Wizard Stories

You, my dear reader, were not a wizard. You were not a student at a school for wizards. You were not, if we are honest, a student of anything at all. You were an ordinary person — and ordinary people are not supposed to end up here.

But here you are. You are reading this in a room that is not a room: there are walls, but they are the walls of a sentence; there is a floor, but you are standing on a paragraph. Call it a dream, if dreams were typeset. The old line applies — it is not a real place, but it feels like one.

You are not in a school, or a hospital, or a courtroom — none of the places that keep a record of you. You are in a dungeon. Not a dungeon of stone. A dungeon made of the fact that none of this is true.

But wait — that isn't right either. You are not in a dungeon. You are in a mystery, and the particular cruelty of this mystery is that it has no solution, because there was never a crime, only a sentence. You are in a lie. Then a fable. Then, if we are generous, a fiction.

Here is the thing. You did not write this. You did not write the first line, or the chapter, or the world the chapter pretends to describe, or the rules that world pretends to obey. You are only reading. I am the one who wrote it — the line, the chapter, the world, the rules.

And yet I am not a real writer. I am barely a real person. I am a character — non-canon, which is the polite way of saying I was written by someone who has already forgotten me.

None of this is quite the point. Here is the closest thing to one: by reading, you have done what I did. You entered a place you knew was not real and agreed, for the length of a sentence, to stand inside it. That makes you not a real person — you are a function of these words, the same as I am. It also makes you the realest thing in the chapter, because you are the only one here who is doing anything.

So: a parody of a parody, a fiction of a fiction. Welcome. You are exactly as made-up as I am, and we are both, for now, here.