A Spell Forgotten

It is your fault, they say, when you lose your magic. 

In the land where you are born, it was outlawed until recently. Your parents still speak of it in hushed tones, only ward the living room when they think you’re asleep. At two years old, you blossom your mother’s houseplants with a touch, as infants are wont to do, but then you’re shunted off to preschool and forget. You grow up with sidelong glances and teachers who do not look you in the face, grow up watching non-magical classmates pull up the corners of their eyes and run away from you during recess. No letter on cream-colored parchment comes when you turn ten or twelve, inviting you back to an old-country academy to nurture your latent abilities; no encyclopedic knowledge of runes lights up your brain upon puberty. Alone in your bedroom, you pinch your fingers, trying to coax out sparks, and wonder if your parents could have at least taught you the social rules of non-magicals instead. 

When you grow older, you try everything to get it back. Short of returning, of course—it is a treacherous country for those without defense-spells sparking at their palms, those who cannot shield themself from the onslaught of that which they do not know. You attend university—non-magical, again—and, around the crushing weight of your engineering major, memorize a few wars your country has won, learn the way unused neurons are pruned from infants’ brains, and how they stop hearing entire ranges of phonemes because their systems deem them irrelevant.

Your magic is gone, your professors tell you, though never in those words. You’ll never get it back. 

And it’s your fault. 

You graduate, in time. Move to a bright new city where you can pretend you’ve lost nothing. You work and drink and pay rent that’s too damn high, and when you lie alone at night, you tell yourself this is the best life you can have.

Then one evening, as you walk home from the office under a cold grey sky, you pass a rune scratched on an open door.

You hesitate, shove your fists in your pockets. Just vandalism, you tell yourself. These could be all over the city. But the sweet milky ozone-scent of magic wafts from the stairs below, and an ache echoes in your chest: like the heartbeat after you’ve been shot, as you realize you are hemorrhaging blood.

You follow the stairs down. 

A dark, crowded basement, a person with eyes like yours perched on a barstool. They’re telling a story of your parents’ homeland—a contentious election, the sly interference of the country you live in now. The speaker is much younger than you, and as they careen into a digression, citing sources and explaining various scholars’ takes, you feel a twinge of regret, that you lacked the energy or curiosity to read between the lines of your gen eds. Perhaps you could have had this, been this, if you’d wanted it a little more. But you’re a worker, now—your time for transcendence has passed.

You return the next week, and the weeks after that. It is not always the same person regaling the bar with forgotten histories: there is an eyebrow-pierced woman in a leather jacket; a man wearing scrubs, having rushed straight from the hospital. But the nights belonging to the first storyteller are your favorite, crackling with fire and indignation. They tell of all the ways your country has mangled that of your parents’—the stoked racial divisions and causeless wars, the forests ashed to fuel its bottomless appetite. You learn about the hangings, the refusals to pay wages, the neighborhoods set on fire, and you want to weep, you want to break the world. 

On a night in which you are feeling particularly fragile—in which they have spoken of students burning a religious school, hands flared bright with illicit magic as police shot them down—the storyteller leaves the stage afterward, sits beside you at the bar. As holiday music crescendos around you, your gaze skates along the rolled-up sleeves of their button-down, the dark hair falling in their eyes. 

Warmth pools in your stomach, despite the weight of newfound history.

I see you around a lot, they say. Are you a mage?

To your mortification, your eyes well with tears.

Sorry, you say, awkwardly wiping your face. I used to be. But it’s gone, now. And I always thought I hadn’t tried hard enough to learn, but—

The residue of decades past still ripples the air between you: spellwork blazed from hands that should have been soft and helpless; the policemen’s bloodshot eyes full of fear. I’d never felt, before, like it wasn’t my fault. 

The storyteller takes the drink the bartender offers them, sips thoughtfully. You’re learning that empire is built on violence. 

You gulp your own wine, feel yourself uncouth. In the low light, their eyes are nearly the same color as yours. Yeah. 

And that it will continue to be, no matter what its own law says. 

Your laugh comes out watery. Yeah.

A perturbation crosses their face, a brief darkness like cloud-shadow. It is not your fault, they say softly. This weight is not yours to bear alone.

And then you are crying in earnest and they open their arms and by some deep-buried instinct you fall into them—trying to speak, to flatten your hurt into language—and they hold you and pat your shoulder and whisper, darling, darling. I’m so sorry about what they’ve done.

© 2024 P.H. Low

About the Author
P. H. Low is a Locus- and Rhysling-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet whose debut novel, These Deathless Shores, is forthcoming from Orbit Books (US) and Angry Robot (UK/NZ/Australia) in 2024. Their shorter work is published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Reactor, and Diabolical Plots, among others. P. H. can be found on Twitter/X and Instagram @_lowpH, and at ph-low.com.