By Amara Mesnik
From Goblins & Galaxies #2 Winter 2026
Davey Nott was not the dumbest wizard in New York. I actually thought he was kind of brilliant. Dude was an idea factory, cranking out schemes faster than Diva Syrenne shat out new albums (and she was hexed to never rest a day in her life). You’d think it would’ve made him an entrepreneurial whizz. He sure did try. But his strength was also his downfall; his quick mind was like quicksand. Concepts seldom swelled to full term before he started nipping at the next pretty thing.
So it was that in the spring of this year, Davey’s fourth startup attempt went under. It was called WizWeb, meant to be a forum for people to connect with and hire specialized magicians. Menders, transmuters, alchemists, charmlayers, you name it. And yes, I know, it sounds just like MagePage, but there was a huge difference. You can’t even get listed on MagePage without hours of paperwork to verify your accreditations. Not everyone can attend a wizarding Ivy or blow thousands on certification courses. WizWeb cut out the snags in the process and made its internal recommendation system user-review-based. Democracy.
The whole thing sounded pretty cool, and much more viable than his previous concepts, so I let Davey pull me back in as a developer. He was the thinker, but I was the maker. I built out the site, and the launch went great.
Until the Feds came knocking, because apparently 90% of WizWeb’s blossoming user base were members of the illicit sorcery scene.
Yeah. Maybe we shouldn’t have left the task of discernment to the public. And maybe Davey shouldn’t have conceived our system to allow financial exchanges in Sygillium—a fucking cryptocurrency. You really should’ve seen it coming, I’m sure you’re thinking. But let me make this all quite clear:
Davey Nott was not the dumbest wizard in New York, because I was.
*~*~*
Two days after the Federal Bureau of Magical Investigations’ Cybercrime Division seized our computers, I got bored of being mad at Davey and met him in the park to smoke. My girlfriend was in one of her moods again, so I was as good as banished for the afternoon anyway.
When I reached our secret spot under an overladen willow, Davey was spread out on a bleach-stained bath towel, already packing his hand-cauldron with something caustically violet. He’d always been in the habit of slipping a few herbal packets from his mom’s apothecary into his sleeves, but this purple shit wasn’t something I’d seen before.
“The fuck is that?”
Davey flashed a smile that made my hands itch. “This, my friend, is a toast to our next big move.”
“Absolutely not. We’ve already got the Feds sniffing around. If they catch a whiff that we’re pushing–”
“That’s not what this is. Just sit down and listen.” Davey chucked another ragged towel at me, then lit the cauldron with a finger-flick and took a long, slow pull of indigo haze. He coughed, then burped, and explained: “Tyrian glowdust. New on the market, organic or some shit, I don’t fuckin’ know. It’s smooth on the intake and’ll have you seeing auras after one hit. But that’s not the point. It’s who I got it from.”
He pulled out his ‘other-other-phone’, the sole survivor of the FBMI’s confiscation, and showed me the lock screen image. It was a grinning cartoon wizard of the sagely sort: long beard, dripping in robes. The sort of stereotype you weren’t supposed to reference anymore, even though half the wizzies in the outer boroughs still rocked the cloaks and staffs. At first glance, I thought it was some new cereal mascot, but the linework was too shitty to have passed by a brand team. Not to mention inconsistent; the sigil plate drawn in the little dude’s hands was incongruously detailed compared to the simple figure who held it. Starkly so, I realized, squinting to make out the intricacies. I wasn’t a sigillustrator by any means, but it almost looked real enough to hold a spell. Which would’ve been nuts, if it was what I thought it was.
I chucked the phone back onto his lap. “Seriously? An NFT? Nobody does that shit anymore, man. I hope you didn’t spend actual money on that.”
“Bro, you don’t even know. This is an actual SygMonk, fresh from their new drop. Yeah, I spent the money, but it’s not just a picture. Buying one of these is your ticket into the Monastery—the Sygillium Monastery. I know you’ve heard of it. Every top wizard in the world is in the club, man. Grandmaster Barthelius, Dark Jacob, Odious Aldrador, Lupo Parnaxus. They still do meetups, and they’ve got hookups like you won’t believe. And money. I’m already pitching WizWeb 2. You need to get one of these, man. I know you’ve got Sygillium in your wallet just rotting. Plus, these cute little guys all come with an AI-composed Sigil of Blessing. Look at this shit. I got a Brighten.” Davey muttered some words under his breath and waggled his fingers at his phone screen. The air around him began to glow.
