obviously

A story is a story is just a story.

True. And more false than anything.

Our fairy tales and legends, our myths and harbingers and endings, all the ink-whispering hope against our eyes and ears, they cannot be broken into anything less than proud, wild stories.

And, more than anything, a story is never ‘just’ this or ‘just’ that.

It is everything, and it allows us to become.

There are countless stories about lovers being separated by magic, but what if instead of falling apart, they grew too close?

Imagine.

A wizard that traveled the lands, selling their art to those who need it for just enough to make a living with it. Their power without comparison. Nobody knew how they did it, what their secret it. It was too much strength for one, and the rumours spoke of dark contracts or monsters inside.

Only when their apprentice, a young one that was still learning and endlessly curious in their character, asked the one question: “Master, how are you so strong?” Then, the wizard said:

“It is a story that you have heard a million times. My magic came through lost love and the power that it gave.”

“Oh,” said the apprentice, shocked how their admired master could do such a thing. “You sacrificed someone to gain something.”

“Not quite.” And the wizard began to spread out a story of a human so beloved that nothing they shared felt close enough. No breath could be taken too near, no hand held for enough hours to feel two pulses as one. The apprentice sat still and with a wildly beating heart when the wizard stood and bared their back, shoulders to waist, and cruel eldritch lines slither across skin that was filled with old scars.

“We wished to be closer than anyone.”

The wizard’s face was white in the night, and their eyes carried the same darkness that curled in the shape of a human figure over their back. A whimper rose in the apprentice’s throat. The shape on their master’s back shifted, black tearing open until skin twisted in the hollow mouth of a thing that could have been human millenia ago.

“Oh, our wish was granted. Closer than anyone, that we are. Nothing is closer than making one out of two.”

A human sat down at night and raised their face to the moon.

“Tell me,” they asked, voice heavy from the dark in it, “is there hope?”

The moon was silent for a long time. It let a cloud pass by, let new stars come and watched old ones dim out. Then, it said:

“Dear human, what are you?”

The human hung their head. “Nothing. I am nothing but alive, not anything.”

And because the moon could not smile, it went full and round and silver instead, and shone down. “That, brave one, is your answer. There is hope, my child, because you are still here.”

an atlantis tale.

Nobody really remembers how, but some mythology professor ended up bringing the topic to a conference concerning the matter of Atlantis.

Fairy rings. The professor had been laughed at, in the beginning at least, until he’d began speaking. A circular formation of mushrooms, substance of legends and myths all over the world. The circle and the sphere held important meaning in magic as well as science, and some scientist couldn’t help but wonder, again and again, how a simple arrangement of plants could produce such stories…

Maybe we’re missing something, humanity told itself. Maybe our science hasn’t come far enough yet to detect what we call magic, to measure the form of energy it exudes.

Ancient cities that have vanished appear in stories and tales from almost any culture. Any story was inspired by something, a grain of truth at its core.

How come they couldn’t find Atlantis if there were so many myths about it, humanity wondered. What could possibly hide an entire city with thousands of people from the glance of the world across centuries? How could a whole city change place?

And so they thought, consulted, imagined – and found. A fairy ring, a circular formation below the ocean to thrum with energy we cannot yet measure. A pulse of something close to electricity, to teleportation, that is powerful enough to send buildings and people unharmed from one place to another. A formation in a round shape, grown naturally.

A portal on the bottom of the ocean, just like the so-called fairy rings on land –

Maybe the children of Atlantis love to play in the city’s beautiful coral reefs that surround the outer borders, where an unnamed energy vibrates in thousands of colours as the city shivers between worlds, dimensions, space and time.