I was finally making progress on The Paradox of Fate, now that Katrin had some books to read too. We would go into my memory palace, make ourselves comfortable, and just spend hours with me learning about fate and her reading Jake Ross and the Forgotten Throne. She was on the final pages already, and I had Jake Ross and the Sword of Destiny as well as Jake Ross and the Shattered Crown on standby. They had been grabbed from various memories, but the covers matched the copies that had been in my memory palace when I first created it - though those had been blank other than a message in the front cover of the first book. I'd hoped that that message would be more readable in the copy that was ensured by divination magic to be accurate, but sadly the ridiculously swoopy cursive remained beyond my ability to decipher other than a few words and enough of the signature to be certain it was from Marjorie West, the author of the series.

The books were bound in actual leather, the edges of the paper looked like gold, and when I opened them up there was a number stamped on the inside cover of each: 0009 / 1000. They were a low-numbered limited edition set, signed. It was pretty impressive. The first time I had them all together like that, the "real" ones with all the detail that had been missing from the blank copies, I had felt a little memory tickling at me. I'd been out of mana of course, having just obtained the third book, but I did my best to hold onto that fleeting image and once I was ready I used the divination again.

Bill was sneering. It looked strange on his face, which was almost always smiling, but I could tell he wasn't sneering at me. Memory-Callie was at a cute little table in a kitchen, plate full of pancakes and bacon and home fries like something out of a movie. It was surreal, seeing myself in such a picture-perfect little domestic scene. The source of Bill's disgust seemed to be Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I was reading as I ate.

"I see that look. Some of us don't have an irrational hatred of fiction."

"I don't hate fiction," Bill said, "I would just rather read about history. Besides, that kind of book is particularly unpleasant."

"What! It's Harry Potter! What's unpleasant about it?"

Bill sighed. "Correct me if I'm wrong, since I haven't actually read them, but I understand it's about some supposedly responsible adults letting a child be abused and then sending him off into danger unprepared because they've decided he's the chosen one."

"I... guess? But come on, Bill, it's a story! Kids getting to learn magic and fight evil wizards and have adventures...?"

Bill snorted, and turned back to the stove where he was cooking some more pancakes. "Also, don't they have... magical slaves or something?"

I started to say something, probably defending the house elf situation although from what I recall it was in fact pretty uncomfortable if you thought about it at all, and I gestured a little too emphatically, backhanding the glass of orange juice and dumping it all over the book. I sprang into action immediately, but it was clearly a total loss. I could see myself looking at the sink, probably thinking that being soaked with water would be preferable to letting the sticky juice remain, but that book had been thoroughly used when I found it and so it wasn't a shock that as I stood there thinking a soggy clump of pages dropped out onto the table. I could see my shoulders slump, and I threw the remains of the novel into the trash can and then began to cry.

"Hey," Bill started, but I was sixteen and there was no way I wanted Bill to see me crying at that age. I turned to face the wall, like that would fool anyone, and Bill just leaned down and kissed me on top of her head and said "hang on" and walked out of the room. He came back with that fancy set of the Jake Ross novels.

The kiss on the head threw current-day me for a loop. I could only really remember Bill as a case manager, and obviously they weren't allowed to do that. Still, it seemed like memory-me didn't mind so... sure.

"I was already thinking I might give this to you for Christmas, since you insist on reading this sort of garbage," Bill said, "so... well, I want you to have something to read and we have plenty of time before the holidays for me to get you something better."

"Marjorie West signed this. Actually signed it. How much did these cost?"

Bill shrugged. "Nothing. It was from a charity thing, I won it in a raffle, and I was doing the raffle no matter what so that means it was essentially free. I was going to get rid of it, donate it to yet another raffle, but then you got here and... well, enjoy."

