Inherent Fate

by Geanna Culbertson

  “Blue, what is it?” Jason asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Liza. “I know there’s a lot of other stuff you told us that we should be freaking out about. But there’s one thing I can’t get over. How could your sister imprison you here? I have a sister, and while our relationship may not have as dark a history as yours, there is a lot of contention between us. But I would never do anything like that to her. How could Lenore leave you trapped forever?”

  “Simple,” Liza said. “I’m an outlier—I’m different. Every part of Book relies on classifying people into groups. It’s the way the higher-ups like it—the Godmothers, the twenty-six ambassadors, the protagonist schools they built to further my legend—and it’s the way my sister likes it too. They think it keeps the realm from falling into chaos like so many of the other worlds. Which is a fine theory until someone doesn’t fit into any of their categories. Then you are a threat—an anomaly that they don’t know how to classify or control. And when that happens . . . well, you end up like me.” Liza sighed again. “It’s not ideal, but at least it’s better than turning into a psychotic, bloodthirsty witch. While I may be trapped in the Indexlands forever, I am still grateful for my fate. I’ve been able to do the impossible and remain myself all these years despite my sickness, and that is an unparalleled blessing. In the past, victims of Pure Magic Disease always turn. There is no cure or antidote. At the end of the day there is just one truth—Pure Magic corrupts and destroys anyone who carries it.”

  I met Liza’s gaze. Her face was tinged with sadness. But from the way she looked at me, I could tell the sentiment was not a reflection of her fate this time, but my own.

  “You mean like how it’s going to destroy me,” I said bluntly.

  I’d been silent on the matter this whole time, allowing Liza to continue talking while I absorbed one truth after the next. But now the understanding burned inside me with too much heat to keep in. It flowed out of me with the same power as a Magic Build-Up episode—intense and mercilessly painful.

  “What?” I said, addressing the dismay in my friends’ expressions. “You were all thinking it. I saw your faces when she was talking about her dreams of the future. Why not face facts? I have Pure Magic Disease.”

  “We cannot be certain of that,” SJ tried to assure me. “There could be many explanations for your dreams. Moreover, you may have one very strong magical power, but that does not mean that it is fused to you and cannot be removed.”

  “But that’s just it,” I pressed, rising from my chair as desperation rose inside me. “When Daniel and I were at Fairy Godmother Headquarters, Lenore tried to take my magic away. She put one of those Stiltdegarth things on my head and the freaky creature took its best shot at sucking me dry, but in the end it couldn’t do it. After it died trying, Lenore asked me if I’d been having any strange dreams. I lied of course, but don’t you see? She must’ve realized that I have the disease and was trying to verify it.”

  “She’s right,” Liza told the others solemnly. “I foresaw the signs a while back. Though I didn’t tell my sister, I’ve had enough dreams to confirm it. Crisa has Pure Magic. It’s been dormant for a while because she’s only ever used her magic unknowingly when operating that wand of hers. But once she’s learned about her power—which I suspect she has, based on my visions—and starts to utilize it for real, there is no going back.”

  I sunk back in my chair—the weight of the revelation heavy on my shoulders like fat vultures.

  “So what happens now?” I asked bleakly. “How long do I have before I . . . change?”

  “I’m sorry, Crisa,” Liza said, seeming like she genuinely meant it. “But I don’t know how or when the Pure Magic’s corruption will start to affect you. It affects everyone differently, and could take anything from days to years to fully develop. But if it offers any solace at all, I think there’s a chance you might be able to beat it.”

  I lifted my head in avid attention. A flare of hope streaked through me like an electric shock. “What do you mean?”

  “As the first person who was able to fight against Pure Magic Disease and keep it from taking me over, I’ve shown that it can be done,” Liza explained. “Furthermore, your prologue prophecy seems to suggest that you could go either way.”

  “My prologue prophecy?” I repeated, as if in a daze.

  It was the whole reason I’d begun this quest. But after everything my friends and I had been through, and all that I’d just learned from Liza, the matter seemed so small. Still, I knew it was anything but. It was why Arian had been hunting me all this time. It was why Nadia had taken such an interest in me.

  “What it boils down to is this, Crisa,” Liza continued. “By next year’s end your new friend Nadia is going to launch a full scale invasion of the realm. I have foreseen it. I do not have many of the details, but I know that she will have all her dominos lined up by then to succeed. And she will succeed, Crisa, unless you stop her. That’s what the prophecy I had about you foretold. When all is said and done, you will either play the key role in helping Nadia achieve her mission, or you will be what ultimately stops her from doing so. I believe this eventuality is linked to whether or not your Pure Magic turns you dark. So you see—silver lining. Based on your prophecy, I would say there’s a fifty-fifty chance you won’t be corrupted.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath. It was a small hope, but it was hope nonetheless. It flickered meekly inside my chest.

  On the day I’d received my prologue prophecy and decided to find the Author to change it—all I’d had was a small hope too. And that hope had been rooted solely in the belief that I could do it. I wanted to believe in myself the same way now, but it was difficult.

