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an excerpt

Prelude.

It started out easy enough. Bah, easy enough for me now. I wracked my brains about the decision for three weeks of sleepless nights and listless days. It is a difficult proposition to give up something to be, well… to be more. Oh, but the more that you can be. It is intoxicating. It is exhilarating, mesmerizing. It calls you… seduces you to give up more for even more. The lotus eaters understand to a point, but their touch with more is fleeting. “Lack of commitment” is what I call it, but that is beside the point. “There is only so far that talent alone can take someone,” the masters said. They said many things, but they did not prepare any in the class for the choices they would need to make. They said, “Choose something insignificant, something trivial and see what the repercussions are.” What they didn’t say was that it didn’t matter what we chose, it would not be insignificant. It would lead to a lifetime of self-denial and self loathing. A lifetime balancing between loss and gain. A lifetime balancing your humanity with the lust for more. A lifetime of determining levels of insignificance.

You see, magic is a balance of power and person. To get more power you must give of yourself. At the first it is just a matter of giving your energy, your heat… your… replenishables. To create flame I would focus heat from my body into a small piece of fluff or dried leaves. I would lose internal heat to create external heat. The bigger the flame, the more heat the body expends. There is a limit to this of course. The body has a self preserving ability. It will not let you kill yourself to burn a field. Just use flint and tender in a dry summer. The worst thing that happens when you over-exert yourself is passing out. In a few hours, you are back to snuff and you better know where you limits are.

The second stage is giving away parts of yourself that you deem “insignificant” for access to more power. Like I said, I labored over this decision for 3 long weeks. Who wants to go through the pain of sacrifice for an unknown? After those three weeks I finally made the choice, the little toe on my left foot. Imagine all the heat that is stored in your little toe over your lifetime. You sacrifice that toe and suddenly all that latent magical power is accessible. The voluntary pain was incredible. I had to endure all the potential pain that toe might suffer over the rest of my lifetime to access the latent power . Oh… that latent power… the first taste of real power. Wow, I can remember it right now… I can almost taste it. It is a sweet taste. The taste of honey. The taste of victory. The taste of power.

There is not a magician worth their salt out there walking around on ten toes. Most are missing toes, fingers, teeth, earlobes, and other pieces deemed unnecessary after the taste of power. But physical sacrifices are just the beginning. The third level of sacrifice involves giving up different aspects of yourself to gain more specifically exotic powers. For example, Master Yulé gave up his sense of taste. He never enjoyed eating and now sustenance is something of pure necessity for him. He drinks this awful tasting tincture of dubious origins and lives for things other than food. He has lost at least fifty pounds since that sacrifice, but now he can see the details of a butterfly’s wings from two miles away. He gave up one sense to enhance another. It is a trade off. This is the balancing act all magicians are constantly living. How much sacrifice until you lose something that defines who you really are.

Magicians of any power are disfigured troglodytic social misfit freaks who constantly obsess of pieces of themselves that they deem un-useful so they can transmute those things into power. We are a popular bunch and much fun at parties. The magicians that you should look out for are the magicians that look entirely typical save for a few missing fingers or toes. They have given something of themselves that should have remained whole and the repercussions are grave. They have near limitless power but nothing else.

Physically, I have only three fingers on each hand, three toes on each foot, fewer teeth than I should, and one eye, but I am an excellent conversationalist and much fun at parties. I have other powers, but then you would know some of the things that I sacrificed to gain that power. Just remember that I am what I am today because of the sum of all I have given.