Throughout my childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the answer to this question was rooted in the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, where a spell may cost an incantation, a few ingredients, and some energy from the spellcaster. To some extent, most modern magic systems derive their cost from one of these currencies—some form of specialized knowledge or language, some form of physical payment, and some of the magic user’s energy.

In service of narrative, there are valid reasons that many stories recycle the same magical costs. One is that they give the writer the ability to manage tension by having the magic fail at the most dramatic moments—by being unable to recall the desired knowledge, running out of ingredients, or being too tired. But all of these costs are calculated on an individual level, with magic treated as a power that an individual can harness and wield. In service of worldbuilding, treating magic as primarily an individual power is a missed opportunity. Instead, magic can be viewed as a resource, one with costs that must be paid by systems, societies, and cultures, far bigger than any individual’s abilities.

The idea of magic as a resource with social significance was skillfully articulated in a Twitter thread by World Fantasy Award winner Fonda Lee when discussing the magic in her groundbreaking trilogy, The Green Bone Saga.

“As a SFF writer, I depict magic as a resource. In this case, one that has to be found, dug up, processed, distributed, controlled, restricted, fought over, and imbued with ideas of spirituality and social values. Magic isn’t an easy ticket to equality.

“Who has access to the resource? Who controls its distribution? Who makes decisions about its use? In my story, it’s rare, requires years of extensive training to master its use, is kept within family clans, has potentially terrible side effects.

“Gender norms/patriarchy, geography, government, religion, history, values . . . all these things affect how any resource, magic included, is distributed and used in a society, fictional or not. Powerful magic users can be oppressed by those systems. (E.g.: the Broken Earth trilogy)

“When I see people suggesting there could be a silver bullet (like magic jade) that would automatically wipe away sexism or racism or put the most innately deserving on the top, I can only shake my head as I realize there must be people who believe that’s true about our own world.”

So allow me to revise the opening question:

Who does magic cost?

To quote a former US president, even wind farms “kill all the birds.” This specific statement is obviously untrue, but the notion that there are negative consequences to the harvesting of even infinite resources such as wind and sunlight is undeniable. The farming of any resource requires securing land—very frequently involving the displacement of residents who don’t have the power to oppose the land acquisition. Once that land is secure, it must be transformed into a farm—again, displacing residents, often plant or animal life.

Magic need not be any different. In my own forthcoming novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, magic is a precious resource, alongside water or iron, that the privileged take for granted and that the underprivileged suffer and die trying to secure. The abovementioned Green Bone Saga spends time in the jade mines, showing the reader the desperate and marginalized souls who make their meager living mining magical jade for already powerful, wealthy families.

But there is one text that most perfectly portrays the high societal cost of magic, and that is the masterwork manga/anime Fullmetal Alchemist (FMA).

For the uninitiated: FMA started as a Japanese manga series by Hiromu Arakawa that followed two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric. The magic of FMA, alchemy, has a fundamental law known as Equivalent Exchange—to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. Only a powerful artifact known as a Philosopher’s Stone allows an alchemist to circumvent the law of Equivalent Exchange. While on their journey to find a Philosopher’s Stone, the Elric Brothers learn a terrifying truth: a Philosopher’s Stone is created through the mass alchemizing of human souls.

So the question arises: How many people should suffer for the boys to get what they desire? Thankfully, our boys are heroes, and they refuse to commit or support genocide just to achieve their goals.

But this is only the first layer of the societal cost of alchemy in FMA. The second layer is exclusive to the 2003 anime adaptation (which deviated from the manga and the manga’s more faithful 2009 adaptation, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood), and is one of the main reasons I hold the 2003 anime above the 2009 anime (much to the outrage of many FMA fans—bring it on, I ain’t scared!).

In the 2003 series, alchemical power flows from a single source: a metaphysical gate that all alchemists access when trying to complete certain feats of alchemy. Yet this gate that is the source of all alchemy is also a gate to another world: our world. Yes, our actual reality. As in, the reality in which you are reading this essay.

Now why would a 2003 Japanese anime that takes place in a fictional reality suddenly need a gate that opens to the other side of the fourth wall?

Because where else would alchemy come from? In the same way that the powerful magic of the Philosopher’s Stone can only be gained through the transmutation of thousands of human souls, the power for alchemy itself—the entire reason why there exists the whimsical, colorful fictional world of Amestris that FMA takes place in—comes from the souls of those who die in our world.

This reveal was a seminal moment in my growth as a storyteller. It reinforces the story’s law of Equivalent Exchange in the most meaningful, metatextual way, a way that forces viewers to reckon with the very relationship they have with the text and to acknowledge a painful truth: most of the things you cherish come from the suffering of others. Whether it is the chocolates you buy on Valentines’s Day or the metals for your phone battery, we all exist within an ecosystem of sacrifice, pain, and suffering that the apex predators of this ecosystem are often blissfully unaware of.

Too often, the fantasy genre is criticized as simple escapism, with science fiction being lauded as the more “serious” wing of the speculative space. These criticisms aren’t worthy of rebuttal. But considering who must suffer for the existence of magic provides a more “serious” examination of magic as a whole and better centers the species, classes, or races that suffer endlessly to secure that resource for others, while likely never being able to know the joys of that resource for themselves.

