Magic is dead. There was no grand moment that signified the passing of the age of magic. No parade was held in memoriam of the magical forces which were once abundant, but now lost to the empty eons of progress. None of the Presidents, Kings, Dictators, or Ministers held tribute for the forgotten knowledge. There were no requiem bells, nor candle-lit vigils to honor the dead. Magic had suffered a slow, ungraceful defeat at the hands of human ingenuity.
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First, the Alchemists began to disappear. Really, it was the Environmental Protection Agency that put their practice out of favor. The EPA was lobbied heavily by Industrial Gold Mining Companies looking to put low level alchemists out of business. They argued that alchemy had little to no regulation when it came to gold wastewater disposal. The process of taking one metal and converting it into gold required millions of gallons of water to cool the metals and facilitate certain filtering techniques in order to sift out any remaining metals that were unable to fully convert into gold. The water would then become contaminated with radioactive materials and need to be disposed of properly. Most alchemists were making only modest profits and had the tendency to cut corners, such as negating the use of proper radioactive material disposal companies. Many alchemists took to dumping waste water wherever they felt like, often leading to the water seeping into ground water supplies and poisoning aquifers.
Industrial Gold took local Alchemist Guilds to court, eventually convincing the courts and EPA that the guilds were dangerously unregulated. The EPA pushed forth new regulations that forced Alchemists to use expensive waste management techniques and safety precautions. These proved too costly for the average alchemist, and in a matter of years most were out of business. Since the Ancient Order of Alchemy relied on passing their knowledge verbally from generation to generation, (with the exception of a few incomplete and erroneous Wikipedia pages), the true knowledge of alchemy was lost to the ages. Industrial Gold remained immune to the harsh regulations imposed on the Alchemist Guild, due mostly to slipping a few gold bars in the robes of some high ranking magistrates in the EPA Department of Magicks and Environmental Responsibility. What seemed like a crusade by the state to punish environmental criminals was really a push by Industrial Gold to maintain the majority production of gold in the United States.
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After the alchemists disappeared, Industrial Gold was free to produce as much gold as it could without competition. They decided to amplify production ten-fold by utilizing cheaper labor forces. For thousands of years, dwarves were considered the standard worker for any form of mining operation: be it gold, silver, coal, palladium – dwarves knew how to produce the most precious metals in the fastest possible time. The dwarves’ proficiency with mining was impressive, and they knew it. Over the course of the Industrial Age, dwarves carved out a rock solid union that ensured proper wages in exchange for their talents. In fact, in the Technological Age it was widely thought that mining was one of the last industrial jobs that would be secure for magical creatures. Unfortunately, job security for the dwarves quickly proved to be more fleeting than originally thought.
Modernity meant that big mining operations like Industrial Gold had to think globally. When Industrial Gold saw corporations like Walmart outsourcing manufacturing needs to third-world countries, they followed suit. Industrial Gold started employing trans-dimensional fairies to work in their gold mines. These fairies would work for considerably less than the wages demanded by the Dwarf Union workers. Less money payed to workers meant more could be hired which eventually worked out to Industrial Gold producing the same amount of gold as they were before, but at half the cost for labor. Since the fairies were technically citizens of the Enchanted Forest and not the United States, Industrial Gold was under no obligation to give full-time workers the same benefits that the dwarves received. The fairies were desperate to work for incredibly low wages as the Enchanted Forest was a land of extreme poverty. Feeling a strong need to catch up with the Western World, the fairies took their paychecks and never complained about the long hours, zero benefits, and rampant safety violations that now plagued the mines.
The dwarves were stuck with nobody to help them, and no viable skills to translate into tech jobs. Many found low paying work in the service industry. Many others found drugs readily available to help them cope with the crushing agony of being a magical minority in lower-lower class American society. Soon, every mining operation in the country followed the example set by Industrial Gold and replaced their dwarves with cheap, fairy labor. The suicide and drug abuse rates skyrocketed throughout the dwarf community. The dwarf population was decimated in only a few short years.
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Religion played a major role in eliminating magic from schools. For many years, students were offered elective classes such as Alchemy, Herbology, Basic Spells, Ethical Treatment of Magical Creatures, etc. Religious parents were often offended by the subject material of such classes, even though the courses were entirely voluntary for students who wanted to further pursue such fields. As parents gathered more sway with the school board and lawsuits became more frequent, federal funding for middle and high schools that offered magicks programs was severely cut. The parents argued that classes based around the magical practices took the power to manipulate reality away from God. Pretending to be gods themselves would guarantee children a place in hell, or so the parents and pastors argued. By convincing the school boards and state politicians that magic was actually dangerous for children and their eternal souls, it was deemed a subject too controversial to teach before college.
University level magic classes were not incredibly popular among students. Parents, role models, and peers often tried to dissuade students from studying the magical arts. To these detractors, magical courses were seen as a waste of money, especially for the cost of University tuition. The stigma surrounding a degree concentrating in magicks was severe. Magic students had significantly lower job prospects when applying for non-magical jobs after graduation. Hiring managers would take job candidates with magical backgrounds less seriously than candidates with other concentrations, even though they both had the same core education.
