The Girl from the Shattered Earth

The only survivor from a magical Earth, prepares herself to teach magic theory here

In 2025, a 12-year-old girl stumbled through a crackling portal in a Wyoming cornfield, clutching wooden boxes stuffed with books. Her name was Elaine, and her eyes held the weight of a dying world. She spoke a lilting, alien tongue, and her arrival sparked a frenzy among scientists, linguists, and government officials. The books—ranging from colorful nursery rhymes to dense tomes on arcane theory—were written in a script no one recognized. Elaine’s world, she explained through gestures and drawings, was consumed by a magical war. Both sides, in desperation, unleashed unstoppable forces—spells that tore reality apart, their version of mutually assured destruction. Elaine was sent through a one-way portal to escape the collapse, a final act of hope by her people.


For five years, Elaine learned English while teaching her language, which she called “Sylvaric.” Linguists at MIT marveled at its complexity, a language where words shifted meaning based on intent and cadence. Elaine’s books revealed a civilization where magic was as fundamental as gravity, woven into daily life from childhood songs to university-level spellcraft. Most of her magic didn’t work here—spells fizzled, gestures produced nothing. But occasionally, Elaine could coax impossible things: a cup floating without strings, a flame burning blue without fuel. These acts defied physics, leaving scientists baffled. Elaine, in turn, found our laws of physics nonsensical—gravity too rigid, energy too predictable. “Your world is… stubborn,” she’d say, frowning at a falling apple.


By 2030, Elaine was 17, graduating early from MIT with a degree in comparative linguistics. She’d become a bridge between worlds, translating her books into English and annotating their magic. She decided to become a professor, founding a department of “Speculative Arcana” to study her world’s lost knowledge. Local witches—self-taught practitioners of Earth’s esoteric traditions—flocked to her, drawn by rumors of her abilities. In a Boston café, over steaming mugs of tea, Elaine met with three witches: Mara, a hedge witch who read futures in tea leaves; Liam, a chaos magician with a knack for probability; and Sage, a Wiccan who swore she’d summoned rain once. They debated joining her class, intrigued but skeptical. “Magic here is weak,” Mara said. “Your spells—how do they even work?”


Before Elaine could answer, the world shuddered. Lights flickered, the air hummed, and the café’s windows warped like liquid glass. Outside, trees bent upward, defying gravity. Elaine gasped, her eyes wide. “It’s the Veil,” she whispered. Scientists later confirmed it: Earth had passed into a cosmic field, a ripple from her universe that rewrote our physical laws. Gravity softened, time stuttered, and magic—her magic—surged. Mara’s tea leaves swirled into glyphs, Liam’s dice rolled impossible numbers, and Sage’s whispered chant sparked a storm cloud indoors. Elaine’s spells, once feeble, now reshaped reality with ease—tables became liquid, air sang with colors.


Panic gripped the globe. Scientists, scrambling, analyzed the field. Data from observatories showed it was a transient anomaly, a pocket of altered physics from Elaine’s universe. Her world, it seemed, had once been like ours but had passed through a similar field aeons ago, unlocking magic. Our Earth, lagging behind in its cosmic orbit, was now catching up. The bad news? The field would linger for 10,000 years before normal physics returned. Governments collapsed into chaos, unable to enforce order when bullets floated and engines sang. Elaine’s classes swelled, witches and scientists alike desperate to learn her Sylvaric spells, the only guide to this new reality.


Elaine stood before her first lecture hall, now a mix of eager witches and rattled physicists. “My world died because we didn’t understand power,” she said, her voice steady. “Yours doesn’t have to.” She opened a nursery book, its pages glowing faintly, and began to teach. Outside, the sky shimmered with impossible stars, and Earth began its long, strange journey into magic.