'My world, Charis, ruined and withering slowly, a sight that became the norm after the last years...'
Red murky sky, air that often becomes toxic to breathe for long and constant natural disasters such as iron sandstorms, which could very easily make anything but he most secure shelters into a mangled mess, or even worse were the eletric magnetic storms that followed which would take out any chance of recovering energy to give any hope to rebuild a civilization...
So many things that would everyday make seem like the last, but without the hope to be able to use that time for anything other than trying to survive... thats the daily life of everyone in Charis, living by breathing with straws, desperately trying to live in bunkers, shelters or deep caverns that were left behind by a civilization that chose to abandon this world.
Thats right... the powerful after destroying this planet on their petty squables just agreed to find another place to live and disapeared before the Calamity struck.
The most frightening detail for all those who couldnt get away was that they didnt even know how they left... some claim they used spaceships, others claim they worsened the calamity by opening portals to other dimensions, realms or whatever you may call them...
There was only one good thing that came with all this mess that still left a bit of hope.
Magic. The power to break reality and affect nature, laws and everykind of possible thing you may encounter in the universe. The power of change we also desperetaly sought to survive, making water out of air, making fire, eletricity and all kinds of atomic manipulation sounds amazing right? Heck some may even think that destroying a planet for magic is a fair trade...
But as often reality tends to be more dire and unforgiving than our dreams so did magic show itself a stubborn force. So many were focused on it and even then our progress would advance at snail pace, some managed breakthroughs that allowed for the continuation of our efforts, but alas... we didnt have enough time to understand it before the end of our reckless fight against our fate came to an end...
On the last day what was I doing? What else if not trying out magic to find a way out of this mess? day and night, grueling and trying it again to manipulate enough mana to manipulate SPACE and TIME, the Trial of our people in Charis was a hard one... When one found a way to manipulate SPACE we would find ourselves without enough mana to do such a jump, not even to talk about TIME, that was a dead end with our resources.
On that last day we chose to make use of a forbidden discovery... SOULPOWER, the capacity of a living soul create magic, it normally is a passive endeavour that allows magic to be used, but when you play around and experiment with the concept it becomes the power that one would expect of crazy cultists of old... SACRIFICE the utilization of people to create more magic forcefully, and thats how it went:
On the last day, we had run out of Food and only had water by using WATER and FIRE magic to purify it, our hopes where close to lost except by the last chance to use SACRIFICE to its maximum potential, when everyone was still alive and had maintaned their sanity.
The elders and the leaders of our shelter chose to abide by a single rule: Only the old enough to not be a burden and the young enough to be able to grow and live longer along with the children were the ones who would go through the portal to a dimension that was dialed to the last coordinates received by a traitor of the elite, who out of guilt send them before the Cataclysm, good thing some of our leaders were paranoid enough to record it before all eletricity was fried by the magnetic currents.
Thus I, Noah was one of the young people who went into the portal at my 13 years of age.
We werent too many on this shelter, many could not get in this faraway shelter in time, we were around 50 people with just 7 young ones to go through the portal, my family was here, my father, my mother and my little sister, Sophy, which was just 8 years old at the time...
After setting up a ward my imprinting mana on the ground for the sacrifice we all said our goodbyes, none of our parents would be able to stand with us in life or see our future sucess... the mana was just enough to make according to that paranoid uncle that held the coordinates and the mana requirements that were calculated by the elite researchers sent by the traitor.
All that was left was take all the clothes, backpacks, tools and notes about magic that we could and take open the portal with the mana gifted by our dead parents and adults which sacrificed themselves for us and then step in and see if there is hope for us on the other side.
And so the ward activated, they withered and lost their lifes like puppets with their strings cut and the red-violet portal opened, we quickly went in before it closed in just around 2 seconds after our arrival.
We little ones cried, for our loss that day, our world, our family, our childhood and just about everything we had before was gone, only ourselves left in this new land.