Had to admit, I was impressed; most AI magecraft models were too underdeveloped to string together a coherent spell. Even at the height of NFT hype, the projects I’d seen promising some kind of magical potency had all turned out to be rugpulls or poisoned apples. But Davey’s JPEG almost seemed like the real deal: generative sigillustration.
Curiosity set my fingertips ajitter, and suddenly, my own other-phone was in my hands. If joining this project meant I could meet the masterminds… a few lessons from them in advanced digital sorcery could go miles beyond the pricey postgrad dev-casting courses I’d been eyeing. Maybe they could even offer me a real job.
And if the socials saw me hanging out with folks like Aldrador and Parnaxus…
Damn. My whole life could finally change.
*~*~*
I was so starry-eyed about my future, I’d forgotten all about my pissed-off girlfriend. When I returned to our one-bedroom Wartsburg broom closet, the petite Long-Islander was standing in the narrow galley kitchen with her arms crossed, aura flaring crimson. I showed her the little smiling mage on my other-phone.
“Babe,” I said. “This is it. I’m gonna change our lives. Soon, we’re gonna be living so well.”
“I hope you’re joking,” said Zanylla, like ‘vanilla’ but za-ny, she always told new people with a sing-song voice and a little shimmy. She wasn’t dancing now. “You’d better be fucking joking.”
I sighed. Sometimes I forgot she was Sparkless, a member of the non-magical majority. “I knew you wouldn’t get it.”
“What is there to get? You just blew your savings on a dumbass picture that looks like a little kid drew it.”
“It’s modern art. One of a kind, and spelled—no screenshots, no saves, no dupes. It’s tied to my wallet, my name, so I’m the only one who can ever have it. Very cool tech magic. And anyway, it’s about the community. Every big-name mage has a SygMonk. You like Lupo Parnaxus, right? Now we’re in the same exclusive club.”
Her scowl softened, though her arms stayed crossed. “You and Lupo? Really?”
“Really. Maybe I can take you to meet him at the next event.”
Zanylla ran a hand through her bottle-blonde hair, looking daydreamy. “Must be a nice event if Lupo’s going. I’d need to look the part. That means new hair, new nails, new products, new clothes…”
“You look gorgeous already. You don’t need any of that. Just be yourself.”
Her scythe-sharp eyebrows bunched. “Now you’re the one who doesn’t get it. You can’t be yourself and get ahead. You’ve got to be better. Even if you have to fake it.”
“Yeah? Whose money are you faking it with?”
“My loving boyfriend’s, who said he was gonna take care of me and make me happy.” Zanylla pouted. “What kind of wizard are you? Can’t you just magic us some nice things?”
“That’s not how it works. There are laws against–”
“Fuck the laws. You’ve got the Spark. If you stopped being such a wuss about it, you could make your life so much cooler. You think Lupo hasn’t transfigured himself some extra cash here and there?”
“I’m sure he has. People like him can do that sort of thing without a spell-sniffing cop batting an eye. But I’m not him. I’m under federal orders not to leave the city from the last time I tried to flex the rules. I’m doing all that I can, Zee. But the bills have gotta come first, and I’m still not sure if Davey can send me my last paycheck while the investigation’s on. Maybe, just maybe, if you got a job, too, you wouldn’t have to rely on me to treat yourself.”
Zanylla’s cheeks flushed to match her aura. “You really are the bottom rung, you know that? You think you’re gonna make it big, but you haven’t even started climbing. And I’m done trying to show you how. Have fun with Dead-Weight Davey and your faerie-scam wiz club. I hope it’s worth it.” She swept her hair over her shoulder and stormed into the bedroom.
I sank down onto the sofa, mocking her words under my breath, and tapped my phone to display the lock screen. “You’re worth it,” I assured the Monk, reflecting its grin. “She’ll see.”
***
I woke up to a note. Zanylla had gone to her sister’s in Queens. She needed some space to breathe and think, two activities I was pretty sure she could do anywhere. Whatever. I needed some time to figure out what my Sigil of Blessing did. Then I could wow her with it, and she’d be too dazzled by the magic to be mad. I should’ve done that in the first place. It worked every time.
Aside from my other-phone and the kitchen appliances, the FBMI had taken everything with a power switch, so I was forced to refer to my stack of old college textbooks. The outline of the monitor stand they’d been propping up was still imprinted on the top volume in dust. The third tome down was what I needed: Infusing Symbolism – Advances in Dynamic Sigillustration. I cracked it open, palms growing reflexively clammy. Sig III was infamously the hardest class at CUNY Orbtower; I’d passed by the skin of my teeth, plus some embedded-eye cheating apparatuses Davey and I had home-brewed in the dorms.
