Kaleidotrope, Summer 2025
A nameless girl travels with her father, a stage conjurer who performs under false names while teaching her the secrets of illusion. Their journey takes a dangerous turn when he reveals a forbidden marvel: a fire-starter made of steel and flint that creates flame without patented magic. In this world, magic has been monopolized by Patenters—powerful mages who control spells through patents, making even basic necessities like fire dependent on their authority. The girl’s father belongs to the Abstainers, those who resist this system.
When they arrive at a river town, the girl realizes they’re approaching her mother’s domain. Her father attempts a desperate gambit: offering to rid the town of “a certain foul witch”—the girl’s own mother, Lanius, a powerful mage. He leaves his daughter with Bess and Reece, abstainer farmers who live without magic, asking them to shelter her if he fails.
That night, the girl discovers even the farmers’ careful life harbors patented magic—their hearth fire, kept alive for years, originated from a spell. She extinguishes it and uses her father’s steel and flint to create new, patent-free flames, freeing the household from magical surveillance.
Against her father’s wishes, the girl follows him to town, where she’s captured and brought to her mother’s enchanted river barge. Lanius reveals the truth: the father had bargained the girl to her in exchange for something unspecified, but tried to substitute himself. For this betrayal, Lanius has imprisoned him in torment within the boat’s deck.
Lanius offers a cruel bargain: if the girl accepts her true name (Amelia), learns magic, and becomes her heir, she can eventually free her father. The girl resists—her father had deliberately raised her nameless, preventing magical control through naming. She has also avoided all patented magic, making her invisible to magical tracking.
Despite Lanius allowing her freedom to roam, knowing her father’s imprisonment ensures her return, the girl refuses to submit. She discovers that Bess and Reece have begun distributing patent-free fire to other abstainers, using embers from the flames she created.
The story concludes with the girl’s realization: she knows who she is—not Amelia, not any given name, but someone who understands that “a certain foul witch needs to be dealt with.” Her namelessness and freedom from patents, once survivalist necessities, have become her greatest weapons. Like steel that holds the memory of its forging, she carries within her the knowledge and tools to challenge the Patenters’ monopoly on magic itself.
Rick Hollon (they/fey) is a nonbinary, genderfluid, intersex writer, editor, nature photographer, and parent. Fey has been an archaeologist, a stay at home parent, and the founding editor of four publications: Scareship Science Fiction & Fantasy, Farther Trees: A Magazine of Fantasy, the Queer Blades anthology, and the Mesozoic Reader anthology. Feir stories and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Crow & Cross Keys, the HELL IS REAL anthology, perhappened, Whale Road Review, Prismatica, Stanchion Zine, and elsewhere. Frequent topics include identity, trauma and its lingering effects, poverty and the necessity of community under capitalist systems, nature before, during, and after the Anthropocene, and of course dinosaurs. They have been writing since they were 9 years old.