A twelve-year-old Seto bit his lip as he realized that no matter how much he shook, the old High Mage wasn’t going to wake up. Suppressing the tears he wanted to shed for his old mentor, Seto went to inform the others of the old man’s passing.

By the end of the day, Seto retreated to his room. Finally letting the tears fall and stroking the head of one of the dragons that was crooning softly in his ear, he looked dully upon the sennen rod, the token of office of the High Mage that had been given to him.

His dragons gave their support as he cried himself to sleep.

Seto bit his lip as he drew his hand through his hair again. It had been two days since he had been given the office of High Mage. As the herald nodded him forward, Seto took one last deep breath to steady his nerves as he walked through the gold gilded doors into the receiving room of the pharaoh-

And caught his breath as his eyes widened to take in the resplendent surroundings. [Damn, if this was created to intimidate, it sure as hell does its job!]

"If you’re done with the sight seeing, could we get on with this? I have to meet with the village elder from Kitsun in less than two hours."

Seto blinked as his attention was brought to rest on a boy with crimson eyes and spiked multi colored hair sitting on a throne in front of him, his chin in the palm of his hand as he leaned on the arm of the throne, staring at Seto in a bored manner.

Fervently wishing that he had his dragons with him, Seto walked forward and kneeled in front of his pharaoh. "How may I be of service to you, sire?"

"Tell me, mage, are you good at games?"

"Games?" Seto asked in bewilderment.

"Surely you’ve heard of the Games of Darkness, as you are the High Mage."

Seto bit his lip and nodded.

"We’re going to play one. If I win, you die."

Seto blinked. "Why such a harsh consequence?"

The pharaoh hesitated. "Because I want you to play it with all you've got. If the penalty wasn’t high, most people would let me win just because of what I am," he said a little sadly.

I sighed. Well, what had I expected? He was a kid, just like me. "Why don’t we just play a game with no stakes, hmm? I’m bored with these official duties too."

He brightened up at that. "Great! We can play that game that I got from those foreign diplomats that I haven’t played yet! You can call me Yami, what's your name?"

"Seto," I replied with a smile as he summoned a servant to bring the game.

"Checkmate!" he cried as he moved his bishop two spots on the right diagonal. I raised my eyebrows in surprise, as I hadn’t seen that coming. Well, that put us at a score of two to one, him winning.

It was then that we were interrupted by one of his many advisors, being told that the village elder was here. I took my leave after arranging for another appointment with him later in the week to play some more games.

The rest of the week was boring, basically healing a few broken bones and calling on some water spirits to put out a fire that had started in the east quadrant of the city.

It was the day to go see Yami again. I wanted him to meet my dragons, so I told them to be quite and had the mother and daughter perch on my shoulders and the father curled up in my hair again as I cast an invisibility spell on them. The dragons’ had been a secret between my mentor and I, but I really wanted to share their existence with someone now that he had passed on.

The look on his face when I dropped the spell was priceless. After I introduced Yami to Jisante, Kiinori, and their daughter Riori, he gave me a puzzled look.

"But I thought you didn’t play the Games of Darkness."

I shrugged, "I don’t play them. The old High Mage took me to the shadow realm and made me create a duel monster as a test to see if I should be his successor."

He looked at me for a moment, stroking Riori’s head (the two seemed to have hit it off), then walked up to his throne and picked something up off of a table by it’s side. He came back to me and showed me one of them. "When you came back from the shadow realm, did you find anything like this in your room?"

It was a card with a picture of a silver wolf with two numbers below it and a small box with written information next to the numbers on the right side and the words ‘Silver Fang’ across the top. "Yeah, but the pictures were blank, and the words on top were ‘Blue-Eyes White-Dragon’."

Yami smiled at me. "I thought so. These are summoning cards for the monsters used in the shadow realm. Usually you couldn’t summon the monsters into the real world, but your magic must be allowing them," Yami gestured to all three of my dragons, and we sweat-dropped as we noticed that Jisante and Kiinori were necking behind a fruit bowl. "Uh, like I was saying, allows them to stay out of the cards here in the real world."

I took my eyes away from the two adults with a slight blush running across my face. Did they do that in my room when I was doing my duties? "So, if I wanted to, I could play those games?"

He tilted his head in an endearing way. "If you had a deck, yes. But the rules of the game are really complicated."

I smiled at him. "I like complicated things. Could you teach me?"

With his consent, we met twice a week from then on, playing games and escaping from duties that were thrust upon both of us at too young of an age. Sometimes we would talk about events in the kingdom and I would give him a few ideas and concerns from a commoner’s view point, but we basically stayed to playing games. Eventually I got good enough at it that I would win now and then, but it took me a few months.