Enna didn't know what was going on. The amulet, soaring through the air, fell into her hand like a wounded bird.

Gentry was ignoring her. He was staring at Orton's corpse. Something had happened, but she had missed it, didn't know what she was supposed to do or say or think. She didn't know anything.

Then, abruptly, she knew everything.

The sigils inside the amulet seemed to expand, opening up and swallowing her; lost, she fell downwards inside it, plummeting through strange vistas and images that she didn't recognize. Symbols and runes swirled around her and through her, crucifying her with weird knowledge and strange facts she couldn't make sense of.

And yet, it did make sense. This spell was a charm for making ants avoid an area; that one was an enchantment which would make someone fall asleep. This particular segulot represented the Nun Sophit, the Final Son, with a gematria value of 50 or 700 depending on its form. That symbol represented all eight of the trigrams comprising the natural order.

This was form. That was intent. These were the strictures of existence. Those were the harmonies of thought which gave rise to all the others.

My name is Dennis Wilkerson.

She unfolded all the mysteries of the arcane that Orton had painstakingly collected, marveling at their intricate interrelationship.

Yes, I will teach you magic.

She beheld the infinite majesty of truth, in all its myriad forms, and grasped the simple beauty of its oneness which gave rise to all its emergent complexity.

Magic is real. I'm a wizard and I'm caught in a time loop.

She collected within herself all the broken and fragmented pieces of cryptic and inscrutable lore that it had taken Orton more than a hundred years to assemble, effortlessly reconfigured them into a seamless whole, and beheld it without flinching.

And me? What tier am I?

She let all of the power within the amulet flow into her, like water filling a glass, a glass that was vast and deep and already perfectly ready-made; a pristine and transcendent shape, given form by its container.

You're a reincarnated sorceress from the year 704.

She knew it all. Because she had seen it all before.

You're a reincarnated sorceress.

Because she had been fifth-tier all along.

Reincarnated

And she was about to hand Gentry his ass on a silver platter.