The rise of the internet as I was a teenager was an explosion of growth for me. Suddenly I had access to a lot more information, access to a lot more people, and I could find out what I was.... Suddenly I had even less reason to associate with my classmates and peers in my freetime. Now I had peers online, in chat rooms, forums, games, instant messengers, and art sites. Now I could dive into the realm of crafting my own identity. I became Paul, Josefina, Razorwyrd, MaraJ@d37692, and whatever else I wanted to be.
Of course as we all know, in the wild west of those times, a LOT of bad people and weirdos came out of the woodwork. After hearing and witnessing some of the horror stories myself, I had worked on a simple charm to show me who was on the other side of my chats. A few old gross dudes lost their eyesight that year at my displeasure. The more important event by far though was when I first met a connection that resisted my charm.
Grace was…an interesting first encounter with another hedge witch. An old lady who sent back my fiddly little charm back at me, leaving me dazzled with the Scrabble.com timer ticking down. It took me a bit to figure out what had happened, and I lost on time that game. She sent me a friend request and an IM shortly after, and proceeded to fill my inbox with a litany of curses, mundane ones at least.
As for me, well, once I’d sorted out the continuously falling scrabble tiles in my vision, and managed to start typing a reply, I was very excited. I straight up asked if she was magic, and received in turn a dead bird via neighborhood cat. She held any sort of reply ransom over a scrabble rematch, and we turned back to our silent wordy warfare. She refused to answer my questions even after a win, then a frustrating loss, and signed off with an animated middle finger.
The next day though, there were two more cats outside my door when I got home from school, one of which was bearing a note:
Follow the Cats to the cafe. Bring money, I’m not paying for you.
I sighed and frowned at the note. No way I could tell my mundane parents about meeting a stranger from the internet in person. No way I could explain that I knew they were magic, not that they wouldn’t encourage me to take my meds if I brought up magic again...Instead I ran to a payphone, called home, and left a message. I told them I had detention for talking back to a teacher. Something they would definitely believe and would buy me at least 2 hours.
If I’m being honest, it wasn’t the first time I’d followed cats around. They always seemed to like leading me someplace, matter of fact, that’s how I’d found one of my favorite bracelets. I tried to make sure I always returned the favors. I had dotted cat food stations all around my neighborhood, hidden from normal eyes, places that squirrels and birds were drawn to, and made slightly sleepy...easy prey for hungry cats.
Without my normal verification methods, I couldn’t be certain who “Grace” really was. I knew they were magic, I knew they played scrabble, I knew they liked to curse…And that was pretty much it. As I followed my feline escorts, I grew more and more nervous, wondering what I could even do if someone more skilled with magic really wanted to hurt me. I knew vaguely how to do some things, and experimentation had led to some other minor cantrips, but the best I could do is maybe make my opponent slightly sleepy or not notice me at this stage…
Watching the cats so closely though, so intently, I started to notice something...around them, about them...A shimmer that they seemed to be following, a magical trail...The path the enchantment was leading them...and me on. I paused, eyes widening, then narrowing once more, trying to get a feel for the magic, reaching out...tugging on it… The cats paused when I did, and I absentmindedly crouched and started petting them. Meanwhile my mind was working on a half-formed concept….Tracing, following the path with my mind, closing my eyes...A momentary lack of sensation, then movement, flowing, ebbing, tugged back towards the original destination of the enchantment. I opened my eyes after I stumbled back onto my butt, wincing. I grinned though, knowing that the destination was merely a block away, and that the caster was indeed an older lady who had raised an eyebrow as my presence followed her magic. I left the cats with treats and raced off to meet her.
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The first time I had to duel someone with magic was over a petty crime, and was more like a brawl than anything. I had stumbled over another spell leading my cats off somewhere and disturbing a small garden I had been working on at the woodline behind my house. Curious as I was about it and a little more than put out by the bootprints among my herbs I followed the line stringing along the spell, and then the sound of meowing.
One of my cats, a chubby greedy thing, was meowing and scratching at a tangle of netting weighted down and sprinkled heavily with leaves. I felt the heat rising to my face as I understood more and more of what had happened, someone had TORN out my catnip! Then they’d used it to bait one of my cats into a net. I was already furious on multiple accounts by that point, but when I felt the thrum of magic and heard someone cough out a spell of breaking I was livid.
