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The Magician’s Choice

The town of Norrath has as a claim to fame that the town was renamed over a decade ago to draw in people from a video game to visit the town. According to locals, the only reason the ploy didn’t work was because Norrath was a world and not a place in the world. The attempt two years ago to rename the town as Skyrim ran into a roadblock of lawyers, all of which the people of the town cling to in a desperate attempt to drag tourists off the main roads.

They even boast their own mad scientist, a self-titled Doctor Kind who has been working for over five years on a technology to reroute satnavs through the town and boost popularity. I have run into several scientists who have gone mad over the years, but never one who began that way. A small part of me is almost tempted to call Jay and see what Doctor Kind would make of the most jaysome of eleven year old’s from Outside the universe. I think more of that is just missing Jay in some ways.

Travelling with another magician has been interesting, but Wilbur is currently two towns over doing things only a ghost magician can do for a cemetery. I wandered, because that is what it means to be a wandering magician. Nothing had drawn me here. No creature from Outside trying to enter, no ancient breaking wards, no person with magical talent in need of aid. Just a town among others, quiet and small.

I have wards about myself made from the feel of the town, enough to stop me from being swarmed as a tourist. Most everywhere else I’m good enough at blending it that I never been wards to blend into the background, but the hunger for tourists here is – not yet worrying, but I could see the hunger reach that point some day. So I walk, and let the magic out. Easing fears here, moving one thing into another there. Repairing a couple of damaged sewer pipes there.

“Magician?” The town mayor is young, but she is a mayor and with that comes some awareness of the wider world.

I turn and nod. “Wandering, yes.”

“Oh!” Beth-Anne’s expression is at once excited and worried. “There are stories about you, on some message boards that – well. My ex could float sometimes a couple of inches above the ground, so I learned the world was a bit more than it was. Learn enough, and you hear about –.” She catches herself and smiles weakly. “Sorry. The stories never do you justice, do they?”

“I imagine that’s why they’re stories,” I say easily. That there isn’t a mob or the mayor running in terror says she at least doesn’t believe some of them.

“Is – is Norrath all right?” she whispers, which says everything about how she saw me.

“It is. I used the magic, because it is what a magician does.”

Beth-Anne pauses. “You didn’t want to?” she asks uncertainly.

I let out a breath. “I have been a wandering magician for over fifteen years. I have been magic, have used magic. More than most magicians I know magic is only a small thank-you from the universe for being a magician. What a magician is for. What the magic costs, too. And I think I am tired.”

“Tired?” the mayor repeats, looking lost.

“I have power. Some has been given, some claimed, some – is mine, even if it should not be mine yet. I find I don’t want that. I don’t want to be that any longer. Magic is a poem between need and desire, but magicians never get to be part of it. We move outside. Fixing the weave of things from there, because that is only how we can see it clearly. To hover between two worlds like a distant star balancing the horizon between night and morning. Always between.

“And I am tired of being the magic, because even then I use it. Even here, trying not to, I bent the magic to my will. I have done so much, been even more, but I understood the magic too well. Until Wilbur. His magic only touches ghosts, and mine cannot. Not in that way, not enough to help him. Limits are almost a relief, but – they fester, too.”

And I smile at the mayor, and nod, and walk away. She does not follow. I walk slowly. I can talk to my magic. Let it out of me, converse, make plans.

“I think,” I say softly, to the universe as much as myself, “that it is time to let go.”

And it is so easy, the jump.

No longer between two worlds.

No longer balancing.

I close my eyes, I open them, I wait for the magic to lead where it wishes to go.

I should be afraid, but I have known enough of change that I almost happy.

The magic does not stir. We do not stir. I begin to walk, in a wandering I’ve never done before.

One I’ve been waiting for, I think.

And I join the song.

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