughs happily. “Just wanted to make sure.”

With an invocation of the second and fourth curse I change the color of my hair to a bright pink. He hates this color and that’s why I buy all in my shirts in it. Fuckers at my school kept calling me gay and ended up getting me expelled. Not my fault they were a bunch of assholes that needed a thrashing.

“See that?” The man smiles and shows off his pearly white teeth. All mages have bleached white teeth because of some weird status thing that stopped making sense a century ago. “He’s produced a layer of liquid that he’s bound with his essence. I’m unsure how he makes it change color but it’s likely some application of the fifth curse that changed the nature of the essence used.”

“That’s very impressive sir.” The soldier starts metaphorically licking my dad’s arse. “It’s unusual for children as young as him to have gained that any degree of competency in the curses. Your offspring has shown proficiency in two and grasped the fifth; he’ll surely bring honor to your name.”

“Fuck you too.” I glare at the soldier and receive a blow to the back of the head in recompense. “OW!”

“Down boy. Don’t go making a fool of your old man.” He sounds displeased and I can take solace in that. I also soon receive another whack for it. This time I fall to the ground. “Don’t go thinking of getting smart with me brat.”

“Yes, father.”

“Sorry about that. I’ll have to have a word with his mother later.” He puts his hand on the soldier’s shoulder. He turns to look at me. “Boy, who’s your mother again?” I growl at him and he just shakes his head. “Never mind. I’ll go have one of the servants get her later.”

If someone uninformed of my situation were spying on me right now, then they might be confused about what’s happening. The truth is that father loves philandering around with women. He’s also absolutely unwilling to use birth control for religious reasons.

Oftentimes the women he consorts with don’t use birth control either; sometimes to get him to take care of them and other times they’re just not thinking. My mother was a case of the former situation. She’d birthed me for the chance to live a life of luxury and she’d succeeded. She, like my father, is what modern society would consider upstanding citizens.

They’re all that’s wrong with society and more. My father is a corrupt politician who abuses his position to leverage benefits for his business and my mother is a vain conniving bitch whose never worked a day in her life. A fitting pair they would make if my father ever cared for a woman. I don’t think he’d even interacted with mother more than ten times in his life.

He hadn’t even bothered keeping her around after she birthed me. She just got shipped to one of the residences he keeps for his mistresses. That’s where we’d stayed until I’d been brought over to him and for whatever reason he’d decided to let me stay at his main residence.

I turn my hair back to blue as my father shoots me a glance. I’d grown adept in deciphering his silent commands over the years.

“Boy, you shouldn’t be so ungrateful.” My father begins lecturing me. “We’ve come here for you after all. We need to begin the rituals necessary for you to begin practicing more advanced forms of the fourth curse.”

“Yes, thank you father.” And I do mean it even if I try not to show it. “Thank you for this opportunity.”

“No problem. You’re my progeny after all.” Father says and accentuates his point by tapping his cane against the floor a couple times. “You’re the one I’ve chosen to teach and upon your shoulders will rest the duty of protecting our dynasty’s legacy.”

Our last name is fucking Page. That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard; the dynast of the Pages. If someone were magically spying on me then they’d also perhaps being wondering about the details behind that little tidbit of information. They also might be thinking this whole situation is too lame to care about.

I’ll, for the sake of my ego, assume they’re the former and also work under the assumption that they can read my mind. The Page family is descended from some knight’s page who took Page as his last name because he wasn’t a very imaginative person. Some stuff went down and he saved his lord’s life. Thus, he became a beloved vassal and eventually, as generations went by, the Page family was introduced into the art by their lord.

There was a civil war, the Page family swore to avenge his master’s house after they were executed by the king by their king, yadda, yadda, boring, mumbojumbo, I don’t care, and now we’re only two hundred years away from the present day. My father is born and sees his friend’s success in the oil industry. He has an accident and my father convinces his family to sell him the company. Of course, my father was the one to fucking kill him. He didn’t even try to hide it and flat out told me when I asked.

What tipped me off? There’s a fucking documentary about his fucking life and the speculation that he fucking murdered his friend goes back fucking ages.

“We’re here.” The soldier says as we enter a room filled with glowing blue cylinders.

