Underneath Central Tower, at the heart of Central Isle, Lord Inquisitor Alice Eve escorted Silvario, Cherriesa and a retinue of armoured Trinity warriors through the secret facility. They came to a stop on a balcony overlooking a massive dark hangar space. Alice activated the lights revealing row after row of mechanised soldiers, most of which were styled in ancient looking armour. Some happened to be sleeker and far more agile looking, but they were all heavily armed with both futuristic melee and ranged weaponry either carried separately or built into their chassis.

As ever, Silvario wore an elegant and flamboyantly coloured robe. His long silvery-white hair was so well kept it looked like it could have been out of a shampoo commercial, and his expression was deliberately kept plain yet polite. His purple Mage eyes went wide when he saw the robotic army before him.

“Is this all of them?” he asked Alice.

“The vast majority of the Autons are here,” she replied, “but there are some hidden in cargo containers on the three continents as well.”

Alice was in her white slim-line power armour which contrasted highly with her brown Tropican skin, and her jet black hair was tied back in a smart professional ponytail. Since meeting with her Goddesses (who were actually twin Archmages from a time before recorded history) her irises were white ringed with black, reflecting her true status as a Book Wielder, although anyone who wasn’t a Supernatural would still see them as brown. The golden ‘I’ and the twin crescents of the Inquisition were on her large shoulder plates and upon a black cape that covered her back. It was a state of the art suit that boasted defence and strengthening capabilities as well as assisting in mobility, and it also had an array of inbuilt light weaponry as an important back-up. A plasma submachine gun was holstered on the side of her hip, and she leant slightly on the silvery spell-forged war hammer that she had retrieved from site of the old Autocrat Edgar Aurelius II’s fiery assassination.

“You know, if you’d told us about these sooner, the attack on the Capital would’ve been a success,” Cherriesa said viciously in her soft and sweet high Tropican voice.

Alice thought of Cherriesa, the Vampire ruler of the Trinity of Old, as the supermodel Supernatural version of herself. As they were both of Tropican descent they shared a similar skin tone. Cherriesa’s was a shade lighter however, and her hair was jet black too but it was silky and shiny, falling glamorously to the beginning of her backside. Her features were small and cute but her eyes were sly and sexy, coloured the standard Vampire blood red. She was wearing an old fashioned tight red and black corset and a dress that showed off her wicked curves, yet she managed to retain her classiness and air of nobility.

Alice tightened her grip on the war hammer. “I could say the same about the Sanctium you didn’t supply,” she answered, “and besides, their operating system wasn’t finished. I didn’t know you’d be able to do something with them.”

“Our Sanctium is in short supply,” Cherriesa spat back. “Anyway, our people had the rounds to deal with the Freaks, it’s not our fault your weak human forces weren’t up to the task!”

“Ladies, please,” Silvario said in his diplomatic tone. “We both erred too far on the side of caution in regard to the attempt to retake the Capital City. We were new allies and didn’t quite trust each other...”

“We still don’t,” both Alice and Cherriesa said at the same time before scowling at one another.

Silvario raised his white eyebrows and gave them the look of a disappointed parent before continuing. “We have to look to the future rather than obsessing over what could have been. The fact is we are losing this war and our survival hinges on our cooperation. Alice, I hope with this act I am a step closer to earning your trust, both for myself and the Trinity of Old.”

He held out his arms and strained hard as wisps and spirals of blue, green and turquoise magic flew from his fingertips down into the hangar below. Silvario forced the ancient magic to his mind, magic that his tutor had taught him when the world was still relatively young, and the wisps and spirals spread and crept into the frozen mechanical army.

The Autons began to move, ever so slightly at first like an uncomfortable shuffle, and then fully autonomous movement as if they’d been alive the whole time. Behind their helmet visors, magical turquoise eyes glowed furiously.

Silvario relaxed and caught his breath before speaking. “With the combination of your basic operating system and my archaic animation spell, these Autons will now be ready to level the playing field for us. Give them a try.”

Alice hesitated for a moment as she watched the strange robotic army, fuelled by both magic and technology, fidgeting below. Then she stood to attention and shouted in military fashion, “Autons, attention!”

The sound of loud footsteps echoed through the hanger as the Autons stood to attention. They shouldered their weapons and waited patiently for further commands from their leader.

Alice nodded appreciatively. Now the combined forces of the Inquisition and the Trinity of Old would stand a real chance against the Archmage Omniosis, and she would be able to find and stop Winston Reynolds before it was too late.

In the Beginning...

Archmages and magically attuned humans lived together in harmony on the world they named Mydia. Magical creatures and vegetation flourished amongst the regular animals and plants, and the world seemed full of possibilities and wonder.

To keep the world in balance, fate assigned special individuals magical books that granted their owners extraordinary powers over both the world and the magic users inhabiting it. These ‘Book Wielders’ created an enormous amphitheatre on Mydia’s central Isle to discuss and debate world affairs, and they also constructed an impressive network of underground tunnels linked together by magical portals so that Archmages and humans could attend the meetings.

The Archmages, who were just like humanity in almost every way except for their lifespan and magical prowess, became obsessed with advancing their powers. They began to look down on the humans who could not rival their amazing abilities, and started following the most powerful group of Archmages rather than the Book Wielders.

The Book Wielders tried intervening several times, but with no success. Even their ability to negate the magical abilities of others was soon overcome by the Archmages’ ever increasing arcane powers.

Soon the once peaceful Mydia was subject to a prolonged and horrific extermination of all those who opposed the Omni, the group of ruling Archmage tyrants. But a pair of Archmage twin sister Book Wielders came up with a drastic plan to save the world.