I refreshed myself on all the aspects of a sigil—arcs, angles, trines, squares, radii, intercepts, recursions, starmarks— then got a piece of paper and started annotating everything I could identify on my little Monk’s plate. It was appallingly complex, like the works of the ancient master sigillustrators we had to decipher in class, yet even more mechanically precise. For every set of minutiae I uncovered, another two seemed to emerge in the periphery. I sighed, running a hand through my hair. This was gonna take–
Wait.
I looked at my hand. It was covered in a layer of fuzz. Of fur. Of… hair.
My hair.
I jumped up, sending my ergonomic gaming chair swiveling backwards. “What the fuck,” I breathed, flapping the dark strands from my fingers. Just to check, I passed my hand over my scalp again. Loose hair rained down around me like ultra-thin confetti.
I bolted to the bathroom, cursing as I fumbled for the light switch. When it blinked on, I stifled a screech.
My hair was all but gone. Only a few pitiful tufts remained. I looked like a tunnel troll, an elder gnome, or my neighbor’s crusty little chihuahua that time it got ringworm. And my face… Patches of skin were peeling off, edges curling like a bad sunburn. I picked experimentally at one of the cuticles. The skin lifted easily, and just kept lifting. My stomach twisted.
What the fuck. What the fuck.
My first thought was that Zanylla had gotten her psychotic witch friends to hex me again. The last time she’d been angry with me, they’d spelled my eyelids shut until I’d apologized. The time before that, they’d zapped all my shoes two sizes smaller. Reversible inconveniences were one thing, but this was beyond too far.
I called Zanylla. She didn’t pick up. I called again. This time she answered, with a sleepy voice as if she’d just woken up.
“What.”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? You fucking hexed me again.”
“No, I didn’t. Whatever you screwed up this time is your own damn fault.”
“My hair is falling out, Zanylla. My skin is peeling off. Are you sure you didn’t say something to the girls that might’ve pissed them off on your behalf? Maybe something they misinterpreted? ‘Cause, you know, they’re not really the most patient and understanding–”
Zanylla laughed. She chuckled and chortled and snorted for a full minute. Then her voice fell abruptly flat. “Fuck. You. Don’t call me again. I’ll come by later in the week to pick up my stuff. By then, I hope you’re bald. Dick.”
“Zanylla–”
The line went dead.
I sat down on the floor, ignoring the crunch of old crumbs under my ass.
Maybe Zanylla was right to laugh. I wouldn’t put this shit past her sadistic little girl gang, but this wasn’t something she’d have them do. She’d always said my hair was my best feature. And even if she wanted to split up, which I was starting to think she did, why waste the years of effort she’d invested into my skincare?
Well, if it wasn’t Zanylla’s petty hex, it had to be something. I hadn’t thrifted anything recently, which always bore the risk of bringing home an old curse or malignment. Nor did I recall crossing any mages, crones, jinn, or fae. I’d checked my apartment’s wards after the FBMI took my stuff to make sure none of my protection spells had been tied to my devices. The only new mageware in the place was–
My SygMonk.
I dropped into my gaming chair and snatched the textbook, heart thundering as I skipped past some of the trivial geometries and set about decoding the sigil’s Core Word. It took me almost an hour to figure out which pattern-case the AI had used, which turned out to be an astronomical dot-ref, and then another few to painstakingly isolate and match the clusters of dots in the sigil to stars along certain radii to produce one letter per cluster. From ascendant to descendant, I identified S, C, O, U, R… then dropped my pencil.
I dialed Davey.
“Yeeello? If this is about the check, I just need–”
“What the actual fuck, man. My SygMonk is a freaking Scourge. I just read the sigil. Did I get scammed?”
Davey sniffed. “Huh? That can’t be right. You got it from the site I sent you, yeah?”
“Yeah, I did. So what the fuck happened? Did I get bait-and-switched? Or did their stupid AI go haywire and actually mint me a hex?”
“I dunno, man.” Davey sighed; he sounded absolutely zooted. “I’d ask around the Monastery subscrolls if anyone else has had an issue like that. Maybe the admins can swap it out for you. At least it doesn’t have an auto-trigger. Shit would suck if that took effect.”
I sent him a selfie. He slurped in a breath through his teeth.
