By Pride I Fell

Prologue: The explanation

I wasn’t always a monster, in fact at one point I would have called myself beautiful. Pride turned me into a monster long before the magic did. It was the changing 60s and I was 14 in the year 1962. I was the best swing dancer in all the school and the editor of the school paper. I guess being a part of the richest family in town inflated my head. I could never tell the school my other life, the one with magic. I was a sorceress in training and my family was the largest and most powerful in the magic universe. I had at least one aunt and uncle in every state and some had joined the military and were protecting us overseas. My intermediate family included my parents, Ellen and Peter Matthews, my eight older siblings, Abraham, Beatrice, Cody, Ericson, Fredrick, Gem, Harrison, and Isa, me, Jane and my younger sister, Kathy. Kathy was the jewel among our family. She was a magical prodigy and was so kind and loving towards everyone, even an older sister who hated her.

I was the least magical of the family so I often felt overlooked. I also didn’t practice my magic at all, so mostly my magic ignorance was my fault. I was always ditching magic class for my mortal friends and we got into a lot of trouble. We stole clothes; we got involved in the KKK and all sorts of bad doings. We were seen as the “cool” crowd because nobody caught us ever thanks to my small amount of magic. Everyone knew we were the ones doing it and nobody questioned our right to. In the 60s it was hard to rebel, so we did the extreme kind. My family was also on the bad side of the orchard so to speak. My family had always dabbled in the dark arts and our history contains mortals banishing us for being cruel to others. My “friends” were getting drunk and having the “pleasures of youth” as we called them while I was studying magic. Things changed when the first black kids came to our school.

First off, I’m not racist anymore so don’t take any of this personally, but I was told to write my history down to help me forgive myself…which isn’t working too well. I was mean to those kids. My teachers all gave me detention and the detention was to sit down and work with them. They were tutoring me to help me with my failing grades. I’ve never told anybody this, but I actually became friends with one of them, Allayah. She helped me start to come out of my bad coma and come into one in which I actually saw a future beyond the next sunrise. She helped me find the better me. That all changed when my old “companions” decided to take the black kid matter into their own hands. We were only freshmen, but all the boys knew how to shoot a gun. Most of the girls did too, and they used that skill to destroy many lives that night. I was unfortunately with them. I didn’t want to lose my status as a bad kid and one of the cool ones at that. I didn’t hurt anybody, I just watched. I watched them shoot my friend Allayah in the arm, nothing to kill just to hurt, and I didn’t do anything. This guilt stabbed me like a knife and then suddenly, my magic stopped working. We were caught and it wasn’t the end of it in prison.

My story really begins with a visit from a stranger. She sort of just appeared in my cell in the middle of the night and scared me very badly. I was having a rough night of nightmares and dreams in which the people we had shot had come back to haunt me, then my cell was filled with light. It was almost a full year after the dreadful night and all of my other friends had been bailed out by their families, I was beginning to feel unwanted. Then this stranger appeared. She told me what had happened to my family. The town had seen what I had done and had run my family out of town for it. They destroyed our beautiful home and my youngest sister’s face. My family had retaliated and used magic against the town. Magic against mortals isn’t strictly forbidden, but the amount of dark magic used to strike back was too large to go unnoticed.  The council of Magic decided that my family had caused enough pain and misery in the past year and were going to place a curse on us. That woman in my cell came to warn me and to also set me free. I would be cursed along with my family and I was to be transported with them so I wouldn’t cause too many questions. The curse would be lifted when one person in our family could learn to forgive and would be forgiven by one of the victims of our past. Hope was very bleak in our situation.

We went to Maine and were put into a solitary house in the middle of a huge forest. Then the curse was placed upon us. The incantation needed all twenty-seven council of Magic members. After all of these years it still rings out as a loud voice in my head,

“For far too long your intentions have turned,

From the path on which we have yearned,

The time has come to end your darkness

Unless one finds strength in forgiveness,

This shall be your fate,

We hope it isn’t too late.”

With those words we were transformed into animals. A mix of wolf, bat and tiger is as best as I can describe us. We had a wolf’s face and ears, a tiger’s eyes, claws and tails, a bat’s hearing and wings and the rest was a human body. The woman who had come to my cell descended down upon us and looked us all in the eyes and told us that we would keep the human body as long as we kept human emotions. If we lost the humanity that barely sparked within us, then we would become a true animal biased upon our personalities. With those parting words, the council left us and then we were left alone to deal with our thoughts.

Days turned into months which turned into years. I wandered the woods thinking about the human emotions. I figured at the time the most human emotion was guilt, after all, animals in the wild never cried while they were eating. So I forced myself to remember that day and never forget what I had done to my friend. I would sit down and reflect upon my thoughts for hours just staring at my favorite looking pool. My family members were becoming animals very quickly. The first to go was my brother Abraham, he turned into a lion. Two of my sisters, Isa and Jane, turned into tigers during dinner. Cody and Frederick were out in the woods one day and one came back as an artic wolf and the other as a grizzly bear. Beatrice transformed into a falcon in the library and Gem a wild mare in her bedroom. Ericson and Harrison were swimming in the pool when Ericson morphed into a crocodile and Harrison into a wild boar. Within a few weeks it was just my parents, my sister Kathy and me hanging on to our little shards of humanity. I started to thirst for knowledge, so I ventured into the library every so often. I learned many things, for it was a magic library, so some of the books hadn’t been written yet. I found an odd sheet of paper in one of the books which was a detailed description of what seemed to be a class someone was taking in High School. I was intrigued and immersed myself into learning all I could while I could still turn the pages with opposable thumbs. My parents both turned into two jaguars in the night, leaving Kathy and me to try and survive.

Food wasn’t a problem, invisible servants, others who needed to serve time for their crimes in the magical world, cooked the food that magically appeared in the kitchen and cleaned the house for us. In order to keep our humanity we both decided to learn how to read music. We also took ventures out of the forest to see how the world was changing. If we wore a cloak and didn’t attract attention to ourselves, we could get news of the outside world. We kept people away from our forest because we didn’t know if our family would eat them or not. Some unlucky lumberjacks found out that they could and would in the late 80s. We were too late. We saw many things and continued to increase our knowledge. Eventually in the 90s, Kathy turned into a Siberian husky and there was nothing I could do about it. I kept my self as human as possible, figuring I got my family into this mess and that I should get them out. It was my duty. What kept me human was the orphanage that opened in the nearest town. I felt pity and guilt every time I looked at the building, pity for the orphans and guilt that I caused some children to become orphans a long time ago.