"I want to live free," he wished as he blew out a single green candle on a cupcake.
Even as the faint scent of burnt wax lingered in the air and the room became that much dimmer without the lit candle, Cole knew that his father's abuse would continue again tomorrow. The ways his father invented new psychological torture every day ate bits away of his sanity even if today was his twenty-fifth birthday.
"Thirteen years," Cole muttered into the darkness of his makeshift attic room. "She died over a decade ago and he still won't let me move on from it."
He began to shed tears silently as his own grief was quietly surfacing. "Every day, he asks me why I hadn't died instead of her. Always asks me why I managed to survive with a severed leg when my own mother lost her life in that accident."
Cole clutched the stump of his right leg as if the phantom pain came back due to the memory of his mother's passing. He understood that the accident wasn't his fault and that his father took his grief out on him, but something deep inside of his soul withered. There was hope that his father would wake up from his grief and move on, as Cole knew his mother would have wanted them to do, yet that very same hope died just moments ago.
When he made his birthday wish, Cole felt like a chain had been broken deep in his soul or a weight had been slightly lifted off his shoulders. He somehow felt that his future became just that much brighter amidst the doom and gloom of his current home life. Even as he unknowingly shed tears, he felt like he could rest peacefully tonight.
With that, he fell asleep with a tear-stained smile on his face.
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Cole's father did not sleep easily that night. Unlike before when he slept, this dream was more nightmarish than all of the others combined.
He dreamt of a world where his son had died instead of his wife and, in her grief of the loss of her son, divorced him. She blamed him for the accident that killed their precious son and never wanted to speak to him again. This inevitably led to a decades-long chase between him chasing her down and her, in grief and fear, fleeing for her life across several countries. When they were in their seventies, it led to him killing her in his insanity. This very act led to her rebirth on the very night the accident happened.
Instead of her son dying, she took the steel rod meant to kill him just before the car rolled under the construction truck. He never remembered what his wife went through in their first life until that very night, but the next morning left him with questions he knew he couldn't answer.
Only the next morning would leave him with even more questions and a revelation that shook his entire worldview.
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"Your wish is granted," a mysterious voice echoed from the Endless Expanse. With a mere breath of quintessential power, a powerful System was created and the tether to Cole's inner soul had been made.
The System followed the tether straight into the dreaming Cole and slumbered deep within his soul as his version of Earth did not acknowledge the existence of magic. As for the mysterious voice, the being that owned it had already selected the world for Cole to transmigrate into.
Along with a new form and abilities.
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Unlike the many other iterations of Gielinor across the cosmos, there were more than a few where Gielinor's World Guardian was either lacking in ability, will, or had never been born at all. In all of these iterations, there existed the Elder Gods.
Jas, Bik, Wen, and Ful created this world to act as an incubator for their eggs, yet events in the canon timeline resulted in drastic changes for their plans of the Great Revision. This led to life persisting on Gielinor without influence of these high deities or their offspring.
There was even an unfinished iteration of Gielinor where another person from a different version of Earth was transmigrated along with her parents and pets as part of a bet with an alternate version of Jas that she'd accomplish better results than the actual World Guardian. This version was not one that the mysterious being had selected.
As it looked for a suitable version to settle Cole into, a version of Jas approached them. She looked just as she did in the game (a giant squid like being), but to the mysterious figure, she merely looked like a baby squid.
It is unknown what they conversed about, but the effects were set into stone beyond what any native of Gielinor was able to understand. One such act of the deal was the admittance of Cole Sol into Gielinor and traversal back to his homeworld once he had the ability to.
Another was a home base on a lost island archipelago that only he, others he allowed, and the Elder Gods can access. They would've accepted him residing on the continent of Ashenfall, but that belonged to their own version of the adventurer.
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As Cole slept that night and dreamed up a wonderful dream, he had no idea that his wish was granted by a power beyond his understanding and the eldest Elder God in the RuneScape universe. He had no idea that his story started to take its first steps in a direction neither he, his father, his mother, or his world could have ever expected.
Thus, just as the time reached two in the morning, Cole's physical body vanished from Earth.
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Continued in: Tutorial of the Ages.