Now, the concept of magic was not unfamiliar to Zachary. He went to a public school- everyone knew magic existed in some capacity. It wasn’t quite intertwined into their daily lives, per se, but of course there was the odd “miracle” or “vision” or whatever that people got. People still dreamed about superpowers as if they were fantasy. Which, naturally, made it all the weirder when Zachary got them.
He didn’t really notice at first. He would wonder if he’d fed his cats that night, and just pop downstairs real quick and sure enough, there was food in their dish. He would reach for a glass of water that was there, and then notice that there was an extra cup in the cupboard when he’d washed it out and put it with the others. He was constantly seeing animals that he could swear hadn’t been there a second ago- he’d hear a twig snap, convince himself it was “just a squirrel,” and sure enough there was a squirrel sitting there. Doing… nothing, really. Squirrel things. It was weird.
The bad stuff happened when he started to think of weirder things.
His irrational thoughts kept him up at night sometimes. Wondered if there was a monster outside his window and sat up to see red, glowing eyes. Later, people would describe reports of a beast that ripped out panes of glass and had an earsplitting roar; Zachary could only shudder in fear. The thing was, whenever he really believed something existed, it would come true. He was terrified of the dark now, because he knew that whatever he feared might appear, and of course that was great for making him fear more things and making them appear more.
His parents considered sensory deprivation until he was sent screaming from the tank by a shark that the people of the establishment said they had “no idea” how it got there. His aunt suggested acupuncture for stress relief, but when he was terrified it would hurt, it did.
Then he figured out how to turn it around. He just had to convince himself that everything would be fine. Of course there was the time limit for this- he would have to catch the fear before it became full-fledged and work on actively reversing it. He did this mostly through lines-
There is no beast roaming the city. There is no beast roaming the city. There is no beast roaming the city. There…
It worked, mostly. Some of the time. People still spotted the beast. But it had mostly disappeared and was considered a conspiracy-
Sharks don’t exist. Don’t worry. Sharks aren’t real. Sharks aren’t real. Sharks aren’t-
Overnight, shark fin soup prices skyrocketed. People told stories of the mythical shark. The populations of certain fish skyrocketed, and it almost single handedly saved dolphins. The remora fish slipped under the radar, never to be seen again; their symbiotic relationship had been crushed and they couldn’t evolve out of it quick enough.
Twigs don’t snap, twigs don’t snap. Squirrels don’t snap twigs because twigs don’t snap. The leaves vanished from trees as the twigs they were once on grew too tough for their shoots to grow off of. Without the leaves, the trees withered and died.
People started getting sick. There was too much carbon dioxide in the air, they said, the trees and bushes were all gone.The plant population had been taken down to a third overnight. People started getting carbon dioxide poisoning. Heavy metals weren’t filtered out of waters anymore, nor were the shores safe; the world started to flood. People got lead poisoning and went mad; the streets rife with chaos, the government in a panic. He tried going back on it, but twigs were as distant a memory as functional trees. How could they snap when they had never snapped before?
He was nearly delirious at this point, out of his mind with thirst and hunger for food that wasn’t hopelessly contaminated and air that was rich with oxygen.
Don’t worry, he told himself, desperately. It’s not real. None of it’s real. Nothing’s real, nothing’s real, nothing’s--
And then it wasn’t real anymore, and neither was he.
--
The Author of this work would like to disclaim that they are by no means an expert on the real-world implications of any of the above effects, and in fact wrote this in less than fifteen minutes with neither editing nor beta reading. They have not edited this post-authorship except to write this disclaimer. Please take all information above with an amount of incredulity, as it is firmly fantasy and has no connections to any real-world knowledge whatsoever.