The realm of Fyrlend was forged of a land of magic.
For centuries, the people in this big kingdom had lived at the mercy of the elements of nature: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.
Every child born in the land of Fyrlend was to be tested for the magical affinity with which each was born, their destinies defined by the strong element they inherited.
Of these, Fire was the chief.
It was the magic of destruction, of power and conquest, and with it, those who use it stood above all.
The noble houses, steeped over generations in this fiery dominance, wear their affinity with lineage proud and unbroken.
Fire was the symbol of authority, and the practitioners were leaders, generals, and kings.
But magic was not confined to Fire alone.
Water brought clarity and control as its users crafted spells of precision and adaptability.
Earth provided resilience, fortitude, and a force that granted its wielders the power to shape the world itself.
Air was the magic of speed and freedom, carrying whispers and storms on its currents.
These elemental affinities served as the building blocks for Fyrlend's hierarchy-a very rigid system in which a person was as good as his magical powers.
Beyond the elements lay the rarer affinities.
The deified magic of healing and purity is light, and the users are elevated as holy figures.
Healing, while part of Light's domain, was considered far weaker-a magic useful to tend wounds, but it lacked the grandeur of Fire's might or Water's elegance.
The dark affinities, like Necromancy and Blood Magic, were feared and forbidden; the use of any of these arts was punished with death.
Whispers of legends spoken of even darker magics, lost to time, that twisted the soul and consumed the world about.
Yet again, such tales had been relegated to the mythical and the remnants of a war so old the kingdom would do better to forget it.
At the center of this world stood the noble houses, their power built upon their elemental legacies.
Among them, none was so much revered as feared than the Gatchduker family.
Unrivaled was their magic with fire, and their lineage has never been broken from generations.
To be born a Gatchduker was to inherit a privilege, an expectation.
And so the kingdom watched with wonder over this family, a dynasty of infernos, each child born to burn brighter than the last.
But magic, in all its wonder and power, was not benign.
Life was merciless for those who did not manage to manifest an elemental affinity.
The "Affinityless," as they were called, were cast out, left to scrape by on the edges of society.
Even those with less common affinities, like Healing, were treated as lesser because their magics did not align with the ideals of the kingdom: strong and dominating.
Such was the way of Fyrlend, where power was the basis of survival, and the weak were not tolerated.
Yet beneath this neatly ordered surface, something rather more malign stirred.
The ruins of the Abyssal Forest spoke in a whisper of old magic buried deep into the earth, magic from a time long before the Great Houses and their elemental dominance.
These lost powers, wrappèd in mysterious folds, were said to be a ruination invoked on any who dared grasp hold of them.
The stories spoke of curses that consumed the mind, of magics that spread like a disease, infecting all they touched.
And in the shadow of this world, a boy was born.
His name was Reing Ven Rectarus, born third of the great and powerful family of Gatchduker.
He was supposed to inherit the flames of his forefathers, rise as one son of destruction and force.
But fate had other plans.
Reing's birth would be the starting point of a series of events that would tear asunder the carefully knitted fabric of order in the kingdom.
A boy with no fire, no strength, worthless to his family.
A boy whose true, hidden, and feared magic one day would shake the foundations of Fyrlend.
For within the world of elemental dominion, Plague Magic was something unthinkable that could ever rise.
It was a magic that rotted the strong, corrupted the pure, and consumed all it touched.
A magic which history had forgotten, buried by those who were afraid it might return.
And in the hands of this unwanted son, it would turn into a weapon.
A weapon of survival.
A vengeance weapon.
A weapon against the very laws that define the world.
For Reing Ven Rectarus, cast out and abandoned, would become the Plague Mage.
And in a land lorded over by fire, he would bring that kingdom low.
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