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Returning back to Earth is a disappointing experience. The world feels so lifeless without talking trees and quests to complete. Even the Song of Creation feels muted, and the wizard must strain to hear it.
The white noise of city life nearly drowns it out, unable to properly harmonize with the Song.
The wizard is quieter here. They revert back to the child they once were, the unsure new student warped into a world beyond what they had ever known. There is no magic here on Earth and they feel disquieted by this. They are unsettled by the fact that this unsettles them, unsure of when they had gotten so used to magic and its ambient forces that swirl and dance through the air in the worlds they had visited.
The wizard sees their old friends. Children who grew up, now nearing adulthood. Some of them have new names, others have fallen in love, others have moved away to never be seen again.
These friends comment on how the young wizard still has that same babyface. They don’t mention the scar bisecting one of the wizard’s eyes, they don’t mention the unnatural sparks and glints in those eyes, they don’t mention how on edge the wizard is. These friends are afraid and unsettled and don’t wish to make things awkward or upsetting, because they do not want confrontation. They thought their friend had died (or worse) years ago, and to have them back at all was stranger than any differences they carried.
The young wizard doesn’t find it in themself to explain it all to anyone. They don’t think they can.
Their parents don’t look at them and see who they are either. They see the child they lost, the one they mourned for. They can’t help but treat them as a child.
Legally dead, after so many years. To be gone for so long with no lead, no suspects, nothing. Their parents have to do a lot of paperwork to ensure they are legally alive again. They can’t help but laugh at the thought, remembering so many lessons on necromancy, remembering ghouls clawing out of graves and skeletal creatures and an exhausted teacher’s assistant.
When asked where they’ve been, they don’t say anything. No one presses them too hard.
They don’t know why their parents or friends or even the authorities don’t grab them by the shoulders and shake them, demanding an answer. They don’t know why everyone is so hesitant to ask this of them, to ask more and more, to take their time and effort and skill and use it.
No one asks anything of them. They let the young wizard live in peace. No one bothers them in their room, a silent shrine to the child they were, still as they had left it. They sit among unloved stuffed animals and too small clothes and wonder why no one cares enough to push past the most meager of boundaries
They don’t know why they want this. They don’t know if they should just stand up and scream at everyone to actually look at them and not treat them as a glass sculpture of a lost child, but a person who is obviously hurt. They don’t know if any of this is worth it, old friends and the people that raised them and living without purpose.
Their parents timidly bring up school, attending classes or getting a tutor to bring them up to speed if needed.
The young wizard stands up from the kitchen table and goes to their room and no one follows them. They sit on the twin sized bed and shake and don’t know why. Their body goes numb and time slows and hours drag and they don’t exist in their body at this time, they just exist and don’t know why they’re so empty and scared.
Their parents don’t bring up school again.
The young wizard spends a lot of time just sitting out in the yard, absorbing the sunshine and listening to the birds and thinking about if a garden could be made here. They can’t remember any non-magical garden plants. They think about Professor Wu’s lessons on plant care, they remember working side by side with Ceren out tending to flowers that sang and roared and twisted with Life.
On dark nights they sit and watch the fireplace, numb and holding a fiction book written for middle schoolers that they don’t open. The fire is electric, and provides no warmth. They can’t help but watch it as if it will suddenly truly burn, consuming all in its path, warping into creatures. It never does. They feel cold.
Their parents gently ask if they’d like to go to bed. It’s only eight P.M. They go to bed and have nightmares.
Things continue like this. They rarely do anything of substance and waste away.
At one point they are dragged out grocery shopping. They wear thrifted and secondhand clothes their old-new-current friends got them. Even with a jacket two sizes too large and out of style jeans, they feel restricted and vulnerable. They got used to the flowy, dress-like robes. They got used to enchanted armor, metallic and constricting but protective.
They grab things off of the shelves in the store and their parent lets them, never denying them anything. Just to test, they choose the more expensive, name-brand products and still are not denied even if it's just a name on a box making it several dollars more expensive. Some of it they actually want, because they haven’t had such junk food in years. Pizza Rolls and Hot Pockets and shitty microwavable pizzas, just because the hot and barely real cheese will taste good and appeal to the part of them that still feels and wants anything.
They get to choose sodas and juice and sugary cereals their parent would normally have scolded them for. They grab a container of pre-made fruit salad even though they could easily ask their parent to make it instead. They pick out a box of oatmeal raisin cookies and not a word is said.
Testing limits doesn’t do anything. Their parent is simply happy that they are making choices, doing anything at all. Their parent is simply happy that they are alive and here even if they want to survive off of Fruit Loops and root beer.
The young wizard gives up on this and goes wandering, muttering something about going to the car.
This is when they run into an old classmate who is shocked they’re alive.
The young wizard just shuffles uncomfortably as this old acquaintance- bully, really- rambles so happily about them being alive. They say some bullshit about how they were such good friends as kids and that they obviously had been messing around and that how they had felt so horrible when the young wizard had gone missing and isn’t it so great to be back, isn’t it so great to be missed, isn’t it all so great to just live here in this shithole city rotting away and doing nothing and being nothing when they had been someone, been something, and now no one cares and they’re just a shithead kid again who can’t even manage to be a good child for their parents, let alone a person at all-
The young wizard doesn’t remember how that conversation ends, too absorbed in their own mind, hands shaking and scratching at their own arms as they walk away, staring off into the distance. They don’t know what happened but they can’t be here, with people, in a motherfucking grocery store of all things, listening to shitty radio top hits they don’t recognize and hearing toddlers shouting and cashiers chirping to have a nice day, have a great day, see you next time, thank you for shopping, thank you, goodbye now, have a good one.
