The 12th Mage

How long has it been? He wondered. Time flows differently in the nether-realms. Perhaps only a mere day had passed in Rexral, but perhaps it has been a thousand years. It was quite impossible to tell.

What he did know however, was that the amount of time he had spent in the nether realms was more or less 24,000 years. He could estimate this because it had taken him about 2000 years to conquer each of the 12 realms which he now ruled. It had been so long that he had forgotten his own name. But he did remember Rexral, where it had all started.

The rebels. They probably thought they had driven him to flee, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. The portal was their goal, not their escape. It was the culmination of all the efforts and sacrifices that the 12 dark mages had made up to that point. It was the ultimate prize for which they had so painstakingly strived for. The entire aim from the start was for the 12 of them to invade the nether realms in order to surpass the limits of their magic.

Alas, in the end, only he, the 12th mage, had managed to cross over whilst the others ultimately fell at the hands of the rebels. What a pity. For a while, he mourned greatly for the other eleven. But he was never one to dwell too long on past regrets. Instead, he reaffirmed his resolve and set forth to conquer. In the end, he managed to subjugate 12 realms in all, 11 in the honor of his fallen comrades and one for his own.

For a time, he was at a lost of what to do next. Theoretically, there were unlimited number of nether realms beckoning for further exploration and conquest, but his appetite for that had been sated for the time being.

More and more, he began to wonder about what might be coming to pass back in his original world. He felt strangely nostalgic for the old comforts that he used to enjoy back in the day. From simple foods and drink to taking long baths. He also missed his eleven comrades dearly. It weighed heavily on him, the fact that he never managed to give them a proper burial, or even got to say farewell.

Thus, with renewed resolve, the 12th dark mage searched for a way back to Rexral. The odds of doing so were rather improbable, like searching for a single thread in a vast ocean. However, as the supreme ruler of 12 almighty nether realms, he did have considerable resources at his disposal.

Time passed. The 12th mage didn’t know how much time he had spent on seeking a path back home, but it would seem that fate had decided to lend him a helping hand before long.

He felt it when it happened. A disturbance in the cosmic flux which he quickly recognized to have originated from Rexral due its resonance with his own soul. Apparently, some calamity had struck his homeworld. Thousands of lives were being sacrificed at once. Their agony and despair alone served as an effective beacon for the last dark mage to pinpoint their location in the infinite cosmic expanse.

And so, after much searching and preparing, the 12th dark mage successfully opened a portal back to Rexral.