These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No, these are the other stories.

Blood and Sacrifice

Written by Matt Butcher

Narrated by June O'O'Otari

Witchcraft is wildly misunderstood nowadays.

It's all angsty teenagers lighting candles and graveyards and reciting incantations they found on the internet.

They try to change their eye color or curse the local popular kids at school

that bully them. The adventurous ones might try to sacrifice a stray cat or something, but it's

just a hollow gesture without the proper practice. Nothing but an act of teenage rebellion

performed to frighten their old-fashioned or religious parents.

The old methods, the true ones, are all but lost.

This, I think, is for the best.

In the times of old, safe practice of the ancient magical arts was limited only to the most learned of society.

Illiteracy kept the uneducated masses for messing with forces they could not comprehend the scalar consequence of.

Nowadays, anyone with an internet connection could access the spells and incantations.

Were they more widely publicized and not lost in the depths of their newer understandings and outright false practices?

Some of these fake rituals are rumored to have been released to deliberately defame and disguise the old arts by those on the inside.

The mystery schools of old were rumored to have taken steps to remain hidden upon realizing

the need to do so.

The mysteries they taught were not for everyone.

There was only so much magic in the world, and it was only enough for a select, responsible

...