Chapter 1: The Spark

Albert’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, hesitating. The screen glowed softly in the dim room, reflecting the city lights outside. He was trying to make sense of it all—ten years after magic first showed up, the world still didn’t fully understand what had happened.

He began typing, imagining he was explaining to someone in the present, someone who never saw those early days. The words came slowly, like putting together a puzzle no one had all the pieces for.

“Ten years ago,” he wrote, “something strange arrived in our world. We called it magic. At first, it was almost invisible—subtle changes that no one could explain. A seed sprouting faster than nature allowed. A wound healing quicker than medicine could. Lights flickering in the night sky without any clear source.”

Albert paused, fingers resting on the keys. How to describe the confusion and fear that followed? Governments faltered, laws scrambled to keep up, and everyday people were caught between hope and panic.

“But it wasn’t just chaos,” he continued, “more like a slow burn. People began to realize this magic wasn’t just a miracle or a trick. It was real—an unseen force woven into the fabric of our lives. Some learned to use it, others feared it. And all of us had to start learning what this meant.”

He thought about the stories he’d collected: the nurse healing patients by touch, farmers doubling harvests overnight, rumors of strange creatures slipping between shadows. None of it made complete sense yet. The rules were still being written.

Albert leaned back, eyes on the screen. He wasn’t telling the full story—no one was. But maybe, by piecing it together, step by step, he could help others see the world as it had changed.

“Magic,” he typed, “is not just a power or a trick. It’s a new language the world is learning to speak. And ten years in, we’re still just learning the alphabet.”

He saved the draft. The story was only beginning.

Chapter 2: Voices from the Storm

Albert’s small apartment was cluttered with notebooks, half-drunk coffee mugs, and a laptop buzzing quietly on the desk. Today’s task: gather voices from the past—the people who’d lived through the first months of magic’s arrival, when the world seemed to teeter on the edge.

His first call was to Helena, a retired paramedic who’d seen it all firsthand.

“I remember,” Helena said, voice shaky, “people running through the streets, eyes wide with fear. Hospitals overwhelmed—not just with the sick but with those affected by magic they didn’t understand. One moment, a man would be fine, the next, his wounds would glow faintly... then heal or sometimes worsen. No one knew what was happening.”

Next, Albert spoke with Jorge, a city council member who’d been caught in the middle of the political chaos.

“The laws were a mess,” Jorge sighed. “We had no framework for this. Suddenly, anyone could do something... impossible. People scared the government wouldn’t control it. Riots broke out. Some tried to exploit magic; others just wanted to survive.”

A young student, Marina, shared a different view.

“At school, we were confused. One day, lessons were normal. The next, our teacher made plants grow in class — like, real green vines climbing the walls. It was beautiful, but strange. I think that’s when people started wondering if the world was changing for good or bad.”

Albert scribbled notes, piecing together these snapshots. The picture was chaotic, yes—but also filled with wonder and fear tangled tightly.

Later, he recorded a conversation with Raul, a farmer outside the city.

“Magic saved us, honestly,” Raul said, gravel in his voice. “Droughts ended early, crops grew strong. But it wasn’t all sunshine. There were accidents. People trying things they didn’t understand—fires, storms. We were learning, but it was a dangerous lesson.”

Albert saved the recordings and sat back. These voices weren’t just memories. They were the first threads in a tapestry of a world forever changed.

He began typing again:

“The early days were marked by fear, confusion, and a desperate hope. A world caught between what was known and what was suddenly possible. And for those of us trying to tell the story, the challenge was clear: to understand magic, we first had to understand ourselves.”

Chapter 3: The Great Hesitation

Albert stared at the blinking cursor on his laptop screen, its rhythm oddly comforting. A soft rain tapped against the window, and somewhere beyond the city hum, a siren wailed and faded. He exhaled and resumed typing, the words forming like sediment layers—fragments of thought, memory, interview, and reflection.

“It wasn’t the magic itself that froze the world. It was the not-knowing.”

