Back To Basics

The world takes its time waking up on a Saturday morning. People grumble their way out of bed or fling themselves into the day in a despairing attempt to not lose all of two precious days off from work. I am not in either group even if I was up early. The air is cold as I continue to walk through the town, snow and rain teasing each other with promises in the air. The local coffee shop didn’t open until seven and I was the first in line; I’ve been back to refill my coffee twice, walked the streets of the town once in that time.

On the surface of it, there is nothing here for me. No creatures from Outside trying to enter the universe, no monsters hunting down tender food, no magicians not yet come into their nature or understanding. But there is no place that does not need a magician. Sometimes the weight of that truth almost buckles my knees.

There should be other wandering magicians. But there are not, perhaps because the story of me has grown too deeply in the past five years, and in the time before that as well. Fifteen years as a magician leaves a mark on the world deeper than I like to think about. I have faced impossible odds in my time. I’d like to think everyone does, but the stories of mine don’t need to grow with their telling. Sometimes I won because I was clever, or knew one thing my foes did not. Other times I had the right allies, or I was stupid enough to do things I should never do.

But a wandering magician is for wandering. For helping places without magicians to call their own. Everything else isn’t important next to that. I didn’t pay attention to the name of this town as we entered it, but I have come to know it. Angers surge under calm waters, everyone drowning in things they think they understand. Pressures grinding together like cultural tectonic plates. I work magic as I walk. Shifting pain, moving hurts, lessening griefs. Not balance, but change.

To be a magician is to walk a world of small miracles and gentle secrets. To be a protection for the world, yes, but that is being a magician. The magic is about need and desire. I shift needs, meet desires, gently hint toward other paths for people to take. No one will know I’ve been here, no one have any reason to suspect magic is real at all. My coffee refills itself without my having to return to the shop. I give the coffee to an older man who needs it, return anyway.

Two children are reading news of the wider world on their phone, trying to hide fear from each other. I turn their fear into a ward about myself, weakening it enough for them to see through the other a little bit. A few jokes become something else, their voices shaking. The least I can do is stop people from being islands. There is nothing save pain along that path, though it took me years to understand that. And, too, there is pain along every path. But sometimes not as much when one has others to share the journey with.

I leave a generous tip as I walk out. There are homes scattered out past the edge of town, and I hitch a ride toward them. A small conversation with an older man suspicious of me without knowing why. I fix the suspension in his car when he lets me out, thank him and walk away. Some things can’t he helped with magic, especially if they can. I walk and meet desires with needs, meshing places and people together until my coffee grows cold.

It’s a couple of miles back to the town, and I wander through the woods toward it. Helping the forest directly, giving aid to some animals, keeping company with a slumbering elemental for a time. There are things I have to do, futures growing up ahead of me like inevitabilities but sometimes going back to basics is the most important thing one can do. I relax, and the magic does what it needs to and for a time I can pretend I am anything other than another magician doing what I can to make the world a better place in my small ways.