April 19

record, suspicion, seasonal, censorship, mask, recycle, stumble, confront, printer, lake

Crouched at the mouth of the alley, I wanted to record the moment. I finally stumbled over my own magic while searching for someone else’s! But I could clearly hear Sidi’s “Wait, somebody’s coming,” as if she’d been whispering in my ear. Telepathy, how cool was that?

We saw the three figures approaching the side door of Headquarters, moving casually with no suspicion that they were being observed. Jasmine made a move to confront them, but I held her back.

“Let’s see how they open the door,” I whispered. But we hardly got to see anything. Jas jumped and was on the three in a flash, bowling them through the door they’d opened with a key. Now wearing a mask, Poa charged right behind her and sent a man sprawling when he tried to rise.

Sidi closed the door behind her and announced, “Humans, all three. Not a trace of magic in them.”

Many humans carried a sort of “recycled” magic generated from magical ancestors hundreds of years before The Proclamations declared by Full Light. The Proclamations included death sentences for procreation with humans (all the sex you wanted but no offspring) and censorship (absolutley no spells or incantations, written or uttered).

Until the Proclamations, there’s been seasonal free-for-alls that resulted in thousands of demi magicals in the Half-Light. Did you really think that Queen Kandake or Leonardo da Vinci were mere humans? The abilities of humans like them threatened Full Light. So the Veil was created and populated in an effort to make the separation complete.

We didn’t need to conjure any light. We were standing in a veritable lake of glowing shoe boxes. A printer in one corner had been used for churning out labels that read “Curry Kobe Jordan, step into magic!”