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“I’m posing this to you logically, not mincing words, because I know you can handle the truth. I’m trusting you.” Bringham said it as though she owed him something in return. What? Her acceptance? Her calm?

“You really knew…” This whole time, the archmages had known. Bringham had known and persisted with magic, great and small, teaching it to the next generation, claiming it was a blessing from God.

“Of course, I know, Freynan. All of us do.”

“But—how?”

“Think about it, Freynan. Archmage Thelanra and Archmage Gamwen are both mapping specialists. Did you imagine that, throughout their combined hundred years in the High Magistry, they never deduced what you did in a few months? Did you imagine that their illustrious predecessors never deduced it? You’re a damn good mage, Freynan, but—”

“I didn’t just deduce it,” Sciona cut him off.

Embarrassingly, Thomil had been the one to draw conclusions from the Forbidden Coordinates before Sciona suspected anything.

“I saw it. Clearly. As though it was right in front of me. If Gamwen or Thelanra had seen what I did, they…” What did she mean to say?

That they wouldn’t continue using magic?

That Bringham wouldn’t? “I saw a girl in my mapping coil, and when I… wh-when I—”

“Freynan, listen to me.” Bringham leaned forward with a note of urgency.

“The most powerful minds and hardest hearts have a breaking point. This—what you’re doing right now—is not something mages can afford to do to themselves.

This is not something I want you to do to yourself. Please. You have too much to offer.”

“So, you don’t want me to acknowledge the truth? To name it? Isn’t that a mage’s purpose under God?”

“Not in this case,” Bringham said softly. “Not when it comes to the Otherrealm.”

Thomil was right. Bringham didn’t care. Not about Sciona, not about the lives he had taken in his long career of magic.

And if warm, giving, nurturing Bringham didn’t care, then none of them did.

Sciona was certain. And, with that certainty, a deep hatred welled in her frozen heart, shooting the ice through with wrath.

It wasn’t just hatred for one man who had carelessly killed so many for his power; it was pettier and more intimate than that.

Bringham and his ilk had built themselves up as Tiran’s heroes for generations, all the way back to the Founding Mages.

Hundreds of thousands of people worshipped them.

Hundreds of thousands of little boys—and little girls, when they were as ambitious as Sciona—wanted to be them.

The mages of Tiran accepted that reverence as if they had earned it when, in truth, they were the deepest, lowest sort of evil.

By both the Kwen metric of the harm they did and the Tiranish metric of intention, these were the worst souls in the universe.

How dare they hold that evil up before Sciona as an ideal?

How dare they siphon her energy, her enthusiasm, her life’s work into their organization on the promise that it was a great good?

“Why?” Was the only word she had in her, this cracked whisper that couldn’t possibly contain all the rage in her being.

“Because Tiran comes first.” Bringham’s voice was as softly earnest as it had ever been, and it poisoned every kind thing he had ever said to her. “Progress comes first. Magic is all that separates our civilization from the hardship and savagery of the Kwen.”

“But we have a hand in making the Kwen a savage place!” Sciona burst out.

“The conditions beyond the barrier—those are conditions our magic created.” She thought of scarred Carra clutching that knife, determined to kill her.

What had to happen to a little girl to turn her into that?

What sort of horrors did she have to endure?

“Our magic creates civilization. Where it comes from is out of our hands. It is God’s will.”

“But it’s not,” Sciona protested. “It’s literally not. We look for energy sources, map them, siphon them—willingly, knowingly. How do you abdicate responsibility for that?”

“By remembering that God gave His chosen mages access to the Otherrealm for a reason. He meant for us to use it.”

“Except he didn’t ‘give us access to it,’” Sciona said. “Founding Mage Leon figured out how to map and siphon based on texts he took from the Endras—the Kwen of the Vendholt Mountains.”

“Under divine inspiration,” Bringham said with insufferable confidence. “Remember, this was at the same time God sent him a vision that he must found a new city.”

“Why would a good God ask anyone to found a city at such a cost?”

“No one can know the Father’s reasons, and those are not for us to question.” Bringham seemed to see that his answer had not satisfied Sciona and pitifully tried to patch it. “We can infer that God knew that hard times were coming to the Kwen, and He wanted His true worshippers to be protected.”