Each one goes up six and a half meters, screw the imperial system that shit’s retarded, and have a radius of a little under a single meter. The glass containing the blue liquid shimmers with the barely discernible presence of an almost invisible shield.

I gag as I smell something wretched. My vision blurs before my pops picks me up by the collar and slaps me in the face a couple times. My vertigo is gone. I blink my eyes and look around the room to see the melted corpses of the soldiers that had been guarding this area. I search for any other survivors and see five or six others still standing on the leftmost side of the room. The ones on the right are dead.

The door to this room seals itself shut as it glows with mana. A screen of metal falls down over any of the entrances like you’d see on the television.

“Mhmm, it seems some insolent interloper is up to mischief.” My father frowns as he looks at the bodies. Their flesh has started boiling and mutating into giant pulsating balls of black flesh. “I think I recognize that.”

“Thank you for your assistance mister Page. Without you we’d be dead.” One of the soldiers approaches. He’s a muscular black man who, if I’m recognizing uniforms correctly, seems to be the lieutenant of the guy in charge. “Do you have any idea on whose done this?”

“One of the mages who’d fled Yuria during the first demon king’s birth.” My father looks at the abominations thoughtfully. “He can’t do this kind of thing without having direct contact and I refuse to believe his mastery has developed so far outside his specialization.”

“Can you just tell me their names?” The man looks annoyed at having to listen to my father’s speculation without being given the answer he was looking for. “I apologize but this is urgent.”

“Visai the Vile and Senan Roewood.” My dad explains. “Those two working together could definitely make something like that. They’re also related closely enough to make such an alliance likely.”

“Got it. Thank you for your time mister Page.” The man my father had been talking to goes to another soldier who’d started calling for help on the radio.

There’s a crunching sound coming from one of the doors. Its shimmering field dims and disappears. Crunch. A hole opens up and the soldiers open fire. There’s a scream as whatever it was backs off. The field momentarily returns before vanishing again and the door begins melting.

It’s turned into green as blobs of metal drip off and suddenly it flies forward, blasted out from the wall, into one of the soldiers. He manages to form a shield and block it. Then everyone’s head falls off. Well, almost everyone since my father and I are still alive. The lights go off without warning.

“Avoid light.” My father taps my glasses and suddenly I can see everything in a blur of red and blue. Heat vision; neat. “Not even I can survive long against that man when there’s light.”

I look around and see a singular figure approaching us. His red figure inverts and turns into an outline of blue before a line is drawn across the figure’s face; it’s supposed to be a smile. Then his figure fades into the background.

I hear my father’s cane hitting the ground as the earth shakes. A bang deafens me as I hear an impact coming from right beside me. Lightless explosions coming from where I’d just heard the impact and suddenly everything goes quiet again. I feel something wet splatter onto me.

“…” A pair of golden glowing eyes are staring at me. I raise my hand and try to use the radiance to see my fingers. There’s a liquid on them but I cannot tell its color. I lick my lips and taste iron.

Suddenly the room is lit up as a ball of light floats off the palm of the figure standing in front of me. He’d a red haired man with golden yellow eyes. His skin, the parts not stained in blood, are mostly white. Some of his skin is peeled off revealing purple muscle underneath. The muscle has a metallic sheen to it.

“Hahahaha.” His dress is a white hoodie and jeans of a similar color; rather they would normally be white if they weren’t stained crimson. Oh, and he’s barefoot. I look down. “Heh, heee, heee.”

Lying there is the corpse of what I presume to have once been my father. There’s no flesh only a red skeleton. I look at myself and see I’m soaked in his blood. I look around the room and see the headless corpses of the five soldiers, the horrific mass of tumors that had become of those who’d died initially, and I see my father’s splattered blood dyeing the whole room. It was as if someone had removed all his organs, all his muscle, and all his blood in order to give this room a new macabre paint job. Not like; it’s exactly what happened.

“Aaaaaaaa.” It’s an interesting look. Something surreal like you’d see out of a painting. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.”

I wonder if I’ll be joining them? That’d be an interesting experience to die through. Get it? Live through? Die through? I laugh at my own joke.

