I shook my head hard. “There’s a difference between believing a fiction and acting because of it, and it being real in the first place.”
“Why, that just comes back to the mind, doesn’t it? It comes back to your dreams. It’s true that you had a vision of chaos pulling you apart on a parapet on a castle from the past, is it not?”
I wouldn’t answer. I could tell when I was being led around by the nose.
“It’s true that chaos was present in that vision, was not?”
I finally answered, “Yes.”
“How can you have a true statement about something that didn’t happen?”
“You can accurately depict the content of a dream without in turn making that dream real. Truth is not something you get to assign to fantasies you would like to occur. It’s a means to form an accurate belief about something that has happened.”
“But who gets to decide what’s accurate if everything’s a vision? How do you know you’re not stuck back there in the past?”
“Because—”
“You feel you’re not?” He brought his hands up and slapped them on his chest once more. “But we’ve already established your feelings don’t count. Truth has to come from something external. Where? Is it in the room? Can you find it for me, Bethany Samson?”
“I won’t do what you want,” I spat.
“I want you to understand, one sorcerer to another, that we all engage in fiction-making every single day. And it is through fiction making that we ultimately control our lives and make the world better for other people.”
I became quiet. Not because I had nothing to say, because I appreciated I was finally about to find the one thing I’d been after since the beginning.
Why this bastard had done all of this. Why he’d bothered creating the Zero Prophecy. Why he’d pulled me into it. Why he’d controlled his sons. Why he was still frigging here.
He kept walking around his sons, then stopped in front of his brother. He ticked his head to the side. “When we were children, Peter and I had the same dream, you know?” Paul pointed out conversationally as if we were two friends enjoying a chat. “We both wanted to clean up the city. You see, we lost our own father to gang warfare,” he pointed out.
My stomach clenched. This was no lie. I didn’t need truth-finding magic or emotion reading to realize that.
“We both promised each other that we wouldn’t let that happen again. We would create a world that was secure for all. No matter the costs,” he added under his breath. “Our father had been a philosopher, and he’d spent his life studying the then little-understood hidden sets. We’d inherited several done the family line. My father acquired more. He had the belief that together the hidden sets were a spiritual path through greed. An ultimate platform, if you will, for human peace. And when he died, I took on that vision.”
My stomach clenched again. It was starting to make sense.
Paul wasn’t lying. Nor was he telling me this to manipulate me.
Just like he’d controlled his sons with his family history, his father, unwittingly, had controlled Paul and Peter.
“So I studied. I climbed the ranks of Internal Affairs. I found more hidden sets. I gathered power. I waited.”
“And you invented the Zero Prophecy?”
“I wouldn’t call it an invention as more of an elaboration. It was a story my father had told me when I was a child. But rather than claim that together the hidden sets would destroy the world, he claimed they would save them.”
“So you what? Twisted that story and shoved it down your sons’ throats? Why? I still don’t understand why you used them. Hell, I still don’t understand where your wife fit in. Why does this mansion even exist?”
“My blessed late wife understood my dream. So she assisted in every way possible. It made… shall we say, more statistical sense to make both our sons believe they were both at the center of the prophecy. She schooled Max, and I schooled Jason.”
I receded, suddenly realizing just how screwed up this situation was. “She fed Max lies? About this place, about the prophecy, about her diaries? Why not enable both brothers to work together?”
“Because those in competition are always more faithful to their cause.”
“Why did Jason think he needed the diaries to find the seventh set? Wasn’t that an ultimate waste of time?”
Paul shrugged. “It was all part of the narrative.”
“You mean it was all part of keeping your own flesh and blood controlled. You and your wife were monsters.”
“Incorrect. Monsters act out of hatred and ignorance. We were visionaries. We understood that the only way to truly save this city was to change the mindsets of all within it. You may not understand that, but neither do you need to. Your part in this play is done. I fed my sons stories so they could one day bring me you. Finally a sorcerer who could fight with chaos to claim the seventh set. And they brought me you. I realized that by making them both independently think they were at the heart of the Zero Prophecy – one to destroy it, and one to save it – I would maximize my chances of them finding and retaining a complete sorcerer.”
I felt like throwing up on the word retaining, almost like I was a good deal the brothers hadn’t been able to pass up.
I breathed hard. “I don’t get it – why didn’t you tell Max about the seventh? Unless he was lying to me, he didn’t know.”
“Because Max… shall we say, was always the smarter of my sons. With his opportunity finding magic, I had to be much more careful, too. I left his schooling up to my wife. As a complete finder, she realized the wisdom in only telling him half the story. As an opportunity finder, it was easiest to constrain him by controlling how much he knew and how much he could know. It was why I added the clause about the finder in the prophecy dying. I knew it would stop Max from seeking out too many opportunities. The only way to truly constrain an opportunity finder is to make them believe that there are no opportunities to find. As long as Max through it was hopeless and he would die – and that it was his duty – I had him where I wanted him. As for Jason, it was easiest to control him by controlling how much he wanted to protect.”
