FELIX FINIBUS

PROLOGUE: EXPOSITION, AND ALL IT ENTAILS.

Both once upon a time and long ago, there lived a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. Now the man and the woman were very happy together, for they had found the mythical true love in the other, but they had one problem.

They were unable to fully realize that love, for they could not produce a child of their very own. For many years they tried and tried, but since the woman was of elf heritage it was very hard for her to conceive with almost anyone, let alone a fully human man.

This caused strife within their happy marriage, and despite their love for one another they both wished so desperately for a child of their own. They both hurt at the inability to produce a bundle of joy, and though the man did not blame his wife, he still felt pain and knowing he would never be able to teach a son to hunt, nor would he watch a daughter grow into a fine young lady.

Eventually, the man became desperate.

In the middle of the night, when the moon was nonexistent in the sky and the stars all hid behind the clouds, the man made a very grave mistake.

He summoned the wizard, Pitch Black.

Now this in itself was a rather stupid move on the man's part, as the wizard Pitch Black was well known to be a creature that hell had spat out. Pitch Black, they say, was once a man.

Once.

But he was no longer, and would never be again, even as he causes anarchy and chaos across the land through use of his armies, nightmares and dark powers.

Pitch Black, they said, would steal your soul and then make you apologize for it.

Pitch Black, they said, had a piece of coal where his heart could once have been, if he'd had one in the first place.

But the man was desperate, and by god was he down to his final straw if he were willing to call upon such a monster. Desperation does funny things to the human heart, you know. So it is with such intense desperation that the man preformed a summoning ritual, one including blood, coal, fire, and sand, in the middle of a night when the moon was nonexistent in the sky.

And, unfortunately, the Wizard Pitch Black decided to heed the summons.

Pitch was a shadow in the darkness, a voice from the left and a touch from the right. The shadow listened to the man as he relayed his story. Elves were notoriously bad at producing children, though incredibly beautiful and immortal. Their immortality was the cause of the lack of little ones, Pitch tells the man with a scathing tone, as a biological cap on the population.

But the man begs and pleads with the shadow, desperate for any type of help.

And the Wizard Pitch Black sees his opening.

"Very Well." He says to the man, keeping to the shadows. "But you will owe me a favour. In return for beginning the life of your child, I will require one. Single. Thing."

The man had nodded along enthusiastically, bravely… or stupidly, depending on how you looked at it, declaring that he would do anything for this great feat to be accomplished.

And the Wizard just smiled.

"Once the child is eighteen," The wizard says with joy, already weaving a secret contract between them, "I will take them as my bride. I'm in need of one, you see. A queen, if you will."

The man stares at the wizard, who stares at the man, who stares at the wizard.

"…And if the child's a boy?"

The wizard just shrugs and holds out a single hand. "It's of no matter. Do we have a deal?"

The man pauses at this, thinking. Would it be better to not have a child at all, or to get attached to them only to have him or her ripped from him into a life with Pitch?

"… You have a deal." The man murmurs, taking the offered hand and regretting it all the while.

The man's wife soon fell pregnant. The man never did tell her why it was that it happened just as they were about to give up, or why he was always looking over his shoulder every other day.

She was too happy to care, really, as her stomach got larger and her glow more motherly.

The baby is born on a freezing cold day in late December.

He's a healthy little thing, with his mother's white hair and his father's blue eyes. They name him Jack, after the lovely Jackrabbits that used to run along the fields outside their lovely cottage. And still the man keeps silent.

Jack grows. Soon he's half a year, then a full year, then two. And still the man remains silent as he watches this child, the one he'd damned himself, grow into a lively, lovable little toddler.

And one day he just can't take it anymore.

Mother and son find the father's body in their little cabin in the woods, with his throat slit by his own hand. The son doesn't see anything, the mother hiding his face away as she wails over the body of her beloved.

And in the shadows of the cabin, the wizard Pitch Black smiles.

The woman burns the house, taking her son and provisions and packing them all away into two tiny rucksacks and leaving.

Jack is only three.

He's four by the time they reach their destination.

The mother runs to her original home in the woods, deep within the elvish woods of old and back to her old people. Her father, the lord of the very woods she'd grown up in, was happy to allow them sanctuary and care. Thus, it is there that they stay, allowing time to pass around them in the safety of the woods. That safety is but an illusion, however, that is just waiting for the day that it would snap in two.

Waiting for the day Jack turns eighteen.

And everything.

Goes.

Wrong.