There is a thing about magic that’s always true: it costs. The price varies. There are those who believe in High Magic, the ability to command the weather and move mountains. Everything always happens on two levels. Let me explain because I understand.

First: what you see. I give a command and I make things happen. That’s the easy part.

Then there is the hidden part. The part you do not see which accounts for nine tenths of the activity. I give a command for the clouds to part, for instance, and what happens is a mixture. Something of this world slides into the next until it meets the variation where the clouds have parted. And though it may appear like magic and totally acausal there is a cause and effect connection which is entirely invisible like a Rubic’s Cube that slides across all possible axes so that surfaces can move inwards as well as laterally.

 
The clouds part because something makes them happen, and my command takes part of one world and blends it with the part of another world that matches and in the process my own consciousness and that of those around me is transported so that we move also. Things change.

That’s the price. The obvious one.

There is another. Hidden. You do that, even once, and you give up your humanity. It does not matter if you want to or not. It does not matter if that was your design. It’s what happens, just like striking a match chars the matchhead that lights the fire. There is always a price.

You have to pay it.

Acausal effects are only what people see who have no vision. Just sight. Magicians always have vision. We can see in the dark and we can see without eyes and we see, even when we do not want to, what happens and why and most of the time we are powerless to stop it because we have no control.

We can make things happen but we cannot control the World. It is too big. The Balance too powerful.

Eventually we falter. Fall. Die.

That’s why we try hard not to do anything. Too many of us are enthralled by the vision. We see what works, why. Why things happen. And we watch.

Try hard to survive. Learn. Move on.

The moment we lose this impassivity we slip. The World claims us and like flotsam in the stream we go wherever we are washed and, because we have no choice, we act. That’s magic. That’s how it really is.

Still think it’s something you want to do right now?