Magic is real

Another six months go by. My vocabulary has expanded quite a bit. The problem is not with how many words I can learn. I know a lot of words. I do talk in my head all the time. No. The problem is with my ability to pronounce the words correctly. My mouth doesn’t seem to keep up with my brain yet. I did manage to say words like ‘food’, ‘bath’, ‘play’, ‘story’, etc. Not a lot, but at least I can make my needs known to my carers.

My brother managed his first word recently as well. His choice was just as original as mine was. He stole my word. The audacity. I guess I will forgive him since he is only a year old.

Our mother has been telling us stories before bed. I finally caught a glimpse of how this world is. Bedtime stories are perhaps not the best source, but it is something. The first story she ever read to us was about how magic appeared in our world. Yeah, the magic is apparently real. I saw it myself, actually. Mother performed little tricks with water to me and my brother. She became silent for a moment and the next thing I knew, a bubble of water started rising from a nearby jug of water. She then started manipulating the water into forming different shapes. A five-edged star, a flower, a sword, and many others.

Back to the story. According to legends, a huge ball of fire came from the skies and landed deep in the sea somewhere where no one could see. The earth shook and the sky started changing colors until it became pink and stayed like that for a whole month. After a month, it returned to its normal color. People back then gave different explanations for the phenomenon, but soon stopped thinking about it. Over the years, however, children started being born who would later be able to do magic. Not everyone could do it. Being able to do magic was rare. At the same time, caves started appearing all over the land with dangerous creatures inside. These creatures would soon venture out of the caves and terrorize the populace. People banded together and started exterminating the monsters, eventually being able to contain them within the caves, now known as dungeons. Soon, the first generation of magic users reached adulthood and were able to greatly help in hunting and containing the monsters. This event occurred approximately 5700 years ago and is known as ‘the Blessing’.

Magic had six main categories or elements. Those are wind, earth, water, fire, light and dark. There are also sub-elements, such as nature, lightning, ice and others. Nature magic, for example, is used by combining earth and water magic to create plants. Ice magic combines water and air magic to create, well, ice. Lightning magic I used by combining fire and air. Light magic users can perform illumination and healing magic. This type of magic is quite rare compared to the four main elements. Not as rare as dark magic though. Under the category of dark magic falls the magic that is hard to assign to other elements. Since it is so rare, there are very few accounts of what dark magic users can do. It is known, for example, that some dark magic users can create illusions. According to other accounts, some could strengthen or weaken gravity. Also, a person can have either a high or low affinity for an element. A low affinity would only allow performing magic on a low scale, and quite weak at that. Weak compared to more dangerous spells. A fireball can still do a lot of damage even though it is considered weak magic. A high affinity would allow a magic user to perform strong magic on a larger scale.

It soon became clear that it was much more useful to keep dungeons open and keep the monsters inside than to eradicate the monsters and close the dungeons. That was due to researchers finding out that monster blood can be crystalized during an alchemical process. The crystallized blood, which is now commonly known as mana essence, granted people without magical abilities to use magic. The essence would eventually diminish in power, but still, it was a tremendous breakthrough. The discovery of mana essence made way for the invention of magical artefacts. It must be said that mana essence is a very valuable commodity because gathering it is extremely hard. First, the strength of essence is dependent on the power of the slain monster. The stronger the monster, the stronger the essence can be created from its blood. And you need a lot of blood to make a small piece of essence. Second, the alchemical process was difficult. In the untrained hands, it could even be dangerous. There are accounts of people having mutated due to performing the process incorrectly.

Still, as a son of the king, you had access to these mana essences. The bathroom that our mother uses for herself and to clean us up is equipped with several mana essence stones. For example, one stone uses a fire element to heat water in the bath. Water essences are used to refill water. Combined with the marvels of engineering, truly splendid devices can be used to channel magic essence into doing amazing things. For example, a specially created nozzle with water and fire essence can be mounted onto the ceiling that would spray warm water from above and clean a person standing below it. Also known as a shower.

So, yeah. Magic is real. Don’t know why it makes me surprised, but it does. All I had to do to make Mother tell me all this stuff was say ‘Tell more’, and she did. Mother tells Artias and me other bedtime stories, but none of them sound realistic. Also, from the stories it is clear that humans are not the only species living in these lands. There used to be a lot of other species, like elves, beast folk, dwarfs, and others. There still are, but not as many as there used to be, I was told. Being able to say ‘why?’ helps a lot in getting a bigger understanding of the world around me. It also helped me get a short history lesson from my mother. Apparently, ever since ‘the Blessing’ occurred more than 5700 years ago, the birthrate within communities other than humans has been in a steady decline. Elves, dwarves and beast folk used to be as widespread as humans were. Now, humans comprise a vast majority of the population on this continent. Mother refused to say more, saying that I would know more when I became older. Having a mind that is curious and ready to learn stuck in a one-year-old body sometimes feels like a curse. That is, until breastfeeding time arrives.

At least Artias was happy listening to Mother’s stories with a blissfully clueless expression.