SpoilerI have no idea what I was doing when I wrote this.

Spoiler
The bull-man unceremoniously gurgled. It fought valiantly, evident in the arduous expression on its face and the way its muscles bulged as it struggled to keep a grip on its mighty halberd. But ultimately the injuries did it in. Its left knee gave away and its right knee – busted and ragged – missed the purchase on the marble floor. It collapsed like a mighty tree and laid there. The pooling darkness beneath it reinforced its defeat and the fact that it had not long in this world as its lifeblood permitted it.

It looked up at the one who defeated it. A lanky young man, dressed in a set of standard wizard robes that had seen better days. He is short of height - mousy-haired, freckled, and fresh-faced, qualities that lent him a personal air of naïve innocence. The bull-man felt an immense sorrow for the victor as it knew the fate that would come to him; the same as it and other predecessors that came before it, but that was the way of magic as omnipresent as life, as unyielding as death. It was only important to tell the man what lies before him and what he needed to face.

“Human…you finally got what you wanted and that is commendable. You are smart – you know the reason why Maze of Miracles was created, but you must know; there is a reason for why this dimension was locked away and all traces evident to its existence scrubbed away. The knowledge – this knowledge - is infinite and the infinity gives it power, but also makes it alien. To put shortly, this knowledge is not of this world and unfortunately, for all its potential use, it has a malign intelligence of its own...”

The bull-man winced as a jolt of pain wracked its shoulder. It saw that the young man also sympathetically winced, the magic sword in his hand clattered to the ground as it convulsed. He quickly grabbed his arm, looking at it with a veneer of suspicion.

“…and the capacity to multiply. It spawned many abominable beings, sharp-toothed and bloody-clawed. Their sheer numbers and their apparent lack of vulnerabilities laid waste to the world, the final toll-bell for the Age of Miracles. The survivors tried to seal it up, but they had already learned and used of this knowledge. Forgetting it was just as easy as un-shattering a broken ceramic cup. So they sealed the accursed maze into its own dimension and sealed it with the greatest curse and the most costly of sacrifices…a being must undergo a rigorous transformation in order to become a suitable guardian of the place. And if that guardian is killed--”

The bull-man’s vision went dark for a moment. When it came to its senses, the man was bent over as if doubled in pain. He uncurled, revealing a disproportionately larger hand, festooned with claws, and a terrified expression. The bull-man chastised itself for mincing words as it did not had long before its death.

“—the closest being would have to take its place.”

“WHAT.”

The bull-man sadly gazed at him. “…Now you are obviously the one chosen by the curse and I am dying, but before I go. I must deplore you, there is a mote of hope within the accursed state. There is a way to seal the knowledge – but not by yourself, but with entities beyond our world as outside evils can only be fought with outside powers. Find a way to gain their help. And if the knowledge is sealed, then the curse will have no purpose to exist anymore, liberating you from a state that had cursed me and the others. Good luck! Stay safe! And…goodbye.”

And so, the bull-man finally died. Its corpse started to boil and sizzle, breaking down to smoke and magic. Its consciousness mercifully faded away before it could witness the painful, prolonged metamorphosis of its successor. Its last thoughts only hoped what it claimed was true and encouraged the man to find a solution. The one thing that was worse than fell-knowledge was stagnation. After all, what brought the Maze of Miracles was progress and only further progress could undo these mistakes.

It has been 50 years. Asterion, the man-transmuted-animal, self-taught himself into a powerful mage. But with time, he still doubted his predecessor’s words.

Spoiler
I was ten when I saw my mother taken. My stepfather saw it too, though we never spoke about that night.

After that I think I was always a cruel person, but I never wanted to be. I did everything I could to subvert the desires to hurt animals or those so weak they couldn’t defend themselves, and I think for the most part I succeeded. I turned my attention to hurting bullies instead, and for a while that made me feel better. When I graduated high school, my grades were in the shitter, so the when the Navy recruiter said I had a future as a seal, it all seemingly fell into place for the first time in my life.

I was drafted into an elite unit. The other men became my brothers. We fought together, we killed together. We toppled regimes together. Never in that time, did I ever kill a child.

We would tell stories at night in the desert. There wasn't anything else to do but talk. When I first brought up what I had seen the night my mother disappeared, nobody believed me. If it weren't for that damn mission in the mountains outside Rakaposhi they probably never would have. But we all saw those fucking kids with the jet black eyes get into a disk that shot off at mach 3. We lost good men to those monsters. Nobody could refute it to me anymore. Now it was our collective truth.

One of the men in my unit started to do some digging into the subject. He wound up dead. I’d done enough cover-ups to know what that meant.

The others didn’t care the way I did. They didn’t see their mother pulled into the fucking sky at ten years old. I could never wipe that memory from my mind even if I had tried. I never tried.

In Rakaposhi I had taken a trophy off one of those things, something my stepfather had me do when we went hunting. I took it's finger. This finger was an obsession for me. I carried it everywhere. And so one day I was walking by this rich business guy and it started to vibrate. For some reason I couldn’t let it go, I followed this man around for weeks as he did the most mundane shit. I started to get a gut feeling that this guy’s life was too... normal. And then, I saw it, the fuckin mask came off, and it was one of those things.

So I killed it.

I knew there had to be more out there. And I started to find them, It wasn't so hard once you knew where to look. Not all of them were easy kills. Some of them fought back. Those little fuckers who looked like kids were the worst.

I figured out that this vibration function in their skin was so the things could find each-other. So I used it against them. I took their faces, which vibrated the most, and made a suit. The fuckers never got the jump on me again.

I did it for America. No, I did it for the world.