I shook my head as nausea picked up through my stomach at that godawful admission. “So what now, Paul Knights? What are you going to do now? You can’t take the seventh off me, can you? If you could, you would have already done it,” I said flatly.
He stiffened. He brought one hand up, locked it on Jason’s shoulder, and brought his other hand up and locked it on Max’s. “Hand me the book, or I will kill them both.”
“They’re your sons,” I said, alarm stabbing through my heart.
“The Zero Prophecy says that someone must die to find the seventh set.”
“You just told me you made that up! Plus, I found the seventh set, and the Zero Prophecy is nothing more than a lie.”
“No, a dream. And as we’ve already established, those aren’t lies. They have their own internal truths,” he said.
He was unhinged. Unhinged in the deepest way possible. He wasn’t a man who simply believed in fictions. He was a man who would do anything to make them true.
And that was the power of this book.
And yet… I didn’t fear it. Nor did I fear the chaos anymore. Both seemed to be only as scary as you choose to make them.
I was suddenly reminded of my vision of the past when Max had warned me not to give in to the siren call of the sets.
He’d warned that they would try to lure me in.
And Jason was meant to be an example of this. Someone who’d chosen power even though it could destroy others.
“Pick,” Paul said as he kept his hands rested on the shoulders of his sons. “Who gets to die? Max would be the easiest pick, wouldn’t he? The most poignant, too. Peering into his heart, he genuinely loved you. It makes the most sense to kill him, don’t you agree? A doomed lover is such a sad thing.”
I looked at him. “You’re crazy. Max didn’t love me. Max thought he
loved me because you created a narrative where it made sense for him to love me. It was the same with Jason.”
He tilted his head to the side. “But if I created everything, why do you feel anything for them? Upon meeting them, why was it so significant for you?”
He almost had me floored. “… Because of my own finding magic,” I answered. “Because I knew they would be significant in my future, even if I didn’t understand why.”
“But if you could know that, then surely it was predestined?”
I clenched my teeth and shook my head.
“If you could feel in your heart that they were significant, it made them significant—”
“It wasn’t the same. I… expected it. From what Josh had said about Max, to what Max had said about me finding my future husband – I’d set up all these expectations in my head. And my magic had simply followed.”
“A neat explanation, but it misses the point, doesn’t it? It missed the very basis of your finding magic. How can you, a finder of opportunities,” he said, his voice rattling out with a blast, “dare to try to ignore fate? For without fate, how would you find opportunities?”
I tried to shake my head. I couldn’t.
He had a point. A point I’d been battling with ever since I frigging found out finding magic was possible in the first place.
“Now – you get to decide who dies,” he said once more, really weighing his hands down on his son’s shoulders like he was trying to pull them through the floor.
I looked up at him. And I tried to understand. How a man could become so twisted that he would threaten both his sons. How a man could so desire one particular future that he would do anything to bring the dream in his head alive.
“Pick one,” he said, his voice echoing out.
There was a real punch to it, and it forced me to blink hard.
I stared at him.
I… almost did it. I almost picked one of the sons.
I stopped myself.
I wasn’t going to play this game. There was always another path. You see, that was the benefit of having no fate. If I’d come into this fight believing wholeheartedly in the Zero Prophecy, I would have lost by now.
I settled my mind back on what I knew. And one fact stuck out more than any other. Paul needed me to give him the book. Why? Why couldn’t he just pull it from my hands? It couldn’t be because he thought he was weaker than me. Now I’d rescued him from the realm of chaos, he was a fully-fledged sorcerer once more. One who clearly had enough power to be controlling every other man in the room.
So his weakness couldn’t be it.
I knew I was so sapped of magic that I wasn’t using some specialized sorceress skill to keep the book pinned to my chest, either. So it had to be something else.
What… if I was using it? Right now? What if I had somehow unconsciously connected to the seventh when I’d created it?
My truth-finding magic almost reacted to that. But before it could, I pushed it away.
Because it was the problem.
Finding magic in general was the problem.
That thought struck me and seemed to take up my soul.
Finding magic – especially opportunity finding magic – was inherently unfair. A world with sorcerers who could acquire their desires by finding opportunities no one else could, wasn’t right.
Magic was the problem, not me.
I clutched my hand tighter around the book. It honestly felt as if it weighed like nothing more than a breath of air.
It felt seamless, in fact, as if it were an extension of me.
“Pick one son,” Paul demanded. “Choose their fate.”
“No,” I said.
He looked down at me and laughed. He tilted his head to the side. “Don’t try to find a way out of this. Don’t try to identify a path to victory. You’re too weak for finding magic.”
“I won’t use it. I won’t use any magic again,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. Then he laughed even louder. “That won’t save you.”
