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 why 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.