After the Wild Years, the world didn't heal all at once. It limped. It argued. It tried.
Albert Weaver, sitting at his desk in the present, looked at the tangle of headlines, old notes, and half-burned maps, trying to make sense of how anyone had made it through. The answer wasn't control. It wasn't power. It was something softer, slower. It was people choosing to understand each other.
Some countries figured it out. They stopped trying to lock magic away or sell it off to the highest bidder. They opened schools. Real ones - where a kid from nowhere could learn the same spells as the mayor's son. It wasn't perfect, but it worked better than fear ever had.
Other places? They clung to the old ways. Tried to decide who deserved magic. They didn't last.
Cascadia rose up out of the American ruins, built on free classes and neighborhood casting halls. The southeast crumbled under the weight of titles and spell codes no one could read. The Lowlands in Europe formed councils where every voice mattered. In the Balkans, smugglers ran the streets and every alley smelled like burnt ink and ozone.
Asia split too - some regions bloomed with co-ops and shared mana pools. Others tried to crush knowledge under boots and slogans. Those places didn't burn. They just... went silent.
South America leaned into open source spells, passed around like recipes. In parts of Africa, local wisdom mixed with mana in powerful ways - where people shared what they knew, they thrived. Where they didn't, they fractured.
Albert didn't bother drawing lines on a map anymore. Magic didn't care for borders. It found the cracks and leaked through - into basements, kitchens, schools, graves.
He wrote, in that slow way he had when something felt important:
"Magic is a tide. You don't hand it down or wall it off. You meet it where it is. You learn to swim."
And then, a few lines below:
"The lesson cost us a lot. But maybe now we understand: if power isn't shared, it doesn't last. And when the lights go out, even magic can't fix everything."