┋John: So. Magic. What’s it all about, then? I wonder what you were after when you go into the game. It’s usually something. Something specific that you think is worth taking risks for. Money. Sex. Revenge. Power. Enlightenment. Thinner thighs in thirty days. It’s a long time ago for most of you, I know. Maybe you don’t remember. Fuck, maybe you don’t even want to. But I’ll tell you something for free. At rock bottom, it’s always about the same thing. It’s always about entropy. The Universe is winding down. Things fall apart. The moving finger writes, and what it writes is “Tough shit.” You can’t get something for nothing. Like God said to Adam when he kicked him out of the garden, “Now you’ve got to work for a living.” If there ever was a free lunch, it ended right there. So we push and we pull and we sweat. Putting in a shit-load of energy to get a little back. Third Law of Thermodynamics, right? The one we all love to hate. Cheers. But with magic, it’s different. Or it could be. Case in point — this fine old plonk. How did it get here? Grapes had to ripen. Peasants had to toil. Some plucky kid in Marks and Sparks had to zip a long the aisles with his pricing gun. Lots of effort. Lots of energy. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. When things fall apart — they do not put themselves back together again. But if you ask a demon to bring you some wine — or jiffy some up with a spell — well, you’re cheating the taxman, aren’t you? It comes for free. No grapes. No peasants. No entropy. So here we all are, then. Chasing the earthly paradise. Trying to sneak back into Eden through the back door, because work is for mug punters. You stupid arrogant little shits. We’re not playing with fire, — here we’re playing with napalm. There’s a war on and we’re whoring with the enemy for pennies. Innocent people die when we fuck up. And we fuck up all the time. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Eden’s a nice place. I was there a few months back. Left a piece of myself buried in the ground there, for reasons I won’t go into. So I can tell you, God hates our kind most especially. The cheats. The hellblazers. The collaborators. Look — this is what Heaven has to say to the likes of us.┋
Issue 215, R.S.V.P. Part 2 by Mike Carey
✠ Thank you to my wife, Ryanna, for the support! Check her Flickr by clicking on her name!
CREDITS:
✘ Outfit ◆ ATMOS DESIGN ◆ Desert Knight Outfit Gacha @ Gachaland
✘ Table, Shack & Decorations ◆ Why not? ◆ Solitary Wiccan Gacha @ Gachaland
✘ Pose ◆ {Bittersweet+Strange} ◆ Posession #2 @ La Vie en Pose