VARIA

Long before anyone called him Varia, he was simply a boy who wanted to become a mage.

He grew up hearing stories of men capable of bending nature with their hands. Mages who could summon storms, change matter, heal the dying, and create things that ordinary people could only dream of.

More than anything, he wanted to become one of them.

Not for glory.

Not even for power.

His family had very little.

Some mornings there was soup.

Some nights there was the same soup again.

And whenever Varia imagined himself becoming a great mage, he never pictured castles or armies.

He pictured his family sitting around a table filled with food.

He pictured repairing their home.

He pictured his parents growing old without having to work until their bodies failed them.

So he studied.

And studied.

And studied.

But there was one problem.

Magic was not something that anyone could learn.

A person had to possess an affinity for it.

And Varia had none.

Not little.

None.

Teachers examined him. Mages tested him. He memorized incantations until he could recite them without thinking.

Nothing happened.

The magic simply wasn't inside him.

Eventually, people stopped encouraging him.

Some laughed.

Others told him that wanting something badly enough did not mean the world had to give it to him.

And perhaps they were right.

Then one evening, Varia overheard a group of travelers speaking in a tavern.

They told an old story about a desert far beyond the settled lands.

Somewhere among its shifting dunes stood a statue older than any kingdom.

The travelers claimed that a spirit lived inside it.

Find the statue, they said, and it could grant a person's greatest desire.

But there was another part of the story.

Most of the people who entered the desert searching for it never returned.

Varia listened quietly.

That night, he packed what little food and water he could carry.

He told no one.

He knew what he was doing was foolish.

He knew he might die.

But the thought of spending the rest of his life wondering whether the story had been true frightened him even more.

So before sunrise, the boy walked into the desert.

Days passed.

The dunes seemed endless.

Landmarks disappeared beneath the moving sand.

Then came the storms.

Varia lost his direction.

His food disappeared.

Then his water.

Still, he walked.

Eventually, there was nothing left in him.

His legs gave way beneath the sun, and the boy collapsed into the sand.

He never knew how close he had come.

Because only a few feet beneath the dune where he fell was the thing he had crossed the desert to find.

That evening, the wind changed.

The sand began to move.

And slowly, an ancient stone face emerged from the desert beside his unconscious body.

The statue had been there all along.

Inside it lived the spirit from the stories.

For centuries, people had crossed the desert seeking it.

Kings had asked for greater kingdoms.

Warriors had asked for strength.

Merchants had asked for endless wealth.

Mages had asked for power beyond that of other mages.

Many had died looking for the statue.

And now, lying unconscious at its feet, was a starving child.

The spirit entered the boy's dreams.

It searched through his memories expecting to find the same hunger it had found in so many others.

Instead, it saw a small house.

A tired mother.

A worn table.

Bowls of soup.

It saw a boy imagining what he might build if only his hands possessed the power to build it.

Varia did desire power.

But power was never the destination.

It was a tool.

For the first time in generations, the spirit granted the wish.

But it did not give the boy the magic of ordinary mages.

Instead, it gave him something far stranger.

The power of Variation.

Varia could take something that already existed and alter its possibilities.

A seed could become a hundred unusual descendants.

A piece of metal could become dozens of new shapes.

A flame could become sparks, embers, waves or strange new forms of heat.

One object could become ten.

Ten could become one hundred.

Each slightly different.

Each carrying something of the original inside it.

But the spirit imposed one law upon the gift.

Varia could never create from nothing.

There must always be a beginning.

A root.

A source.

And the quality of that source mattered.

If Varia placed a worthless stone into his hands, he could create a thousand extraordinary variations of that stone...

But in the end, they would still be stones.

His magic could reveal possibilities.

It could transform.

Mutate.

Multiply.

Discover.

But it could never replace the effort required to find something worth beginning with.

The spirit gave him this limitation intentionally.

It wanted the boy to remain the person who had crossed the desert.

Someone willing to search.

Someone willing to work.

Someone who understood that abundance meant very little without purpose.

The spirit healed his body.

Before sunrise, it carried him beyond the worst of the desert and placed him beneath a tree near the edge of the wasteland.

Then the statue disappeared beneath the shifting sands once again.

When Varia finally opened his eyes, he believed for a moment that he had failed.

Until he reached toward a small stone beside him.

The stone trembled.

Then split.

One became two.

Two became four.

But none were identical.

He stared at them.

For the first time in his life...

magic had answered him.

And that was how the boy who could create nothing became the mage who could create everything that something could become.

VARIA

Nothing comes from nothing.

Give it a beginning.