The Magician 1

They looked at themselves in the changing room mirror of an abandoned tailor shop. A well formed and nearly otherworldly late teenage boy stared back with nearly impossible to exist Caribbean blue eyes. "So, in the end, this is to be the default when I stand alone? It doesn't matter. A body is just a set of clothes for the soul. I'm not human. I'm not anything specifically. Not physically, anyway... I made a promise to not let my heart die... Don't worry, Keita. I've forgotten almost everything not related to academic knowledge, skills and 'Laws' but I remember you and I remember my promise."

Shadowy figures and shadowy conversations whose words wouldn't come all the way to the surface of their mind from their soul swam around. An enemy came. One unlike any faced before. It invalidated everything material. Names, entire histories of lives were just gone, as if they never existed. Even the world from that time was erased as if it never was.

"My name is Orison. It means prayer. Maybe I'm the only one who remembers me, the only one who might be able to remember them. And I know there was a 'them', many 'thems'. I'm their only prayer...

"Why do I exist? Why am I the only one who was capable of surviving? Was I spared for the sole purpose of living this life surrounded by shadows, a witness to an event no one else can remember?"

A shadow unraveled to reveal a word with a definition.

"Acausality. It's mostly a made up word and I don't know who said it to me. But if my survival wasn't on purpose... being unmoored from standard cause and effect might actually explain it.

"I have an enemy. They seem to have no goal and act almost purely off of whim. What are they called?... They have many names but the one I know, the one that causes the most hate to well in me is 'The Blue Eyed Magician'. Then I will be The Magician. It might be basic and crude but it puts me in a place before that thing. They are just one of many kinds where I will become the definition of what they are merely a representation of.

" Now that I have a goal, what do I do to achieve it? Do I need to become more powerful?... No, that doesn't sound quite right."

A shadowy veil lifted off of a stern man's voice lecturing. "You, like I, are a tier four existence. With one foot in the mortal and one in the transcendent, you are both and neither. Walk the line between. Search for the truths within mortal existence to fully step into the transcendent."

A child's voice asked, "And that will make me stronger, more powerful?"

"Strength and power are situational. A strong person may fall where a weak one may survive. A power may be godlike in one place or instance and become worthless in another. By all means, pursue them but recognize that they are a means to an end. They are tools.

"From all that I have encountered, crossing from tier three to tier four is a struggle of resources and opportunities. Perhaps that never really changes but the resources and opportunities you need to seek have changed. Anything that helps you achieve new insight into your personal laws are your new resources and opportunities.

"They aren't only found in external existence but also within. A strong soul and body might help you claim them but a clear and focused spiritual consciousness is necessary to use them. And until you can make what you use a part of yourself, they can be taken away from you."

The magician took some time to run through a cheat list of quick experiments designed to point out the rules of a reality quickly and efficiently. Once they had a decent idea, they sized up a set of durable denim and some boots. Once done with that, they let their space sample the fabrics and tools in the store, finishing it off by tossing the cash register into the first layer of their space to be chewed up for the precious metals.

Walking down the main street of the abandoned town, Orison repeated the process in multiple other shop fronts, sporadically placed diseased and partially rotten corpses the only witnesses. They were tempted to summon a mount but the world they were in was an advanced payment casting kind of reality. Magic was expensive in general as it wasn't something that was readily available to everyone.

Firing up a solid looking economy car, the magician siphoned off as much gas as they could find from the other vehicles and stored it in the trunk. With nothing else of interest, they took off, following a vague impression of where intelligent life might be found. It would take some time.

The reality was dying. It was in the mid-dimensions but falling rapidly to the dividing line. There wasn't any reason for the magician to fear that anymore. Inert essence pressed from all sides but Orison welcomed it into their space at a pace just shy of their ability to generate life and spirit essence.

What was a terrifying scenario that needed to be escaped as fast as possible had become an endless banquet of inner growth. It was a slow and steady acquisition but it needed to be. Inert essence was like water to the magician, myriad in use but potentially lethal if overwhelmed by it.

That was reason enough to not be in any particular hurry to leave but another reason was potential will shards. When a reality breathed its last, if a will was still attached, that will would fragment along with the existence. Such fragments possessed potential insights into laws but not all laws were useful. A tier four typically had incredibly limited ability to hold shards and ones possessing law insights outside of their concepts were all but useless.

