Every one hundred years a cycle takes place on the continent of Einix, two children are born marked as the Hero and the Demon Lord. The cycle has begun again and a young woman discovers that she is to play a part in it.
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A young mother had not long gone into labour; she was being assisted by the local medicine woman while her husband waited outside. The soon-to-be father paced as he heard the cries of pain from his wife and the reassuring words of the medicine woman. Suddenly the cries of pain stopped and were replaced by the cries of a newborn. The man stopped his pacing as he heard his child's cries of life; the door to his small home was opened minutes later by the medicine woman.
"Both mother and child are fine, sir; you may go in now," the medicine woman tells him as she exits his home. The man thanks her for assisting his wife and quickly enters; he moves to his bedroom, where his wife lay in their bed with a wriggling, crying baby in her arms.
"We have a daughter," the young mother says to her husband as he joins her at the side of their bed. The man looked down at his tiny daughter and felt nothing but joy; she had a small tuft of bright red hair and her mother's pale complexion. His wife was gently rocking the new born to calm her and help her to fall asleep. The baby's cries stop as her mother rocks her, and her father can finally see her amber eyes before they are once again covered as she yawns. It is not long before the newborn is asleep in her mother's arms.
"Would you like to hold her dear?" the new mother asks her husband. The man nods and gingerly takes the small baby into his arms, being gentle so as not to wake her. As he held his tiny daughter, his wife smiled sweetly but tiredly at him. The new father turns and places his daughter in a small wooden crib; as he does so, the blanket she is swaddled in becomes loose, and the man can see what looks like a birthmark on his daughter's chest.
He re-swaddles the baby before joining his wife on the bed; he whispers words of praise into her ear as she slowly falls asleep; he joins her in sleep soon after. The new mother is awakened later by the hungry cries of her child; the sky outside is inky black, the sun having set long ago. The cries of the child continue as her mother picks her up to feed her, the blanket falling from her body as it had become loose once more. As she fed her baby, she saw what her husband had seen earlier: on her chest sat what at first looked like a birthmark. The longer she looked, the more the young mother realised that the mark was something far more important. Her eyes widened; once her baby had fallen back asleep from her meal, the young mother woke her husband. She showed him the mark on their daughter's chest in worry, and the man gave his wife a reassuring look.
"Everything will be fine," he told her. He knew what that mark potentially meant, but this was his daughter, and he would treat her as any other child. His wife calmed at his words; her daughter had not long been born; if she had been chosen by fate, she still had time to live as anormal child.
The next day, thenew parents presented her to the rest of the village; her name wasMira. Her parents were sure to keep her chest covered so that noothers could see her mark. However, it is the responsibility of allparents to welcome a mage into their home to test and report themagical capabilities of their children. A mage would be arriving fromthe kingdom's capital before Mira turns one to expose her to acrystal that will reveal her capabilities. And when the day came,they were worried; they didn't want their daughter to be taken awayfrom them. Neither of them had tested high for magical capabilitieswhen they were young, but they knew Mira would; the mark on her chestguaranteed it.
