A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGIC
JOHN ALEXANDER
The First Spellbook
One day, while I watched the magicians, I tried to mimic their tricks. I spoke their incantations and waved my arms while I recreated their rituals, in the hope of bringing some brilliance into being. Those blessed with magic in their speech said the same words as I, but no crowds gathered, and no minds bent to my will. Those gifted with spells of creation pulled vivid sights and smells into reality, but all attempts of my own were met with laughter and embarrassed ignorance. And as for those who’d enchanted their own bodies, transfiguring their forms to bulge and bend, those were even more impossible to replicate by my own boring body.
Even now, squatting in the snow after a painful attempt at stealing the knowledge of a machine-cultist’s runic inscriptions, feeling it turn my metal-burn to ice-burn, an umbrella was placed above me, and I flew at its owner enraged. How dare they flaunt these gifts towards someone without!
The man, in all his supernaturally gifted kindness, simply left me, didn’t even complain, didn’t even retrieve his umbrella (Which I kicked into the road, to stop me falling victim to his sorcery).
It took a week for my jealousy to melt into shame. My efforts were for nothing and repeating them would be insanity. I was simply one without, but even so I meticulously noted all the branches and disciplines I saw, waiting for my own to awaken.
It took almost another week to return the umbrella when its owner passed the street again. I took the opportunity to rant to him about my conundrum, and he patiently listened and nodded along as if he agreed with me, another annoying exceptionality that sent me storming off, until I returned a minute later to pay the café’s bill.
Then finally, six weeks after that it hit me. I shot out of my bed with a scream and tore the window open, desperately sucking in fresh air. The umbrella man looked up at me from his book, sitting in our bed wide-eyed and naked from the waist up. I slapped him with a pillow for using magic in the house, and then held up my life’s work, laughing. My pocketbook of spells. My copied collection of their gifts and talents. My encyclopaedia of magic. My magic.
*
Ants That Speak
This was all I remembered from today’s magic class before it put me to sleep fifteen minutes in. Of course, I didn’t stay that way, and the next hour and forty-five were spent muffling out the drone of psychoanalysis-disguised-as-history-lesson while I paid attention to far more illuminating matters in my notebook than “our glorious founder”. A little too much, the materialized earplugs in my ears a little too perfect, and I’m still scribbling away when my name is called, the room empty. I’m complimented on my diligent note taking, I smile and nod and laugh all very pleasantly, and the faint scent of charred paper is ignored as it usually is.
My twenty-two-minute walk home afterward is blurry, the scenery of the peak of magical society and its wonders being nothing more than a void-white road compared to my thoughts. To have my attention stolen here, by person or place, would be like watching for ants as I step. Ants that speak.
As has become routine, I again magically purge and replenish the chemicals necessary for my body and mind to spend all night in my studies. Three hours on rituals, two on curses, six on practical application and research of my personal projects, maybe one on history (Glorious founder’s diary becomes surprisingly engaging in its last third) and ten minutes on tomorrow’s due work. It will shock, it will disturb, it will send me to many disciplinary hearings, and I will be flunked out of class until pressure and embarrassment once again send them pulling me back in with honours.
Seven hours and twenty-six minutes in, I’ve done nothing but cast the simplest spark-charm over and over again. I can feel something that fascinates me in the act, in the heatless specks leaping from my finger. They’re coming from somewhere and I can feel it. I can feel a tiny thread on each spark, it’s snaking through my arm and vanishes just as the spark forms and I need to get it out, I need to grab it and rip it out, where’d it come from, how’d it get there, I can feel its wriggling itch as it burrows through me on each cast-
Each cast
Is it in every cast
A coldness settles in me.
I form an earplug. My bones itch as something flows through to the palm and with a cry, I dig for it.
I reach it in two minutes. I’m shaking and dizzy and my nails are cracked and caked in red, but I don’t let go. It’s thrashing now, a dark, oily thread from something, somewhere. I pull and the pain makes me plead aloud that I don’t pass out. I pull and pull and there’s a tearing SN-AP.
