A/N: This is a story that I'm writing for my senior project which is actually a graduation requirement. You'd think that would take the fun out of this creative process… and well it sort of does, but now I have a dead line… Comments and constructive criticism are always appreciated. Edit: I'm taking out the Italics. Hopefully most of the other errors have been cleared up as well.

Prologue: A Brief History of the Wardens

Before many of the great ancient civilizations had come into creation, the mortals roamed the Earth in tribes. However, the tribes were primitive and could not defend themselves from the onslaught of Soulless that poured into their unprotected dimension. The Soulless devoured the early humans and stole their spirits without prejudice or mercy.

Perhaps the Heavens took pity on the lesser beings as their population dwindled, but just as abruptly as the horde of Demons had appeared, so did the Immortals. From a dimension that rivaled the power of the Soulless, the seven demigods emerged in the guise of Humans to banish the demons from the Earth. At the sight of the Immortals, the tribal humans fell to their knees in reverence. They had been saved!

Having eradicated the evil, the seven Immortals found themselves in a peculiar situation. In order to continually keep the Soulless from slinking into Earth's dimension again they had to create a barrier. The barrier they managed to summon was known as the Veil. But the Veil could not function without the Immortals to keep feeding it power. They had orders to protect the mortal inhabitants, but to ensure their protection the Immortals had to stay on Earth until another power source could be found to sustain the Veil.

Cut off from their home, the Immortals wandered the world in hopes of finding a way to maintain the barrier. However, after countless years of searching, they grew despondent. Over time the humans had come to worship the Immortals as gods, and as they yearned for the company of others, the Immortals each adopted a tribe of humans to govern and protect.

The Immortals, took lovers and spouses from among their respective tribes and produced children. The First Born, as those ancients were known, were mortal but were not completely human. Those special children were connected to the Veil the same way the Immortals were, but they were also creatures of the Earth.

The First Born shared the connection with the Veil through their blood and their soul. Those linked souls were called Wards, and a child who inherited a Ward was called a Charge. Later on, when the child reached a suitable age, and his Ward had fully developed, the Charge would undertake a ceremony to become an adult and then gain the title of Warden. The term Warden was created out of regards to the Veil and the path such person would have to take to protect it.

Such titles in those days dictated social status in the tribes as they formed clans. As the mortals without Wards married with the First Born, the tribes became clans of Wardens. Soon, there were no Ward-less in the clans at all.

From the Seven Immortals, Seven Clans were formed. Each of those clans had slightly different Wards depending on which Immortal they had spawned from. The Clans and the Wards they produced were known as Mind, Heart, Will, Time, Space, Life, or Death. Such labels were merely intended to categorize the type ability that each unique Ward was capable of, but in the end, the labels also became the name of the clans.

As the Clans grew in power and skill, they grew bored and felt constrained. If they had such gifts, why not use them? But without Soulless demons for the Wardens to test their skills on, they turned their eyes to the neighboring clans. However, the Immortals refused to listen to the conspiring whispers of their mortal children. Who would want to make war with his cousins, they reasoned?

It was pure folly when the Immortals did not intervene as the Death Clan began its march on the often weaker Heart Clan. The Death Clan had Wards that specialized in pure destruction. The Heart Clan, who's gifts centered on the reading of emotion, was reduced by half in the first week of battle.

The Heart Clan's Immortal would not stand for such unprovoked chaos, however, and soon, the woman called her brother's Mind Clan to her aid. Against a demon, the Mind Clan would undoubtedly have been weak, but the sentience of the Death Clan bent, twisted, and inevitably broke, under the battering of three thousand thoughts tearing straight through memories and personality. Linked into psychic union, the Mind Wardens reduced the Death Clan to a state of consciousness so far from intelligence and sanity that even the most hardened Wardens took terrified note of their prowess.

Seeing their cousins fighting, the Life Clan, who's Wardens had once been dismissed as pacifists, could not help but go to the badly needed aid of the Death Clan. While categorized under "life", which most assumed meant "healing", the label actually referred to Ward's particular trend to protect and preserve the life of the Warden it resided in. That was not to say some that some Life Wardens could not use healing abilities, for indeed many could, but mostly the gift was for self defense.

The Wards of the Mind Clan were rendered useless by the shielding and regeneration Wards of the Life Clan.

During this pointless war, the other three clans, Will, Time, and Space, conferred in secret. The Time Clan, whose gifts were the least varied but considered some of the more useful, had seen visions of a nearing catastrophe and aimed to stop it with the help of the last two un-warring clans.

Together, the three clans marched to the battle field that the Heart Clan's home had become. They had been neutral to the matter before, but the images of such maimed and tortured creatures their cousins had been transformed into, left a bitter taste in the Wardens' mouths. The combined power of the three clans completely halted the fighting in a matter of minutes upon arrival. But they were still too late to reverse much of the damage that had been dealt. Dead Wardens, aged and barely-turned-adults alike were splattered helter-skelter across the European landscape.

