Someone smashed a flutterfler and without even thinking she touched her Stone and used Wyrd to piece its broken body back together. She filled its empty vessels with dreams and it became the stuff it used for blood. It brushed her cheek with its wings, then flew off - dancing in the hot air.
I guess I had always sort of fantasized that a guy would see me and get past the ponytail and the glasses and the giant sweatshirt to discover how insanely awesome I am, then come and whisk me off into that magical teenager fairytale where everyone else gets to prance around.
Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren't ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated.
- Harry Dresden, Changes, Jim Butcher
...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.
This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.
I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.
'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!'
- Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher
Do you really think you can win?'
'Yeah. Hell, Ortega is only the third or fourth most disturbing thing I've tangled with today.'
'But even if you do win, what does it change?'
'Me getting kiilled now. That way, I get to be killed later tonight instead.'
- Susan Rodriguez & Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher
This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit.
The only magic that's left in the world right now is the magic that we make ourselves, deliberately. You're not going to stumble over enchantment by chance. You have to be open to it, looking for it, and when you first think you might have glimpsed it, you have to will it into your life with every machination available to you.