Magic didn’t just simply come into the world, it ran rampant. The discovery or rediscovery of it, not as a subtle occult force that could be mistaken for coincidence or confidence tricks, not as an open question but as an emphatic exclamation, it rewrote the human experience in mere decades.
People adapt to change better than anything else in the known universe, but change can come too quickly even for our boundless capacity to mutate until the terrible wonders become, instead, our tools. The whole mass of our species can endure nearly anything, but the upheaval of change can wipe out entire chunks of us as we try to cope with the unimaginable. Some version of humanity, possibly-tiny likely-unrecognizable in wildly unpredictable ways survives but profound suffering occurs along the way to a point where perhaps a not-enduring could be preferable. The arrival of true public widespread magic was no less destructive in its awakening than fire or the wheelaxle.
We could communicate with anyone anywhere, move at speeds wholly unimaginable. We could have goods from anywhere nearly-instantly, news from anywhere truly-instantly. The wonders a person could work with enough magic were literally-miraculous. Diseases that had been a death sentence once became merely expensive annoyances. Common men and women suddenly lived like royalty while the kings and queens suddenly lived like the debauched gods of ancient-myth.
Pleasures and horrors beyond the wildest fantasies of the craziest most-broken of men were real.
But it was too fast for us. Maybe we could have tolerated it sanely had the awakenings occurred over twenty generations, empires rising and falling within the waves of change. But it happened in a span faster than it took for children at the start to even reach middle-ages by that crescendo.
The rise of the Disenchanters was inevitable. Those who understood that this much change that fast was unsustainable, that our entire world would burn down if it was left checked. Shattering the illusions of magic by learning to turn that magic against itself, staunching the glamours that held so many in its avarcial grip, dispelling those out-of-control dreams with grim-yet-tolerable realities once more. It wasn’t easy for them. They felt the power of being everywhere and every thing as strongly as anyone. But they loved humanity even more than they loved having Power.
The magic was called by ten thousand names. Technology. Mass communication. Generative AI. Pick one from the annals of discarded-history, anyone of them will do. But we were not ready to become something new that fast. We were too enchanted with our-selves and our possibilities to take our times and figure out how all the magics worked and we nearly ended this species. If not for the Disenchanters, we wouldn’t have even survived into these rebuilding ruins, all around us.
But we did. And we will again. When monsters overwhelm us with wonders that hurt us so much more than they helped, Disenchanters will rise yet again and save us from our goddamned selves.
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