And I see the source for only five seconds. It turns to look down at me. So far down.
I open my mouth and scream my throat raw.
*
I’m Pleased to Announce that Magic is Dead (and I shot it)
She finally tears that miserable mage’s journal page off the corkboard, wordlessly passing Lisa at the blueprint desk, whose yelp and annoyance go ignored.
The page goes into the incinerator. No more of what might become. They all know the story by heart anyway; the page was as symbolic as it was depressing.
She takes her time coming back. Puts on that newly scavenged electric kettle, stares at its yellowed plastic and tries to think of something to think about. Biscuits. The cupboard’s handle was scrabbled for and yanked; it reveals a lonely tin tied in elastic. Last week’s meeting flashes through her mind, expense charts and failed targets and ‘the New-Old World’ and the word ‘no’ and their stupid confidence in their ability to hide from gods-
‘Tea’s ready!’
She’d forgotten Lisa’s cup.
‘You forgot my cup!’
She pauses, and hands over her own, like it doesn’t have her name stamped on it. The biscuits too. There’s a lump in her throat.
‘Not hungry?’
She feels sick. Almost goes to retrieve the journal page, then remembers it’s ash, remembers that instinctive snap of her fingers she almost made instead of using the lab’s incinerator. Where’d this indecision come from? Fear? Exhaustion? Was she giving up? THAT should be the kind of thought that makes her sick, if she had any kind of fucking pride- Oh.
Well, luckily there’s an easy solution then. She throws herself into her work, hits a wall immediately, a wall of impossible size and unknowable composition and strangles a cry into her pursed lips, nails digging into her scalp, eyes clenched shut.
‘Tissue?’
Oh god no. How pathetic. Her big dreams and speeches on saving everyone and everything, laughing and mocking the tome-burnings while her own team of believers dwindled and died and now the only one left knows.
This struggle simply isn’t possible.
‘That’s fine.’
What? She’s stunned into silence.
‘So that’s it for us?’
Is that it for them? It can’t be. Another simple impossibility. She looks into eyes that stare confidently, impossibly, back. She lets go of things that can’t be, and the flood of things that can is so overwhelming she’s in tears in seconds and laughing because it’s so obvious.
She’s got no time to cry as she stumbles out of the chair on new legs, teardrops still rolling on her face, and with a thud that shakes every surface in the building, drops a lovingly preserved spellbook onto their blueprints.
*
Epilogue
These days, the volume’s so cranked that the slam really does shake the whole building. And he’s there, every time. Only giving small claps now, since that one day when the nice guard had a sick day and they brought in that asshole who told him to fuck off with the ovation.
They only play it once a month now. No one ever really watches, not even the Order’s diehard fanboys. But he’s there for the art, the inspiration, that portrait from the past and in all its wizardry.
And on that dazzling summer day, it means he’s the only one there who catches the curse floating on the breeze, landing right into his hand. A serious crime in broad daylight. The Order’d have his head. But this feels too much like fate to him, and home he goes.
And if a curse meant his head, the contents of his home would get him ground into paste. Charts of rituals, pages of grimoires, sticks and stones that glow and spark. All that’s left if you wanted to get away from those sickly green magitech batteries. And in quite the usable state too!
Nauseating excitement bubbles up through his chest as his fingers skip trace over the parchment. The forbidden oldspeak isn’t as alien as he once thought, a mere hundred years could only morph “English” so much, the root words easily retraced. Its all so absorbing he doesn’t hear the muffled clinks of slow-moving armour through grass, doesn’t notice the shadows that momentarily block sunset’s rays through his window.
Nor does he hear the crunch of steel plate buckle and bend, the coughing of blood and screams turn into gurgles.
A pale hand gently drags its mess back through the grass as the prayer inside comes to an end.
