The Harbingers
Created by Gabriel Urbina (Audacious Machine Creative, 2026)
What would you do if magic were real? This is the central question that animates Gabriel Urbina’s fiction podcast, The Harbingers, which slowly unravels the story of the first two people capable of performing magic in thousands—perhaps millions—of years. (At least one answer they give to that question is “teleport all of Boston to the moon,” in case you were wondering.)
Urbina and the rest of the Audacious Machine Creative team use the audio medium to great effect: The sound design and voice acting render Harbingers closer to a television series than an audiobook, and the lack of visuals helps to very prettily paper over the fiscal limits of an indie development studio. The podcast’s more Lovecraftian backstory elements—magic is loosed back into the world after uncovering a super-ancient civilization buried under miles of snow in Antarctica—would be difficult for even a major studio to pull off visually.
Despite this reliance on the deeply fantastical, much of the story of Harbingers is remarkably down to earth, centered on the very-human foibles of two ambitious, struggling academics in a university anthropology department. Their attempts to use their magic do sometimes result in massive cataclysm—see the aforementioned disappearance of Boston—but often their tragic effects are much smaller, more personal.
Which brings us back to that core question—what would you do if magic was real? One other answer Harbingers suggests is simply nothing. The magic they discover, even in its smallest, most well-intentioned forms, has a way of breaking down the structures, rules, axioms, and limitations that make it possible to behave as humans, much less themselves. We’re products of our environment, as they say, but what if that environment ceases to exist? Do we cease as well?
This article also appears in the July 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 7, page 37). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Cover art for The Harbingers
