Clover's Bloom

Prologue - One Thousand Years Ago

"Please! You can have them all! My wife, my son, my daughter! Just spare me!"

Backed into a corner of the room, the man stared up at the beast towering above him, his limbs quaking. He loved his family, but he valued his own life above all else. Someone needed to survive to tell the tale, after all.

"Are you sure about this? I'll eat them all, you know." The beast tilted its long, cylindrical head, and curiously inspected the man with one of its four faces. Their otherwise human appearance was distorted by the two pupils in each of the eyes - and its razor sharp teeth. Drool ran down the beast's chin. In two of its four arms, it held a giant spear with a blade on each end. With the other two, it propped itself up as it leaned forward into the man's face.

"If you let me, I promise you safety."

"Yes! Anything, as long as you let me live!"

The demon peered behind itself using another one of its four faces. In the opposite corner of the room, a wounded woman stood firmly in front of her two children, arms stretched out, shielding them.

"Don't worry, you two. Mommy won't let anything happen to you," she said. She seemed like she might collapse at any moment. The two children, a young boy and a girl, crouched behind her, sobbing in each other's arms. Disappointment clouded her eyes as she looked towards the beast and her husband behind it.

"Your wish is my command." The demon stood up. It spun its cylinder head around with a crack, and folded its spear arms behind it. With its feet facing the opposite direction, it stomped towards the mother and her children. Fiercely, the mother stared back at the beast, not a trace of fear in her eyes. She yelled, hoping her fury would be enough to defeat the monster.

In the next second, she noticed her feet were no longer touching the ground. She looked down. The spear was pierced through her stomach, like a skewer, and the beast raised her up towards the ceiling. She struggled and punched away at the spear, attempting to break it apart, but her strength was slowly fading away. The demon slowly turned the spear around, and its cylindrical head split open in the middle. Round and round, the cylinder was lined with teeth, spiraling down into its throat - if it could be called that. It wiggled the spear until the woman's body finally dropped into its mouth. The cylinder snapped back into place.

"Mommy! How dare you, you monster!" The children ran up to the beast, wailing and sobbing, kicking and punching its thin legs. They were hard as steel, but they continued hitting them until their knuckles bled. With its other two hands, the demon picked each of the children up by their head. They struggled and kicked and resisted. To no avail.

The horrible, fleshy crunching sounds of their skulls breaking apart pierced the man's eardrums and shook his very core. It was over. The demon swallowed both of the children, leaving nothing but a pool of blood behind. It turned its cylinder head back around to look at him with what seemed to be its primary face.

"Well," said the beast, "a promise is a promise. Thank you for the meal." It saluted the man and stomped out of the house, into the burning village outside. More strange monsters ran past the door, chasing after another person. Screams of terror were drowned by the roaring of the flames.

Relieved, the man let out a sigh. The tension faded from his body, he allowed himself to drop to the ground and just lay there for a moment. He closed his eyes for just a second, but when he opened them again, he found himself staring into the double pupils of the monster from before. It gripped him with two of its hands and raised him above the ground.

"Oh, one more thing," it said.

"Don't go makin' deals with the devil."

The last thing the man saw was an infinite spiral of razor sharp teeth.

-

One thousand years ago, the world suddenly changed forever. In the midst of witch hunts and religious crusades, the Collapse turned everything on its head.

The earth split open, and from the fiery depths below came hundreds of thousands of misshapen beasts of every size and shape, horrible demons which spread out until they eventually roamed every corner of the globe. Humanity was desperate.

And in their desperation, they turned to the ones they trusted least: Witches.

With their mysterious magic, harnessing the power of the elements, they fought back against the demons. In spite of being persecuted, even though most people hated them, they became humanity's saviors during those dire times.

Eventually, in a terrible struggle, they managed to banish most of the beasts, but the everlasting threat of demonic attacks remained regardless. It was impossible to defeat all of them - after all, they just kept crawling out of cracks in the earth.

But they slowed them down until life was able to return to some degree of normalcy. Many humans and witches lost their lives during the Collapse; many great cities were destroyed, and much knowledge was burnt and scattered into the winds. Development slowed down to a crawl, and humanity and witches were forced to cooperate with one another to rebuild what had been lost.

A degree of mistrust and hatred for witches still remained in some parts of the human population. Some even pinned the blame for the Collapse on the witches. But quickly, most of mankind realized that witches were necessary. Without them, they would have no means to fight back against the demons - especially considering the great technological set-back they had just experienced.

Humanity understood their own helplessness, and begged the witches for their help.

And the witches responded with support. Many of them were initially against it, feeling no sympathy for the humans which had, prior to the Collapse, only ever sought them out to mock them, hurt them, or even murder them. But eventually they came to understand that it may be better to get on their good side, and to coexist with each other.

Only a few years after the Collapse, humans and witches worked together to rebuild cities and infrastructure, to repair the damages the demons had caused. But, perhaps most importantly, they also established the Witch Academies - entirely new structures, colossal and beautiful, scattered all across the globe, like huge castles on hills and mountains. They acted as fortresses to ward off the demonic invaders and were mostly erected in the so-called "cursed zones" where the cracks in the earth were particularly prone to spitting out monsters, but also as schools to teach new generations of witches the ways of their magic.

One such academy is where this story begins. On a fateful day one thousand years after the Collapse, a new year of students painstakingly made their way through a lush forest on a hillside, excited for what the future might hold in store for them..