  “Do you think she can do it?” SJ asked Liza after a pause. “Do you think she can fight the Pure Magic Disease?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” Liza admitted. “I can see pieces of the future, but I can’t read minds or hearts. That is the great fiction about what I am and what I write. The Godmothers and ambassadors have made it so that everyone assumes my visions and prophecies influence the will of others, but the truth is quite the opposite. All people affect their own fates; they choose who they want to be. What I see is nothing more than a reflection of that—reactions to their actions, if you will.”

  Liza stood up.

  “On that note, I think two things are in order. One, we better divvy up so that I might speak with you all privately. I’ve seen enough of most of your futures to know why each of you has really come here.”

  “And two?” Blue asked.

  Liza crossed her arms. “Before that, I need to explain to you the concept of Inherent Fate. I have a feeling it’s going to change everything for you.”

  s dusk fell over the Indexlands, Liza altered our perspectives on the world and the control we had over our fates.

  We’d always believed that the stories the Author wrote influenced our choices, but on this day we learned the truth—it was actually the other way around. Our choices were always our own; the visions Liza wrote in our books were just glimpses of the choices we were eventually going to make. Despite what our schools, the Godmothers, and everyone else had always insisted, she wasn’t creating our futures. This whole time her job had been cataloguing them. Telling us otherwise was simply a way for the realm’s leaders to control us and convince us that we couldn’t be anything more than what they wanted.

  As for our prologue prophecies, while they vaguely summarized our fates, they were vague for a reason. All of Liza’s prophecies were completely accurate and destined to come true unless we unexpectedly died due to third party intervention—like Arian trying to kill me before my prophecy became reality. However, the prophecies’ lines were riddled with double meanings and shrouded with possibilities for eventual outcomes. This was because of a concept she referred to as “Inherent Fate.”

  After so many years of observing people and their paths, Liza and the Godmothers came to understand
that each individual has a number of destinies he or she can achieve. These outcomes may be very different in nature, but they are all based on that person’s unique inherent character—his or her heart, mind, personality, and beliefs. What determines which fate a person ends up with is their choices.

  Liza used my own mother’s fairytale as an example. Cinderella was strong hearted but also a timid soul conditioned for obedience. The night of my princely father’s ball she had two choices: not go to the ball or go to the ball. She chose the latter. When her wicked stepmother tried to stop her, she could have given up or kept fighting. Again she chose the latter. When the clock struck midnight she could have left like her Godmother advised or chosen to stay at the ball in spite of it. She chose the former. When she lost her glass slipper on the stairs of the palace she could’ve dashed back to get it or kept running. Obviously, she chose the latter.

  If any one of these choices had been different her fairytale would’ve resulted in a different fate and her life would’ve had a different outcome. Maybe not a bad one, but a dissimilar one nonetheless. She could’ve stayed under the thumb of her wicked stepmother forever. She could’ve eventually moved out of the horrible woman’s house and forged a fresh start somewhere else—maybe even in another kingdom—and pursued some sort of career (she mentioned to me once that she had dreams of being an ice dancer when she was younger). She could’ve even met and married someone else.

  The point Liza was trying to make was that fate can only take us so far. The rest is up to us. We decide the specifics of our own destinies by following what our hearts and minds prompt us to do when we’re faced with choices.

  Hence the vagueness in Liza’s prologue prophecies. Because our choices could lead to different Inherent Fates, our prophecies could be interpreted in multiple ways. They might not be what we expected at all. The futures we’d been “assigned” were far more changeable than we realized.

  Take my friends for example. Until now they’d been focusing on single interpretations of their prologue prophecies. If they read more deeply into the cryptic lines—as Liza suggested—they would see that their fates had many other possibilities that their choices might lead them to.

  In other words, our destinies might be written, but the Inherent Fates we ended up with were up to us.

  This wasn’t the most assuring idea and definitely hadn’t been what we’d been expecting, but it did inspire hope that there was another way. After all, if our Inherent Fates mirrored our choices, I had faith that we would choose the right ones.

  My head reeled from the revelation. Lo and behold, we’d been the masters of our destinies the entire time. We just hadn’t known it because we’d always been told we had no control over our lives.

  I didn’t know if I should be more happy or ticked off by this twist. The notion was churning in my mind as I tried to process everything. I felt like an unsettled ocean trying to regain calm after a storm.

  As I waited for my turn with Liza, I imagined the discovery was also messing with my friends’ brains. I was sure they were all full of questions about their specific prologue prophecies. Well, all except SJ since she hadn’t gotten her prologue prophecy yet. But Blue, Daniel, and Jason definitely would be.

  Of my friends, Jason’s was the only prologue prophecy I’d never known anything about. I knew he wanted to change it; he’d come on this quest with us after all. But I’d never pried for details. I wondered if he would share some now that the pressure of singular outcomes with our prophecies was off the table.

  Before she left to speak to each of us individually, we had given Liza a recap of the various adventures that led us here and the various characters—Arian, Ashlyn, Nadia, etc.—we’d run into along the way. Since she’d bestowed so much information on us, it was the least we could do to offer her the same in return.