The lower dimensions had more dying realities but shards from them weren't nearly as potent. Chancing upon one in the mid-dimensions was quite a lucky find but there was increased risk as well. Tier fours weren't the powerhouses they were in the lower dimensions and dying realities could garner the greed of tier fives depending on size and contents. The rare mad god and other eldritch nightmares might plague such places as well but were fewer and further between than in the low.

Everything had its exceptions but this place didn't strike Orison as being exceptional in any particular way. That made it a perfect place for them to start their new journey ability growth-wise. The same couldn't be said for keeping the dying coals in their ash strewn heart from extinguishing but a remembered promise was enough to keep them alive for awhile longer.

As they traveled, feeling a faint drawing to something, the magician ran into a small group of survivors shacked up in a prison. It hadn't been a bad idea but the leader of the group was a bad man. Two of the man's subordinates lead Orison to receive an audience.

Peeling a withered apple, the heavily muscled and scar faced man said, "What skills do you have and why should we spare any supplies for you?"

Orison smiled and said, "More than you can handle and I don't need your supplies. I stopped because your men flagged me down. I assumed they needed something. Turns out, what they thought they needed was my car."

The man leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and said, "Turns out, the strong own everything and what you NEED is someone strong to find you useful... Take him out back and have some fun. Don't hurt him too much. My right hand might take a shine to him."

The man went to straighten up with a leer on his face but suddenly went slack-jawed as his eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped forward, dead. No one else in the room was capable of seeing the slight tendril of smoke waft up from a pinprick burn in the corner of his left eye.

As the scruffy and dirty smelling man on Orison's right went to check on the leader, the one on the left held a gun to the magician's head. "Move and I blow your-"

With a fluid motion, Orison twisted the gun out of the minion's hand. Two 'bangs' later, there were three bodies in the cafeteria turned reception hall. A little over ten minutes and four more dead bodies later, the magician had informed the remaining and turned the place over to them.

They were confused why Orison wouldn't stay and was even more confused by what little was taken along with the three least useful people there. Back on the road with a solar compatible SUV, the magician looked over their new traveling companions. There was a catatonic young woman who had endured everything there was to endure, a man quickly approaching forty missing several pieces of himself and a six year old boy who was looking at Orison like he was seeing the devil incarnate.

"Why did you take me? What are you going to do with me?" the boy asked.

The older man seemed interested in knowing as well. Although, that one wasn't talking. It would have been hard without a tongue anyway.

"I took you because, if I didn't, the survivors of your father's cruelty would have taken their pain and hurt out on you. As far as what I plan... I suppose I'll drop you off with a group of people who don't look psychotic and won't have a reason to hate you because of your father," they said.

Two days later, Orison found an older couple with a relatively neutral aura and traded off some goods for them to take the hateful kid in. The magician would have tried harder to find him a better home but he'd tried one too many times to cause mischief. The husband looked like a heavy handed disciplinarian but since the boy's father was likely no different, it wasn't that bad of a match in a dying world filled with much worse.

When the SUV pulled into a withered corpse riddled town, the tongueless man went white with fear. "We are safer here than in other places. As long as you're with me, disease is one of the least concerning things about your world."

The magician took some time to clean out and clean up the suite in the hotel before stockpiling useful goods and valuables in it. After that, they got busy fixing their people projects. The man was a nightmare of issues, Orison sadly wished they had some troll fat for.

A couple of days later, Orison took a break with the project named Gus.

As they sat back drinking some random top shelf that wouldn't matter to the magician unless they were guzzling it, Gus said, "Why?..."

"Because I can. Because it's better than being alone and someone who owes you is less likely to do you harm unless they're a pile of crap," they said.

"Is that why you chose me, because I'm not a pile of crap?" Gus said with a bitter chuckle.

"Less than most of them there," they said almost ambivalently, which stole the words out of the man's mouth for awhile.

A few hours later after a DVD movie ended on the generator powered TV, Gus said, "You could have grabbed up one of those willing girls or that one eager boy, if that's your thing. One more thing to do while we wait for the world to end. Least, that's what it feels like."

Orison smiled and said, "That's exactly what it is. They were young enough that if they came with me, they might live to see it. I didn't want that."

Smirking at the gallows humor, the man said, "And I'm not? What about her in there?"

The magician shrugged. "You might or might not but she WANTS to see it. It might bring her soul some peace before she passes on to her next life."

A ghostly rasp of a wail emanated from the catatonic woman's bedroom. "That's my call, Gus. Help yourself to whatever. There's no real need to hold back but try not to get too drunk. We're going to be back on the road tomorrow."

