In the City of the Nightmare King

Excerpt From The Diary of an Unknown Wizard

There's an old story that wizards tell around the Institute. Some say they first heard it in the Night Market, that place where all dream creatures slither around. It goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was the Void. Darkness. But not nothing. No. Nothing is the absence of something, but this darkness wasn't an absence. It was alive. Maybe the Void was one consciousness, or maybe there's no such thing as oneness in the Void—either way, some of the Void split away and became the immortal Void-spawns.

Some Void-spawns were content to exist in the endless nothing, but others longed for more than the Void's cold embrace. They longed for love. They dreamed of it, despite having never known such a feeling. Some say their dreams took on a life of their own and became Everywhen—the dreamworld. Those Void-spawns fled into Everywhen, and absent of the Void's influence became the Creators.

The Void grew jealous, sending its loyal Void-spawns to destroy the world the Creators had built; however, the Creators had planned for such treachery and built another world— ours. Using clockwork that they'd forged in Everywhen, they built this world and gave it meaning, purpose. And so, before the Void-spawns could wipe them out, the Creators fled into our world, continuing their quest to build a place of infinite love.

But the Void's loyal servants wouldn't let the Creators go in peace. They chased them, fought them, hunted them down. The war lasted eons. Some say the Void-spawns eventually succeeded in their tireless quest to annihilate the Creators, but in doing so lost their way back to the Void and became trapped in the maze of Everywhen. As the story goes, the Void-spawns came to know our world, their new prison, as a cursed land that damned their bodies to an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Many in the Night Market insist that a shadow war continues between the Creators and the Void-spawns, and that wizards are their descendants.