Fire of Time – Short Story

In troubled times of battle, but also in intense times of discovery, people reached their peak before the hour of self-destruction. After years of technological breakthroughs, people have finally been able to decipher the DNA mystery of the hidden abilities they so longed for, so much has been written about, so much art has been dedicated to the supernatural, the supersensitive… the perfection of consciousness.

But what they unlocked was surprisingly different from their wildest dreams – they unlocked the dark sides within themselves, their greed became immeasurable for power, their envy bottomless for other people’s power… Race for the mana of even their closest people.

In this world, the most important exchange currencies became mana boosters, which were technological devices that recharged the magical power of the user and concentrated energy – a special magical technique that could focus a large amount of energy in a special vessel. This technique could lead to the physical exhaustion and death of the magician, and the vessel itself was taken and sold as a means of supplying entire cities. Thus, for a negative time, with the unleashed greed of the magicians, the nuclear power plants were replaced, but many greedy for the benefits of affluent living with the sales of these vessels left this world prematurely.
The economy built on exhausted greedy corpses flourished, and official tournaments in which magicians fought and the loser had to give up his energy became a national sport.

Magic and despair were everywhere, but an extraordinary boy and his niece appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the tournament. They bet not on anything, but on the “Fire of Time” – the most powerful magic for regulating personal time – the person who controlled this spell can regulate his own time and bring back aging processes, wounds, traumas; it can heal, as well as regulate its time forward as the learning of any skill could, instead of years, accelerate in a matter of seconds.
Then several factions allied and managed to kidnap the niece and tried to kill the boy, but they could not – he was too good with his magic techniques and managed to escape in time. He returned to the arena and called, without traps and traps, for the criminals to appear, and that in exchange for his niece he would give them what they asked for.

49 robbers appeared, each uglier than the previous one, more perverted than the previous one, more crooked than the previous one. Then the boy with a few sharp movements read an alchemical circle in the sky, it thundered, darkened, the arena split in two, hurricanes swirled from the ground to the sky, and from the sky to the ground waterfalls of ice-cold water, which in contact with the soil it was freezing; fires began to spew out of nowhere, and a huge tongue of fire spread from the horizon.
All the robbers responded to the insights of the centuries, the combinations of lessons, the abundance of light and darkness, as darkness had totally conquered the world; the boy magically showed the light and smashed the factions.

Time passed, it turned out that the boy and his niece were missing. Most likely free escaped to distant lands. The world has seen for the first time in a long time the destructive power of light, which can overcome the darkest abductions of the mind and insanity. With this event, all the magic disappeared from the earth and people were left to decide their own destiny.
At the crossroads of the black earth, burned with disgust and enlightened by hope, people saw a new sunrise of magic – choice and their own morality. This was the new law.