At some point, home goes some place else.  It’s not longer where we learned to ride a bike or had our first kiss.  “Home” becomes a new place with new traditions and feelings associated with it, and your previous home becomes just a place to visit.

We do this when we move on from old friends, or fall in or out of love, or lose something or someone important.  The things before are not there any more.  There’s something new where that thing used to be in us.  Sort of like this:

That is what magic is, in my world.  We are all energy, exchanging energies.  I push you, your physical being changes a bit.  I push you away socially, your emotional being changes a bit.  We can measure kinetic and potential energies.  My world supposes that we can measure the energy of intent and connection as well, and that some of those exchanges are enough to reconfigure reality.  But it’s hard to recreate–there are so few things on the planet known to carry this energy that unless you’re prepared to do some hunting and to create some immense emotional backlash, you can only achieve moderate reality-bending with tried and true reagents.  Certain herbs and earths.  The power of the moon and sun on our hearts.  The loss of a life or the death of a dream.  The spark we feel when meeting kindred spirits.  These are the elements of magic.

I think there are aspects of this we’ve all felt, and called it different things: nostalgia, faith, home-sickness, soulmate and we know each of these to carry different value to us.  As my series is ultimately a story of humanity, I believe this is the heart of the human experience–our ability to reach out, to imbue something with more value than the sum of its parts.  That is the small magic we use every day, in every interaction we have.

This is explored in great detail in Sacrifice which, I’m pleased to say, should be about ready for beta readers by the end of this week!