Albert stared at the blinking cursor on his laptop screen, its rhythm oddly comforting. A soft rain tapped against the window, and somewhere beyond the city hum, a siren wailed and faded. He exhaled and resumed typing, the words forming like sediment layers - fragments of thought, memory, interview, and reflection.
"It wasn't the magic itself that froze the world. It was the not-knowing."
Those first few weeks after the phenomenon began, Albert recalled, the internet slowed to a crawl - not from lack of bandwidth, but because no one knew what was real. Footage of uncanny acts flooded every corner of the digital world: a woman in Porto Alegre calming a rabid stray with nothing but her voice and a green shimmer in her eyes; a teenage boy in Tokyo projecting ghostly images of dragons into the street - spectacles no camera could record, only human eyes could perceive. A man in Prague clutching his chest after a knife wound, and standing upright moments later, breathless but unharmed, the blood drying before anyone could understand what had happened. People didn't know what to believe - but they knew something had changed.
At first, it felt like fiction bleeding into reality. Hoaxes, people said. Deepfakes. Mass hysteria.
But then governments began to act.
Borders closed. Air travel halted. Troops appeared on city streets - not to fight, but to observe. To show presence. That was the word - presence. A word used when no one wanted to admit fear.
Albert opened another folder on his drive: transcripts from political briefings, hastily leaked over the past few years. A U.N. emergency session. A G20 press blackout. Rumors of special task forces formed in secret.
"The world didn't scream," he typed. "It held its breath."
It wasn't war. Not quite. It was like the atmosphere just... thickened. Corporations paused production. The stock market spiraled. Scientists clashed on television over theories. Religious leaders scrambled to reframe the unexplained within their doctrines. A few embraced it. Others called it heresy. A few called it judgment.
And the people - ordinary people - watched.
"There was awe, yes. And there was wonder. But underneath it all, fear. Because awe without understanding feels like standing at the edge of a cliff with a blindfold on."
Albert took a sip from his now-cold coffee. Outside, the rain had turned to a drizzle. He clicked back into his outline, the part where he labeled that first season as The Great Hesitation.
In the silence that followed magic's emergence, the world didn't collapse. But it paused, teetering between the past and an ungraspable future.
That pause, Albert once hoped, might have saved everything. But in truth, it only took a couple of weeks for someone to do something monumentally stupid - and monstrously cruel. Fires lit by Red Casters leveled entire apartment blocks in Montreal. A White Mage, wrapped in layered force fields, walked unscathed through gunfire during a bank heist in Milan. In San Francisco, reports surfaced of Blue Casters overriding the wills of others, turning people into puppets. And worst of all, the first whispers of Black Magic - of souls yanked back screaming into decayed vessels, of dead eyes opening in unison - spread like rot.
"We didn't tame magic," Albert wrote. "We simply opened the gates - and chaos walked through wearing a smile."