  As it turned out, she already knew a lot of it. Like me, she could see the future in her dreams, but after a century and a half of practice her powers were like a million times stronger. She probably had an incredible amount of control over navigating her dreamscape and must’ve witnessed an obscene number of images every night. My visions had only become more vivid in the last few weeks and I already felt overwhelmed. I couldn’t imagine seeing so much over so many years like she had. It was a wonder her brain hadn’t cracked in half.

  Liza explained that she had timelines and paintings and storyboards cataloguing what she saw for all her protagonists. Contrary to what we’d always believed, our prologue prophecies were not the first things that Liza glimpsed of our futures. Her visions didn’t appear in chronological order, which is why she needed such elaborate means to keep track of them. When she received her very first vision about a person she let the Scribes know. That’s when the Scribes told us we had a book, designating us as protagonists. But it wasn’t until Liza received the corresponding prologue prophecy that she would pen it down in an actual book, which she would then send to the Scribes to share with the schools and the protagonist. From there as her visions came and went, Liza filled in the blanks.

  In order to keep up with so many characters and story lines, Liza had seven tree mansions across her forest prison. Each was huge, multi-leveled, and contained full living quarters so that she could vary her routine as she worked.

  My friends and I wandered about the original tree mansion she’d brought us to while she took each of us to another location to discuss our private matters. I was in the grand art studio by myself when Liza appeared in a flash.

  I’d been staring at a rough sketch on one of Liza’s easels. The drawing was half-finished, but it featured Chance Darling. He was riding on the back of a dragon, which looked like Lucky, with me sitting behind him.

  “You ready?” Liza asked.

  With another flash Liza released the golden aura of her magic and teleported us away. When the light receded, I was standing in a library.

  The library was much more welcoming than the one that belonged to the Scribes in the Forbidden Forest. The walls were warmly colored, the floors were blonde wood, and twinkling lights illuminated everything.

  When the weird aftershock of teleportation subsided, I noticed that the shelf on my right held an electric red book that I’d seen before. The name “Natalie Poole” was engraved on the spine. I picked it up and looked at it as if it were made of gold.

  “I saw this book in a section of the Scribes’ protagonist book library marked ‘Other Realms,’” I told Liza. “I guess this means you’ve dreamed about her too?”

  Liza sighed. “Natalie Poole. ‘A girl of good but fragile of fate.’”

  I frowned in confusion.

  “It’s a line from the prophecy that came to me about her,” Liza explained. “She is very special.”

  “She’s in trouble is what she is,” I asserted. “Or at least she’s going to be. You know how we told you about that bunker we found beneath the Capitol Building—the one where Arian and his men were keeping track of protagonists they need to eliminate? She had a file there. Just like she had a file at Fairy Godmother Headquarters. Nadia has Natalie at the top of her hit list, so Arian and this girl named Tara are trying to destroy her.”

  “It seems like you’ve figured out a lot,” Liza commented.

  “Maybe so,” I shrugged, “but one thing I can’t understand is why. What makes Natalie so special, Liza? How are we able to dream about her when she’s not even a part of this realm?”

  “I told you that people with Pure Magic are able to see the future because of the way their spirits connect with the magic pulsing through our realm. But the same goes for other realms too. Earth may not have magic in the traditional sense like Book does, but that does not mean the realm doesn’t host other kinds of magic.”

  “What do you mean, other kinds?”

  “Crisa, magic is not simply limited to spells and curses and fancy abilities that Book and the other Wonderlands are known for. The root of magic is power—the kind that is strong beyond compare and potent e
nough to affect change. Every realm has its own form of it. Earth, for example, has as much good magic and dark magic as Book does, but it is generated from actions and experiences so it takes the form of emotional energy. We call that aura magic—the kind of magic that you can’t see or touch but can feel around you nonetheless. Dark magic on Earth is created through acts of evil, and it manifests in the form of hatred, revenge, heartbreak, and malice.”

  “And good magic?”

  “Good magic on Earth is the result of true love, self-acceptance, and hope. These forms of good magic—like the forms of dark magic—are all connected to some kind of complete, unwavering belief. The three core belief systems are belief in another person, belief in one’s self, and belief in the world at large. Before the Godmothers abandoned Earth, they referred to these core belief systems as the three magic classification categories.”

  A light bulb went off in my head. I remembered one specific line in Natalie’s Poole’s file that I had never been able to figure out: “Magic Classification: Category 1, 2, & 3 priority.” Based on what Liza was telling me, that meant all three aspects of Natalie’s core belief systems were important to her destiny, making her Earth magic potential off the charts.

  Liza didn’t notice my eyes glaze over as I thought on this. “So you see,” she said, “that is why we are able to dream about Natalie. Her life and her future will be characterized by high levels of Earth magic and that is what we are tapping into. It’s the same reason why there is a whole section in the Scribes’ protagonist book library, and my own, for books about people in other realms. While those visions are a lot fewer compared to the protagonists I’ve foreseen in our realm, they still exist and I am able to see them just as clearly as the others.”

  An embittered look crossed Liza’s face. “Of course it’s not like the higher-ups will ever acknowledge any of that. It would throw off their precious system. So instead, what do they do? They pretend like they don’t exist, just like they do with any books I write for people who don’t fit in with their stupid protagonist quotas.”