The truth about Magic

   I knew someday someone would find me, and it happened to be you.

Let’s see, who are you?, a warrior, certainly. A dreamer, of course, why else would you look for me. But what is your dream?, do you wish to have my power?, are you ambitious?, or did you perhaps seek my help?. Maybe your little brother fell sick with some strange illness and you heard stories that my power could possibly help… yeah, you could tell me which one it is if I allowed you to speak, if I released you from my spell… but I won’t. Your motivations are not important to me, and neither is your identity.

I guess I will kill you, I have no use for you, but I must admit that it pains me to cut your life so short… perhaps… I could tell you my story. I have never told my story to anyone, you will be the first.

I was born at a different time, before humanity amassed itself into large tribes fighting each other. Back then there were only small families traveling together, there was no grid upon the world. There was just the vastness of the landscape, filled with danger, opportunities, and beauty.

That’s the world I was born into. My mother carried me through the forests and the meadows, I walked through the jungles and up the mountains. I hunted the beasts and was hunted by them. I sought the berries and the fruits before the birds could peck them. I drank water form the rivers and the puddles along with the wolves and the horses.

Back then, everyone knew a little bit of magic. It’s true. We humans had been given the gift of speech, and what was our surprise when the universe heard us and replied.

It wasn’t that our words had power, no one can command the universe to act. Put simply, the universe listened to us, and sometimes we could convince it to act in a certain way.

We would start fires for the night, we would heal wounds, we would guide our arrows to our prey… and we would make illusions at night while we looked at the stars to fill each other’s mind with our stories.

No one taught us to do magic, no one taught us what it was. My father never sat me down and explained to me how it worked. I simply saw him pilling wood one day and whispering the word “fire" to it, but it didn’t reply. He kept whispering “burn, please”, “flame, arise, I ask you”… he was about to give up and start the fire using friction when the fire finally replied to him. I saw my mother one day singing a song to a broken bag, she sang to it like it was a baby, assuring the bag it would heal, and when she was done the bag was not broken anymore.

People just accepted that sometimes, if you said something, it would happen. That’s just how it was.

But I didn’t just accept it. I learned and I practiced and I became really good at it. My family said that things always listened to me because of my beautiful voice, but I knew the truth: this was a skill that could be mastered, it could be improved.

I was old when I started testing the limits of my voice, the limits of the things I could make happen. I could bring rain, I could bring thunder, I could kill animals with a single word. My voice would boom across the forest and I walked through it unafraid of the wild beasts.

I became famous among other people. Families would travel to meet me and talk to me. They called me: "the one who had become friends with the spirit of things”, and "the one who was always heard”.

One day my son, my little man, was missing. His mother and I got very worried, we looked for him in all the places he liked to play. We asked everyone, the children, the adults, and they told us another kid was missing. We found her crying among the trees.

She told that strange people had found them while they played. Those people had convinced the air to go outside of their lungs. She and my son were gasping for air, that’s when they took him. They tried to take her but the air came back to her and she ran away.

We tracked them. Their camp was just one day away.

You see, in those times we all lived in small groups, and if you could convince your group that something was good, it was. That meant sometimes you would find monsters.

We found them, and we observed them from a distance. They not only had my son, they had children from other families that lived in the region. I had seen them a few times. They were telling those children they would be wives or husbands for other people in their family, but the children were crying, confused, wishing they could go back.

I wanted to pounce on them, but my wife told me to be careful. If they convinced the air to leave my lungs I could not speak and they would certainly defeat me.

It happened in an instant. My boy saw his chance to escape and ran away, but someone took a rock and threw it at his face. He fell down and did not stand up.

“Die!” I screamed and blood poured out of that person’s eyes and mouth.

Their sorcerer saw me.

“Leave his lungs!” he commanded the air inside me and it worked. I felt myself dying and I thought to myself  “I wish you were crushed by the very air around you”… and it happened.

I had discovered one did not need to speak for the world to hear your wishes.

I made the air come back to me and I walked into their camp. I convinced boulders to smash onto their faces. I convinced flames to start in their stomachs. I convinced their blood to boil. No one was left, except for the children who were their victims.

At last I went to my boy, my precious boy lying dead, his face destroyed by the rock.

“Live" I implored, and suddenly he was not hurt anymore. He looked at me in amazement, and he hugged me.

But I could not be happy. A human should not be able to command life an death. At that moment I knew I could walk around the world and everything would obey my word. There was no limit to what I could do.

But the most terrible meaning of it all was that I was just the first. That tribe had had a powerful sorcerer of their own, he could have done so much more, if he had learned. Others like me would arise eventually, they would command life and death, they would command nature and it would obey. I would be a world of gods.

I could not let it happen.

That night I left my family. I opened the Earth and I went deep into the caves. There I invoked the spirit of the world, the one listening to me every time, and we had a long conversation. I finally convinced her to stop listening to humans, to never do what we told it to do, and she agreed… she agreed to only listen to me, while I lived.

For that reason I have maintained myself alive deep into these caves, only going to the surface eventually to see how the world has changed, to see what they have made with the world I’ve given them…

But inevitably knowledge about me and about magic has survived. Perhaps it comes form the ancient memories of how the world used to be, or perhaps people have learned to listen to the world, and it whispers to them memories of a bygone era. It whispers to them secrets of the things that should be possible but aren’t because I am here, stopping it.

Those whispers leak into the world and it was inevitable one day someone would look for me. The sorcerer, the magician alone in his study, learning, consumed by projects beyond the understanding of regular people.

Now that you know my story you understand why I must kill you… although… perhaps I can try something different, something I’ve never done because I’ve always been alone. Perhaps I can convince you to forget…