– Wikipedia

• • • •

This morning, I finally recognized myself.

I was in the living room when it happened, licking my testicles. The whole month had been an amnesic stupor, sniffing around the house and neighborhood, searching for my identity. Then, on my third lick, it suddenly became clear.

I can’t wait to show her.

She’s almost home. I can smell her car, coming around the corner house with the grey forget-me-nots. I can smell the lunchtime coffee on her breath, staining the seams of her cow-skin seats, a small pool on the passenger side floor. I can smell the approaching heat off the front grille, hear it rattle like the teeth of a tasty yet frightened squirrel. I smell it all come to a stop on the driveway.

My chest quivers. This anticipation—this is what love feels like: paws up on the couch, tail swishing in fevered applause, looking out through the living room window as she steps out of her car.

And what heartbreak feels like: How could she have left me?

Once she finally sees me, the question evaporates. She bares her teeth—that’s how you know a human is happy—and explodes with loving scents. As she traverses the driveway, my heart swells; as she turns the door’s lock, my spine shivers; as she steps across the threshold, I lose all restraint.

I throw myself at her like a floofy fetch stick. She catches me against her chest, her hands working me over. She ruffles my cheeks, rubs and pats my spine. Our faces touch; if I may be a bit lewd, moisture is exchanged. Two become one; I become her becomes me becomes she, scents intermingled, realities melded.

In this moment, we recognize each other. She is the smell of coffee and avocado; yoga sweat and gym spandex; sharp brie cheese atop a lunchtime salad; tangy lemon car deodorizer; bedsheets and cologne. And I am—once again, finally—me.

Then we part: the one becomes two again. I shimmer with pride, ready for us to celebrate my rediscovered sense of self.

But she just sniffs me and pulls away. She speaks, but her words are too fast, too garbled. I never understand. Her bared teeth contort into a closed and downturned mouth, a wrinkled nose and brow. I’m confused.

So I sniff. She smells equal parts hesitant and perturbed. Why, my love? What is it?

Her frisbee eyes rove my body, then she rises and disappears down the long hall. There’s a quiet whine, like a strangled squirrel. Twice, then thrice, then water rushing through the walls.

Huh.

From the far side of the house, I hear her call to me. It’s all gibberish until a familiar word emerges. “Huuuuuwauncetagophiruh WALK”

Walk? I like walks. But even as she calls me toward her, I hesitate. Something is wrong.

“WALK,” she repeats.

I take shaky steps forward. As I lurch toward her sweet song, I recognize a scent from the rooms to my left and right, emanating from my scatter of old toys, my tin food bowls, my bed.

“WALK.”

It’s me. The house smells like me. I smell like me. For the first time in a month, everything is in alignment. So why am I afraid?

“WALK.”

At the hallway’s end, the water is loudest, gushing grey from the bathtub faucet just ahead of me. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there—she smells like herself. And like victory.

Then the door closes behind me and I realize, all at once, what has happened.

There will be no walk.

She grabs my collar, yanks me up into the tub. I thrash, but my paws can’t find purchase on the slick ceramic, and the tub is filling. Her grip—the clamp of toothless jaws—is tight on my neck. Her teeth are bared in joy. Laughter ripples her throat. Her rapid, meaningless words flow like the water, both of them splashing over me, leaving me drenched and confused and betrayed.

Love, I’ve learned, is like a squirrel.

Titillating.

Delicious.

Fickle. I’d thought she loved me, but she only loved the me she could control. The real me, she found unbearable. In need of change. In need of erasure. It wasn’t the first time, but love—again, like a squirrel—is so often blind. I should have known.

I howl. It rips painfully from my gut, as cold and raw as good meat. I’d thought pain was a universal language, but in the way that I don’t understand her, she doesn’t understand me. My plea goes unheeded.

She pours a substance into her hand that smells like lavender and rosemary—nothing like me. She lathers it into my hair, her fingers kneading deep. Piece by piece, from head and back to legs and tail, she scrubs me off, lets me float in foam. I watch me swirl down the drain, and as the last of me spirals away, I sniff.

I was the odor of backyard rocks and teddy bear belly. The decaying musk of old lasagna torn from the side of the kitchen trash bag. The aroma of upturned soil and earthworms from the hole near the neighbor’s fence. The fragrance of uncut hair, squirrel bits stuck between teeth, wet tongue against meaty testes.

That was me. She washed me away.

When the deed is finished, she dries with a towel some dog I don’t know. She holds it up to the mirror above the sink, where another dog—grey and confused—dangles from her grip. She bares her teeth again, gazes at her reflection.

That’s how she recognizes herself—with sight.

When she speaks, I don’t understand her words. Except for one.

“Seeeethasnautsobadizzit Cooper!”

Cooper. That’s how she recognizes me—with sounds.

But I sniff and I sniff and I don’t recognize myself. The dog in the mirror sniffs too, and the longing in his expression fills me with pity.

He looks like he’s lost something he loved.