Wizardcraft: Murder Hornets

I have made a grave error.

This must be one of the worst timelines to find myself trapped within.

Hundreds of thousands of years I have lived. Exploring every inch of this planet. Collecting every morsel of magic. Becoming the most powerful creature ever to stand the Earth. Destroying all who challenged that notion.

The only one left to defeat me was myself. A fact that has led me to rest for the last thousand years. I have transmuted every aspect of my being from eternal dimensions. There is only me - the sole existing body uniting every version of myself across the multi-dimensional universe.

I have accomplished my endless conquest. I hold infinite magic. And not a crumb of it fallen to the floor for the mortals to squander. I am the most powerful being in the universe!

Why did I have to wake up here?

There was always risk in choosing to destroy my parallel selves from this individual body. It forced me to choose a singular Earthly plane.

Though my deepest concerns involved this Earth being destroyed before I woke from my evolutionary slumber... This may be much worse.

The previous thousand years without my presence has allowed humans to progress without my influence.

They have completely forgotten about me. All my fantastic feats dwindled down to myths, hearsay, and fiction. Ignored are the great monuments that they have constructed in my name. Turning my pyramids and great halls into “tourist attractions” is the highest of insults for the places forged for their own slaughter.

They have disregarded my name. I have had too many names to have an individual one. When I began my thousand-year evolution, they called me… Merlin the Magnificent. They found such joy in giving people an adjective back then. My name was revered the world over; my powers were of legends.

Likely the monarchs who despised my dominance besmirched and erased my history after my disappearance.

I left the North Sea Empire in the hands of Cnut the Great. The ambitious little weasel. He knew to respect me but would have swiftly changed his tune with my back turned.

The world was simpler back then. Mortals were so easily impressionable and would do anything for the slightest bit of power. Though weasels every one of them. Each would as easily have murdered me, if possible. Thankfully, none of them lasted exceedingly long.

It is quite different here after being absent for a millennium. This futuristic world is… unexpected. The mortals have extended their lifespan by double. They have had the same monarch in England for 68 years. Their wars lack slaughter. Most of the mortals are not even considered healthy. And there are literally billions of them swarming the entire planet.

There must be 30 where one once stood. They have plagued and ripped up the beautiful Earth and put so many things in the ground.

But none of them stays in spot. They travel to places that were once unknown to them or were considered explicitly sacred. They are everywhere and get into everything.

Far worse than any of that is their… “science”.

Suddenly, these pests believe that they can explain everything. Answers to every little question. No longer will they believe in magic. Little do they know; they do not have magic because I have been hoarding it all.

They do not have to act like magic never existed. It took me 267,000 years to master and collect all the magic in the world. I worked extremely hard. I became a walking godhood with power beyond their comprehension. Now they do not even care if I walked this world at all. It is enough to hurt an all-powerful wizard’s feelings.

I have made a grave error.

2020 was not the year for my triumphant awakening.

Lightning shot from the skies to thunder my millennial tomb and awaken Earth’s mightiest wizard. And the mortals were too distracted with their own diseases, diversity, and sloppy monarchies to glance up from their hand-held monoliths. I even released a plague of murderous hornets upon the weasels, and they became a humorous novelty.

Dominating these mortals will be difficult enough without them ignoring me completely. My magic - as all-powerful and spectacular as it is - holds no weight in their futuristic world of “horse-powered” motor vehicles, “iced” creams, and evening lighting.

Maybe I should not have slept so long.

Perhaps I have chosen the wrong dimension to conquer.

Either way. I have made a grave error.