Featured Art
Lucie Ward
Lucie Ward, now aged 16, has an amazing talent for art.
Here are just a few pieces of work she has created over
the last few years that she kindly sent in to be featured
in IGNIS. Are you an artist? Would you like your artwork
featured? Send it over to us at amazingchildren@
potentialplusuk.org, we would love to see it!
Featured Story
‘Jörmungandr ‘
Anonymous author
Essay: “The Atlantean War”, by Becky
Mason.
Just after noon, on November 29th,
1998 - a rainy, overcast day - in a
physics laboratory in the British town of
Lancaster, humanity discovered magic.
We then failed to realise what we had
stumbled across for almost seven years.
It was a programmer named Miles Linus
who realised that the strange ability that
allowed a person to convert ambient
heat into a small electrical current might
also allow them to convert other types
of electricity, or be trained to handle far
larger energies than the small amounts
of heat that had so far been observed.
Temporarily leaving aside the question
of how a mental “twist”, as one of the
volunteers described it, could cause
energy to be converted from one form
to another with no apparent transfer
mechanism, he began to experiment,
both with further energy changes and
with attempting to “twist” the energies
into a pattern similar to a computer
program.
The results defied belief.
Within three years, “mages”, as trained
magic users came to be called, were
commonplace. Anyone could use
magic, though most had only a low
talent for it, and a few had almost no
ability whatsoever. Some, though,
were incredibly powerful. Miles used his
knowledge of programming languages
and the data he had gotten from his
experiments to develop three “magic
styles”, ways to shape magic into
patterns to cause the desired effect,
with individual spells being analogous
to individual computer programs. More
followed, and spells were invented by the
thousand. Humanity flourished.
It did not take long for the events that
directly sparked the War to be set in
motion.
6 | FUSE
In early April of 2013, three young
adults - a pair of fraternal twins and a
close friend - requested funding for an
expedition to investigate a group of
five linked magical anomalies located
across the planet. Their preliminary
analysis suggested that four of them
were highly secure containment for
magical artefacts, which, combined,
could open the fifth. The combination of
the fact the sites appeared to be almost
ten thousand years old, suggesting a
magical civilisation at that time, and the
location of the fifth anomaly convinced
the UN and USA to grant them a
substantial amount of funding.
At the head of a crack team of the best
mages and archaeologists in the world,
21 year olds Harry Mason, Benedict
Winters and Abigail Winters started to
collect what became known as the Keys
to Atlantis.
Three long, hard years later, the rift in
the Pacific Ocean located approximately
1000 km south of the small island of
Bermuda was opened, using the fourpart key assembled from the artefacts
found at the anomaly sites. After a
six day period of tumultuous activity
centred inside a stationary hurricane
of devastating power and size, an
island roughly equal in size to Iceland
appeared, the storm dying away to
reveal it.
All hell broke loose, and a desperate war
for survival was initiated.
It was later discovered that, in a similar
manner to the process by which a ship,
sunken and left for some time, will begin
to grow coral and accumulate colonies
of sea life, Atlantis had become infested.
However, rather than the bottom of
the ocean, Atlantis had been forced
sideways through dimensions, cast
into the drifting place between reality
and the void. The creatures which had
infested it - violent, eldritch things - were
classified under three terms. The weakest,
able to be killed by a single well-trained
human, were designated . The
“main troops” that had infested it, often
bearing the appearance of abnormally
large pseudo-creatures - sometimes up
to a storey high - were called .
Surging out from Atlantis into the seas
and appearing on beaches all over
the world, they attacked anything and
everything in their paths.
The most powerful were labelled
, and were only named such
if it was calculated they were powerful
enough to have a higher than even
chance of singlehandedly destroying
civilisation if not stopped. Nine such
attacked over the course of
the war, at an average rate of one every
five years.
The three young adults who had opened
Atlantis led the war effort, slowly
pushing back onto Atlantis proper.
still escaped into the seas, to
wreck what havoc they could elsewhere,
but the vast majority wer R