The year 2030 marked the start of a catastrophe that would divide human history into before and after.
It began with the sky.
One ordinary morning, the heavens turned a brilliant, unnatural blue.
The clouds darkened into deep sapphire, and even the sun's rays took on a strange, cold azure, bathing the earth in light that belonged to no world anyone had known.
People poured out of their homes and offices and stood in the streets with their faces tilted upward, phones and cameras raised to capture the spectacle.
Some laughed with delight. Others locked their doors and hid.
The air filled with rumor and prayer, and whispers of the end of the world spread like wildfire through every language on earth.
The scientists had no answers. Their instruments gave contradictory readings, and their finest theories collapsed within hours, leaving the experts to stare at their screens, rattled and speechless.
Then the animals went mad.
House pets turned on their owners. Zoo animals tore through their enclosures. Wild creatures abandoned all fear of humans and hunted in packs.
Rats poured from the sewers in black, writhing tides and swarmed the streets.
Birds, once a symbol of peace, dove in screaming flocks at anything that moved, and children, once safe behind their own windows, huddled in the dark while talons shattered the glass.
Gun sales soared. Desperate people stocked up on whatever they could find to hold back the nightmare.
It did not help, because the worst had not yet arrived.
On the fourth day, the sky tore open.
Meteorites rained down in numbers beyond comprehension, each one wrapped in a cold, blue flame.
They fell on cities and on deserts, on cathedrals and on capitals, and when the dust finally settled, five billion people were dead.
Another half a billion succumbed to their wounds in the weeks that followed.
The world's leaders, who had always believed themselves untouchable, were buried along with everyone else.
Governments crumbled. And in the vacuum they left behind, a new power stepped forward: the Council.
The meteors had carried something with them. Embedded in the craters was a strange blue crystal, glittering like frozen lightning. Etherium.
Humanity would learn to prize it above gold, above water, above life itself. The fumes of the falling stars had done something to the world's creatures, too.
Animals twisted into new forms. Humans changed as well. Some gained a slight edge in strength or speed.
Others manifested abilities that defied every known law of physics.
So humanity evolved, by way of its newfound gifts and by the power of Etherium, and from the ruins, the Terran Federation rose beneath the rule of the Council.
For two hundred years, it knew a kind of peace, then history turned again.
A voice rang out across the whole planet, from every sky and every speaker, announcing that Earth had merged with a sister world.
Its name was Fantasia.
Where Terra had its gifted, Fantasia had magic.
At first, both sides kept to themselves, wary and silent, like strangers sharing a cramped room.
But the Etherium that the Terrans had never managed to harvest had been quietly poisoning the land.
It was seeping into the air and the soil, and the worst of the corruption lay in the region that bordered Fantasia.
It ate at their fields. It devoured their forests. Within a few short years, the Fantasians could no longer live in their own homes.
They asked to move their people into the Terran lands.
The Council refused. To the Council, the Fantasians were aliens, strange and dangerous visitors who wielded stranger powers, and the Terran borders were closed to them without exception.
The Fantasians would not stand by and watch their children die, and so there was only one path left to them.
War.
It started small, and then it didn't stop. Eight hundred years later, the war still burned.
Echoes of War followed a boy named Lucas Draken, who, against every impossible odd, grew into the most powerful being on either world and finally brought that war to an end.
The Terrans lost, of course, but the story was always more about the climb than about the victory.
And me? I had been reborn as the man who stood in his way.
I leaned against the window frame and pulled up what I remembered of Nathan Hunt.
He belonged to the Hunts, one of the great ruling families of the Federation, though his place within it was complicated at best.
He was the illegitimate son of Marshal Joseph Hunt, head of the Hunt family and commander of the Terran military.
Not a name that gave him love, but one that gave him power.
And Nathan was powerful. Abnormally so.
By the final chapters, he was the only person alive who could still stand toe to toe with Lucas Draken.
Or maybe it was the other way around, and Lucas was the only one capable of fighting Nathan on equal terms.
Either way, I couldn't have asked for a better skin to be trapped in.
I'm in the body of the main villain. As long as I play this right, I should be relatively safe, for now.
I'd been given a second chance, and I was not going to waste it. Whatever it took, I would survive.
I pushed off the window and headed for the bathroom to get ready.
After all, today was the entrance exam.