From what I have been able to piece together, the year everything began was 1977. Well, not everything, but 1977 is as comprehensible to many of my classmates as the beginning of all creation. For all purposes, they are the same abstract mental concept.
The Self-Help Book of a Madman
On a late summer day in 1977, a man named Malik Huntstone wandered into a used bookstore. Malik was an unremarkable university student in nearly every way - boring, dull and uninspiring.
While digging through the store in search of used textbooks, Malik came across a battered copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. What caught Malik’s eye while flipping through the book wasn’t Carnegie’s prose, but the partly incoherent ramblings scrawled in the gutters and margins. The owner of the bookstore, a man named Eliot Stevens, sold it to Malik for next to nothing. Eliot seemed surprised when Malik brought the book to the counter; he didn’t remember receiving the book, nor would he have considered stocking such a damaged book.
It took weeks for Malik to make sense of the notes. He theorized that the writings referred to powerful beings from outside of normal mortal understanding and how their wisdom was interconnected with Carnegie’s ideas. Knowledge from the fae, vampires, angels and demons could be used for profit in social practices and in business. One of the referenced figures was an entity known as the Messenger From Spaces Inbetween. “The Messenger doesn’t fear truth,” the writings explained. “The Messenger speaks a fuller Truth than can be created here and lays waste to any lie that stands in its path.” But the notes also mentioned that reaching the Messenger was near impossible - it existed beyond this reality. Malik took that as a challenge.
Time passed. Malik got a banking job downtown and slowly worked his way up the corporate ladder. His drive to contact the Messenger lead to him studying very basic magic. He had mastered some elemental magic, almost strictly all earth-based, but not much more. The Huntstones a minor natural affinity for magic, it seemed, but the family line lacked any real power. Shattering the barriers of this plane of reality would take more than they were capable of.
The Illuminated Brotherhood
The answer to Malik’s problem came in the spring of 1982, if my understanding of mortal time is correct. While working late at his office one night, Malik was visited by the man who sold him the book five years earlier - Eliot Stevens. Eliot revealed that he was a magic user himself, one from a much more established family than the Huntstones. Malik was growing dangerously in power and, in Eliot's mind, needed to be put down before he destroyed the whole city.Eliot should have succeeded in destroying Malik. The only reason he didn’t was due to freak luck on Malik's part. Malik used his weaker magic to redirect Eliot’s intended killing blow down to the earth, wrapping the spell in a plea for Messenger to answer back. The increased power of the spell was finally enough to finally reach the Messenger, making Eliot and Malik the beginnings of a cult that would become known as the Illuminated Brotherhood.
Oh, the Messenger let Eliot live. While Malik swore loyalty to the being, he lacked enough magic skill to open up the stable connection between himself and the Messenger. Eliot’s power was required for that; he was a magic battery supply, to compare it to something in this reality. Not that Eliot was really a threat anymore. When the Messenger spoke his Truth through Malik, Eliot lost any will to rebel.
Malik retitled himself Hunterstone the Excavator. He vowed to rebuild the Messenger’s broken cult and restore it in Toronto in exchange for small tastes of the Messenger’s power. .
The decade or so that followed was a haze of drugs and excess. The Illuminated Brotherhood was formed mostly of office workers and bankers and, at the risk of sounding trite, people with such money know how to throw a good party. It was a series of banquets that would make even the Gods jealous.
Huntstone was content to be the cult’s leader, calling the members together into secret rooms and hidden spaces normal people wouldn’t dare speak of. The Truth that the Messenger whispered to Huntstone allowed him to become a powerful businessman, one feared even outside of supernatural circles. And among the supernatural? Those that remained downtown reported directly to Huntstone. Times were good.
And Eliot. He was there for all of it. Sort of.
The Fall of the Brotherhood
Eventually, Huntstone realised that the power given by the Messenger would only go so far. It was the late 90s by mortal time then and Huntstone had grown listless. He wasn’t free to contact the Messenger himself - he needed Eliot for that - and the Messenger was the one who controlled if the Truth could be spoken. Huntstone was a mouthpiece, nothing more. That angered him.
Huntstone knew that Eliot's family had collected magic knowledge over generations. They had amassed a giant magical library, hidden deep within the used bookstore. It was Eliot's job to protect that library, but it wasn't like he had any freedom to stop Huntstone.
Digging through the library’s books, Huntstone discovered a ritual that could reforge two souls into a new being. While the ritual was intended to combine mortal souls, Huntstone speculated that the soul of something more than mortal could be fused to a mortal soul with enough raw power. The ritual involved a human sacrifice and willpower to amplify the energy from that sacrifice. The cult could provide the willpower, Huntstone decided. The sacrifice, that could be obtained easily enough.
When the Messenger contacted Huntstone next, the cult leader explained that he had finally found a ritual to rip apart the barrier that protected this reality. The Messenger could finally have the freedom to reign Earth in its full form. The Messenger greedily agreed to go along with the plan, not questioning Huntstone’s loyalty or intentions.
Part way through the ritual, however, the Messenger realised something was terribly wrong. The ritual was meant to bind it, not let it roam free. It lashed out at the cultists, slaughtering Huntstone and countless others in a single violent blow. Unwittingly, this attack completed the sacrifice needed for the ritual - the Messenger was doomed to become mortal.
The Messenger’s existence fused to the nearest living body - an infant human intended to be the ritual's sacrifice. The two beings fused into one existence. Me? I? Us? We? They? It’s been 16 years and I still don’t have a good answer to that.
My parents were two hapless cultists who lived through the initial attack. The Messenger must have realized how impossible it was for a parentless infant to survive. Or maybe the infant, stealing some of the Messenger's power, decided it was going to make its own parents. I don’t remember who decided what needed to happen. I do know, in either case, they now believe we were a family who had been kidnapped and nearly killed by madmen.
Not all of the cultists were swiped out. Some managed to escape. I believe Eliot lived. I don’t remember seeing his body in the aftermath. On the other hand, I haven’t seen him since. Huntstone is long dead and accounted for in the city's records. The dead cultists are long forgotten. I’m pretty sure the media wrote it all off as a mass suicide.
This reality has such trouble coping with the Truth.