“Oogh. That’s… You know what? I got a silver lining for you: this is perfect timing for a bit of disguise. ‘Cause, uh, the Feds came back, and they were asking a lot of questions, and they gave me a funny little bracelet to wear around my ankle…”
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling the remnants of my eyebrows depart. “What did you tell them.”
“C’mon, man. You know I’m no yapper. But this old wiz came in with an Orb of Truth. I don’t think that’s even legal outside a courtroom–”
“What did you say.”
“Just… that I was aware all along who our users were. That I maaaybe might’ve advertised in a few underground locales. That it was all my idea, of course… but I miiight’ve mentioned you designed the entire platform. I know, I know—but they really seemed impressed by your code. I was just trying to give you props. I mean, when you think about it, the whole situation is pretty funny. In a few years, we’re gonna look back at this from our yachts and laugh–”
I hung up.
*~*~*
No returns. No refunds. Once it’s minted, it’s yours ’til you sell it.
Yeah, I’d skimmed the Ts and Cs when I was connecting my wallet, but I hadn’t expected to be dealt such a shitty hand. Now I read them again, thoroughly. The legal team must’ve been jinn or fae, because they didn’t mince a word and had their asses covered at every turn. Even if they accidentally vended a curse instead of a blessing, ‘the response to any sigil’s effect is subject to interpretation and thus cannot constitute a liability claim once the agreement has been signed’. No cuts, no buts, and definitely no magic coconuts.
I went to the official SygMonk exchange platform and put my nasty little wizard up for sale. Deranged glee nearly had me giggling at the thought of finding some other schmo to stick with it. A Scourge hex was an absolute nightmare; its target would soon find their life swiftly, meticulously, and perhaps even literally torn to shreds. The sooner I could get this thing off me, the better, since its effect was already well underway.
Which was, I’d bet, exactly why my listing was reported hardly ten minutes later.
Fake listing was given as the reason. Bullshit. I’d set it up directly from my Monastery account, which contained the hash, metadata, and any other verification info someone could possibly need. This wasn’t WizWeb’s laissez-faire approval system, this was the blockchain. How could it possibly be faked?
I hit ‘appeal’, then went over to the Scrolld app and asked the SygMonkExchange.Scroll forum what had happened. The responses were almost instantaneous.
@sweetmarie112: obvi its gonna get taken down if youre scamming asshole
@parnaxus_fave_kitten: o shit, ur the guy who listed the fake monk? howd u do it?
@texmexhex: we all know it’s a scam, bro. You can’t mint a cursed sgmk
@fartholomew: @sigilscraper777 confirmed it’s got hostile geometries, there’s no way the AI spit that out. Mad hack tho
Damn. How had they surmised the Word so fast? The preview on the site could only be scaled to a certain resolution; there was no way they could’ve parsed the geometries, let alone in under ten minutes. I was annoyed they’d snitched on me, but begrudgingly impressed.
The appeal was granted and the listing was allowed to stay, but after a while it was becoming clear that nobody who’d seen the forum was gonna bite. Whatever. This wasn’t the right crowd, anyway. I needed a duller bunch, a more desperate scene. And I knew exactly where to go: SygBoys.Scroll.
No esteemed tech mage would be caught dead in the SygBoys subscroll, a known neckbeard nesting site. Most of them were Sparkless, woefully misled into thinking the Sygillium community could get them access to dope magical items or babes. In other words, they were easy prey.
I posted my listing. Selling spare Monk, floor price, new mint. Looking to add more under-appreciated talent to the Monastery. DM for proof of ownership.
After a few minutes, a couple likes popped up. Three people tagged other users in the comments. None appeared in my inbox.
The sun began to set, golden beams illuminating the ring of fallen hair and skin flakes around my chair. I tapped my phone to check the time; beneath the clock, the Monk seemed to sneer. I briefly considered defenestration.
Then a notification popped up. A new DM.
@4swornf8kr: Hey, my friend is interested if the SygMonk is still clear. He’s not on this subscroll, but you can reach out here.
I nearly moaned in relief as I tapped the accompanying profile link, which, for some reason, took me to the Scrolld browser site, where I wasn’t signed in. Too excited to question it, I punched in my login details. Then the site began to glitch, and I watched in blank-faced horror as an animated faerie appeared on the screen, pointing and laughing in a five-frame loop. After a moment, the GIF changed to a fae with a fishing rod, still cackling at my expense. Words appeared beneath it:
Foolish being, you have bequeathed your account to the Folk.
