She sat back, sweat plastering her blonde hair to her face. The circle was cast. The fires burned. The incantations chanted. And the power… the power was coming.
Midnight.
Her body convulsed as a million registers tolled, a million transactions occurred, a million books opened. Across the world her worshippers eagerly turned her pages, a literary prayer wheel feeding her with energy that grew by the second. Emotions flared bright on their way to her waiting form; fear and joy and sorrow. And, in a few cases, outrage, when one of her worshippers accidentally paid full price.
She was more than human now, beyond mortal concerns as the ritual she had spent a decade building finally closed and her skin felt ready to burst from the power within. Tens of millions of people were thinking of her and her creations and nothing else, and the sheer force of it was filling her with–
RING!
Her attention, focused through hours of painstaking effort, broke with the sound and the power funneled out of her, dispersing into the heavens. Tears of frustration streamed down her face as she picked up the phone. “What? Hello? Who is this?”
“Ms. Rowling, this is SkyCast, we were hoping for a quote on the end of an era? What were you planning to do now?”
She looked around at the ruins of her spell, and sighed. “You know, I was thinking of starting another series…”