The next day, after sterilizing the foodstuffs, toiletries and valuables that had taken anyone's fancy, the small group was back on the road. The young woman was weak and her leg muscles were atrophied but she would suffer the pain to walk a little more. She only would allow Orison near her and she would freeze up, begin her raspy wailing, if he did anything more than offer an arm or shoulder for her to brace on.

"Why don't you drive the car, Gus? Just keep her under thirty-five and be ready to stop if I say so," Orison suddenly said after a grocery raid.

"You expecting trouble?" he asked.

The magician shrugged. "I don't think so but it's possible. No matter what you see or hear, calmly slow down and park at the side of the road if things become strange. I'll say 'punch it', 'bust a U' or shout 'breaks' otherwise."

Over the next couple of days, the magician would direct Gus to make a detour or stop and wait when they felt a vague and distant signal of something supernatural occur or move nearby. As the group got closer to whatever faint pull Orison started to feel, the presence of supernatural activity became less vague and distant but the older man expertly responded to directions.

"Odd question. Were you a cabby before all this went down?" they asked.

Gus sighed. "Box truck driver for a moving company. Did some independent work for one of those hospital ride services before that. You can't imagine how relieved I was to get out of that before the Silent Death plague hit. Nobody knows exactly what causes it."

The magician said, "It's a one-two punch. There's a fungus that releases a mild immune system suppressant and a blood born virus that stays dormant until that immune system weakness occurs. White blood cells prioritize virus over fungus. They help each other out. The reason why it happens so fast is supernatural."

Looking excited, Gus said, "Does that mean you could make a cure?"

"It would be pointless. The plague could be seen as an act of mercy," they said.

For the first time since she stirred from her trauma induced coma, the young woman said just above a whisper, "How is global genocide a mercy?"

"To limit the amount of people who have to suffer the end. A dying world is no place for souls to grow. It's a charnel house for heavy souls to fall." they replied.

Looking out the car window with vacant eyes, she said, "If that's true, why did you save me?"

They gave her a gentle look that showed a hint of repressed madness."Because you wanted to see the world end. I don't know if you will but we're going to where the world's destruction will start, at least on this continent.

"I didn't save your lives because I think I can help you survive. I did it because I think I can save your souls from falling. You were tortured which helped reduce your debts but you need to find something positive to latch onto. It doesn't have to be much."

Gus chuckled humorlessly, "If you're selling religion, I'll buy as long as you're helping us survive."

Orison sighed. "Sorry, I'm a godless independent and I don't have any desire to be one either. A god, that is. The only salvation I'm selling is the kind you can only give yourself. The currency I'm using to sell it to you is just your company.

"I'd say that's pretty cheap but I'm heading to the heart of darkness. I can't guarantee your survival. Feel free to leave when you want."

Gus stopped the car. "You're headed to the most dangerous place possible?"

"We're already mostly in it," Orison said with disturbing calmness.

The man turned the car around and started driving the other way.

"You don't want to go? There's a gas station over th-" the magician said as Gus ignored him and kept driving straight at greater speeds.

Trying to appeal to reason one last time, they said. "If you don't calm down, we really will run into danger. If you don't want to go, that's fine but turn right at this next road and we'll find you a-"

Seeing that they were going too fast to make the turn, Orison ghosted while spreading his aura over the young woman, snagging her with it like a small net, barely able to fit her in. It took a couple of seconds for their momentum to slow to floating stillness. The magician was a little fatigued but the maneuver was pulled off without injury to the young lady.

Mystified at what had just happened, the young woman had forgotten her aversion to physical contact and was practically plastered to Orison's back. Brain catching back up to speed on what it witnessed and what she was currently doing, she jerkily stepped back twice to create distance. She was stunned out of a building flashback that would have left her paralyzed by the appearance of a phantom horse.

"The sign had one and a half miles to the gas station. You haven't recovered enough to walk that far. I'll put the horse in the ditch... There, climb on and I'll keep it out for awhile. Don't worry. We'll go slow and I'll walk beside," they said.

She looked at the horse dubiously for a moment before complying. Half a mile down the road, Orison suddenly felt something approaching. Under orders, the horse took off into the brush while she screamed hoarsely through dry, unlimber sounding vocal cords. A few seconds later, she and the magician were sprawled out in the tall grass as a familiar SUV caught up to where they were and sped past.

Myriad buzzing filled the air mere moments later. The cloud of insects was moving far faster than it should have been able. In it's center, something vaguely human shaped was visible but even Orison couldn't tell the exact nature of it. The massive swarm surrounding it was an effective screen against the more detailed aspects of spirit sight.