It all began over 1800 years ago. Things were very different back then than they are now. All those things you read in those storybooks of yours, those things your parents assured you were not real, they existed. Witches stole children away to feed their sisters. Vampires and werewolves hunted and fed upon humans. Ravenous undead and ghosts of angry spirits took their wrath out on the living. Kami tricksters hounded travelers and led the to their deaths. All in all, it was a rather unpleasant place to live. Then Faust came. No one knows how he came to learn the secret art of the magic, a secret its practitioners would die to keep, or even where he had come from. Most don’t even know he existed. All that mattered was one night a deafening roar echoed across the land, and when it ended, all those creatures that had terrorized humans were gone. Always fearful that they might someday return, the people of that time told stories to warn their children of the danger. Still, with the confidence of youth, the children did not head their parents’ warnings and the stories became nothing more than bedtime stories for weeping babes. It is with confidence that I say that no one ever knew what really happened that day, the day the monsters became myth. How could they even begin to grasp at what was happening around them as Faust gathered powerful magics around him and created the divide? The divide that has kept all those creatures of the night trapped in their own shadow world, separate from ours. It truly was a masterful spell, the like of which this world will never see again. But it did something else that Faust did not expect. When it took those creatures and sealed them away on the other side of the divide, it took all the magic of the world with it. For centuries Faust tried to bring magic back into our world. When at last he gave it up as hopeless he noticed that the world had changed and past him by. Terrified of the strange new creations mankind had made, Faust sought someone who could re-introduce him to the world. He found Able. Able was a very intelligent boy who had always aspired to greatness, but had always suffered from a rash and naïve personality. So as you can imagine, when a strange man came and offered to teach him real magic in exchange for teaching him about the world, Able leapt at the opportunity. That would have been the end of the story if not for one tragic flaw Able possessed; he was in love. The girl of his affections reciprocated his feelings, and they planned to wed even though Faust warned them it would end badly. The night before the wedding, Able’s love died in a car wreck. Grief-ridden, Able buried himself in Faust’s old tomes. Faust foolishly decided it was better let the boy mourn alone and failed to keep a close eye on him. As it was, Able was not morning, he was looking for a way to ‘fix’ death, and soon he found it. He was going to break the divide so her soul could come back. Fortunately, Faust realized what was happening in time to prevent the ritual from being completed, but not before it had done incredible damage to the divide, leaving a scattering of holes in it all across the world. Faust began his preparations to fix the divide, but before he could a monstrous creature leapt out from the shadows and ripped out his throat. Police rushed to the scene in time to catch the monster and were also slain by it. Faust’s neighbors heard a roar that night and a shout of, “Freedom! By Azarath, we shall feast on Man flesh!” and the night was silent. With the last of his strength, Faust wrote a warning to the rest of humanity in his own blood, “The divide has been damaged, those… things are loose. Save yourselves!”, but it was unfortunately disregarded as the ravings of a madman.

Since then, strange disappearances, thefts, and murders have been happening all across the land. Those creatures from your storybooks, those things that ‘are just fairy tales’ are coming back. Fortunately for humanity, so is the magic, albeit slowly. The question is, will it be enough?