“AH!” I throw a right hook at the golden eyed man and he catches it in his mouth that had unhinged itself unnaturally. I stare in confusion as he gives me a look and chomps down. My hand is gone. “AHH!”

I turn and flee only to find him standing in front of me again. I try to back up but I slip on the blood. I begin crawling away but he’s in front of me again. I receive a kick in the face. I try getting up but get kicked down. Every attempt at escape is crushed and I’m kicked back into the place I’d started. Eventually I give up.

“What’s takin’ so long?” A man with an arm covered in a red cloth walks through the door. “You wastin’ time kickin’ puppies again?”

“Should’ve come in sooner. I was waiting for you.” I took the chance to roll over but I just get kicked back into place. “Not my fault you were taking so long.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.” Absalom scoffs. “You were suppose ta get us after makin’ sure the guards were dead but ya took so long I couldn’t be bothered waitin’ and came in meself.”

“Mhmm, what’s that?” He stomps on my leg and I scream. “Couldn’t hear you. The boy was making too much noise.”

“What the hell is wrong with ya today?” The man asks loudly as my voice dies down into a whimper. “Normally ya ain’t such an arse about things.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He grabs my maimed hand and starts grinding it against the floor. “I’m just feeling frustrated lately. His majesty turned down my more recent plans in favor of that asshole’s ideas. Just makes me feel bad. I was also hoping to see little Addy but she ended up getting delayed.”

“I getting’ it. Gettin’ ignored can be frustratin’.” Absalom nods in understanding as they ignore the young man screaming at their feet. “Ya got pretty roughed up by someone.”

“Lawrence Page was lounging around here with this brat tagging along. Do you know who he is? He’s wearing the manly color of pink so I think I might like him.”

“I think I read somewhere that Page had sired a brat.”

“Boy, are you Lawrence’s son?”

“Fuck you, fuck you, fu-“ A foot lodges itself in my mouth.

“Hmmm, he didn’t teach him very well.” The red haired my rubs his cleanshaven chin. “No manners.”

“Bein’ fair he did just lose his father.” Absalom sighs. “Cut the poor boy some slack.”

“They’re gonna be pissed at how side tracked we’ve gotten.” The red haired man removes his foot from my mouth and gives me a good kick. “Wanna get on it?”

“I was getting’ tired of ta waitin’.” The cloth wrapping his arm is pulled off revealing a black limb with two mouths on its palm. One of them opens wide and bulges like a cancerous growth as it extends in a tendril out of his hand. It bites down onto the field and tears it off before swallowing it down.

“Oh, yeah we forgot about Claire.” The red haired man says.

“Can’t believe he didn’t come check yet.” Absalom lets out a laugh. “What a pussy.”

“OI, CLARENT GET OUT OF HERE!” The red hair man yells at such a pitch that my ears start bleeding. “That should do it. His name is really stupid and I hate saying it.”

“Quieter next time.” Absalom rubs his right ear. “I’m right next ta ya.”

A man enters the room. He has a silver earring hanging from his right ear. At the end of it is a small ivory sphere. Upon his left hand are two rings. One plain gold and the other with gems embedded within. He’s dressed like a bum but still has a rugged handsomeness to him.

“Why aren’t we more kind to each other?” He looks at me with watery eyes. “The cruelty of man truly knows no bounds.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah; get on with it already. I don’t wanna listen to your nonsense for a moment longer than I have to.” The red haired man rolls his eyes. “I don’t believe for an instant that you actually care.”

“Just because all things end in nihility does not mean there’s no meaning to it.” Clarent says. “A humble life is good. True satisfaction comes from a humble soul. Basking in the pleasures of wickedness brings only emptiness.”

“He’s in one of those phases of his again.” Absalom says as he finishes destroying the barriers surrounding the cylinders. “Just ignore ‘im.”

“Tragedy befalls all.” From his ivory earring drips a shadow. It extends itself and covers the wall ground and out of it comes another man.

“Wait, how did you kill them?” I ask my tormentor desperately and he gives me a smile.

“Esme had possessed one of the officers and dropped little sacks of my disciple’s brew throughout the compound.” Senan says. “I waited for them to start bursting and came on in after everyone was incapacitated.”

I get a kick to the head and everything goes black.