Generally speaking, when one becomes aware of the fact that somewhere in the world there is a callow youth running around who is destined to someday kill them, thereby bringing about the untimely end of their evil, supposedly indestructible empire, the logical course of action would be to get rid of the callow youth while they are still a callow youth and not yet the all-powerful, empire toppling hero they are destined to become. Generally. Logic would further dictate, at the very least, taking steps to protect oneself or otherwise avoid the rather fatal fate they find themselves looking at. Surprisingly few so-called all powerful lords of evil have done so. Surprisingly many so-called all powerful lords have consequentially ended up dead due to this all-too-common mistake. Julian was not one of them.
Julian, since birth, had been complimented as the handsomest, brightest boy in his village. Very quickly tiring of the forced intake of such empty praise, he ended it the only way he knew how: he slaughtered the entire village. That was his first mistake. It was not long before he discovered how difficult it is to be six and utterly without anyone to care for you. Magical powers, he realized, are wonderful tools of mass genocide, but not so much for cooking dinner. Or any other meal for that matter. That was his first life lesson.
As he grew older, there were many other mistakes and life lessons, therefore he learned quite a bit. The most important lesson he learned is that while killing often brought him a great deal of pleasure, it often worsened problems rather than fixed them. It was extremely difficult to purchase food from dead vendors, no matter how insufferable and stupid they might happen to be. He had a conscience about stealing.
When he estimated himself to be around sixteen, he was accosted by the first of many doom-prophesying seers. His initial reaction was to wonder why one apparently could not be a seer and less than a thousand years old at the same time; then he sought out other seers in order to find his destined adversary. There were some problems killing could fix.
Seers, while undeniably old and far-seeing, are not necessarily very perceptive. The vast majority of them being blind—courtesy some ancient ritual no one could remember the purpose of—and a slightly smaller majority being very gullible, Julian found it stunningly easy to identify and locate the object of his search.
Expectations have a way of ending in disappointment. Julian’s destined killer was no exception: a farm boy, about his age, purportedly impetuous, immature, and ignorant. The boy lived near a veteran of an ancient, most likely archaic war no one bothered to remember anymore. The veteran had taken a liking to this farm boy and intended to make the boy his first and last pupil, passing on all his skills with a sword—with a little magic thrown into the mix—before he died. Understandably, he was rather upset to find his would-be pupil dead at the hands of the person the boy was intended to kill. The veteran soon joined the farm boy in a manner nothing like the self-sacrificing, life-altering, lesson-teaching manner he had envisioned.
That was the first of many farm boys. After the third one, Julian began to wonder if it wasn’t simply a game Destiny was playing with him. If it was, Destiny was being horrendously beaten. It even appeared to grow desperate enough to attempt a farm girl. The result was worse than the farm boys—who rarely have aunts who refuse to let them anywhere near something quite so pointy and dangerous as a sword; psychotic murderers are no excuse to sacrifice propriety—with no observable benefits. Destiny did not attempt this again for quite some time.
In between callow youths, Julian began looking further into his magical abilities. Some ancient tome informed him that he was one of seven chosen few born with the strongest magical abilities the land had ever seen. Another tome said it was three. Yet another said seventeen. One said the others were written by quacks and peddlers who couldn’t be counted on to know anything useful. It went on further to say that one should not believe a book simply because it was old. Julian opted to not believe books at all and went to find himself another seer.
Meanwhile, Destiny decided it was time to change its tactics. Taking advantage of Julian’s pseudo quest of self-discovery, it had a good think about what it was doing wrong and came to several very important conclusions. The first of these was this: it was not a good idea to tell Julian that there was someone destined to kill him. It took much sneaking behind Justice’s back to keep seers out of the equation this time. Second, seasoned war veterans had apparently gone out of style and were no longer helpful to the cause. Third, while callow was a pre-requisite of destiny-heroes, impetuousness and ignorance were not. While Chance was busy introducing Julian to his very first not-thousand-year-old-and-blind seer, Destiny distracted Justice with an immortal psychic—which, for the benefit of the unaware, is heinously unfair—and did something it had never done before: it cheated.
