You've got a bad case of magic

Reader, you’re practically infested.

Magic is jumping all around you, biting into your skin waiting to be noticed, but more importantly, absorbed. And yet most of us just live life swatting it away, because honestly, magic fucking hurts.

Let's dissect this together. Magic, warps things that already exist, or creates things that weren’t already there, or it makes things disappear. Warping anything is at the best of times, hard work. Now lets look at the cost of creating life, birth is an extreme act of power, and of pain. And making this (or most anything) disappear… usually takes hard physical work, but its the emotional work we tend to brush off when trying to disappear things. That one I find the most mystical of all, because does anything really disappear from our minds? It can always be remembered with just a hint of a scent or a string of words played in the right order.

In other words, magic is fucking rough. And sure, it creates physical and emotional works of art both externally and internally, but there is always a cost.

Magic has a bite.

When I was re-evaluating my magic system in 2024, there was a tsunami’s worth of magic biting me. In fact it bit me so hard, parts of me died. My joints unalived themselves and I got to a point that at 32 years old I had to replace both my hips. I like to call myself a necromancer because of it all, even though I was a failed one since reanimating my joints wasn’t in the cards for me.

But I decided to listen to the bite.

Essentially, the beautiful and fucked up magic in my fantasy world is based on my actual experience with my own body. The magic I was REFUSING to see for a long time. The pain that comes with dying while you're still alive. There's something poetic in that. You never appreciate life more than when it’s on the line.

So it works like this: In my fantasy world the cost to gain access to magic is entirely separate from the cost of using too much magic. See, to go beyond your limits, means death–at a cellular level of course, can’t have characters dying all willy nilly.

Lets say you use more magic than the cells in your body have stored. Well where does that extra bite come from? Your actual cells. The magic literally eats at you at the cellular level. And no, there’s no magic bank app to see how much your body has. Just like I never knew what would push my body too far.

But what I did know: it was time to make some magic out of that bite.

I say all this to give you a different perspective, on all the horrible shit happening to you, because lets be honest, the world is a fucked up place lately. And no, you wont be able to absorb the magic immediately, but I hope you eventually find the magic with everything you’ve been through. And I hope you do something great with it, like plant a garden, doodle a sketch, or make some media to share it with the world.

Now it’s your turn, hit reply and let me know about all the magic bites happening for you. Things that hurt, things that fucking suck, and how you’re navigating them. And then tell me some of the ways you think or hope that the bites might manifest into magic.

With so much love beyond the scroll,

-A