Those first few weeks after the phenomenon began, Albert recalled, the internet slowed to a crawl—not from lack of bandwidth, but because no one knew what was real. Footage of uncanny acts flooded every corner of the digital world: a woman in Porto Alegre calming a rabid stray with nothing but her voice and a green shimmer in her eyes; a teenage boy in Tokyo projecting ghostly images of dragons into the street—spectacles no camera could record, only human eyes could perceive. A man in Prague clutching his chest after a knife wound, and standing upright moments later, breathless but unharmed, the blood drying before anyone could understand what had happened. People didn’t know what to believe—but they knew something had changed.

At first, it felt like fiction bleeding into reality. Hoaxes, people said. Deepfakes. Mass hysteria.

But then governments began to act.

Borders closed. Air travel halted. Troops appeared on city streets—not to fight, but to observe. To show presence. That was the word—presence. A word used when no one wanted to admit fear.

Albert opened another folder on his drive: transcripts from political briefings, hastily leaked over the past few years. A U.N. emergency session. A G20 press blackout. Rumors of special task forces formed in secret.

“The world didn’t scream,” he typed. “It held its breath.”

It wasn’t war. Not quite. It was like the atmosphere just... thickened. Corporations paused production. The stock market spiraled. Scientists clashed on television over theories. Religious leaders scrambled to reframe the unexplained within their doctrines. A few embraced it. Others called it heresy. A few called it judgment.

And the people—ordinary people—watched.

“There was awe, yes. And there was wonder. But underneath it all, fear. Because awe without understanding feels like standing at the edge of a cliff with a blindfold on.”

Albert took a sip from his now-cold coffee. Outside, the rain had turned to a drizzle. He clicked back into his outline, the part where he labeled that first season as The Great Hesitation.

In the silence that followed magic’s emergence, the world didn’t collapse. But it paused, teetering between the past and an ungraspable future.

That pause, Albert once hoped, might have saved everything. But in truth, it only took a couple of weeks for someone to do something monumentally stupid—and monstrously cruel. Fires lit by Red Casters leveled entire apartment blocks in Montreal. A White Mage, wrapped in layered force fields, walked unscathed through gunfire during a bank heist in Milan. In San Francisco, reports surfaced of Blue Casters overriding the wills of others, turning people into puppets. And worst of all, the first whispers of Black Magic—of souls yanked back screaming into decayed vessels, of dead eyes opening in unison—spread like rot.

“We didn’t tame magic,” Albert wrote. “We simply opened the gates—and chaos walked through wearing a smile.”

Chapter 4: Borders and Fault Lines

Albert sat back in his chair, the hum of the air conditioner barely covering the faint tap of his keyboard. The monitor bathed his apartment in a pale glow. On the screen, a world map—one he’d saved from a decade ago—flickered beside a more recent one. The shapes were almost the same. Almost.

He resumed typing.

“It didn’t happen all at once. Revolutions never do. But in the years that followed the First Manifestations, you could draw fault lines through the world—not by tectonics, but by panic.”

Some countries simply couldn't cope. Not with the paranoia, the mass awakenings, the sudden collapse of everything that seemed permanent. Institutions didn’t just crumble—they evaporated. Police forces turned on themselves, borders became suggestions, and currencies lost all meaning.

One day, Albert noted, the government of Belarus tried to outlaw all forms of spellcasting. By the end of the week, their own army had splintered, half of them demanding magical education for their children, the other half accusing their officers of hoarding magical power to themselves.

Brazil almost fractured under the weight of its own contradictions. São Paulo turned into a fortress of order and regulation, while parts of the interior became havens for mystics, healers, and grifters alike. Eventually, a truce of sorts emerged—fragile, and wholly unofficial. Even now, Albert wasn’t sure if Brazil was one country or three.

And yet, humanity persisted.

“We didn’t descend into barbarism,” he typed. “We limped, bled, shouted—but we moved forward. And strangely, even when old maps burned, new cities rose in their ashes. We feared magic, but we also adapted to it. Slowly, unevenly, and sometimes tragically.”

Albert listed a few examples. The founding of the Crescent States in North Africa—a federation built on shared magical academies and a common weather infrastructure. The Great Agreement in Finland, where casters were granted full citizen rights in exchange for strict schooling and lifelong transparency. The island of Taíno Nova, created not by tectonics but by hundreds of Green Mages working together to raise coral and stone—a new nation with no army, no prisons, and very firm laws on Blue and Black spells.

