The wizard pointed at Ula with a finger like a dried branch of a dead tree.
“You, Ula, have broken the rules of the Evil Wizard Council by making it appear that you have bunny ears! The council finds you guilty of frivolity! Your sentence is thus: You will live a life without magic. Your wands and trinkets and spells will no longer work. All around you, magic will not function. Your children will also have no magic, and your children’s children will have no magic! No descendants of Ula shall ever know magic! Now begone! Go back to your village in shame!”
Many years later, Dub, son of Ula, comes into the kitchen.
“Ma, the neighbors say they had a singing fish, and it stopped singing when you came back to town.”
Ula sighs. “Yep. We ended up eating it.”
“They say you used to be all magic and stuff.”
“Yep. Did you get those potatoes?”
Years later, Dub is cutting some branches for firewood. His daughter brings him some ale in a battered stoneware cup.
“Dad?” she asks. “They say that when Aunt Tira moved to the city, all the magic streetlights there stopped working.”
“Yep. Probably your grandmother’s curse.”
“That stinks. When I get older I’m going to move far away from here!”
Years later, Gungo the Magnificent runs down the hallway of the Wizard Tower, eyes wide with terror. “Run for your lives! The mystical seals of the dungeon have been dissolved! The spectres inside will come devour us!”
Jeff, whose study door was open, stood up in panic. He had been having no luck at all with even the basic spells today. And now the Grey Spectres were escaping? He jumped to the door and watched Gungo run past. He looked behind Gungo. Nothing was following him.
Months passed. At the emergency meeting of the Evil Wizard Council, the topic of discussion was the disappearance of magic through the land. Eight Wizard Towers had to be shut down, the wizards moving to places where magic worked again. They didn’t know why this was happening. They moved on to the next agenda item, which was whether they should change their name to “The Evil Wizards Council” or the “Evil Wizards’ Council”. Apostrophes, you know.
For ten years, the wizards still couldn’t solve this mystery. Their crystal balls wouldn’t show them anything in what they were now calling ‘the mundane zone’. They couldn’t send spy birds, because the birds became normal birds when they went into the mundane zone. Inexorably, magic fled the land.
Eventually, the Wizard Librarian approached the Master Wizard. “I found something interesting in the justice archives…”
The Wizardry Genealogy Department had one member, and she was surprised at all of the attention. “You’re asking a lot,” she explained to the Council. “These small villages don’t keep track of births they way you’d expect. And are we counting out-of-wedlock births?”
Several years later, the wizards had a target. They had to travel far away to where the magic would work. Munka, great-great grand-niece of Ula would suffer their wrath! The skies above Munka darkened. Lightning flashed! Alas, the bolt dissipated over Munka’s head. She didn’t even wake up from her nap.
Another meeting was held. The mundane zone had engulfed this Wizard Tower. It was strange to see Tog without the miniature moon orbiting his head. “What about ogres?” he was asking. “I mean, they’re just meat, right? They’re not magic.”
Flippin shook her head. “There aren’t many ogres left, and we can’t perform a binding on them anymore. Our control would fade as soon as they entered the Mundane Zone.” She said it with capital letters. “Maybe we could become assassins?”
A year later, young Haggor is walking with his new thug friends. “So I just moved to this city last week, and I’m coming back from the brothel when this old black-robed guy with an ancient knife jumps out of the alley. I mean, I had my usual big stick, right?” He held up his big stick so the others could see. They nodded. “So I bopped him. He didn’t know what to expect. It was like he never ever held a knife, even. Old dope. I took his knife and traded it for a week at the brothel, which is where I’m going now.”
“Careful at the brothel, Haggor,” warned Telom. “I hear those anti-baby magic charms ain’t workin’ no more. Brothels will be closing down all over!”
“Yep. That’s why I left Puck City and came here! They all closed down!”
The last Evil Wizard Council meeting was in their last Wizard Tower, way way out on a rocky outcrop in the ocean. There was a heated argument about whose fault this was, and things got ‘splodey. Too many fireballs flew about and the whole tower was destroyed.
A couple of millennia later, Adam Robichaud was looking at his phone in his backyard in upstate New York. He called to his fiancee Sara to come look. “It’s like magic!” he was saying. “With this app, I can make it look like you have bunny ears!”