Sharp Leashes for Kept Wizards

Leashed 

Wizards are not fit for society. No matter how much a wizard might want to leverage their knowledge, curses and tools for a normal life it will never be available to them. If it was, they would cease to be wizards, settled in stultifying normalcy. Many have no use for society. 

Society will find uses for them. 

Some wizards fail to hide their presence. Some strive too hard for a normal life and others fail to manage their assets properly. Thus does their projected mastery meet the grinding wheels of capital and government. Thus can a wizard become a dog. 

Lillian Blythe

John Singer Sargent - Pensive Girl

Lillian Blythe found perfection when she was sixteen. There was a boy just a few years older than her, just out of high school. His name was Duncan or Dylan or something, but names hardly mattered. He loved her. He said so. Lillian loved him. She thought she'd die without him. He was so beautiful. Pale, fair, and thin. The Daunorubicin kept him that way. 

It would be unfair to call Lillian a stalker. Devon or Damian appreciated the attention at first. But Lillian did not have time for anything but perfection. Her embrace left bruises on perfections skin and she could hardly bear it. But she knew he loved her. He said so. Love, she knew, is the most powerful force in the universe. 

Or maybe it's cancer.

They buried Daniel Prince in the Wilkesboro cemetery in the pouring rain. His parents forbade Lillian to come. There was a scene. Broken orbital bones and bite marks on aunts and cousins. Lillian spent two years in state prison. Her heart had broken, was breaking, would break. Dawson or Declan was forever taken from her. But her love could bring him back. She knew it. The woman who lived in the cistern at the jail told her it was true. 

She whispered to Lillian a simple recipe.

1 quart menstrual blood

2 tbsps. genuine tears

3 reptile hearts (the bigger the better)

1 hair of the deceased, ground to powder

6 oz. heavy cream

1 sheet gelatin

1. Gather and prepare all ingredients. 

2. Chew the reptile hears into a paste. Spit the resulting paste in the bottom of a slow cooker.

3. Sprinkle with powdered hair and tears.

4. Brown on low for three hours.
5. Meanwhile mix heavy cream and menstrual blood. Heat to 98.2 degrees. 

6. Pour over reptile hearts and add gelatin. Mix gently.

7. Place in the fridge to set for 6 hours.

8. Remove and enjoy.

So long as she genuinely enjoyed the dish the spell worked. It only took four tries for her to learn to like it, which was a kind of victory all its own. Unfortunately there was a problem. It did return Daniel Prince to her, rising from his grave healed of rot and harm and perfect. But it cured him. Wrap the cord around his neck and try again.

Lillian tried the recipe twice before she was noticed posting on certain websites by employees of a highly connected corporation. The Firm was more than happy to smile and listen to Lillian as she babbled about her recipes, which she had been testing on animals and strangers at this point. They were oh so sympathetic. Of course they could help her with ingredients. Of course they could find her old books and scraps of knowledge. 

But wouldn't she rather just do it the easy way? There were other perfect nineteen year old boys in the world. There were almost more nineteen year old boys with leukemia, after all. It was the easy way out, bringing their dead back to life in return for a new Devon or Dustin every few years. Her heart had broken, was breaking, would break again and again. But it was the easy way out.

Egan Bury

Abbot H. Thayer - Head of the Artist

So they told you you could have it. White picket fences and a 401k. An obedient wife and children you could be proud of. Sitcom simple problems all throughout your days. Not for you, Mr. Bury. Born too late and too poor to make a go of it. Abusive mother, absent father. No kind of way to grow up. Drop out of high school, get a job in retail. Everyone vile. Everyone hateful. A string of cruel women, barely kinder than your mother. Her death certificate said alcohol poisoning. You figure that's close enough.

Twenty turns to thirty. You scrape just enough money to get a house. The bottom falls out of the economy so no house, no money. Watch as it Vanishes like smoke. Take another half dozen jobs, each one vile, each one hateful. Obliterate your back lifting a 55" plasma TV you could never afford. Workers comp denied. Pain constant. Not from the slipped disc. From the slipping world. The broken promises. 

Magic came to you in fits and starts, from the cracked old CRT TV screen. Late night infomercials slipped into reruns of old sitcoms. Somewhere in there was the truth, in the crack between them. The one you'd fallen into. But through the crack there it was. And you could have it. 

Pull a tooth, ideally a molar. Soak it in hydrogen peroxide, watch the bubbles spin. Leave it on the altar, the cracked CRT TV. It cooks in waste heat, while you watch the crack grow wider between what they promised you and the world that is. For ten easy payments of $10.99 you too can laugh with your wife about your son's latest antics. Sometime during this, induce a fever. Simulated works, but better to eat at dozens of restaurants with bottom of the barrel health inspection grades. So close, so ready to take a bite of the good life. 

When you use the spell at last, after the fever has broken and the tooth has been braised into a reddish kind of pearl, spend a week exultant. Your ex-girlfriend wants you back. An inexplicable offer of a job at a bank. A neighbor moves in next door with whom you have an instant rapport. It is happening.

They know to watch. Wizards in the fullness of their power are hard to leash. No carrot or stick will suffice to those who have descended far enough. But you? You, Egan Bury, want such terribly quotidian things. They can give it to you, the tired men in dark suits. A house, a job, even a wife and eventually the resulting son. They can make it happen. 

But.

You know it can away at any moment. You can squirm and thrash and gnaw at the limb you've stuck in their trap. Their grip is tighter and tighter. They hold the reigns of respect, of the nice family in the white neighborhood. Their price is greater and greater. Read this, try this, do this. Late at night eyes burning as the cracked CRT TV, final reminder of all your fuckups and failings, spits satellite photos, infomercials, pornography, war footage, decapitations. The crack in the screen holds some truth between them. You can feel it. 

You haven't figured out a spell beyond your first, the one that smooths lives and brings impossible fortune. But they are sure you are close. Maybe once they find it you'll have earned what you were promised.