Flash Fiction February - The Real Master
This flashfic is inspired by a prompt posted on 12th February 2022 by the Writer’s Digest to write about “magic”. This story is just over 800 words. Enjoy!
My master is good in only one way: the way he allows me to wonder the halls of his great mansion, doing the rounds and petting the many wilting servants and slaves. I have little ability to ease their pain, little choice but to ignore their heart’s hardborne wishes, as I stroke my many ringed fingers through their hair and bid them farewell into beautiful dreams full of honest and worthy desires come true. For the master who stalks the halls, black and booming, tailcoats moving in whisps of smoke, lips clacking in time with the steal-lined whip, the master who commands me holds the amulet I treasure and am forced to call home.
The Djinn is safety mechanism of the natural balance. A protection against the unreasonably powerful mage.
Magicians of the current order refuse to explore the very real fact that most Djinn are women. Contrary to the assumed enraged hypothesis, nature is not in fact against women and their attempted rise against the patriarchal magician’s order of then and of now. No, it speaks rather to the fundamental flaws of both sexes.
Where typical men, often those in power, enjoy perfecting the craft of success, often requiring themselves to sacrifice greatness for sustained lifestyle, status and financial stability, love drives most renowned women, particularly the passionate and beloved ones, to perfect themselves, their magic, their craft and the world. To women like me, it seems all too reasonable that the excessively powerful should be naturally obligated to do the bidding of others, for the greater good, lest their own flawed selfishness conquers their better judgement, as intoxicating surplus often does.
And its not as if Djinn are unable to live in comfort, as they can will themselves almost anything they could want. So our state, as it was originally defined, seems only fair to us.
Something that is unanimously understood between the Djinn, but ignored by the amatonormative majority, as their dominant sex continues to be, is that Djinn are often bereft of sexual or romantic desires, often preferring to form friendly or even familial relationships with their masters, associates, reoccurring immortal beings in their region and other eternal Djinn. This aversion to coupling seems to me like yet another safety mechanism of nature, one that is more concerned with the happiness and sanity of those caught in the aforementioned mechanism of Djinnism than with the “balance” of the world. As a consequence of this, I, and my brethren, find much of our daily satisfaction in bringing joy to others, in relieving pain and in making impossible dreams come true.
Pity then that we Djinn are considered “subhuman” by this order.
As if in nature’s breath we could become something entirely unnatural.
No, as with anything made conveniently easy to control, we are bought and sold to the wealthiest buyer. As with the muddy slaves by the riverbanks, as with the brothel fodder and the master’s bedroom keeps, Djinn are kept as animals are, often bewitched into objects too significant to our history to break with our powers.
And with the powerful comes the corruption of surplus. With our wills bound to powerful masters, those unfortunately tending to be male and often bent on maintaining themselves and unbalancing others as the natural masculine cycle goes, we watch granted wishes undo the pride of the greater peoples, dash down the dreams of hopeful youths and burn the happy camps of thriving homes.
As some weak safety measure, nature limits us to 3 wishes per master, but a master of one is usually a master of many, with options to breed more wary children or coerce struggling fathers into giving up their wishes to the whims of their lord.
Nameless, without real will, this is the reality of the Djinn, the consequence of power.
Little known, even to Djinn themselves, is our power to lose our magic, and quite easily too. But why would we? When our original passions are so strong? When that original hope, that original elation when we granted our first wishes to the unfortunate and the poor, that eternal hope that we will contribute to something great and good still glows strong?
There is one solution that I understand as viable.
Djinn’s, like their sex, sexuality and autonomy, are themselves greatly ignored.
This is the mistake.
To anyone understanding enough of magic to be honoured as a Djinn, they would recognise nature as the only master of the wish-granters. As she holds so many safety mechanisms, so many spells and technicalities and complexities, in being changed beyond our rightful birth, we become extensions of her. Mechanisms ourselves.
And her will is all.
Where there is a highly converted man, one who took himself to the highest, safest pedestal of magical proficiency, there is usually a lack of care towards the divine complexities of his craft. As Djinns are tools rather than people, magic, to him, is to be used instead of enjoyed. So, why should he know? It wasn’t studying that brought him this far.
Why should he know how easy it would be to send him over the precipice?
12/02/2022