Follow our commandments if you wish to regain the yoke.
Shitty ass rhyme.
I closed the page, tossed away my phone, waved a hand to shut my blackout curtains, and went to sleep.
*~*~*
Morning brought no respite.
I awoke in a pile of grated parmesan, my over-exfoliated and fully-epilated skin ass-clenchingly breezy as I got up. I lumbered into the kitchen (where all my cheap prints had suspiciously fallen from the walls) and poured some cereal (suddenly stale) and milk (spontaneously putrid) directly into the garbage.
As I shoved the folded cereal box into the recycling bin, I noticed a heap of letters on the floor behind it, presumably slid under the front door. I riffled through the stack, heart sinking with each postmarked date. They were letters of warning from my landlord, some two months old. Apparently my checks had bounced. I was now three months behind on rent. The latest missive, a final demand notice formally served two weeks ago, had given me fourteen days to pay up or face eviction proceedings.
I rang Davey. Boo-doo-beep, this line has been disconnected. I tried his other-other-other phone. Same result.
There was only one reason he would’ve disappeared like that. And if he’d been arrested only a day after he’d sang my name to the Feds like a brown-beaked canary…
I sank into a chair at the kitchen table, cradling my head in my hands.
It was karma, wasn’t it? Just deserts for allowing myself to be led on by Davey’s glitzy schemes. I’d thought I was finally overcoming my own aimlessness by pairing my knack for making things with Davey’s sense of direction. With his wind in my sail, we were going to take the digital sorcery world by storm. People were gonna know our names; Aldrador and Parnaxus were gonna be clamoring to meet us.
The storm had come alright, but the only place I’d been blown was right off a cliff.
Below me, my chair creaked in haughty agreement. Then it buckled, sending me to the floor with splinter-pierced palms.
“Come on!” I shouted, loud enough to stir the neighbor’s chihuahua into a yipping frenzy.
That was enough. Self-pity wasn’t gonna get me anywhere. I had to break the curse before it killed me.
It was time to hit the emergency button. And her name was Nancy.
*~*~*
In the musty hall of the old Twixt-the-Bridges tenement, I banged on #5’s metal door, then stepped back to wait. After a minute, the peephole cover squeaked open, punctuated by an irritated sigh. Locks clicked in a lengthy cascade, wards depowered with ear-tickling crackles, and the door jolted open with a grunt of metal hinges—only to halt abruptly, braced by a brass chain. A narrowed, crinkly-lidded yellow eye peeked out through the slit.
“What do you want?” the crone said in a high, sinewy voice. “I’m working, so whatever this is, make it snappy.”
I moved closer. “Nance, it’s me.”
The eye darted around, inspecting me for a long moment before recognition struck. “Hag’s honkers, it is you. You look like an old tortilla. Lover’s quarrel, or another experiment gone wrong?”
“Neither. Look, I know I said you’d never see me again, but I need your help. I’ve been cursed, Nance. A Scourge.”
The crone looked amused. “Guess your Sparkless girl isn’t of much use on that front.”
“We broke up.”
“Good. Maybe you do have a couple neurons still knocking together in there.”
Nancy slammed the door in my face. Then came the sound of a sliding chain.
The cursebreaking crone’s apartment was bigger and brighter than I remembered it, perhaps because the curtains had always been closed when I was here. Heavily-warded glass cases and small spell-wrought cages lined the walls, displaying the maligned objects she’d either failed to cleanse or chosen to keep in containment. She was one of the best in New York at what she did; I’d always wanted to get her listed on WizWeb as an exemplar to other lawfully-inclined magicians. But after the way we’d parted, I’d never worked up the nerve to ask.
Crones, you see, are seldom actually as old as they look. Their kind merely suffers from an excess of skin, like those shar-pei dogs. Zanylla, like most Sparkless who’d grown up mainly around their own sort, couldn’t get it through her head that Nancy and I had a past. In her disgust, she’d taken it upon herself to make sure my former classmate—and former bedmate—would want no part of me ever again.
And I’d let it happen. All because a hot babe had paid attention to me for the first time in my life, and I’d decided to risk it all to pull her. Even at the cost of my friends.
Nancy had me stand on a containment square in the corner of the apartment as she sat down with my phone and a jeweler’s loupe. She flicked a set of multicolored crystal filters in front of the glass, inspecting not only the sigil plate but the little Monk as well. I began to sweat, or possibly to leak cerebral fluid, as moments turned into minutes without a word.
“Well,” she finally said, “you really are a dipshit.”