“Hard times…”

It was such a pleasing story, imagining that the Tiranish were simply chosen for survival by an all-knowing power beyond their control.

But there was a serious cause-and-effect problem with Bringham’s logic that Thomil had identified only moments after coming to understand the origins of Tiranish magic.

‘Hard times’ had come upon the world because of Blight—if not solely because of it, mostly because of it.

How was a population supposed to recover from a bad crop or bitter winter when death kept striking out of nowhere?

The Kwen hadn’t coincidentally fallen into chaos and starvation during the same time that Tiran was founded; the Kwen had fallen because Tiran was founded.

Because stolen magic had enabled Leon and his disciples to take even more of what was not theirs.

“Need I remind you that Leon gave the tribes of the Kwen a chance to join him in salvation?” Bringham said.

“He warned them of the dark times to come if they chose not to submit to the true God. Those who refused him simply suffered the consequences of their heresy. They brought Blight on themselves.”

“But Tiran itself is the cause…” Sciona started before realizing that this battle was lost in every way that mattered. Bringham knew. Anything she might say, he already knew, and he had already decided it wasn’t important.

Her kindly mentor was gone. He had been gone before she met him.

“I’m so sorry, Highmage Freynan,” Bringham said, and God, he really sounded it.

How dare he? “Most highmages get to grow into this truth gradually and absorb it as they are ready. Feryn, I think I was twice your age when I had it all pieced together.” He let out a wry laugh. “Such is the curse of the sharp mind.”

“So…” she said quietly. “ You know what the Otherrealm really is. Obviously, the other Archmages of the Council know… Who else?”

“Anyone who’s served in the High Magistry for more than five years or so, as well as any city official who’s worked closely with the Council for that long.”

Sciona ran the numbers in her head. That was most of them. Most of the High Magistry and most of Tiran’s government. A whole entrenched system of mass murderers here in the heart of civilization.

They’re either evil, or they’re stupid, Carra had said, and now Sciona knew which. She should have known from the beginning. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. And still, a last hope in her refused to die. There was one more thing she had to try.

“My research could help stop this,” she said, hating how fragile her voice was, how defeated she already sounded.

“Stop what?”

“The taking of human life. I’ve created a mapping spell that allows me to view the Otherrealm—the Kwen—in total clarity. It’s like looking through a window, color, detail, and all.”

“Color?” Bringham lit up as though they weren’t still discussing the mass slaughter of innocents. “Impossible!”

Sciona tried to smile and felt like her facial muscles might tear. “Sir, you know that word is not in my vocabulary.”

“But—how…? No, never mind.” He returned her approximation of a smile with a disturbingly genuine one. “I suppose I’ll see at the demonstration in a week like everyone else.”

“I just thought that if we could see the energy sources we siphon more clearly, we could select them more carefully.”

“Absolutely!”

“We could avoid murder.”

“Not murder.” Bringham held up a finger as if Sciona had said something incorrect, gotten a term wrong in class. “It is not murder to use what God has gifted us.”

“But now, God has also given us a way to use it without hurting anyone,” Sciona protested. “Isn’t that the greater gift? The opportunity to move forward in clear conscience?”

“Sciona,” Archmage Bringham said, and she knew from his weary, apologetic tone that she was being rejected.

“Your compassion does you credit as a woman, but it is not realistic. Even if we were to direct magic away from humans, Tiran must still feed on life in the form of plants and animals. The savage people of the Kwen are still living on borrowed time on land that cannot sustain them.”

It was the same argument Thomil had made—that direct siphoning was only half the reason the people beyond the barrier were struggling. Only Bringham phrased it as though the decline of the Kwen was a fated inevitability, not the result of human action.

“This is the price the Kwen pay for their heresy.”

“Three hundred years ago,” Sciona said. “Three hundred years ago , a dozen Kwen leaders refused to convert to a new religion and move in with their conquerors. Those people are all dead now. Everyone who could have had any hand in that decision is dead. But the decision to Blight the Kwen—to siphon—is a choice we make every day. How holy is it to steal life from people who’ve never had a chance to convert?

Who’ve never knowingly slighted our god? Who’ve never even laid eyes on Tiran?”