The Woods

The woods were a quiet place. It went on forever, and never stopped. Or at least that was what the occupants of the village that was in the middle of the woods had been led to believe. Once, a villager went into the woods, and came out back in the village, as if they had traveled in a circle. However, many people were desperate to build a new town. This could not happen, as whenever they cut down trees around their town, or in the woods, their axes would break, or simply bounce off. So the people stayed in the village for several thousand years, with their picket fences and farms, their perfect stores and houses, and their perfectly brought up children. At least, they stayed until something tragic happened.

The tragic event was caused by one little girl, who disappeared into the woods and had been gone for a year before the villagers sent search parties into the woods. The villagers had given up all of their hope of finding this little girl, until someone discovered that they could travel into the woods and come out in other villages. As the search went on, they lost their hope again and they stopped looking. But now they had a new interest. Now, they noticed that the woods had something they could never hope to possess. Magic. And the witches were found first. And they were unlucky when they were found.

You see, it is human nature to hate things that are different. For example, a child can be differently behaved from others, maybe more rude and disturbing. This makes the other children around that child immediately dislike the person. They may be polite and fun to be around when you get to know them, but you never tried. Which is what the villagers did to the witches.

When the word got out of witches in the woods, there was panic in the small village, but even more panic for the witches. The villagers thought that all they could do was burn those witches at the stake, and hope they wiped them all out. The witches feared for their lives, as they watched their fellow sisters in magic burn at the stake, and hope they would not be suspected of witchcraft after hearing their screams. But even though the villagers caught and tried many people, innocents were burned to death for the accusations of being witches. They never even truly wiped out the witch population.

Then, the villagers realized that there were also wizards and warlocks, not to mention sorceresses and enchantresses. They did the only thing they knew how to do to these magic-users. They wiped their populations out. And yet again, most of the people they convicted of using magic were innocent, and hadn't done a thing to harm the people.

The next threat that the village had was war and enemies. The village had not been kind during the years that it had hunt down the witches, and many of the other villages were angry because they had burned their children, husbands, and wives for supposedly possessing magic. The village's unkindness had included making the family watch as their relatives screamed in agony, and smell the burned flesh of their loved ones as the person was consumed by heat and misery.

Armies were gathering, and the village had to enlist the help of five young witches to put a barrier around the villager and it's farmland to protect them from the thousands that wanted to pillage and plunder. With a heavy heart, the young witches cast a spell over the town so that they would forget what had happened in the woods, and all record or evidence would be erased from their minds, then set a magic barrier around the woods to protect the village from other witches, and from armies.

The witches realized that the spell wouldn't hold forever, and that, as soon as one of them died, the barrier would fall, and leave the village defenseless to the other angered villages in the woods. They made potions of immortality, so that they would not die of old age, and as long as they were peaceful, the barrier held. They told everyone of how magic would fade away if people stopped believing in it, and no one listened to them, thinking that they were either young fools, crazy, or old hags.

However, as all things do, they died eventually, but the village was lucky enough that, by the time the witches had died hundreds of years after the spells were cast, their wrongdoings had been forgiven, and they were free to go about what they had been doing before. They updated their system to catch witches and wizards as soon as they were born, and went about clearing the world of what they thought as the evil of magic.

This time, their system made no mistakes, and they had caught every witch and wizard born to normal parents that agreed to the testing, and eventually made it mandatory. They told people lies, how every baby boy or girl born with magic was the spawn of Satan himself, and that they should kill the baby before it had the chance to wreck havoc on the world that was so protected by normality. And what they said, happened.

Eventually the villages elected a leader, who conquered all of the known land at that time, and united the villages into one kingdom. Under this king, the kingdom profited, and no magic was known to exist. The system they used continued to be used, up until the king died and his son's grandson took the throne. After the king's great-grandson took the throne, magic was seen as something to be cherished, though the people of the kingdom were never fully convinced. They started pretending that magic didn't exist, and that it was never anything that was possible. The things people did to prove magic was real were dismissed and claimed to be science, not magic.

So the magic in the world slowly started fading away, as no one believed in it. Until it was all gone, and couldn't come back.