The old wizard watched his wife, beautiful and wretched, kneel on the crude scaffold. When the executioner walked onto the stage with an axe over his shoulder, he was tempted to cast a spell– the last magic left in this forsaken world.

The rain was pouring and the courtyard was bogged with mud and rot. The musk of animal faeces with a tinge of urine lay heavy in the air. The peasantry wore dark looks of malice and hatred which he knew to be masking scared hopelessness. And not one in the crowd save for the old wizard knew what this world was about to lose.

As the executioner raised his axe, the wizard looked at his wife. She saw him, they locked eyes, and she shook her head. Don’t– not for me.

But I must. My heart will be torn asunder. What am I without you?

Tears welled in her eyes.

The wizard’s mind enumerated through incantations. Could he cast a fireball at the executioner, rush to the stage, and rescue his wife? He saw the King’s men, their hauberks glinting in the grey light, and realised that it was hopeless.

He could summon a portal beneath her which could swallow her and leave her somewhere safe. But then the King’s men would kill him, and when he looked into her eyes he realised that she could not carry that burden of grief her entire life.

Impotent rage grew within him. These fools had burned sapphic witches and destroyed precious dragon eggs and chased pixies from their hovels. This realm was now nothing but the mechanical engines of feudal bureaucracy.

He imagined this world taken to its logical conclusion– castles as far as the eye could see, stretching to the sky, filled with arbitrary nobles ruling over insignificant fiefs. Such a world could harbour no magic nor love because it would be cast out by the infinite suffering that monarchal greed brings.

Maybe it would be better if such a world could not exist. He devised a simple spell that would salvage the bonds of matter to fuel its own replication and break more bonds– creating a hungry void in existence. But before he could mumble the incantation, the executioner brought the axe down and the crowd went silent.

Oh my love. This world has lost its last ray of hope.

He wept as he remembered the lives they spent together, filled with love and tension and tenderness. She was what this world needed, not his spells– finite state machines powered by arcane engines. And so he used the last of the world’s magic– please, let me see this world like she did.

The old wizard staggered from the town square, down the main street, and he stopped near the town’s well to catch his breath. A gentle breeze blew across his face and in it he could hear her whisper.

Look.

He looked up. Fallow fields were blooming with young dandelions and a matted kid bleated and a gaunt farmer gave it half his einkorn loaf. He saw a harlot in red silk leading a blind crone across the street and heard a mother, flustered and exhausted from hand-washing garments, take a moment to share a fairytale with her children. And the church bell rang, and he looked inside and saw friars with their foreheads pressed to the cold stone tiles– simple folk aspiring to ideals beyond their nature. Was this not the same building he had thought to be a hateful institution borne to bestow legitimacy to the undeserving? And he realised– there was love baked into every brick of this world.

Is this what you saw?

And he sobbed as he realised that this world could never lose its magic.