Who Am I?

I want you to disregard everything you think you know about the world for a moment. Imagine a world that exists alongside, possibly above and below, but mostly parallel to this one. Forget what you learned in the Abrahamic Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) for a moment, and briefly ignore everything that modern science tells you. Except maybe String Theories. Those might help you.

I suppose the point I'm trying to get across is that this isn't about religion. You'll find your share of old men in robes spouting dogma, but religion doesn't cover it. This isn't about science and the people who think that everything can be quantified, proven, and tested with one hundred percent accuracy, although you'll find people who'll say that there are universal concepts you can get behind. This is about Magic. I'm not some goth chick who'll throw a "K" at the end of it to make it sound more mystical and dignified. There are hard and fast rules, but for the most part it's a crazy cosmic turkey-shoot of give and take and hit and run. Not necessarily in that order, but lets cut the pseudo-philosophical bullshit, shall we?

My story begins in deepest pits of hell. Not fire and brimstone, goat-men with pointy horns hell mind you, I mean an actual cosmic location that exists alongside the religious hell we all believe in. At the end of the day, the hell of religion is something that exists because all of us believe it exists. The hell I'm from exists because we fucking live there, and there's nothing metaphorical about it. It was somewhere in the great scheme of dimensions below the planet Earth, and a little to the south.

Some of the greatest warriors in history came from places where it should be impossible to survive. The Mongol Hordes came from a place in Mongolia where the ice consumed them from the moment they were born, and lived on horseback until the moment they died. They took over half the planet because at the end of the day, you can only live on nothing for so long before you'd kill to have SOMETHING.

And so it was with my people. We lived in a barren wasteland, where crops barely grew and there were monsters that would laugh if you shot them. How does anything survive in a place like that? I wonder sometimes. What I know for certain is that reality was not nearly so rigid as it is in this world. Magic flowed freely, and survival comes easier if you can flash fry something with your mind. There were never a lot of us, but the ones that survived were warriors beyond compare. We were versed in magic and the fighting arts, and the beasts of our world became our tools and weapons. We were what Nick has referred to throughout as "Demons."

People think of "Ivan the Terrible", the Russian Czar and conqueror whose alternating madness and genius transformed that nation into a force to be reckoned with, and they don't realize that "Terrible" is a bad translation into English. The proper translation is "Ivan the Awesome." Awesome is a much misused term in our day and age. It means to be filled with Great Awe at something. Awe relates to being overwhelmed with emotion, positively or negatively. This is why they mistranslated him as being Ivan the Terrible. English-speaking scholars from beyond Russia only remember his evil, but none of his good. They forget that often, old Ivan was quite Amazing.

I was a demon. And I was awesome.

Any questions? Because I'd like to move on and talk about how I ended up on earth as a human when I can.