[ TT ] The most powerful spell ever cast backfires , sending the entire world into a sunless void . As scholars seek a solution before everyone freezes to death they find that something in the void is trying to stop them .

It has been twelve days since they took the sun from us, by the reckoning of my timepiece. Twelve dark, miserable days in the middle of June, when the sun should have been shining ever-bright over the land. And it was starting to get cold. 
 
 Lucky for me, I am used to the dark and cold. Way up here, above the arctic circle, over a third of the year is spent with the sun lounging around below the horizon. If I did n't prepare, with thick walls stocked up with warm blankets and piles of firewood, I would freeze to death before the leaves started to turn brown farther south. So twelve days of night? Not so much of a problem as an inconvenience. 
 
 *In all honesty, it would have been worse for me if they actually had succeeded. * I thought, pouring over scroll after scroll, bound up tightly in a mountain of wool to ward off the cold. I pushed a strand of long, white hair out of my good eye, careful not to poke it out with my claws. That's how I nearly lost the other one. I blinked it experimentally, to see if it was getting any better, but no dice. 
 
 See, I have my own reasons for living up here, in my little log cabin squirreled away from civilization. I'm not exactly what you would call... normal. Well. I *feel* normal, most of the time, but I look a little odd. You can thank my parents for that. 
 
 They call themselves Aether mages, which is just a fancy way of saying they like playing with glowing gasses in little bottles. They are pretty good at it too, able to summon and control enormous clouds of the stuff to do all sorts of interesting little things. In fact, a number of their inventions - such as aether-powered scrying mirrors, which are now a household staple - had changed the world for the better. The problem comes from when they try out new applications. 
 
 I sighed at the memory of it all, flipping through a page in one of the many scattered tomes that I had laying open in front of me. It was n't that they did n't love me, far from it. One could even say they loved me too much. But once they got an idea in their heads, nothing and no one would ever get it out. 
 
 So one day, despite my protests, they decided that they would use me as the subject of one of their newest machinations: Binding aether with a living being. `` It will make you smart, strong, and beautiful besides!'' they gushed over me at every turn, ushering me back into the containment circle every time I went to step out of it. `` Just look, we have perfected it with animal subjects! There is no danger at all!'' 
 
 Or so they thought. They were half right: Just like the mice that could solve mazes in seconds, I got smarter. WAY smarter. Books and concepts that had escaped me before came as easily as breathing. Just like the mice, my skin became smooth, with all scarring and damage disappearing like a bad dream. And, despite the distinct lack of muscle on my twelve-year-old frame, I found I was able to easily lift things two or three things my weight with ease. For a while, I was on top of the world. 
 
 
 And then, two weeks after the experiment had been performed on me, the secondary effects began to manifest. 
 
 It started with the mice. I was the first to notice the tufts of fur in their cages, the patchiness in their coats. At first I thought that they were molting early -that is, until it started happening to the rabbits as well. And - even more concerning - the monkeys. Soon, every animal in the lab was as naked as a newborn babe. 
 
 They did n't stay bald, of course. As if they had all decided to don lab coats of their own, stark white stubble began to grow all over their bodies. In a week, each one of them had a glistening, shiny new coat of white fur. Within their eyes, the bluish glow of aetheric fire began to burn, giving them an ethereal, otherworldly look. My parents were thrilled, taking notes at every turn, ooohing and ahhhing at every little whisker. And then, in a burst of blue flame, the first mouse exploded. 
 
 
 Dinner that night had been stoic, to say the least. I had only picked at my food, wincing every time someone dropped something or made a loud noise, thinking it was another mouse going up in flames. I was assured by my father that I would be alright, that perhaps it was a rare side effect and not a rule. I still had not changed, so maybe I would be immune to the whole thing after all! I would have been more convinced if the second mouse had not interrupted him by turning into a messy fireball. 
 
 
 For two weeks, everyone walked around as if on eggshells. My parents sequestered themselves in the lab, working day and night in order to find a spell that would extract the aether from the animal's bodies. But every day, their expressions just looked darker and darker, and their eyes grew wearier and wearier. 
 
 The second big shock came when the first monkey exploded, taking out a bookshelf and half of a workbench in the process. Luckily, no one was hurt - my parents had shielded themselves as they worked with the mice, and besides they had been across the lab at the time. But the damage was undeniable... and I was quite a bit larger than the pitiful monkey. 
 
 So when I found a clump of my long, dark hair on the pillow, I knew that there was no way I was getting out of this in one piece. Using a well known - and more importantly safe - spell for aetheric space expansion, I packed away as many of my worldly possessions as I could into a backpack and fled into the night, taking a great deal of my parent's library with me as I did. They could afford to replace the books... but I could not afford to be here when the magic took me. For weeks, I traveled north, getting as far away from other people as I could. By the time I arrived at the rundown little cabin, I had a shock of white hair and a reputation for being an evil spirit among the more superstitions townsfolk. Magic was rare this far north, after all, and my appearance could hardly be considered natural. But they accepted my money well enough, even if it disappeared back into aether a few days later. 
 
 
 It had been three years since then, and my parents had long ago given up looking for me. If the scrying mirror was telling the truth, they were back to their old antics - inventing things that changed lives, for better or for worse. A fortnight ago, they had declared that they would put an end to night in the country altogether by bathing the land in eternal light. It seems that whatever magic they used had backfired, however, for since the day of their experiment there had been precious little light around at all. 
 
 
 I rubbed my arm, pale as snow in the candle light. In truth, a part of me was glad that they had failed. Light, it seemed, was the catalyst for the aether within me to grow. I felt it straining against my very cells whenever I dared go out in daylight. If they had succeeded in bringing about an eternal day, I would have never been able to leave my little cabin again without winding up like the mice. 
 
 
 I closed the book with a snap. None of my research had ever born fruit, as far as freeing me from my curse, but it had given me a great understanding of aether itself. Perhaps... 
 
 
 Careful not to tip over any of the candles, I shed my warm blanket and stepped barefoot onto the floor. It was cold beneath my feet, made of rough wood sanded nearly to a polish from my solitary pacing. Brushing aside several loose pieces of paper, I grabbed a piece of chalk and set to work. First, I drew a circle - the boundary for my spellcrafting - then inlaid three more within it's frame so that they each interlinked and formed a point at the center. Assisted by the aether in my brain, runes jumped to the forefront of my imagination. Binding, seeing, aether itself... I wrote each out carefully, making sure to not make a single mistake, lest the whole thing grow beyond my power to control it. I stood, shivering in my thin clothes, and began to chant. 
 
 *** 
 
 *Oops! It's a bit too long. Part 2 below! *
