go wild about ur au, i'd love to hear it :)
Oh god okay you say this but you’re going to regret it/j
okay so basically the background of this au is that there is this ancient all-knowing being ( which I, in my head, imagine as a more distorted and larger version of the nightmare archivist ) of dark magic. Dark magic(DM) is opposed to light magic(LM) and if a lm user tries to use dm it will hurt them and Vice versa. Dark magic ≠ black magic, the two are entirely different concepts in this. Dark magic is linked to knowledge of the forbidden and other concepts of the being.
this ancient being gets sealed into a void at some point for its dubiously ethical methods of gaining more knowledge ( using dark rifts to see into new worlds yet also being destruction if anything escaped, using its knowledge to benefit only itself by learning the magic of floating, never sleeping with its countless eyes all open at different times ). obviously, since it cannot gain knew knowledge in a void, it becomes rather mad and wants to devise a plan to influence the world even though it cannot directly contact it anymore.
its master plan is to create a cookie that can learn for it and essentially become all of its knowledge and prowess condensed into one form, a magnum opus of the being’s knowledge and power gained from existing, and then release them into the world. It creates a cookie made of the most pure and dark caffeine and then drops them as a child into the world, altering a few cookies’ memories to make them think he’s always been there ( The cookie is Espresso if that wasn’t already obvious )
( getting into hc territory here for a second, this is just me explaining my regular backstory for Espresso and Latte ) Espresso grows up in the coffee tribe in the Dark Cacao Kingdom with Latte as his cousin until they have to leave on their own for the Republic when they’re around 13-14(?? I can never decide cookie ages) because their place got overrun with cake monsters.
they attend a magic school in the Republic with Eclair. ( who goes there because I want to be self-indulgent, but if you want a plot reason why they’re not in the kingdom it’s because they grew up there before leaving soon after they became an adult. ) Latte is the more social of the two cousins while Espresso mostly stays to himself, but he becomes friends with Eclair mostly because of the latter‘s persistence. ( and because they have a crush on Espresso )
anyways one day Espresso asks Eclair to look into stuff ( specifically, the ingrained hatred of light magic- even he doesn’t know why it almost burns his soul when he tries to use it, nor why he knows so much about things he shouldn’t. Eclair finds a book detailing the all-knowing being and shows it to Espresso, who immediately has the dots click in his head that he is in some way related to this being.
knowing how the Republic sees dark magic ( hc it to be viewed with intense scrutiny compared to light magic ), Espresso makes Eclair promise to keep it a secret, and they make him promise to tell them if anything happens relating to the all-knowing being.
that’s the basic premise of it, but I have been planning out a story involving the reappearance of the dark rifts in canon and the all-knowing being ( who still does not have a name yet )! Might post my theory-crafting on that later if it garners enough interest.
I don’t really have a name for this au yet?? Ive tentatively called it DMATA ( Dark Magic At The Academy ) but I will gladly accept other suggestions
as a bonus for reading this long have some designs that go along with this au ( as well as just being my designs for these three when they were younger )
Ok I think that’s it for a semi-detailed explanation? Idk