He paused at the thought of Taíno Nova. He’d always wanted to go.

“Some places were reborn,” he added. “Others simply never stopped burning.”

In the former United States, five new currencies had taken hold. The old federal system persisted, technically. But in practice, every state had its own rules on spell usage, its own magical militia, and its own interpretation of "safety."

Albert leaned forward, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

“We still don’t know what magic is,” he wrote. “We know what it can do, in part. We’ve cataloged thousands of effects, categorized schools, drafted laws, and trained casters. But its nature? Its origin? Its purpose, if it has one? Still a mystery.”

That, more than anything, haunted him.

The world had changed—violently, beautifully, permanently. And at its heart, something unknowable pulsed quietly, waiting to be named.

Chapter 5: The Breeze Before the Storm

Albert sipped lukewarm coffee as he stared at a blinking cursor. For a long time, the words wouldn't come. He wasn’t short on data—his files overflowed with interviews, academic papers, leaked memos—but something about this particular chapter felt... elusive.

Because, for a few brief years, it almost felt like humanity had it under control.

He began typing.

“Every era of false calm feels golden in hindsight. Between the chaos of the Awakening and the horrors that would follow, there was a window—narrow, flickering—where it looked like we might actually figure magic out.”

They called it the Breeze Years. It was the media’s phrase, not his, but it stuck. The winds of change had passed. People weren’t running anymore. They were building.

That was when the first academies appeared—not hidden, not outlawed, but state-sponsored. France opened the École des Arcanes Libres in Marseille. South Korea built the Hana Institute across three vertical campuses. Brazil took over the old University of Brasília’s engineering wing and turned it into the Faculdade de Artes Arcanas, graduating their first class of "licensed casters".

Albert smiled, remembering how clumsy the early titles had been. Arcano-Engineers. Spell-Techs. Mana Specialists. Most of them had no idea what they were doing, but they wanted to.

And that mattered.

“We discovered we could store mana,” he wrote, “but not generate it artificially. That changed everything.”

The term mana had come from the Pacific, a linguistic borrow that predated modern fantasy by centuries. Scholars, casters, and policy-makers all adopted it almost simultaneously—probably because it felt right. A shorthand for something invisible, finite, and fundamental. Like blood, but not. Like breath, but more.

Every living caster has a Mana pool, though its size varies. You can’t cast beyond it, like trying to run a car without gas. But Mana can be stored: in bones, quartz, certain glass or silver, and especially in items forged for that purpose.

And so, a new industry bloomed.

Mana rings. Channeling rods. Protective bangles for guards. Alchemical charms. Spells no longer needed to be cast live—they could be bottled, inscribed, imbued. A dangerous spell could be locked into a glyph. A healing touch could be wrapped into cloth and worn like a bandage.

Albert leaned back and looked at a small paperweight on his desk—a rough disc of onyx, faintly humming. It didn’t do anything fancy, just stabilized air quality in his apartment. A Green Mage had made it at a weekend fair in Belo Horizonte. Cost him just a couple bucks.

“Magic became useful,” he typed. “And the moment it did, we stopped fearing it—at least, openly. We domesticated it just enough to forget how wild it truly was.”

Legislations followed. At first, messy and local. Then increasingly global. The Vienna Accord on Magical Practice banned several spell classes, including all Black Magic involving reanimation, mind-altering Blue illusions, and high-yield Red discharges. The Mana Ethics Commission was born, mostly ceremonial, but loud. Insurance companies required certification. Airlines banned mana-bearing jewelry on flights. Urban zones created “casting lanes” for street-level magic.

And yet, under the surface, everything was still moving too fast.

Albert remembered the headlines: Mana Startups Hit 500M Valuation. Green Enchanters Revolutionize Crop Yields. White Mage Guilds Lobby for Trauma Center Contracts. Magic was no longer mystery—it was currency, status, and control.

He frowned.

“No one asked why only some people could cast. Or why the schools emerged the way they did. Or where the boundary really was between using magic—and being used by it.”

But that was the next chapter.

For now, in that brief year, society breathed. Built. Smiled. And just barely noticed that the breeze had stopped.

