I discovered my magiq fairly recently, actually. About two months ago, I was on a camping trip with a group of my friends. It was the end of the semester, and everyone was ready to relax. At first I was surprised that I was invited, since I’ve typically been left to my own devices while my friends went out to get wasted. I was ecstatic to be able to hang out with my friends without feeling pressured to use substances. Unfortunately, my friends had other plans.
When we arrived at the place that we were going to camp, we set up our tents around the fire pit. We were surrounded on all sides by a healthy grove of trees, and were deep in the forest. For me, it was the perfect place to relax before finals week. Around sundown, though, one of my friends brought out a handle of cheap vodka; another brought out a small plastic baggie of weed. The rest of my friends cheered: I sulked. I realized that the reason I had been invited was to babysit my friends while they got wasted or high, or both. So, while they were preparing for their festivities, I slipped into the darkening woods, unnoticed by anyone.
I wandered around for what felt like hours. The ground was relatively flat, and dead leaves and fallen branches crunched underfoot as I trudged through the forest, upset at my friends, but also upset with myself for thinking that they would refrain from substances just because we were camping. I finally found myself in another small grove, though this was more rocky and seemingly more natural than the one with the campsite I had helped put together earlier. The moon, which had been mostly obscured while I had been wandering through the forest, was now revealed as a mere sliver. It was extremely dark, and a brisk breeze was starting to blow from the west. I then found that I was now very tired: walking through rugged terrain in the dark after a long day tends to do that. I walked around the clearing a couple of times, trying to find the place that was least affected by the wind. After a couple of minutes of stumbling about, I sank to the ground haphazardly, and curled into a ball at the base of a tree at the edge of the clearing, and drifted into unconsciousness.
When I awoke, the sky was still dark, but the slim crescent of the moon had long ago passed its zenith and was sinking into the western sky. The wind had stopped, but I now found myself covered in a light dew. I had slowly begun to wipe it off of myself, when I realized that I was lost. I hadn’t exactly followed a straight path from the campsite to the clearing I was in now, and I had disoriented myself by wandering about looking for a place to sleep earlier in the night. It was really shaping up to be the worst camping experience of my life.
At this point, I noticed a slight glow in the clearing. It was too bright to be the moon, and too widespread to be a flashlight. Thoroughly confused I looked around me, looking for the source, when I noticed that the light seemed to be coming from my hand. I lifted my hand from the ground and found floating above its center a small glowing object, similar in shape to a compass needle. As I watched it, it seemed to grow to the length of half-depleted pencil, and it began to swing pointedly in the direction of the forest behind me. While many people would have questioned their own sanity at this point, I was out of options. I was alone in the woods without anything but the clothes on my back, and the only people who knew I was out here were either passed out or too intoxicated to be much use. So I followed were the compass pointed me.
As I walked, the world seemed to become brighter around me. Dawn was coming, and though I didn’t recognize the trees around me (it had been quite dark before), I was gaining confidence that I was going the right way. I remember the whole time thinking “Just get me out of this forest. I don’t care where, just out of here.” I finally stumbled my way back into the camp I had left. Most of my friends were collapsed on the ground, resting fitfully. I sighed, and looked back at my palm, to the bright needle of light that had led me here, only to find it shrinking until it was no longer visible. I frowned, and then started the process of moving my friends into the tents that we had set up. That finished, I looked towards the road that we had come up, and watched the sun crest over the horizon. I smiled, and sat down in one of camp chair around the smoldering fire, only to find that there was a small, black book already in the chair. I didn’t realize it until much later that day, but I had used magiq to find my way back to the campsite to do the job I needed to do: take care of those I called my friends.
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