Magick:

Magick, untold potential in the palm of one's hand. Scholars say it was the first breath the universe ever drew. It predates light, predates sound, predates gods and predates the idea of order itself. The standing theory, is that in the beginning there was only The Arcane, an infinite, writhing ocean of formless energy, wild and without will. Then came The Dawn, a hemorrhage in all of reality. The Arcane split its own skin and bled into the void, a torrent of living power spilling across the unborn realms; Punching hole after the next into our worlds through portals we know as the stars. It sought purchase where none yet existed, clawing for form, drowning darkness in brilliance and birthing new matter in its convulsions. Wherever it touched, the void screamed and became land, where it recoiled, galaxies curdled in their cradles. This first light was no gentle birth, it was an act of unparalleled violence, creation torn screaming from nothing so the Arcane might steady itself and know the shape of existence. Even the Gods, so the faithful whisper, were shaped by it before they ever learned to speak its name.
  To study magick, then, is to look creation itself in the eye; A temptation few can resist, and fewer survive unchanged. Yet for all its wonder, our grasp of magick remains pitifully small, a field likely still in its infancy. The Great Schism burned nearly every library that held its secrets, and those who still practice it today, do so behind locked doors or while looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle; The hands holding the trigger go by the name of The Arcane Coalition, militant sorcerers tasked by The Monarchy to watch for any misuse of magick and address it with the urgency a surgeon does an Infection. What few academies survive today are half-sanctum, half-asylum, where apprentices risk madness or spontaneous death for what power the law allows them to grasp. A spell miscast can level a street in a moment. A charm performed improperly can stop the heart that wove it. Many who uncover new knowledge hoard it like Dragons do a mound of gold, ruling the unsafe fringes of the country with it by fear until the King’s men gun them down, their discoveries buried with them. And so magick remains both the source of all that is, and the author of much that perishes. It is not a science, nor a faith, but a wound, one the world keeps reopening, hoping, perhaps foolishly, to find beauty in the scars.