Chapter 6: The Wild Years

Collected Evidence, compiled and annotated by Albert Weaver.

“You cannot tame what was never meant to be held.”

—Fragment found in the journal of Armand Vale, rogue caster, presumed dead.

[Audio Transcript – Police Interview, Buenos Aires Incident]

Det. Mariana Fuentes, interviewing neighbor witness.

WITNESS: “I told him not to mess with that stuff, I did. Said he was practicing Red Magic from some online forum—talking about kinetic shaping and plasma loops. Then one night, boom. Just... boom. The whole block lit up like the Sun. Three buildings gone. They said he tried to cast a fireball.”

DETECTIVE: “Intentionally?”

WITNESS: “Yes! But he was aiming at the sky.”

[Excerpt – Online Journal Entry, pseudonym: “Wishbone”]

Archived on the ManaLeaks netboard.

I work for someone now. He’s never in the same body twice. Says it keeps the Blue energy fresh. I don’t ask questions, just run the drops. One time I saw him rewrite a banker’s entire memory with a single word. She laughed like it was a joke. A week later, the whole branch transferred ownership to him. Magic’s not fire or light. It’s... suggestion, rewired memories. The world nods ‘yes’ before it realizes it didn’t agree.

[Segment – TV Special: “The Rise of the Black Army” – Canal 7 News]

ANCHOR: “The reanimated surged through the Alps, not stumbling like old movie zombies—but coordinated, fast, immune to damage. They were not alive. But they were not dead either.”

FOOTAGE (blurred, timestamped):

A mounted corpse driving a stake through a roadblock. Screams. Something inside a man’s eyes that doesn’t belong.

ANCHOR: “Authorities believe the army was first raised by a group of Black Mages operating out of deep Slovenia. Witnesses report cult-like chanting, runes carved in bone, and apparitions preceding each surge.”

WITNESS CLIP: “We shot them. Again and again. They didn’t stop. One of them spoke with my brother’s voice. My brother died months ago.”

[Email – Internal Memo, Mana Regulation Agency – Confidential]

Leaked, confirmed authentic.

We’re facing decentralized magical proliferation. The concept of a “secure society” is no longer viable. Magic spreads like fire, but teaches like hunger—once you need it, you find it. Basement casters. Children mimicking words on school desks. Black market spell-scrolls imported in books and candy wrappers. We are losing the monopoly on knowledge.

[Interview – Prof. Valéria Mendes, Mana Ethics Commission – Monday Journal]

INTERVIEWER: “Professor, what do you make of the increase in magical accidents?”

PROF. MENDES: “It’s not magic that’s unstable—it’s people. Guns require factories. Spells just need desperation. You want to fly? You jump enough times, you’ll try anything. The problem is, some landings... affect others.”

[Excerpt – Children’s TV Show: “Mana & Me!” – Public Broadcasting]

CHARACTER 1 (Mana Mole): “Remember, kids! Never cast alone!”

CHARACTER 2 (Safety Squirrel): “And always ask a licensed adult before enchanting your doll!”

CLOSING SONG:

"If the glyph goes red or starts to spin,

Put your wand down—don’t begin!"

Albert leans forward and comments:

“We thought there would be systems. We thought regulation would work. We didn’t account for curiosity, or loneliness, or the staggering human need to be more.”

In less than three years, millions died. Entire neighborhoods became ghost zones. Memory became malleable. Cities burned not from war, but from failed ambition. And still, we didn’t understand magic. We only learned what it could cost.

Chapter 7: Reflections

Those two years—what people now call the Wild Years—felt like the world had tripped over something ancient and dangerous, and tried to act like everything was still normal. It wasn’t. Magic had arrived, loud and strange, and no one was ready. Not governments. Not scientists. Certainly not Albert.

He’d lived through it with wide eyes and a notebook. And looking back, he didn’t really see heroes or villains—just people. Some scared. Some greedy. Some trying to help and making it worse.

Magic, he wrote once, wasn’t good or bad. It didn’t care. It could close wounds with a flick of the hand, make animals understandable, paint illusions that danced in the air like dreams. It could also burn down homes, twist memories, or dig up the dead. Same force. Just different choices.