Nothing happens and they’re standing in the middle of a parking lot full of metallic beetle cars and the sun bakes into them and the asphalt beneath them. They stare at the small gatherings of crows and blackbirds sitting in the shades of the few trees and they watch as the birds scavenge for crumbs, some of them convening around a food truck for greater spoils.
They don’t remember what their parent’s car looks like, and they awkwardly stand in the sunshine in the middle of the parking lot and have to move when someone honks at them for being in the way. The birds scatter as they sit on the curb under a scrappy tree.
They don’t remember why they thought any of this would be a good idea. Why did they spend countless nights homesick for this.
They want to return to the Spiral, the real Spiral, where magic sings to them, where the birds and bees and trees all can talk, where they have a purpose. Where they learn their spells and theory and magic and they are given quests to go on, people to talk to and help, enemies to defeat and threaten and kill. Without all of that, what even are they?
Who is the young wizard when they’re suddenly nearly an adult, and just an average person?
They can’t live like this, they think, but they haven’t even been living at all.
Their parent rolls a shopping cart out of the store and calls to them with a laugh, waving them over to the car. They help store overflowing plastic bags of food into the car. They stare out the window on the drive home. Their parent turns on the radio, and the same shitty hit song is playing, and the lyrics are something about fucking in a club and never forgetting this night, and neither of them comment on the silence stretching between parent and child, a canyon no one would cross.
When the young wizard had been a child they would demand shotgun, and control the radio with glee, rarely actually able to find a station they liked, usually ending up on some obscure talk show or something not even in English, and then insisting it’s what they wanted and subjecting their parents to it for the rest of the car ride.
They don’t give a shit about that anymore. Every song pales in comparison to the Song of Creation, it feels lifeless and empty without those refrains of the Song that Life magic emulates, it feels like nothing but words because there’s no magic. Music should be magic, it is the basis of the universe, and the young wizard knows this. They don’t say anything, but wish they could turn the radio off.
They’re dragged out more, by friends and parents. They return to their room with new books and games and clothes. They go out and eat ice cream and go to museums and aquariums and a zoo at one point. They supposedly are making memories and being a person again or something but apathy is stronger, surging up and engulfing any moment of supposed joy into a fog of nothingness, so when they look back on these times they only feel vague emptiness and remember flashes of moments and the bare minimum.
At some point they hear their parents talking about taking them to a therapist.
Just a week later they’re sitting in some soft chair across from a well meaning young woman who has a clipboard and everything and asks soft probing questions just so they can get to know each other.
The young wizard is half tempted to just start rambling about the Spiral, about magic and Ravenwood and the fact that they totally murdered people, Malistaire chief among them. They don’t. They sit awkwardly in near silence and give nonanswers and toy with a piece of paper in their hands, slowly ripping it into pieces.
Things devolve from there. Their parents start arguing more about what to do. Their friends stop trying to reach out, one by one dropping off and visiting less and less. They don’t find it in themselves to care.
They want to go back to shitty dorm life and stressful classes and being ordered to kill but because it’s with magic it doesn’t feel real enough to matter, because they’re saving the Spiral, everything leads to that, and it’s enough justification for them.
They want to go back.
They haven’t bothered trying to cast magic on Earth. Not without their wand and spellcards. They try now, in the middle of the night when they’re barely coherent but still stupid and tired enough to try.
The night is cold, it’s been months and so they’ve seen spring slip into summer and now fall is upon them, dying leaves and cold nights accompanying their few ventures out of the house. They don’t know where to start. They have nothing of magical value, and haven’t even used their magic in months.
They’ve begun to believe maybe it all was a dream, some fantasy or delusion they clung to as they were kidnapped or whatever made them go missing that they’ve used to survive and warped their brain into believing wholeheartedly. Maybe something horrible happened to them and they can’t remember it because they were a child and their brain couldn’t allow them to remember it if they wanted to survive.
Reflexively they sink into the fog of nothingness to hide from any panic that rises. They sit in the dying grass and wrap their arms around their knees, barely there as they stare up at the unfamiliar sky and its foreign constellations.
They begin to hum, unknowingly harmonizing with the Song of Creation. A breeze brushes past, tugging at their hair playfully. The grass beneath them shifts and loses some of its yellow tinge.
They hum mostly to comfort themself, hands moving from around their knees to into their hair, pulling to ground themself, to be here in their body and alive and anything at all. The Life magic they’ve manifested curls around them, twining between their fingers and loosening their grip, giving them something less harmful to dig their nails into.
Their breath comes raggedly and heart beats rapidly and yet still it is in time with the Song, it always is. Dead flowers raise their heads once again to bloom in their neighborhood. Trees grow new leaves, and the scent of spring fills the air, wet and fertile earth and fresh cut grass and sweet delicate fruits. The young wizard whines in pain and frustration, tears spilling over easily despite how they haven’t cried ever since they arrived back to Earth, and the magic around them thrashes and tries to comfort them.
The Song misses its favorite wizard, its savior, its prodigy theurgist, its chosen child. The Song is so far above mortality that it barely has a consciousness, having risen above the need for one, and yet it knows what it wants, and it is selfish, as it has always been since Bartleby sang it into existence. It demands to be listened to, it orchestrates the entirety of the Spiral and its movements. It is fate and the fabric fate is woven into.
It is both the Song and the wizard that sings it.
It wishes to return to when things were simpler, to when it was naive and sweet and that child their parents still see, to when it had a purpose and they learned so much and its universe was magical and infinite.
The young wizard wakes disoriented in a strange place. An old man and an owl peer at them.
They are asked their name.