The Harrowing of Minerva Damson · Goblin Booth Productions, LLC

First-Degree Magic Intro and Chapter One

March 6, 2025·38 min·3 clips
An alternate 1927 America has no racial segregation, an indigenous-majority territory called Comancheria, and magic that first entered public life during the Great War.
Bernie stands over ruin. The crime scene is packed with coroners, cleaners, and Powell, all waiting while her altered sight checks what ordinary light misses. Nobody has much patience left. Under her shoes, the asphalt holds spatter, drag marks, and the strange shape of bodies pulled together from opposite sides of the street. Her sight finds the violence still clinging there. The black touch around the victims suggests awful magic, pain, and someone using demonic force. Powell politely offers a flashlight. Bernie does not need it, not for the part of the job that comes from applied alchemy instead of better lighting. She moves to the alleyways next. The nearest one gives her nothing dramatic, just trash cans, broken glass, a kickball, a bicycle, and wet cigarette ends. The humidity makes everything feel closer and worse. What she finds is barely anything: a small distortion near a faint streak of blood on the wall, enough to bother her without solving the scene. Something moved fast, hit hard, twisted the victims into agony, and left marks only specialized sight can read. Procedure keeps running into dread. Questions about light, searches, and scene boundaries sit beside the uglier possibility of demonic power. Bernie keeps at it. The chapter settles into a grim investigative rhythm, where horror shows up through residue, bodies, and professional irritation instead of a big explanation.

As heard by us

A murder scene read through magic, blood, and procedure.

The episode opens with a murder scene that does not stay neatly physical. Bernie reads the asphalt like a set of clues, and the show gives that work enough room: spatter, drag marks, a flicker at the edge of sight, and the dark trace of terrible magic all land with plain, grim…

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Why you'd press play

You start at a crime scene and stay for the forensic creep of magic.

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