Those first years were messy. Everyone wanted to be the first to understand it. To control it. But it wasn’t that kind of thing. Magic didn’t slot neatly into boxes or follow the rules people liked to build around power. It went where it wanted. And it didn’t ask for permission.

Albert kept a list once—places lost, people changed, spells gone wrong. It got too long.

Still, something shifted. After enough fire and fallout, people started treating magic less like a toy or a weapon, and more like something real. Something that could stay. Laws were written. Schools opened. Words like “mana regulation” and “ethical casting” made their way into news reports.

No one had tamed it. But they’d stopped pretending it wasn’t there.

Toward the end of that chapter in his notes, Albert scribbled:

“Magic doesn’t reveal who we want to be. It shows who we are when nothing is stopping us.”

And under that, in smaller letters, almost an afterthought:

“We had our turn to play. Now we have to grow up.”

Chapter 8: A Fragile Path Forward

After the Wild Years, the world didn’t heal all at once. It limped. It argued. It tried.

Albert Weaver, sitting at his desk in the present, looked at the tangle of headlines, old notes, and half-burned maps, trying to make sense of how anyone had made it through. The answer wasn’t control. It wasn’t power. It was something softer, slower. It was people choosing to understand each other.

Some countries figured it out. They stopped trying to lock magic away or sell it off to the highest bidder. They opened schools. Real ones—where a kid from nowhere could learn the same spells as the mayor’s son. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked better than fear ever had.

Other places? They clung to the old ways. Tried to decide who deserved magic. They didn’t last.

Cascadia rose up out of the American ruins, built on free classes and neighborhood casting halls. The southeast crumbled under the weight of titles and spell codes no one could read. The Lowlands in Europe formed councils where every voice mattered. In the Balkans, smugglers ran the streets and every alley smelled like burnt ink and ozone.

Asia split too—some regions bloomed with co-ops and shared mana pools. Others tried to crush knowledge under boots and slogans. Those places didn’t burn. They just... went silent.

South America leaned into open source spells, passed around like recipes. In parts of Africa, local wisdom mixed with mana in powerful ways—where people shared what they knew, they thrived. Where they didn’t, they fractured.

Albert didn’t bother drawing lines on a map anymore. Magic didn’t care for borders. It found the cracks and leaked through—into basements, kitchens, schools, graves.

He wrote, in that slow way he had when something felt important:

“Magic is a tide. You don’t hand it down or wall it off. You meet it where it is. You learn to swim.”

And then, a few lines below:

“The lesson cost us a lot. But maybe now we understand: if power isn’t shared, it doesn’t last. And when the lights go out, even magic can’t fix everything.”

Chapter 9: A Cup Gone Cold

Albert paused mid-sentence, fingers hovering above the keyboard. The document blinked at him—Chapter 9, nearly finished. Outside, the rain drummed gently against the windowpane, steady and patient, like it had all the time in the world.

His coffee was cold again.

He sighed, then chuckled at himself. A small flick of the wrist, an awkward whisper, “calor minor” and the mug steamed faintly, the scent of overbrewed beans curling into the air.

It was the only spell he’d ever truly mastered.

Ten years since magic arrived, and still he fumbled with mind-patterns like a child trying to play piano with mittens. He’d tried, of course. Took a course. Read the books. Even bought one of those overpriced wands that promised “channel clarity.” But magic remained, for him, just out of reach—like trying to remember a dream from years ago. The harder he thought about it, the more it slipped away.

And maybe that was the point.

Everyone he’d interviewed, every caster he’d studied, even the so-called experts—they all described it differently. To some, it felt like breathing. To others, solving a puzzle blindfolded. For a few, it came in dreams, in whispers, in pain. No one understood magic. Not really.

And yet, it was here. In schools, in cities, in tragedy and triumph. It was a fact now. Like weather. Or gravity. Or love.

Albert sipped his coffee and frowned. Too hot.

He leaned back, rubbed his eyes, and stared at the blinking cursor again.

Maybe we weren’t meant to understand it, he typed slowly. Maybe magic isn’t a question to be answered, but a mirror. One that shows us not what we want to see—but who we are when the rules change.

He saved the file.

Then made a mental note to stop letting his coffee go cold.