Magic

by Blake Carpenter

–

It’s a magic city.[1]

            Here gloom falls from terra-vents, sewaging below and beyond The City of Mana, cascading its deep crimson contents over a forgotten land, Hieitus. The City strives among the clouds, above its waste; Hieitus slouches beneath, managing without the niceties of uniform structures created in mere minutes, without the universities that share their secrets, without the hierarchy of elemental niches, without magic (and its pleases).

            The City Head, the Chancellor, has the wrinkles of a fascist.[2] Wrinkles that have, are, and will see the atrocities he’s committing and subsequently shrouding.

…

“People live there?” said a woman peering over City’s Edge—the fringe of her world.[3]

            “Not ‘people’, animals, but afraid so.” The man joined in the peering, watching the gloom fold across opaques that exposed the sprawling dots of not-people, “I hear they can’t even incarnate.”[4]

            “What? But animals incarnate.”

            “Not them.”[5]

            The woman brought a thumb to her chin, “Monsters then?”

            “Wha…what’s a mo… monst—er?” stuttered a child who was about to learn.[6]

            The woman proposed a visage worse than savage. She’s never seen a Hieite, of course, but certainly thought she described one well; from what could be reasoned, justified, in novel discovery, could be veiled in mysticism.[7] Smog, below the plateau state, had been clearing after all. The City sought this new land and thus dazzled adverts over its population—one that had become crowded.[8]

            The campaign was effective:

APPLY FOR DAEMONSHIP NOW! FIRE INCARNATES—FRONTLINE PREFERRED!

            Just the idea of working elements in ways previously not permitted was enough for fire-, shock-, and kinetic-mancers to storm Hieitus in droves. But hitherto them, the First Strike.[9]

…

Becoming a Daemon begins, and ends, with education. A good soldier should know their enemies—what they are, and what they aren’t. A good cop should know their criminals—those who are in the way. A good enforcer, a good Daemon, should know about the Hieites—not anything; no single thing: having no prospect of progress; of no value: not at all: nothing.[10]

…

Account from something:

“They were just walking—liberating the air with their radiance. I did not know them…I mean, I’ve seen them before, once, maybe twice at the market gate, or the local bodega. I’d liked to have known them. Hieitus loved to congest itself with extra faces, before the Daemons, before The City, but I digress: they were just walking—eyes never lingering, though still sparing attention and space to those who had it, like Baptiste, the Quarter butcher. ‘How’s little Jean?’ they asked. Baptiste was proud of his son, his fulsome face said as much. They continued exchanging glances and grins that reflected the scarlet break of that day—and the Strike. I was leaving the bodega then—when they were just walking, talking, smiling, and then they were nothing. That is why I fight.”

…

The City ate them.[11]

            There never was a New Hieitus.[12]

…

---

[1] The first scene establishes setting, the evidential influence of magic throughout The City, and a reference to Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, “It’s a port city. Here fumes rust the sky…”

[2] A term that’s lost all meaning after the Rifts, after the cleansing of the world.

[3] From Old Planet, Sara Ahmed’s Affective Economies, “The politics of fear as well as hate is narrated as a border anxiety: fear speaks the language of ‘floods’ and ‘swamps,’ of being invaded by inappropriate others, against whom the nation must defend itself.”

[4] To incarnate, is to be one with magic and manipulate its forces.

[5] From Old Planet, Jennifer McDonell’s Literary Studies, the Animal Turn, and the Academy, McDonell presses the “othering” of the already “othered,” its propensity to change, and its systematic terrors—like how, for a time, people of Old Planet had this irrational fear of a subsect of canine called “The Pitbull”—lovable dopes they were.

[6] From Old Planet, Paul B. Armstrong’s How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstong analyses aesthetic experience taken from literature and art, and the formative, often misconstrued, nature of reading/processing. The child will never see what an actual Hieite looks like, how they act, and thus take the woman’s tale at its face.

[7]From Old Planet, Tobin Siebers’ The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification, Siebers deconstructs the effectiveness of disqualifying and discriminatory propaganda. Funny word, “mysticism,” in a setting woven by magic.

[8] An issue, for as long as there’s hormones within glands, magic cannot solve, not yet anyway.

[9] The first of many sky raids that barred Hieitus from its surrounding resources. Fire magics known only to the Chancellor initially targeted Roamers—Hieites that lived off the Rim, who traveled freely through Hieitus, still clueless of what loomed above.

[10] The varying definitions of “nothing” and what The City says is below the gloom.

[11] From Old Planet, Michael Parrish Lee’s Eating Things, “The City ate them,” like the not-people they could scarcely be.

[12] Hieitus; [Hee-ādəs]; “He ate us.”

…

Works Cited:

Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, vol. 22 no. 2, 2004, p. 117-139. Project MUSE. Accessed 5 May 2024.

Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Project MUSE. Accessed 3 May 2024.

Delany, Samuel R. Babel-17. Open Road Media, 2014.

Lee, Michael Parrish. “Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 68, no. 4, 2014, pp. 484–512. JSTOR. Accessed 3 May 2024.

McDonell, Jennifer. “Literary Studies, the Animal Turn, and the Academy.” Social Alternatives, vol. 32, no. 4, Jan. 2013, p. 6. Accessed 5 May 2024.

Siebers, Tobin. “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification.” Literary Theory: an anthology. 3rd Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Wiley Blackwell, 2017. 1487-1506. Print.