It was the Will Clan that eventually totaled the death count by gathering the broken and dead Wards into a pile to release the souls into the Veil. The fury the Will Wardens felt at their cousins' stupidity was only kept in check through sheer force; a testament of their true strength some said. The Will Clan had the gift to identify, possess, overpower and nullify the Wards of others merely by desiring it. It was a gift that dealt heavily with inner strength and which was just as deadly to the user as it was to the victim. Of all the clans, only the Will Clan was ever known to posses the ability to see the Veil itself and directly harness it.

A temporary cease fire achieved, the leader of the Time Clan addressed the other leaders. In her speech, the woman casually asked the other clan leaders where their Immortals had gone. The clans were confused. Hadn't their Immortal ancestors been with them through the weeks of bloodshed and fighting? A search party formed and they quickly checked the surrounding area but no traces of the Immortals could be found.

Frustrated, the leaders, of the previously fighting clans, demanded answers from the Time Clan. Instead, the woman informed the leaders to look to the Heavens. When the clan leaders proceeded to do so, only the leader of the Will Wardens could gasp in horror at what he saw. There were seven gaping holes in the fabric of the barrier. Even as he observed, countless demons were already emerging from the portals in the sky.

The Will Warden quickly warned the others, and together they readied their clans to prepare for the assault. It was not enough time however, and many Wardens died as the demons descended upon them. But by some miracle, the joined forces of the clans managed to beat back the vast horde. However, the casualties only increased as the defeated demon's poison spread through the bodies of the injured.

The Demon Doors, as Wardens referred to the tears in the Veil, did not repair themselves as the Soulless were killed, though. Instead, the doors merely disappeared from sight as the Will Clan observed. For a while the Clans took that as a sign that the Demon Doors and the Soulless were gone for good, but over the centuries the demons began to gather in areas with higher population. Sometimes, a particular class of demon would gain enough sentience to organize an army, but the Clans had developed a system to counter it by that point.

Just after the Demon Doors first vanished, the Immortals were declared to be lost. The Charges had no idea how the Immortals could have disappeared, however, because the Veil was still relatively intact. Some Charges speculated that the Demon Doors had been formed as the vast power source of the Immortals disappeared from our dimension. But the Veil had been created by the Immortals, others argued; surely it would have collapsed entirely if they had left the earth. And yet another question arose, if the Immortals were still our dimension, then what created the Demon Doors and where were the Immortals?

Even with the questions unsolved the seven clan leaders decided to form an alliance. The resulting government was referred to as the Council of Representatives, the representatives being a single qualified Warden from each clan. The Council had the power to mobilize the clans into an army, and conscript Charges into teams of seven representing each clan, called a Protectorate.

While the Council lacked the power to regulate the laws of the Ward-less mortals, they had full authority over any Charge born into the clans. Some peace-loving or all together rebellious Charges did not like this new government however, and went to live among the Ward-less. On the opposite side, some Charges liked the new alliance so much that they went to live with Charges of another clan.

The results were that the Charges, who lived with the Ward-less, produced children oblivious of the Council of Representatives, and more often than not, discovered their Wards merely by accident. On another note, the Charges that married Charges from other clans were shocked to find out that the Wards of the children they conceived had mixed both of the parents powers, or in some rare cases, granted two completely separate gifts instead of accepting a dominate one.

As the population of the world increased, and the means of communications improved, the Council of Representatives, having no real country or territory to call their own, began to set up Embassies in every major city around the world. Through the Embassies, the Council of Representatives maintained control of its Protectorates as they battled the Soulless.

It was also through such Embassies that a new born Charge is registered and put into filing for a Protectorate. A child of mixed blood is considered a fraction Ward by way of identifying which Clan it would represent in a Protectorate. Since there are many fractions to consider, a whole Protectorate could be comprised entirely of fractions who's main power isn't even the Clan they are supposed to represent.

Another development over the years was the numbers of Charges not content with the Council of Representatives and the Embassies. Some of those unhappy Charges, which had already been conscripted as Wardens in a Protectorate, defected from their duties without first going through the legal process of "retiring" and were consequently considered Rogues. As another option for Charges, they could instead be conscripted as Slayers to hunt down Rogues and unregistered Charges. The Embassies offer bounties for Rogues who cause too much trouble.

When the idea was proposed that all registered Charges to turn sixteen be conscripted as a Warden or a Slayer in the early 1800's, it was met with mixed reviews. Nobody wanted to be in the service of the Council for life. There was panic, and even talk of anarchy, but when angry Charges tried to contact the Council through the Embassies, there was so much wait before any responses were made that the Council decided it was high time to build a capital. Within fifty years, the combined Wards of many artisans managed to build a city in the middle of an American State. The capital city was protected and hidden from the prying eyes of both the Charges and the Ward-less. In fact, the only way to even enter the Capital at that time was to file a request with a local Embassy and wait for permission to use its portal.

But such a system did not last long after a Rebel Group took over an Embassy and tried to use its portal to stage a coup at the capital. Luckily, the capital had been informed of the plan before the Rebels arrived. As soon as they appeared, the guards quickly dispatched them, and went to work on redesigning the portals' integrity. The new process, and the one still in use today, involves much paper work and any Charge to enter the portal without express permission and the required pass will instantly be teleported to the Embassy's lower dungeons and scheduled a court date.

So ends a Brief History of the Wardens.