Luck Weaver

1. Trigger

 Chapter 1 - Trigger

As the line progressed, it was quiet, with only hushed whispering.  Tension showing, rivals and enemies glared at each other.  Even friends weren’t joking around.  One by one, the students slipped in the room. 

The center of attention was the teenager.  Both the best in the class and the newest, he intimidated most people, not that he would get mad.  The aspect of him that scared almost everyone was his lack of emotion.  Only his friends knew what he really was like.  A deep thinker, he kept silent most of the time.

"Are you nervous?" a fellow student named Ray asked.

The teenager didn’t give a verbal response, but he gazed at Ray.  Ray nodded, satisfied; only he understood what just happened.  The intensity of that gaze scared him.  Ray fervently hoped that he would never face him in combat, sure that he would lose.

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Watching a ruthless, one-sided battle, Jay sobbed on a tree, surrounded by a lush forest.  Some orange leaves were mixed with the greens around him; fall was approaching fast.  Watching as the mephs slaughtered his neighbors, he clenched and unclenched the branch he was gripping. Even from the forest, he could hear the screams of pain and terror that floated through the air.  The mephs made no noise at all.  He wanted to go down there and help his neighbors, but that wouldn't achieve anything.  He stood no chance against the mephs, he would just be killed with ease, just another of the countless farmers dying. 

The mephs kept to themselves and were little known.  No one knew when they first appeared, but a farmer gave the first report.  He was ignored, and never seen again.  Rumors started that they came from Earth, but no one on Earth knew what they were.  Never taking off their cloaks, their only visible feature, were their eyes. Their eyes were a deep shade of blue that seemed to pierce though the object of their gaze. 

Jay, though, could also see their auras, a common skill in Avalon.  Surprisingly instead of having red auras, which most criminals had, the mephs had black ones.  Their pitch-black auras flickered mesmerizingly.  No one, in the history of either Avalon or Earth, had ever seen black auras, except in myths of a time long ago.  As the knowledge of their auras spread, people began speculating that they were from the realm of the gods.  From where else could such strange auras come from?  There were also rumors going around about the Others- mixes of human and rare magical creatures such as elves, nymphs, giants, and others. 

Another far more disturbing myth was they were the beings who ruled before the gods.  The gods took over the heavens from Avalon.  The races in the heavens offered no resistance, forming speculation whether they actually existed.  The proof of their existence came in the form of drawings, books, and technology so advanced they made no sense.  Naturally, the gods tried to destroy all evidence.  No one knew where the mephs came from.

At first, mephs were only glimpsed from a distance watching cities, towns, villages, and everywhere else with humans, but exactly a year after Jay mysteriously appeared, everything changed. In one devastating battle, they stormed the capital and razed it to the ground, sweeping aside resistance like leaves in a gale.  Overnight, Avalon descended into chaos without a king or anyone to govern it.  The mephs offered no explanation to why they destroyed the capital.  They neither stole wealth nor tried to establish themselves as rulers.

The other elusive races that lived in Avalon offered no assistance.  Likewise, the mephs left the other races alone.  Humans, terrified called the natives of Avalon fools.  The mephs left the humans alone at first also, before turning on them.  Still, the races were hidden, for good reason, and sent no help at all.

According to popular rumor, the king was the only being to manage to slay one of the mysterious mephs, but as soon as it died, the cloak faded, revealing nothing.  The most reasonable assumption would be that the body faded with the cloak.  Still, that led to disturbing accounts of ghosts under the cloaks.  Rumors were flying everywhere, and no one could separate exaggerated lies from truth.  One thing for sure, the king did die. 

One way for the king to die was the king was distracted when the mephs took the opportunity to stab him.  Of course there was no evidence that the king managed to slay a meph, but no one doubted the king's ability.  He was a special man, trained in both magic and arms by the most advanced tutors in the whole region.  Even the revered Elementalist took a trip out of his stronghold, to help the king train his personal guard.  The personal guard did nothing against the mephs.  The ones trained in arms were easily, even contemptuously, destroyed by the mephs.  What happened to the magic users is a mystery.  Differing accounts ranged from the mephs using their own elements against them to them being magic resistant as they physically slew the magic users.

The night Jay appeared, he looked about 15, and he claimed he had no memory of anything. He showed up in a village the same night the first sighting of a meph was reported. With clear light blue eyes, a rarity in Avalon, though not in Earth, some skeptical people thought he was related to the mephs.  Despite the shared eye color though, no one could be sure about anything else.  The mephs were always hidden under their dark cloaks. 

Jay seemed like a nice person, though, so most people just accepted his presence.  Also for some reason, whenever someone did something nice to Jay, it seemed like they had good luck for they rest of the day.

The few people in the village who could glimpse auras claimed that things done to Jay were magnified in effect.  Ordinarily good and bad deeds only slightly affected the color of auras. When Jay first turned up, the people who could see auras, seers, announced that Jay had a purple aura, neither good karma, nor bad karma.  After a year, Jay's aura grew more to the blue side though.

On the other hand, people that made fun of Jay always had accidents. One bully fought Jay when he refused to give money.  While the bully eventually won the fight by pushing Jay into a pond, the next day, the bully tripped and fell into the same pond in front of everyone.  The next day, the same thing happened.  Eventually the boy had to take a detour everyday to avoid the pond.  The boy's auras turned from a deep red aura to a bright red one.  That was unheard of.  Even murder made a slight change.  After that, superstitious people who suspected Jay was practicing a form of magic unknown on Avalon avoided Jay.

Then suddenly, directly after the storming of the capital, the mephs took an interest in their little village. Their village was so unnoticeable, that it didn't even have a name. The mephs were seen watching the village constantly.  Frightened, most of the villagers left.  Curious, Jay stayed behind in the forest hidden, but watching.  It seemed the mephs were looking for something.  The poor villagers had no idea what the mephs wanted, as they never spoke.  They just let the mephs do whatever they wanted.  More and more people left though.

One day, without warning, a meph shot a flaming arrow that struck a single house.  That one house caught on fire, but the fire spread and soon the whole village was flaming. Enraged, the remaining villagers banded together and attacked but they were no match.  Even the king's personal army couldn't defeat the mephs.  The band of farmers was equipped with farm tools like shovels, but even with those tools they used everyday, they were clumsy trying to fight with them.