Anti-magic propaganda also began to spread across college campuses worldwide. This attack was orchestrated by militant on-campus religious groups that saw the study of magic in public universities to be offensive. Eventually, American government representatives became involved as well and demonized magical studies as being unpatriotic. Schools that didn’t cancel magic programs quickly found themselves without much needed government funding. In a matter of months, magical studies disappeared from even the most liberal public universities across the United States.
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One of the final nails in the coffin for the magical arts was the disappearance of wild, enchanted animals due to man-made environmental impact. In what was labeled as the 6th mass, magical extinction by some scientists, over 97% of enchanted creatures went extinct within a fifty-year period, with the exception of creatures labeled as necessary to the survival of the global economy, e.g. gold mining fairies, indentured house elves, and gladiatorial ogres. Most scientists were in agreement that the extinction event had man made causes, but poorly informed and/or malicious lawmakers prevented many environmental protection laws from being enacted as well.
Poor regulation of magical energies production was perhaps the worst environmental offender. The cheapest and most profitable way of producing magical energies was the conversion of crystals and gems into liquids that were utilized by both solitary practitioners of magic and big industry alike. The process of producing these potions involved grinding magical stones into a fine powder then treating the powder with various chemicals to separate the rock from the magical essence. Acid was added to the mixture to further separate remaining metals from the product. Acidic wastewater was often mismanaged and leaked into aquifers and ground water supplies frequently. The resulting elixirs, potions, and other magical liquids that were created by this process were often burned off in spells, releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The pollution released by the production and use of these cheap, magical energies destroyed water sources for animals and greatly contributed to global warming, killing thousands of species worldwide.
Another leading contributor to global warming was the overproduction of hobgoblins for human consumption. Americans and Chinese both developed an insatiable need for hobgoblin meat. McDonalds found Hobgoblins to be cheaper to produce than cows and they took up less room on farms. With less resources being put into production of meat coupled with the delicious taste, hobgoblins eventually overshadowed beef and poultry as the world’s favorite meat. Hobgoblins, however, were vegetarians. With corn being subsidized by most governments worldwide, overproduction of corn led to low prices and more farms started feeding their hobgoblin stock with an all corn diet. What seemed like a perfect way to feed cattle turned into a major environmental catastrophe. The all corn diets forced hobgoblins to produce immeasurable amounts of methane through flatulence. Billions of hobgoblins around the world were directly driving global warming through greenhouse gas production.
Through these and various other human factors contributed to climate change and vastly increased global extinction rates for magical creatures and non-magical animals alike. Scientists warned of the effects, but policymakers across the world often refused to listen. Countries had become overly reliant on environmentally disastrous industries. These industries were upheld with little change or oversight both to line the pockets of the rich, and spare the poor from the further harm that solving these so-called, “maleficent problems” would undoubtedly bring. Ultimately, it was the magical creatures that suffered the most, as the extinction rate began to skyrocket after far too many years of environmental abuse.
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Poaching of exotic creatures was also a main contributor to increased extinction rates. Ultra-rare game such as skunk apes and chupacabras were the first to be declared extinct. Hunters developed creature-specific tech in order to get the maximum yield from their kills. Entire species were wiped out with the help of man’s terrifying inventions created out of the perceived necessity of dominance over nature. The Loch Ness Monster was captured with the help of robotic submarine mapping of the underwater caves that had sheltered the creature and its family for years. Loch Ness is now a prominent water skiing resort and the site for a popular “pray the gay away” camp for youths. Yetis were also hunted relentlessly after special drones were built utilizing equipment capable of detecting miniscule heat signature variations between the yeti and their environment. These leveled the playing field between hunters and the yeti’s masterful camouflage that had been built over thousands of years of climate adaptation. Colossal, fire resistant tanks were created to defeat the already endangered dragons. Water dragons were destroyed by more indirect means – usually getting caught in trawling nets or the occasional soda six pack ring.
Many species were wiped out in a matter of years, but the creatures that got the worst of the blitz were unicorns. These magnificent animals were killed off in mere months. Prized for the supposed aphrodisiac properties gained by a person ingesting their crushed horns, the unicorn population was virtually non-existent only three months after the start of the “unicorn horn rush” that drove up demand and price for black market horns. Despite the best efforts of animal rights groups across the world, the last unicorn was found dead in a remote stretch of the Appalachian Mountains. Its horn was cut off in order to be ground into a fine powder and feverishly devoured by a rich, white man hoping to maintain his erection long enough to get off with the young prostitute he met outside of a Washington D.C. Denny’s. He bought her a Grand Slam in hopes of rounding her bases himself. He would finish his Denver Omelet sprinkled with the powdered horn, then take her back to his cozy hotel room and pass some legislation of his own. At the same time, the unicorn lay dead; decomposing by a watering hole on some unnamed stretch of mountain – half its face missing from where the poachers sawed off its horn.
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There wasn’t a specific day that could be attributed to the last touch of magic leaving our world. Over many years, people started looking back on their lives and feeling as if something were different in the past. It was as if there was a fundamental force missing from our memories. Perhaps gravity was a bit stronger back then. Maybe there was more electricity in the air – humming deeply into our bones. Something was off. Magic is gone. Magic is dead. And our children will never know that there were more worlds than these.
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