Michael Dawson's Journal Entry 1

A character portrait generated with AI

To whomever finds this journal first, just know I was trying my best. If anything should happen to me, please share my story with, if no one else, my child and her mother. 

My name is Michael Dawson. This is the story of how I died. 

Cause of death? Rebellion, and it wasn’t even mine. I didn't ask to join the freedom fighter cause. I was born into it. The freedom fighters originally existed before the war as a group advocating for the rights of people with magic powers. It started about a hundred years ago when the first rebellion led by the fae and creatures of the night failed. Then the Tolkein era rebellions failed. Those rebellions had a better ending than the most recent because they could all just slink back into the old ways of hiding in plain sight. The second rebellion which took place hurt before I was born became an excuse to justify oppressing witches, wizards, etc. My father was one of their leaders and expected me to be a foot soldier on his behalf. 

My task had been simple: charm the daughters of the political machine and use their connections to get intel. Then my father started working on a side project called the Sons of Dawson. He was gathering the disenfranchised magics, mostly male, and teaching them forbidden magic rituals to make themselves stronger or get anyone to do whatever they wanted. Half the rituals were made up and didn't work, but my father could convince them it did or trick them into needing his mentoring for longer. The one thing that worked, the one thing that actually required real forbidden magic and not just random herbs and crystals anyone could use, was the draining ceremony. They only did it on half born witches, or wizards whose powers skipped a generation. They would drain their magic and then cast them out of the house with a sloppy glamour so they couldn’t remember who did it.

Those ceremonies weren't just barbaric, they angered the gods. Kateque the goddess of witchcraft was very protective over all her magics and it was said anyone who performed such a horrible act would have nothing but misfortune. So my father made sure his followers did his dirty work. He wanted me to observe so one day I could take over for him as leader. 

As the youngest freedom fighter, I was meant to seduce and hypnotise the daughters and sons of the politicians to get access to their wealth and connections to further our cause. Sometimes this meant we networked, sometimes we extorted money, but always it meant we blackmailed. As the only son of the leader of the Dawson's, I was meant to lure those poor witches to their doom for their twisted ceremonies and watch. I tried to get out so many times. When we lived in the capital, I took the exams and made it into mage school but my father pulled me out. The people of Crown City had started noticing so we could move to Lydia, the wealthiest with the most political power. 

I was so depressed I stopped eating. At night, I was plagued with nightmares of the ceremonies I had tricked those witches into attending and seeing how my hypnosis made those poor children destroy their families with our group's greed. My father used an amulet to quiet my qualms about how they wanted me to play along in their wretched game. In Crown city, they had me use my studies to lure in witches. In Lydia, we used a different approach. The freedom fighters craved vengeance and power with an unquenchable thirst, but what they really hungered for was knowledge. Knowledge of who had the most political clout and secrets to hide. The elders would learn who held the most power in this town. I would find their young in the shops and romance them into giving me whatever the leaders wanted– intel, money, artifacts, and blackmail. At the very least I was free from luring magics to their doom, the town was more ordinary and only a few of the witches were half bloods or dormant, meaning their powers wouldn’t emerge in full force unless they were in danger. My father hated the halt in his power feasting, he was addicted to it. 

That was how I learned about Angela Garland. Sister to the wife of the prince of Aurelia and daughter of automobile titan and local politician Richard Garland as well as powerful socialite Theresa Garland, Angela was a prize the freedom fighters were determined to win. If they had her in their clutches, there was nothing they couldn't do.