Three Ways of Magic — Alt-Universe Prompt
Nobody noticed when Orion died. He went quiet, the world kept spinning, and somehow he got back up like nothing had happened. The broken sci-lab device he’d been tinkering with looked the same as ever—silent, useless, dead. Just like he had been.
Orion didn’t realize anything was wrong.
But something had come back with him. Something hungry. Something that kept leaking into his moods, making him lash out, pressurizing him from the inside. He lost friends. He picked more fights. Even his parents scolded him for being “difficult.” He felt clueless and hurt.
So he did what stressed teenagers do best: he ran away.
Tiny flaw in that plan—he had powers now. Powers tied directly to whatever he was feeling.
So the moment he wanted to be anywhere else, reality said “bet.”
He blinked— —and landed on top of a kid in pajamas with the thickest accent he’d ever heard.
Twelve-year-old Jack Constantine shoved him off with a scowl that could peel paint… right up until Orion started crying out of sheer panic. A little chaos later, the two swapped stories: Jack hated his home life. Orion had apparently teleported across continents by accident.
Jack could work with this.
They ran away together, two disasters wandering the world. Jack studied forbidden magic. Orion tried to understand whatever lived inside him. Somewhere along the line, they stumbled across an abandoned, weirdly alive house that decided to adopt them both.
When Jack was sixteen, he learned teleportation. When Jack was sixteen, he also overdid teleportation.
He dragged Orion with him and they both faceplanted into a bush in front of a girl who had definitely watched them materialize out of thin air.
Before either boy could form an excuse, she started chanting in not-Latin-but-suspiciously-Latin, and suddenly they were floating like startled cats. Her name was Zila. She just happened to know magic too.
The trio formed fast—three flavors of disaster, studying arcana, comparing scars, sharing food, and avoiding responsibility.
Years later, Jack and Zila left to travel and hone their craft. Orion stayed to study. Life finally felt stable.
Until the night someone knocked on his door. There stood Jack, Zila… and a man wearing a pointy-eared mask and a cape.
Apparently the world was ending. Apparently they were the solution.
[Masterpost]