If Vorpal were a DC comics title? Well, this could probably be issue number one's cover: Fractured Souls.

Keith O'Neil was a young man from the Bronx, an idealistic and eager young man who, from a very early age, showed an unusual level of determination. Keith's fondest memories of his mother were those in which she spent time with him at night, after a long day a work, reading from a worn and dog-eared copy of Alice in Wonderland. When Keith turned eleven, his mother succumbed to cancer. He never knew who his father was. From that point on, the boy lived with his aunt, uncle and three cousins. His only memento from his mother was a necklace with a pendant in the likeness of the Cheshire Cat as seen in the Tenniel illustrations of the Alice books. His uncle, fearing that Keith might become undisciplined and fall into bad company, enrolled him into a local martial arts academy. It was through it that Keith discovered his love for martial arts, and he applied himself.

Eventually Keith moved out after high-school and continued his practice, finding work in a local warehouse in order to scrape by. One night, having fallen asleep on-site after an exhausting day, Keith woke up to find some of his fellow employees in the middle of helping some questionable individuals relieve the warehouse of some of its valuables. Being a young man with a sense of right and wrong, he intervened and there was a scuffle. In the altercation, Keith was outnumbered and sent reeling, causing some of the stocked goods to fall upon impact and crush the young man to death.

Or, at least, that is what -should- have happened.

The warehouse at the time was being used as a temporary storage space for a rare antiquities dealer, and in that particular warehouse there was a very rare and magical item— a convex mirror from the Shang Dynasty, exceedingly rare.

Within the mirror there resided a magical entity, a feline spirit of chaos and mischief, but not destructive chaos. This spirit had been imprisoned in the a mirror by Huang-Di, the Yellow Emperor of early Chinese legend, and folklore called this spirit 'The Tiger Of The Mirror.' His imprisonment came about after a long romp on Earth causing mischief throughout and bringing about legends such as that of the Caith Sidhe in Ireland, the Bakaneko of Japan, and other similar stories. The Tiger of the Mirror, being a creature of chaos, saw a unique opportunity at the moment that Keith was sent reeling, and used its subtle chaos magic to manipulate the trajectory of the young man by just a gentle correction- the only thing it was capable of while prisoner in the mirror. As a result, Keith crashed against the mirror and shattered it, impaling a long shard of it through his chest and apparently dying.

Or so it appeared.

The Tiger of the Mirror was eager to find any vessel to escape… however, it had been weakened by millennia of languishing behind the mirror and it could not overpower Keith's soul. Instead of the Tiger obliterating Keith's soul, the two souls merged into one- the cat's chaotic nature is curbed by Keith's own personality, and the young man's last thought had been to stop the robbery of the warehouse. Seeking a suitable form with which to manifest himself, the Tiger in the Mirror found Keith's memory of the Cheshire Cat, and its association with his mother, and chose a form. The hero Vorpal had been born.