Whoever it was was a poor practitioner and as scared as I was angry. A thin, balding man’s half-shiny head poked out behind a pine, and I glanced up to watch a heavy dead-looking branch get caught among the boughs above and skitter to a creaking halt above my head. I was incredulous, felt the intent, where he had meant for it to land...Saw the thread that was to guide it to the top of my head. I knew at once that I had to act, throwing out my hand with great malice towards him as I tore a bangle off my bracelet, causing the 3-leaf clover inside to crumble and casting a hex of probability at him. Bad luck was sure to follow, and it came quickly. He coughed out another spell of breaking, harsh in whatever tongue he was using, maybe french? This time he aimed it directly at me, but a living thing is much harder to force a spell into, especially one aware and as full of magic as I was.
My legs stayed solid, much to his horror as I rushed towards him, fury in my eyes and not a single plan in my head. I was angry for his treatment of my cat, for his petty theft, for his unprovoked attack on my person, and my clenched fist was ready to plunge into his ribcage, but he was already stumbling back. Losing his own footing as his spell came back at him, as his ankle snapped, as he slid in the leaves, as he came crashing down wide-eyed and thumped against the ground.
I heard him shatter the third time he tried to gasp out the spell, no magic at hand to pull on, nothing in his grasp, his eyes wide staring up at me as my spindly body loomed over him. Another bark of what I was certain was French now, though guttural and ugly on his tongue. I watched as the threads inside him became tangled for the effort, drawing on his body’s inherent magic and turning on itself. I watched the light leave his eyes and felt the rush of his energy enter me. My first human sacrifice filling my veins with thrumming magics, and my heart with horror.
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Grace was an uncouth delight and a fountain of wisdom to my thirst for knowledge. Or more like she was a rusty old drinking fountain that sometimes sprayed water at you when you pushed her buttons. The first thing she told me, before I even sat down was:
“Don’t cast on a whim you fucking idiot.”
I blinked in surprise, frozen halfway between standing and the chair,
“I wasn’t…”
“Don’t care, don’t fucking do it. And don’t dally, I’m old, I don’t have time to wait for you to decide if you wanna moon the table next to us or fit your skinny ass in these crappy chairs.”
I simply stared, a deer in headlights as my brain scrambled for a snappy comeback, but instead I just slowly sat down.
“Ugh, and don’t freeze either, make a decision, and then do something. But before you do something, PREPARE!”
She continued her impromptu lecture, glaring at me.
“And don’t you dare take out that notebook and start jotting dicks in it while I talk. I don’t want you recording anything I say anyway.”
I blushed fiercely, bringing my hand back up to the table from where before I had been ready to draw it out with my pens and take notes and consult the questions I’d prepared for her. I learned in due time that she had the power of a Seer, mostly using it to buy last minute lottery tickets and win at games of scrabble, or poker in her youth. She also taught me the importance of sacrifice, preparation, and math. Numbers it seemed were intrinsic and important to magic, same as they are to biology, to music, to patterns we choose to see. She taught me to be ready for all circumstances at any time, demonstrating more than once why she carried such a suitcase of a purse. And she taught me sacrifice, that every living thing contained the threads needed to weave more powerful spells, and that she kept insects to feed her lizards and both were useful in their ways as sacrifice for serious magic. She showed me too, her withered left hand as a consequence of trying to cast a binding charm without the necessary preparations, without the sacrifice to empower it.
What she never taught me though, is what happened when you sacrificed another mage. Never prepared me for the thrill, the power that filled you to the brink when what you did caused the unspooling of all those magical threads. When those threads full of magic tried to weave themselves into your own tapestry. What happened when I killed that petty thief and catnapper.
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“Hang up and call the police. Meet me later.”
The click-beep of the phone call ending felt like a sledge-hammer to my chest. It knocked me to the ground, staring open-mouthed at the body, the corpse not five feet away. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, that everything was too tight, too wrong, too heavy. I could feel myself breathing, but it felt like my lungs couldn’t hold enough air. It felt like something was scraping at my ribs, clawing at my heart, it felt like something had shattered inside me and the warmth in my veins felt like magma pumping through my heart.
I don’t remember even dialing the three numbers that brought sirens and men in uniforms into the woods. I remember someone putting a blanket around me, asking me questions, a blur of faces, of hands, of reassurances.