(Prologue)

"Enter," called the soft, enticing voice of the Yotsuba Toshu, Yotsuba Maya. Her loyal butler, Hayama, quickly opened the door to allow the visitor entry into Maya's study, the deepest and most secure room of the maze-like Yotsuba mansion. In fact, the mansion was actually built to be a labyrinth, and when the Yotsuba bought it they removed parts of the outer sections to serve as open training grounds, resulting in a very confusing three-story building full of dead ends and abrupt floor changes. The study in question was placed underneath the eastern wing, and used to be a small wine cellar until it came into the hands of the Yotsuba. It still shared one characteristic of a wine cellar, and that was darkness. The moonlight came from a small window but only served to cast deeper shadows across the room.

The study door opened without a sound, oiled once a week by the dutiful Hayama, and in entered Yotsuba Tatsuya, officially Shiba Tatsuya, the son and heir of the Yotsuba name. His features were of no particular note, excepting for his eyes, the right of which being jet black, and the left appearing as though it was being drained of color, as the top of his iris was a light grey-white color. He wore a flexible gunmetal-grey suit, with a white shirt and a tie of the same color. Tatsuya, being a thin youth of the age of fourteen, easily slipped through the door when it was still halfway opened and bowed wordlessly to his mother.

"Ah, Tatsuya, thank you for coming on such short notice. So, are your cousins, the Kuroba family, treating you well?" came a hauntingly beautiful lilt from Maya's equally exquisite lips.

Tatsuya straightened his body and, without saying a word, nodded his head once. If anyone else had done this it would have been the height of disrespect, but Maya seemed not to mind.

"Well it's good to see so. Even if you are a guest, I was afraid that Mitsugu would isolate you from his children. Speaking of which, how are his children?" continued Maya, "Actually, I think I'll ask him at dinner tonight."

Tatsuya merely nodded his head again, showing no indication of how rare it was for even a family head to dine with the Yotsuba Toshu.

"Well then, shall we go." stated Maya, giving the order whilst rising from her throne-like chair. Hayama quietly opened the door, and Tatsuya followed her out.

(April 24th, 2078, Birth of Yotsuba Tatsuya)

Most births are full of pain and mother's cries, followed by the cries of a child who was forcefully ejected from the womb, despairing at the unfamiliar lights, sounds, and cold. For Yotsuba Tatsuya this was not the case. The woman who bore him was not one so weak as to fall into tears at a little pain. As a proud Yotsuba guardian she had been chosen to bear the child of Yotsuba Maya, from an egg sample that was cryogenically frozen before her others were lost. Immediately after the childbirth, she handed the yet-unnamed baby to her master, who held him aloft before the world, proudly and defiantly. Her butler, Hayama, clapped softly, the sound echoing throughout the room devoid of any but the three of them.

Tatsuya gazed quietly into her eyes, motionless, as Maya gazed back at him. It was then that she noticed his eyes. His right eye was jet black, but his left eye was a gradient shift between white and black, and the gradient moved. As the gradient lightened, Maya noted a fluctuation of pushions throughout the room, and as the black drained from her son's eye, the glow brightened. The black then once again flowed into his eye, returning it to a deep ebony, darker than a moonless cloudy night. As the color poured back into Tatsuya's eyes, the pushion fluctuations ebbed away into nothingness. It was at this moment that Maya knew she had created a very special child, and lost herself in joy and madness.

(Yotsuba Tatsuya, Age 7)

Seven-year-old Yotsuba Tatsuya sat quietly on a bench canopied with vines, reading a book. Because Tatsuya was a rather large child for his age, it was easy to mistake him for an eight or nine-year-old, making this seem like a rather normal image. Except that it was overcast at midnight, and Tatsuya was reading a college physics textbook.

After several more hours, Tatsuya finally closed the book and stood up, dusting off his purple plaid button-down shirt and black pants, looking at the moon as it peeked from a corner of a cloud, only for it to fade quickly like a dream, leaving only the sweet memory of its radiance. Tatsuya stretched to relieve his muscles of their soreness, walking quickly, but not rushing, through a slightly overgrown garden path before entering the small house where he currently lived. The color drained from his left eye, and it emitted a soft glow, like the first star of the night.

What actually happened is that one of Tatsuya's twin souls left his body, and entered the door to allow it to open itself. There are many different definitions for life, but the one recognized by Tatsuya was that to live, one must have a soul. A soul is not something that is used to go to the afterlife or preserve one's spirit or consciousness for all of eternity, but instead a method to efficiently convert energy into movement, and Tatsuya had one of his souls partially embody the hinges to the door. The hinges, being small, required only the smallest fraction of Tatsuya's souls, but changed the color of Tatsuya's eye entirely.

Eyes, in fact, are the window to the soul, or rather the gateway or mask of the soul would be a better analogy. The iris specifically is used to cover up and trap the soul within, and modern magic is actually just using energy from another dimension, accessed via the so called "magic calculation area" to form the mask of the soul into an image of said soul. Most human beings are unable to open the gateway to their souls because they would then be unable to keep said soul within them, and would cease to be life. However, because Tatsuya had multiple souls, one from his biological mother, and one from the woman who bore him in her womb, he was able to freely manipulate his spare soul and perform true magic: the giving of life, even if temporary, to otherwise inanimate objects. The capabilities of said objects were often very limited, to the point where the soul within it was able to dictate what it did. This soul, of course, belonged to Tatsuya, and therefore Tatsuya could command it as he pleased. This means that Tatsuya could control whatever he put his soul into, using the energy contained within its matter to manipulate it as he pleased.

The door closed behind Tatsuya, and he sent one last hopeful glance through the windowed wall of the mudroom for the moon, only to be disappointed and remove his shoes, the laces of which undid themselves from their pretzel knot and placing them under the polished wooden bench and entering the main room. The house Tatsuya lived in resembled a traditional hunting lodge, with deliberately crude furniture covered in lacquer, all made of homely oak wood. This was in fact built by a five year old Tatsuya, as he was given a tent, a week's worth of food, and four square kilometers of woods and told to survive there for six years, and Tatsuya has been doing a remarkable job. He was able to get books through delivery and terminal, and had been training his body and mind for the last year and a half, the first six months being time he used to adjust and build his home, as well as explore his territory. The decorations were all Tatsuya's personal preference, though is affinity for the night can be said to come from the Yotsuba blood that flowed through his veins.

Tatsuya entered his lodgings, and grabbed some venison jerky from his pantry before reclining on his couch like a partially curled pillbug, lifting his upper body to swallow before laying his head back down on the deep emerald green pillow while pulling up his terminal keyboard and typing away like a woodpecker digs for insects in a tree at whatever ideas had popped into his head.

Everything properly recorded, Tatsuya removed all sources of light from the room with a simple command, and put the keyboard away before putting his hands on the back of his head. His breathing softened to be barely perceptible, and he lost himself in the world of dreams.

Sorry about all of the similes and metaphors, I felt like being poetic. Please review, and I will see you all soon with an increased tempo in the next chapter. Also I'm sorry if the description of Tatsuya's powers was unclear, I had an idea in my head that kept changing on me so they will hopefully become more clear as I flesh the story out.