Thaidakar the Ghostblood

The world likes spectacle, something grand, something impossible.

Especially something impossible, I’ve found in my experiments. The world loves to tear apart the illusion, trying to find the fabrication in the impossibility they have been shown. Many of these are found to simply be, on close inspection, just that, a smart fabrication. 

And, yet, there are other instances that boggle the mind, that truly cause wonder and… horror. There are these impossible feats that can only be described as magic that make the foundations of the world shake, that defeat the logical conclusions of the wise and the boring tendencies of the narrow minded.

Without explanation, impossibility becomes something horrifying, something earth-shattering. If it has no logical explanation, the wisdom enriched mind wonders, then is my world, my life, my very existence, a lie? They wonder, and ponder, think, and research until it comes upon one of two conclusions, though sometimes both. (A third option can appear, but the chances of orangutans manipulating humans through small bugs in their minds is so far fetched as to cause a person such as I to look at whomever suggests it to me with a glance that says “Do you need help in the mental department, my good friend?” I would know, I’ve heard it and suggested it many times. You’d be surprised at the statistics, I’m sure)

It is either an unrevealed science, something that has been hidden by functional but untrue methods or it is purely illogical magic.

And the latter option terrifies to the point of paralysis. 

Many become entranced in a state of pure horror at this option, ready to fall back into the ignorant state of being they begin to think was their life before. They begin to search and search and search even more for an answer, not finding one, but still searching for some logical conclusion to tell them they aren’t going insane or are suddenly, for no apparent reason, the protagonist of a novel filled with half-baked conspiracy theories.

Magic, they decide, is real, despite how ridiculous it sounds.

It is spectacles like these that really bring the world together in trying to explain it. Many propose elaborate, ridiculously untrue theories, others give the cowardly explanation that it was somehow edited with cgi, even if they saw it with their very own eyes right in front of them. 

It is the puzzle that everyone is seeking the missing piece to. But, they simply can’t find it. It’s as if Waldo was removed from the largest “Where’s Waldo” page in the world. But the real answer is that Waldo’s caricature was on the other side of the paper, there the whole time exactly where they were looking, but only to be seen if you looked the right way.