Chapter 1
I had always been convinced that magic was everywhere. Like air. Something we sucked from the atmosphere into our lungs, filling our blood, tickling our brain, and pumping in our heart and soul. But like air, it cannot be seen, so we could not believe in it. “Science. Science is what we should believe in,” echoed almost everyone around the globe. What we couldn’t see was not to be believed in. But we couldn’t see the air or the tiniest creatures in the sea or the germs that nestled firmly into the computers we kept in our pockets, and we definitely believed in all of those. We wrote documentaries on those tiny unseeable creatures and were kept out of schools because of those mythical germs, so we couldn’t there be magic?
The world was in a renaissance. The Digital Age! The Information Age! An age that took pride in thrusting itself into the future, without ever looking at the past. All the discoveries made before Steve Jobs made the first computer were archaic. The stories of witches and gods and magic were merely silly explanations that people gave for the inexplicable before modern science.
I guess I never bought all of that. How could 200,000 years of humans knowing about magic mean nothing? Especially when every continent’s city-states had some sort of belief system related to magic. These city-states were isolated, yet they all knew of one thing, something out of reach of humans that powered life and religion and the soul.
As I’ve said before that it was of absolutely no surprise to me when I finally found it. But I’m not sure I will ever get over the shock of harnessing it.
_____________________________________________________________________
2070
“Grandma Ivy! You’ve told me all that before! Tell me something new!”
“Yes Mia, but I can tell you don’t believe me. Your eyebrows shoot out in that little scowl of yours every time you’re suspicious.”
“Well, how could there have been no magic before you? We see magic all the time!”
“We didn’t look for it back then.”
“Tell me how you found it, please! Please, please, please, please, plea-”
“Alright! Alright! I guess you’re old enough now to hear it.”
“Yay! Thank you, Grandma! Then will you teach me how to do it?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Let’s see here… Where to start?
_____________________________________________________________________
2020
The first day of my sophomore year of high school was really tough. We had moved just a month before to Boston from Quincy, a suburb, to get better care for my father, your great-grandfather, William, who was stuck in the hospital. I was the new kid. I was a little bit counterculture, I didn’t really do or know what was expected of me in a new place. I wore baggy clothes with unicorns and let my big, bushy, red, waist-length hair go wherever it wanted in the wind. I also was not a fan of shoes. I liked to let my toes touch and experience everything it came into contact with, just like my fingers. As you can imagine, the bullies had a lot of ammunition. At lunch on my first day they came up with my brilliant nickname, Clifford on account of my red hair, and they made me crawl around on my hands and knees and bark like a dog. It was completely humiliating! Absolutely no one stood up for me. When I was forced to stand-up in class after lunch to introduce myself as Ivy. People changed it to Poison Ivy and said that if I were to come in contact with them that I would give them a rash.
I went home that night and locked myself in my room and cried and thought and cried and thought and reflected on all that was going wrong in my life and how my life in Quincy was so much better. I wanted to help my dad, but I didn’t know how. I wanted to fix my situation at school, but I didn’t know how to do that either. I came to the conclusion after much deliberation, that the only way to fix my problems was to run away to find a way to help my dad and get revenge on those jerks at school by actually making my skin poisonous or something like that. That that would probably become problematic later did not occur to me. I had been hearing of magic all of my life and I was sure with a little research that I could find it and maybe even use it. After all, you could find anything on the internet. I would keep going to school the next few days until I had fully formulated my plan. And then, I would be out of there.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Wow, Grandma! They were so mean to you! Your hair is so pretty!”
“Thank you Sweet M. But it was for the best. They were how I knew that there was such a thing as dark magic. A magic that anyone could issue out of the shadowy part of their souls.”
“Um...you’re scaring me Grandma Ivy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Dear.”
“Also, who is Clifford and what is the internet?”
“Clifford was a giant red dog in a TV show. And the internet was like Dataglasses. It gave you information from your phone or your computer.”
“Oh… okay. Um… what’s a computer?”
“Ummmm.”