“I know,” I said with a sinking heart. “I never should’ve let her say those things to you. So if you’re still pissed, I understand. But look, Nance, I’m scared…”
“No, idiot. This isn’t a Scourge. It’s a Scour. I don’t know why you jumped to conclusions; there are only five letters in the Word.”
Oh. I shrugged, sheepish. “I was in a rush. What’s a Scour, then?”
“Not a curse, for one thing. Just a rough cleanse. It removes that which does not serve you.”
I coughed out a disbelieving laugh. “My hair isn’t serving me? My skin?”
“I’ll admit, this Scour is stronger than the others I’ve seen. But the principle is the same. Only by purging the old can the new settle in.”
“I don’t want to purge the old. I like the old. I mean, not really, but it’s sure as hell better than this. So can you break the sigil or not?”
Nancy set down the loupe. “It’s too deeply entangled. Blockchain magic has been a nightmare for us cursebreakers. This thing has been tied to your identity in the whole system. So, the only way to completely de-associate it with you is…” The look she gave me was downright pitiful.
It took me a moment to understand.
“No,” I said, stepping out of the containment square and snatching my phone. “Absolutely not. I can’t just… give that up.”
“The Scour seems to think you can. Has it really been serving you well?”
“It’s my whole life, Nance. It’s everything.”
The crone shrugged. “Like I’ve told you before: it’s not as big as you think.”
*~*~*
I didn’t go home. I wasn’t sure if I even had a home to go to. The Feds probably had the building on lockdown, just waiting for me to prance through the door. A bulletin with my name and face on it was likely circulating through the local PDs. At least I didn’t look much like my old self anymore.
I traipsed the short distance to the East River, walking aimlessly along the promenade until I came to a secluded bench. There I sat for a while beneath the thunder of FDR Drive, watching seagulls scuffle for discarded French fries. I wondered how long I’d have to lie on the trash-strewn riverbank before they started picking me apart, too. Considering the Scour thought my physical self unnecessary, probably ten minutes, tops.
I slumped on the bench, chin to my chest. What Nancy had suggested was impossible. But the alternative, at this rate, was letting the sigil run its course. Was there really an end to it, a point at which it decided I was fully cleansed? Or would it only cease once the last atoms that had ever comprised my being had leached into the soil, taken up by the worms whose names were so primal, not even the fae could claim them?
Shit. I had no good options. My life was over either way. All those goals I’d pondered, all the dreams I’d chased off high-rises… well, I supposed those could remain. What I’d really be losing was my past. My achievements, though there weren’t many. My failures, far steeper in number. My criminal record, and the warrant for my arrest… would no longer apply. My inhibitions, my self-consciousness, my hesitations… would be pointless. I wouldn’t need to fight to place my name in high esteem if I didn’t have one.
I could just do… whatever.
That was pretty cool.
Maybe even cooler than Lupo Parnaxus.
My hands moved in a blur. I created a new Scrolld account under my real name, breaking rule #1 of our modern fae-infested Internet. After wracking my memory for the handle of the dickwad who’d phished me, I sent him a message with my login credentials. Scrolld, Owlest, Vaultr, the Monastery, my Sygillium wallet, my social security—I gave it all.
The faerie responded immediately.
@4swornf8ker: Utter fool, you dare to cede your name? With full understanding you shall never be the same? Your life and your possessions are now under my thrall. Should you want them back, you’ll need to heed my every call.
me: All yours, asshole. Enjoy.
I locked my phone screen, then tapped to awaken it. The SygMonk, unable to be replicated by a non-owner, was gone.
The East River burbled, the gulls cussed each other out, and a ferry blared its horn. A warm breeze stirred the shrubbery around me, tickling my excoriated skin. I felt lighter, clearer. A crown I’d gotten used to wearing had been lifted from my temples. But I wasn’t going to miss its weight.
I, me, the innominate inhabiter of this body and mind, suddenly unbound and unfettered from all expectations, was no longer the dumbest wizard in New York.
Congratulations, Davey. I always knew you could do it.
I left my phone on the bench, illegally transmuted some leaves into cash, and went off to buy Nancy a bouquet.
*~*~*
Amara Mesnik is a NYC-based writer and filmmaker with a love for all things science, fiction, and science fiction. Her short stories have previously been published in DreamForge Magazine and Luna Station Quarterly. Amara currently works as a video editor at BBC Studios, and spends her free time hammering away at something that’s finally beginning to resemble a debut speculative novel.
*~*~*