There is always a cost to magic, and don’t let anyone try and tell you otherwise. For it’s easy for those with clear, unclouded eyes to see the cost of a city where magic floats in the air like snowflakes. Magic is too expensive to use as a constant, for anything and yet the Center finds so many trivial things to waste it on. They use it to clean their smoke stained streets and steel towers, they use it for the expansion ever outward, devouring life as the steel and smoke slowly creeps over the earth. 

If you find yourself ‘blessed’ with the gift of magic my advice would be to never show it. As soon as the Center finds out you have ‘the gift’ you have several grueling years alone to look forward to as they mold you into “the modicum of magic”. Which is a fancy way of saying that they groom you to be subservient. Then they demand your magical energy for the good of society. You will never have any left over for yourself, they drain every last drop to fuel their smoking engines, leaving you practically catatonic until the next week. 

Then there’s the oh so high society itself, a huge gap between the outer rim and the inner, a gap in all things, cleanliness, safety, monetarily. The outer rim is a maze of winding tangled streets and cobbled together sheets of metal, piping, and maybe a bit of wood mixed in for houses. The smog hangs heavy in the air making a perpetually gray twilight, while motes of different colored magic softly floats from the massive engines, providing the only light in this dim world and the only promise of a better life. By comparison the inner ring is brilliant with illumination. White and gold buildings scrape the sky, glittering their majesty for all to see. Light pours from magic powered lamps, lined up in neat rows along the swept open aired streets. People strut about with supernaturally beautiful features, no rough clothes or soot stains in sight.

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 If you found yourself in conversation with one of the blooming flowers that swept into whatever pristine plush room you found yourself in, more often than not that flower would turn out to be a deadly nightshade, ready to weed you out as an imperfection. In the lower rim it is hard to survive all of the creatures that would steal their way in for a chance at a tasty treat but the inner ring is a subtler more deadly kind of death. 

Even if you do survive in either place, ice and frost creep into you, you don’t live anymore you just exist. A walking zombie not alive nor dead, somewhere in between. The facade of the Center gets to everyone eventually, I’m just the first of the gifted to see it. So that’s the reason why I left. The smoke cleared before my eyes and I could see the magic and the city for what it was. It wasn’t easy to leave, even now I can still feel the hooks the Center gets into you, calling me like a siren’s song, because part of my magic is in that city, part of my soul is in the streets. But I’m never going back because magic has a cost and it’s always expensive.