“You’re wrong. That’s the only way to save all of us,” I realized as something finally fit together.
In my hands, I was essentially holding something that could change reality. I was holding the means to alter what people thought was possible.
So why not alter what every single person in this room thought was possible?
Why not remove the one thing that had created this situation in the beginning? Power and the quest for it.
Paul, you see, was right. Good men should seek power to protect. But they should not hold it. To do that is to create disharmony.
Great men give power to all.
When I started this, I knew that the seven sets could be used to give magic and take it away.
I could easily use this set to give myself every single sorcerer power under the sun. And I could easily tell myself that that was the only way to save Max and Jason and the world.
But that was wrong.
There was a far more powerful way to save everyone and make a lasting change on reality – to remove the magic from every single soul in this room and to delete finding magic forevermore.
For, if I deleted finding magic, I could push the seventh set back into the chaos, and it would never be found again.
Perhaps Paul could realize that I’d come up with a plan – maybe my expression changed. Maybe, as a sorcerer, he read my emotions.
He took a sudden step forward, and with his hand locked on the shoulders of his sons, he dragged them with him.
Neither of them could retain their balance. They were in some weird frozen state. As they were jerked forward, they fell onto their knees like robots being controlled by a harsh master.
“There is nothing you can do, so give in.”
I took a breath. I pressed the book into my chest.
This was it.
I would not back down.
I opened the book.
Paul thrust toward me, charging with power.
He didn’t have time to use it.
I didn’t even have to read a word of the hidden set to understand how it worked. For it was the chaos embodied. That formless void opened up within my mind as soon as the cover of the book fell into my hands.
At once, I had access to everything.
Every single power in existence. All of it was locked within the chaos.
And for a second… it called to me. It begged me to use it.
But I did not use it.
Instead, I took Paul’s magic away. Just like that. It was almost as if I could reach into his mind and body, and reset them. With nothing more than a command, he was sapped of his warlock powers for good.
He sank down to his knee in front of me. But I wasn’t done yet.
One by one, I removed the magic from everyone in the room.
Then I wrote finding magic out of existence completely. It was the strangest experience of my life, and it was indescribable. I felt reality shift in my head, only for it to lurch around me a second later. I swore the world shook. One single shudder. Then it was done.
No. Not yet.
Two more things to do.
I stood.
Paul was in front of me, and before he could attack, I reached out and put him to sleep.
I put Peter to sleep, too.
And then?
I took away my own powers.
I reached right inside myself, and I pulled out the witch. I had never wanted to be a witch, but this was different. This was giving up almost absolute power just when I was on the cusp of grasping it.
But I would not grasp it. Not because I had been warned in that fictitious vision from the past.
Because I didn’t need it. Because absolute power – or at least the quest for it – was nothing more than a distraction from life.
I won’t describe to you the sensations that pushed through my body as I rewrote my own freaking genetic code and eliminate my magic. The feelings were purely indescribable.
And
once they were done, I knelt there on the floor.
Just before the last scrap of magic could leave me, I placed the seventh set back on the ground and I pushed it back into the chaos.
With nothing more than a finger charged with my last scrap of magic, I sent it back to where it belonged.
And then?
Why, I won. You see, I’d found the one path to success. Not with magic, mind you, but with the greatest force in reality – the will.
Epilogue
I sat at the kitchen table, holding a cup of tea as I stared at Josh’s back. “How much longer are you going to be with those biscuits?”
“As long as I damn well want. You’re not a sorcerer anymore, so you can’t order me around.”
“I gave up my sorcerer magic to save the world. I deserve those biscuits.”
“Great logic.” Josh turned around and dumped the biscuits on a plate, shoving them onto the table and scooting them toward me. “Don’t eat them all. We have a mountain of frigging paperwork to do. Even though the Justice Department is in disarray as it’s under review and the bad eggs are finally cracked, I can’t believe they’re still insisting that I put a case report in on this one. A case report? It’s gonna be an entire novel.”
“Try a series of novels,” I said with a grin as I stole two biscuits with one quick movement of my hand.
Josh growled at me. “How can you still be that quick even though you don’t have any magical powers anymore?”
I shrugged. “Some things in the universe are mysterious.”
“Well paperwork isn’t. This case report is probably going to form the basis of Peter’s case along with the case file we found in the archive room,” Josh said, his teeth clenching. Something very important happened as they did. They didn’t clench that much. He didn’t go into full Josh McIntosh mode. In other words, he didn’t repress the memory of his murdered sister. He didn’t need to. He was going to get all the justice he needed.
Peter was going to go down for a lot of things, including ordering the hit on Josh’s sister after she wouldn’t drop the case. Well, along with the help of Paul Knights. And Paul Knights? He’d gotten his comeuppance. He was in prison. With no magic and with no lies left.
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