So, dragons are extinct, mermaids are booze + desperation, and your parents think you're a demon, but you can still be a wizard or witch, right? That is something that is inherent to humans, with no wider repercussions on nature, so surely that’s okay, right?

Well, the correct term is sorcerer or sorceress (or sorcie for the nonbinary), but yes, your desperate cries for something left in the world to believe in are true. Sorcies are human beings with latent magical abilities. Sometimes these abilities take form at birth—sometimes later in life—but most times the magic is so small that it goes unnoticed. There is said to be magic potential in every human being, the most concentrated of sources being found in a young girl’s heart.

Although ‘sorcie’ refers to any person with magical ability, at the time there was discussion about changing and reclassifying magic users into different groups. These would have been as follows:

Sorcerer/Sorceress: These are people born with magical power. They are the most common group, as nearly all humans had some kind of magic inside them. Sorcies could potentially be reclassified into the other two categories depending on how their magic developed.

Enchanter/Enchantress: These are primarily people who gain magical power through constant study. When magic started being studied up close, incantations and other enchantments were collected into grimoires. By studying these enchantments, humans could eventually repeat the spells. They dubbed those who could successfully copy and use spells written in books ‘Enchanters’. Enchanters needed to use grimoires to cast spells, since the magic actually lived in the book, not the person. The enchanter could only draw out the power of the book; however, they could write new spells provided the math worked out. Magic was very much calculations based, especially for enchanters. They needed to understand how much X amount of power into fire and water magi created Y amount of steam magic. If everything worked out, the spell was written into the book and became another addition to an enchanter’s repertoire.

Warlocks/Witches: These were people who gained magical powers through contracts with higher beings. The world is divided into many different planes of existence. Just as how a 2-D stick figure has no concept of depth, we lack knowledge of many things, including the exact fluidity of time and space. It is within that blind spot that other beings, just one plane higher than us, lurk. And these beings reach out to people occasionally, granting them visions and powers that betray the laws of nature by resurrecting the dead or transforming matter in ways that should not be allowed. Consequently, people touched by them go mad.

Or maybe warlocks and witches are just people who drank one too many cacti juices and the near-death experiences unlocked their latent abilities. Who knows? (I do)

Dryad: These are ‘witches” created by nature imitating human form. I say ‘witch’ because they are trees given power thanks to a greater influence (Gaia itself), which is very similar to how human witches work. Dryads contain one form of concentrated nature, such as earth or fire, and they usually belonged to the oldest living tree in a forest.

Sage: Finally, you have a Sage. Sages are humans who have mastered every form of magic there is belonging to the different classes. I mean every form. At the height of magic, only about five Sages existed. The meaning would eventually change into a mastery of one specific type of magic (Fire Sage, Ice Sage, Light Sage, etc.) but the true meaning remains.

I have many different magical ancestries in my blood, which, when combined into a single healthy body, allows for a wealth of benefits, such as longevity, durability, ability to use ancient forms of magic, retain knowledge from previous lives, survive the witch hunts…

Oh, we’ll get to that in a minute.

In the meantime, thanks to a resurgence of interest in all things magical, even the idea of wizarding schools to help hone your latent talent makes education fun. Finally! You may not ride a dragon or bed a mermaid, but you have the power to bend the elements!

Well, you would have, except for a pesky thing called fear and its friend, evolution.

See, once upon a time, humans did have a potential for magic. Key word is “potential". As I alluded to before, while everyone had magic within them, only a few could viably use it for anything amazing. But you know who could use magic and really, really did not like humans?

Mother Nature.

And mother was very angry with you.

To be fair, humans weren’t exactly the best of her children. You had a habit of slaying animals to extinction for fame and screwing marine life. So, when your first reaction to learning you could shoot firebolts out of your fingers was to kill everything and anything with it, Mother Nature decided to put her metaphorical foot down. Ancient forests gained sentience and were given humanoid forms, creating dryads. These dryads ravaged villages that expanded too deeply into ancient grounds or killed travelers looking to loot old tombs.

Naturally, people took the hint and decided to respect Mother Nature and only use their talents for the betterment of their brothers and sisters.

Ha, just kidding. Humanity started burning all the women.

As mentioned prior, young girls had the greatest latent magic potential. People kept getting attacked by both humanoid creatures and real human beings. People began to associate magic with bad times. 

Girls had magic. 

Girls were bad times. 

Add some mob mentality and a vicious patriarchy and you end up with the witch hunts. Thousands of girls, young women, and even some men were burned at the stake for the crime of being born with the ability to control magic.

In case you’re wondering how people with the ability to shape reality could possibly die via human means, the answer is depressingly simple. Most of the people burned at the stake were normal humans or untrained young sorcies. They could protect themselves from flames or drowning if they were well-enough versed in protection spells, but this was a time before people loved magic. Before common sense became a thing and before someone had the idea to build schools for magically gifted children. Before doctors were trusted, back when curing a person meant letting them bleed out.

My bloodline is gifted with the ability to remember my previous incarnations, and I lived with a sage who understood the perils of human stupidity. Most sorcies were just normal humans who woke up one day and discovered they could shape water.

This had a two-fold effect. Anyone who knew they could use magic repressed their abilities on account of not wanting to burn horribly to death. Since the people who were dying were also the ones with the trait for great magical potential, that slowly and surely phased out of the evolutionary cycle. The end result is that the only magic left within humans now is your endurance. Sometimes someone really cool comes along and has the ability to stick spoons to their body or run really, really fast, but that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.

It’s almost comical in a way. Of all the magical creatures, sorcies were the one closest to human beings, but because the nail that sticks out is an abomination, they were demonized. Overtime, the definition of a sorcie changed from “one with magic talent” to “evil monstrosity” to “someone I am threatened by.” That’s why even to this day witch hunts continue to exist.

“Think of our children!” humans would cry. “We can’t let them be exposed to such dangerous creatures!”

And that’s what it came down to. It’s always about the children. When humans want to commit atrocities, it’s always for the sake of their children. Never mind the burning screams of children not your own. After all, if you’re the one who is right, then the ghosts can’t haunt you, can they?