Like any other civil war families were torn apart, people thrown from their homes, people killed.

But that's nothing new. No, what separates this event from other wars in the past was the cause. You see, a few years after I was born, it was said that some powerful witches and wizards fashioned a tree branch into a lens for their magical power. Of course, no one believed such a thing, it was the ramblings of a madman on the street, with no proof. It sounded like a fairy tale. That was until one night, as the moon rose on the horizon bathed in the crimson red glow from our planet, a shooting star flew over the horizon. And as some slept, others took a step outside, and stared at the ball of light streaking across the sky.

Some may say what happened that night was fate. From where I was standing, barefoot in my garden, it looked like nothing more than chance.

The object split into thousands of uncountable pieces. The news the next day said it broke up from heat and air resistance. But that's not what happened. Each piece seemed to have a mind of it's own, ducking and diving in-between the others, weaving through trees and cables. All until it found it's place. And one, was meant to land at my feet.

I foolishly picked it up. It was glowing white, but my tired brain didn't understand that something glowing white is hot until after I picked it up. Except it wasn't. I turned it, rolled it in my hands. Then there was a white flash.

When I woke up at the base of my garden, the stone was no longer in my hand, but instead lay a small piece of wood. The thing was hardly ornate, but it had been rounded, and polished, and there was and indent where I assumed the grip was. I assumed it was merely a stick.

That was until I got inside and turned on the news, which was filled with stories of arson, and murder, with the cause almost unknown, save for a small rod of wood left at the scene. This is when people started to put 2 and 2 together,

What followed was a frenzy of activity: How could we use this new, seemingly limitless source of energy? The same question asked by different people yielded different answers. The Military were first to capitalize the new feature, as did large corporations, who saw it as a way to rapidly increase productivity, using the nebulous power of "magic".

This riled a few people. See, the wands only worked for their owner, so if you didn't have one, you were out of luck. As I say, this pissed people off.

It started with riots, buildings were burnt down, people were killed, things were torn up. It wasn't fun, and people had to protect themselves. I had to protect myself. I didn't know we were just giving them ammunition. I hope you understand that. Next they moved on to politics, saying we were dangerous, and not to be trusted, and should be deported, using deaths during riots as proof.

Then it got serious. And I mean, concentration camp level serious. People were rounded up, for "our own safety". We were cataloged, branded, and thrown in. People started disappearing. I don't want to think about it, but people talk, y'know? You could probably draw some interesting parallels from this, but people do bad things when they're afraid.

Then we broke out. See, we realized that a wand would make it back into the hands of it's owner. So one day, we killed a guard, broke out of our cells, then killed a few more guards for good measure. I mean, we only barely know how they work, but blowing stuff up tends to be the default mode for these.

But anyway, we're hiding out. Trying to work out what the hell's going on. It may take time, but hell, we've got all the time in the world.