The Twins and the other rebel Book Wielders and Archmages headed to the central node of the underground tunnels located directly under the amphitheatre on the Central Isle, and opened a dimensional rift in the middle of the amphitheatre above using a golden quill artefact that amplified Book Wielder power. They drained out the majority of Mydia’s magic and forced it through the interstice. The Archmages were unable to exist without the magic so they desperately followed it through the portal, but some clung to Mydia and eventually split into the first feral Vampires, Werewolves and Mages. The Twins and their comrades also entered the portal, hoping that the world would once again flourish without the huge amounts of magic to abuse.

Mydia started anew, and the story of what had transpired flowed into legend while the rest was forgotten, including the name of the planet. The twin Book Wielders were falsely portrayed as Twin Goddesses who banished evil from the world, styled after the planet’s twin moons. The humans prospered and the feral Vampires, Werewolves and Mages hid in the shadows, eventually passing on their powers inadvertently to other humans and creating the regular Supernaturals. They, along with newly chosen Book Wielders who no longer understood their purpose, crafted a society in secret behind the human world.

The world carried on relatively unhindered. The Shadow War between Supernaturals and witch-hunting inquisitors led to an alliance between the Vampires, Werewolves and Mages called the Trinity. The humans’ enormous Great War that spanned the world for years and years later caused the Supernaturals to turn their backs on the Trinity and emerge from shadows to enjoy influencing the human world behind the scenes once more.

However, the Twins’ portal was not the end of the Archmages. The magic drained from the world formed a new sub-dimension, a plain reflection of the real world, which the Archmages seemed to have complete control over – just as long as they stayed near the sphere of magical energy at its centre, which was Mydia’s drained magic in one giant orb.

The Twins and the other kind-hearted Archmages retreated from their tyrannical brethren and headed high up into the sky of the new dimension. Far from the source of magic, their physical forms were completely diminished, leaving only a consciousness wrapped around a sphere of light. The Archmage despots below shaped their isle in every magnificent way they could imagine and lived like gods, until things began turning sinister and vile.

Unknown to the Archmages, their heartless and cruel minds in close conjunction to the source of magic were shaping the dimension around them into something dark and corrupt. Regardless of how much magic they threw at their creations to correct them, they only ended up deteriorating them faster.

The Omni left their brethren behind where they eventually amalgamated with their creations and each other, until they were one giant fleshy mountain at the heart of the now black sea. Some other Archmages had left the source of magic to explore the new dimension, and some of them realised what would happen to them just in time to flee, but either way they deteriorated into insane demonic creatures. The Omni had followed the rebel Archmages’ example and fled upwards, but not far up enough to lose their physical forms. However, their appearance was still subject to the same ugly transformation as the rest of their kind that had escaped the isle. They were lucky enough to retain their sanity and the majority of their powers, but they weren’t powerful enough; they were never powerful enough.

They formulated a plan to escape the dimension (which the new Book Wielders who wandered into it every now and then were referring to as ‘the Gloom’), a plan involving the golden quill that the Twins had used to open the rift in the first place. They used their Demonic brethren, the strange puppet-people and the other weird creatures below to find the artefact, but as the Omni were not Book Wielders they were unable to use it. Enraged, the cruellest and most powerful member demanded that the others sacrifice themselves to him so that he would have the strength to merge the worlds back into one. Some of them volunteered and the ones who didn’t were forced, but in the end all that was left was a single entity named Omniosis. To its unrelenting fury though, it still was not able to wield the quill. So Omniosis plotted and planned as he waited, for a thousand years and then a thousand more, for an opportunity to escape the dimensional prison while bringing the source of magic along as well.

Then one day, a Book Wielder named Winston Reynolds discovered the Gloom for the first time. From his first interaction with the puppets, Omniosis knew that he was possibly the most potent Book Wielder since the beginning of Mydia, so he began a scheme to trick the young man into working for him. Fate delivered the Archmage his opening in the form of another young and powerful Book Wielder named Lewis Thorne, who was stupid enough to drink the black water out of desperation on his very first crossing. The vile fluid warped him enough to be influenced, and through him Omniosis managed to convince Winston to merge Gloom City into the Capital City.

Now, Omniosis sat on a throne of white marble at the top of his magnificent glass and stone tower. He looked out on Imperia City, the world’s Capital, which he had magically manipulated to look like a cross between modern day and his own era.

His body was covered in white masquerade masks: one on his face, two on the side of his head, one on each shoulder and chest armour, and one on his stomach plating. He wore a black chainmail coif underneath his head masks, with a long black and white plume, to hide his hideously deformed Demon skin. Over his white plate armour he wore a tight black robe cut at strange angles.

Lewis shuffled into the room and bowed. “You summoned me, boss?”

After some heavy yet concealed alterations, the young blonde haired Book Wielder Lewis Thorne was now completely his puppet.

The Archmage nodded. “Which of them will be... problematic, my puppet?”

Lewis scratched his chin, barely blinking his strange eyes with the pure black irises. He had to remember to blink. “Brooke and Veronica can sense something is different with me, and maybe Lucius too. Alexander is smart. He’ll figure it out pretty quick given the opportunity.”

“What about the other Werewolves?” Omniosis asked. “The big one with the scatty girl?”

“What, Lynette and Kavarne?” Lewis chuckled. “You’re safe with those two. As long as they’re together causing trouble and getting drunk or stoned, then they’re happy. They won’t be much trouble. You could just send them far away to do some killing and it would probably benefit you much more than getting rid of them.”

“Fine, take care of the others.” The Archmage lifted one of his gauntlets from the throne and pointed brashly. “But do it gradually and cleverly. Winston cannot know that we’re distancing him from his friends… and make sure that you leave Veronica until last. She’s a big problem but he’ll be less inclined to play his part without her by his side.”

“You got it, boss-man!” Lewis said with a creepy big grin.

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