Once upon a time, there was a world much like ours, where humans and witches, ghosts and dragons, and even vampires and werewolves, all lived together in harmony.
Any supernatural being that you have ever heard about existed within this world and each one of them was blessed with its own special power. Witches had their spells, Vampires were immortal, Dragons could breathe fire. And humans? Well, they were just plain old humans, or so they thought. They had always felt inferior to the other species, so one day they decided that they should be the leaders of this magical world and tried everything they could, to claim this power they felt they deserved.
They started building cities with big walls all around the world, shutting out anyone who wasn’t like them. Within these walls, humanity continued to evolve, always inventing new things, century after century, completely transforming their way of living. All in the hope of finally gaining the upper hand. In their delusion, they even started to fight each other.
As time passed, and wars raged on, humans eventually forgot about their mission of “world domination”. They stopped caring about their surroundings, and started worrying solely about themselves, with each wave of technological advancement only enhancing this way of life. Tales and stories of the diverse inhabitants of this world, and their magic, were traded for stories and recordings of fellow human beings, reporting on their own lives and successes. Humans had become so wrapped up in their own little bubbles, that they had no time nor desire to believe in anything they couldn’t see, anything outside of their walls. Eventually, only a small minority of people still remembered magic, or even believed it existed.
To their regret, the other, non-human inhabitants, however, had quickly come to recognize the true power of the human species:
Their belief or, in the absence thereof, their ignorance.
With each human individual that stopped taking an interest in the other inhabitants of their world, the special powers of the other species weakened. As time went on, more and more humans were born inside the walls, unaware of their surroundings. So, eventually, some of that outside world, including its variety of different creatures, started to disappear…
© Marie-Christine Castelazo Hidalgo 2022-08-31