Fatewriter - Prologue

June 1st, 1901

The old man sighed. Yes, that was what he was, an old man. He wouldn’t last much longer, not in this world anyway. That curse had been placed on him at birth, as it had many others before him. Never dying, not truly. Just passing from world to world, dying and being reborn. He knew that this wasn’t the world he had been born into. They had told him that when he was little more than a boy. They had told him that he had a gift, that he was special. He hadn’t had a clue what they had been talking about, then. But after that memories had awoken. They weren’t his own, he had thought, but as more memories kept coming, he knew that they were. He had done so much, and it felt as if he had had the mind of an old man inside the body of a boy. For the memories were many, and it was too much for him at the age he was.

Now, as the years had passed, he was an old man completely, and there were now even more memories to stack onto the pile.

He had dreamt last night, and that was always a bad thing. Dreams for him meant that something big was going to happen.

The dream had been of a boy, still quite young. His clothes woke a faint memory, but not from this world.

The boy had stood near a girl, also dressed in an odd manner. She would have been shunned if she had been seen wearing such a thing on the streets in his world. Her clothes were black, as was her hair, which she wore down. She wore pants, which to him, was a disgrace.

She had said something, and the old man had marvelled at how beautiful her voice was. It was a voice of power, the type of voice that could change time.

As she spoke, the boy pulled something out of his pocket. It was pencil. The boy had begun to write something on a sheet of paper that the girl gave him, but the dream had ended.

As he reminisced about the dream, the old man’s hand struck something in his draw. It was a pencil, the same as the one the boy had held in the dream. Could there be a significance?

The man looked at the sapphire sphere, his most prized possession. Sometimes he saw things in it. They had given it to him, all those years ago, when the memories came, when he learned that he wasn’t human.

Today nothing showed in it.

Twirling the pencil in his fingers, the man felt himself fall into a trance.

He knew that his time on this world was up. How many times had this happened? Four? Five? Perhaps it had happened a hundred times.

But after he died, his body would vanish. That would make an interesting story on the newspaper. Nothing much happened in this sleepy town, and the newspaper had little in it.

He would have just vanished. No body, that was the curse. Friends and loved ones not knowing what had happened.

It wouldn’t matter so much for him. He had no family, and was a recluse. No one would miss him.

But what would his next life be? Where would he live?

Then he decided, no. He wouldn’t have a next life. He remembered the pencil in his hand. This could be his saviour.

He began to write, in a language that no one on Earth spoke, that even he didn’t know. It was the language of magic, some would call it.

When he finished, he dropped the pencil, and heard it clatter onto the floor. With that, he took his last breath, and vanished into nothing.