HE'S NOT REAL

"I wonder, though," Baylin went on, "don't you fear it?"

"Of course, I fear it," Marvel said. "It wants to destroy everything, uncreate the world. It wants to hurt people. It's just waiting for me to lose control. Who even knows just how much it's capable of?"

Baylin tapped a long nail against her lip. "If you fear it so much, why haven't you asked once how to get rid of it? Tried to find a way to dispose of the akathar and make kathar with your new magical centre? You are not without options."

Marvel swallowed hard. "Because I can handle it."

Baylin shook her head. "You don't know that. But you don't particularly care. It could hurt people, and you might be able to control it, or you might not. But that doesn't matter to you in the face of all that power, does it?"

"That isn't true," Marvel protested sharply. Underneath his outrage, he wondered, isn't it? 

Baylin's depthless black eyes continued to pierce through him. He snatched his gaze from hers, shoulders raised in defence. "You don't know what it's like to be nothing more than a speck of dust in the eyes of mountains. As I was, anyone could do anything they liked to me. It wouldn't matter what they did to me because they were the stronger ones, and that gives you the power to escape consequences to your choices."

A small part of him shifted uncomfortably under the resentment that flooded him. He thought of Echo dropping him out of the window and decided the feeling was justified.

"It's a fact of nature, boy: the strong are entitled to crush the weak simply because they can and the sun doesn't care one way or another. Who cares about that point?" Baylin seemed uninterested in dwelling on the subject though. "What I want to know now is if you have any knowledge of how akathar energy works."

Marvel thought about playing dumb.

"I know about the stolen books. Relax." She held up a hand to calm him when he sat forward. "If I cared about it, I would have punished you ages ago. Do you think I don't know what goes missing from my own library?"

The revelation was humbling. To think he'd thought himself so clever… "Akathar—" Satis, did he hate saying that word— "doesn't it pretty much work the way all magic works? Take a part of it from your center through your arrays and instruct it with a spell?"

"And?"

"And what? What else is there to it?"

Baylin gave him a look that poured forth disdain. "I would have thought, facing a dangerous power you know nothing about, you would have done as much research about it as possible."

"I forgot to schedule it between all the nearly dying. My apologies."

"Do you even have any idea how Fusion magic works at all?"

Marvel thought he was beginning to. "Um, I don't know. It's athar from things that used to be living, so it has a will of its own." A will that could be occasionally determined to see you aimed or dead.

"And?"

Marvel, stroking the creature's head softly, let out a wearied breath. "Alright, fine, I don't know much. I'm the worst person who could have been given this power. I get it. If you want to say something, go ahead."

Baylin frowned at him.

Exasperated, he cried, "What now?"

"You aren't following etiquette right now," she noted with a thoughtful sip of her tea. "No 'Master'. No 'Honoured One'. You can't even be bothered to moderate your temper anymore."

Marvel hadn't noticed. That could be dangerous: forgetting to address higher mages properly, especially since he still wasn't quite sure how to use his powers yet.

But honestly, why should he? Judging from the sheer size of his athar, he was far more powerful than most Journeymen who'd spent centuries building up their energy stores. All he needed was to learn how to use that power and he'd be better than everyone.

Baylin kept looking at him, frowning slightly.

"Would it make you feel better if I went back to using honorifics?" he asked.

She skipped over the question. "Warlocks create golems to harvest akathar energy. It retains the will of the person who died, and because it is necromantic magic, it becomes twisted, bent on destruction and chaos. Only held back if the will of the user is stronger."

"So that's what makes it evil?" he asked.

"That's what makes it powerful," she corrected him. "Mages are confined to spells, measuring and testing energy to know how to manipulate the world. Akathar energy already knows exactly how to manipulate the world. Under the guidance of a strong-willed warlock, the possibilities of what it could do are endless. Who needs spells when you can change the course of the world with a thought?"

Intrigued, Marvel forgot the creature to grip the armchair. "If it's so powerful, why doesn't everybody use it?"

Baylin stared at him with clear irritation. "Don't you know anything?"

"We've already established that I'm clueless," Marvel replied. "Please, enlighten me."

"Well," Baylin began, her tone dripping with sarcasm, "besides the minor inconvenience of it being time-consuming and incredibly difficult to constantly create golems, any warlock who doesn't want to be hunted down and destroyed must serve the King of the North."

Right. The legendary king, rumoured to have power even eclipsed the greatest Grandmasters. The stories claimed he had turned everything north of the mountains into a barren wasteland and commanded an army of golems ready to sweep over Orr at any moment.

They said only the combined might of the Draconian Heritage and the Conclave of Grandmasters kept him from expanding his reach across the continent.

It all sounded like a load of rubbish to Marvel. Propaganda to justify the war that had consumed most of his childhood—a convenient excuse to extort unreasonable taxes from the surrounding kingdoms as a "protection fee" and control trade by guarding its routes.

"He's not real," Marvel said.

Amused, Baylin quirked a smile. "Isn't he?"

"Have you seen him with your own eyes?" Marvel pressed. "Have you seen his golem army? Or any warlock pledging undying loyalty to him?"