Prologue

Just a little exposition to get the world of the story fleshed out.

Prologue

Looking back on it, I suppose I was never a normal college student. Normal college students stress out over midterms, essays, and final exams. Normal college students get drunk at parties or play videogames until ungodly hours of the morning. They take out student loans that they’ll then spend a good chunk of their adult life repaying and they live in dorms and eat at cafeterias and make a big deal about every little milestone they pass as if it were the new most important event in their lives.

So why was I so different? Why did I have my own home at age twenty? Why did I only have a handful of friends who would talk to me? Why did most people in my hometown call me “witch” or “demon” when I walked by them? That’s a little tough to explain, but the short answer is that you should never trust your secrets with anyone but yourself.

You see, about forty years back, the FBI was running some sketchy tests on a human specimen known only as “Project Orpheus”. One of the scientists blabbed to his lady-friend for hire, and she told her friend who then informed the presses that an FBI test subject was apparently able to perform actual magic. Now, this whole ordeal was just about ready to blow over. The internet wasn’t exactly a thing yet, so people were about ready to forget about it. Unfortunately, a few years later, some crackhead who happened to have a bit of Talent themselves flew off the handle and went to the press, telling them that the rumors were true. He promised more details about magic and the people who used it as long as they would protect him from the feds.

The truth was out there. People knew. Witches, warlocks, alchemists, and just about any other magic user you could think of started cropping up around the country and, later, the world. People learned. People adapted. People… honestly stopped giving a s**t after about five years. Things settled down, and life went on as normal.

And then, like a massive plague, the digital age swept across the globe. People of all races, nationalities, creeds, and beliefs could gather together to rip on the people who could do cool s**t they couldn’t. Social media sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter popped up, and users immediately demanded there be a profile option for whether or not you could use magic. This got people thinking about all the people who could use magic but kept it hidden. Students who could pass any class and earn any degree with no effort, politicians who could entrance audiences with their voice, companies that could seemingly draw resources from thin air. In 2008, President Aaron Reynolds was elected on a platform of magic registration.

Within two years, every prospective student and employee in the USA was screened for Talent. When I got my driver’s license, there was a little purple square underneath my date of birth that stated that I, Dallas Dmitrus Burrows, was a registered magic user.

Within the next four years, I was on my own. My mom, a completely normal, non-magic-using human woman, was found dead under mysterious circumstances while my dad and I were out of town. My dad was shot point-blank in the back of the head at a Magic-User Rights Movement rally in Long Beach. He left me a living trust with everything he owned: a nice house, two decent cars, and a small fortune his family had accumulated over the years. He also stated in his will that he wanted me to go to college and live a normal life. Apparently he forgot about the legacy he’d already given me.

So that’s how I ended up at Golden Coast University in Huntington Beach, California. I didn’t have a normal life, and college wasn’t fixing that. Word gets around pretty quickly when a warlock signs up for your US History lecture. About halfway through my first year of college, I decided to go all out with the whole outcast vibe. I grew a beard and let my hair get long and shaggy. I pierced my ears, I got a few small tattoos, and I started perfecting my brooding scowl. I was already a pretty big guy six feet and change and built thick, so I tended to be a fairly imposing guy. Somehow, I managed to make a handful of friends, and I’ve even gotten close with a few of them. They hung out at my house, helped keep a******s away from me and a few other Talented, and were generally pretty chill. Things weren’t normal, but they were starting to at least get somewhat easy. That’s when I should have known something was very, very wrong. I’d forgotten the one harsh lesson that life kept trying to drill into me:

Never get comfortable.

Author's Note

Is this too "narration"-y? I'm trying not to sound like a talking head, but I also don't want to start putting dialogue or extra characters into the prologue, you know?