"MAGIC IS A DRUG."
"The reason you treat magic like a drug is because the people that taught it to you act like drug dealers. They buy it and they sell it, and they fight and they fuck for it."
— Chaplain Richard, The Magicians (2016)
"Magic was a drug even worse than poppy."
—Mistress West, Emerald City
Few mention this to their students along with the more traditional warnings, but sorcery is addictive. Once you see someone do something that cannot be done — once you taste real magic — you can never go back. This addiction bites both ways, of course: it gives us the enthusiasm and motivation we need for the endless studying and practice, the incredible effort of will that is sorcery. Yet it also leads some of us to make bargains with devils, demons and far stranger things in the rush to learn more.
—Mage: The Ascension - Sorcerer (revised)
The Worm of Magic had uncoiled inside my mind and was begging to be unleashed, promising to extinguish my panic. Magi had never determined if the Worm was real — the urgings of a living magic wanting to be used — or an imaginary personification of magic's effect on the human body, but in any case, the seduction to use magic was a palpable need, and the more you used it, the more holes the Worm ate through a magus' self-control. Like a leaky bucket riddled with woodworm, sooner or later most of us gave in and let the magic flow. That was the beginning of the end — there was no patching over holes in self-control if the entire bottom of the bucket fell out.
—The Traitor God by Cameron Johnston
