Monica's Modern Magic - The Fade

“This is no joke, Monica O’Randel. You are a mage.”

            Fresh out of middle school, Monica thought moving from the city to her grandmother's old house in the woods was going to be her biggest change this summer. She had always enjoyed her Grandma Addie's stories about being magic and going on all sorts of fantastic adventures with the many strange and wondrous beings that lived in the forest around her home. But she is about to find out that they weren't just stories. Magic is returning to our world, and with it, so too are creatures long thought only myth and fairytale.

1st three chapters available on Deviant Art

        The Fade: Every wonder where all the creatures in old stories, goblins and elves, dwarves and pixies, nymphs and sprites, came from? Our many cultures are filled to bursting with such mysterious beings, so they must have been around at some point. But no one has seen them in so long, where did they all go?

    Well, many ages ago, when the world was still new and man was still young, magic did indeed exist. And with it, all the creatures now thought only fable and fantasy. Raw magic was known as mana, and the world was filled with it. Much like air, it flowed freely all around, unseen but felt. The many beings tied to it, the Faye, were friends to us then and taught a few to wield mana, gather it, alter it, and do wondrous, magical things with it. These select few were the first mages.

      With their new magic, mages strove to make life in a harsh world a little easier for them and their people. Magic could douse crops with water, keep homes warm with fire, clear paths with earth, and even speed ships with wind. Because of its many valued uses, the mages of the world were often given high status and greatly respected in their cultures.

     Excited by this new power, mankind eagerly used magic, not knowing the mana needed to fuel it was limited. And like all things, when taken from too greedily, it eventually began to disappear. Mana-less regions began to appear in the world and the many creatures tied to mana were forced to leave them. But even seeing this, man had grown too dependent on magic's many conveniences, and so continued to draw in more mana to fuel spell and after spell, and in doing so, caused the mana-less regions to spread. This forced out the many beings of the supernatural, who needed mana to live, pushing them further and further from humanity as mana was steadily ripped from the world. This depletion of mana and the exodus it brought was called, the Fade.

     As the Fade continued, it forced those fleeing from it into ever shrinking pockets, further and further from man's sight and attention. Countless numbers of Faye perished, unable reach or hold onto these last few mana rich lands. Those that did only managed by viciously fighting for what they could claim. Despite this new animosity toward one another, these few survivors never forgot the cause of their strife.

     Mankind, however, being short lived and forgetful, discarded magic, and all things related to it, the moment it was no longer of use to them. With much of the Earth now mana-less, mages could no longer perform their once great feats and steadily fell from their places of reverence. Man turned toward a new source of power, technology, and let the old beings they had once shared the world with, drift away into increasingly distant memory.

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