I remembered, dimly, that Bill was always doing charity stuff. Raffles, and soup kitchens, and building houses, and cleaning up litter. Memory-me was staring at the books, and I know what I was thinking. I was thinking about how I could have sold it and had more money than I'd ever seen in my life. More money than I'd seen even if I totaled it all up; every crumpled single my mom had given me to get groceries, every twenty my uncle had handed me for pizza, every pile of change from the desk drawers at Universal Servicing Systems. And even if I didn't sell it, it would be nerve-wracking to read them since I would be terrified of damaging them; if I accidentally dog-eared a page or got a spot on one from eating while I read I would have to immediately kill myself. And Bill had just handed them to me. Of course, he hated fiction. It wasn't like he had gone out and bought it for me, he had already won it at a raffle and had probably been really sad that he didn't win the... golf clubs, or coffee table book about the most boring moments in history, or a lifetime supply of white paint.

Some other memories filtered through the haze, just fragments - he'd regretted giving me those books. Not in a bad way, but in a very... dad way. I got way too into them, and he hated them - I would tell him what was going on and the plot never failed to get a reaction out of him, ranging from exaggerated eye rolls to tortured groans. There wasn't a single thing about the books he didn't find ridiculous, stupid, or somehow offensive. But it was a bonding thing to make him upset and so I just gushed about it more so I could see that twitch develop under his eye. Katrin, as it turned out, was about halfway between me and Bill on her opinion of the novels.

"They're kind of... stupid," she said, "but I can't stop reading. I wouldn't say too much about them to Errod, though."

I looked up from where I was leaning against the wall of the bedroom and staring at The Paradox of Fate without really reading it. "Why? Because of his obsession with Brynnklar?"

"Sort of... there's a lot in here that does sound like it's probably pretty accurate, even if it was badly distorted - like it was told to someone as a story and then that person told someone else and only the third or fourth person wrote anything down - and I think with his belief that he's somehow destined to be some sort of legendary knight of Brynnklar he would read too much into things. Especially some of these supposed prophesies about a chosen one."

"But that was Jake Ross, right?"

She shrugged. "Presumably, yes. But he was supposed to kill Tantek, or I guess Thanatos in these books, and in actuality he either died or ran away. He didn't save Brynnklar, and everyone had to evacuate. So my concern is that Errod might decide this is his responsibility now, and... I don't know. Tantek would have to be dead by now regardless I would think, but... I worry about him getting into something dangerous."

"Oh for sure, it would be awful if he got all mixed up in some apocalyptic fated stuff linked to a visitor from Earth. Can't let that happen."

Katrin sighed, but didn't respond.

"Let's take a walk, you can help me process what I'm reading in Paradox of Fate."

I picked a memory from Earth, a campground in Pennsylvania that my mom had taken me to a few times while we lived in New Jersey. She'd abandoned me there of course, but somehow that never ruined it for me. Katrin spent a few minutes examining my mom's car and the tent - she was skeptical about that, saying it was too thin to protect anyone properly from the elements - and then we took a stroll through the woods. I wasn't using divination and there was no way I actually remembered the forest in any detail, so presumably some part of my brain was making up our surroundings as we walked.

"Okay so... it's still a little dry, but it's getting into the mechanics some. There's a chapter on failed prophesies by the way, I haven't gotten to it yet but it's possible that it talks about that whole Brynnmar situation. If I don't get to that soon I'll skip ahead in case it matters.

"But anyway, this last chapter was all speculation on how fate does things. Like, it has to be intelligent to some extent, right? And the question is if it's really simple like the spirits people can summon and zombies and things, or if it's one of the gods, or something in-between. There was this whole fairy tale about people making a machine to force fate to actually have an opinion on things, that was interesting. Actually it's something someone mentioned before I think? You or Connie, I can't remember."

Katrin shook her head. "It doesn't sound familiar to me."

"Connie, then. Anyway, they made something where basically it was fated to not work if it worked, and work if it didn't work. Like, it worked backwards in time or something so that it... let me see if I can get this right. The story didn't spend a lot of time on the technical details. Basically, if something came back in time then it would turn itself off and not do anything, and if nothing came back in time then it would send something back in time. So either way there was a paradox, and since it was all powered by fate magic whatever force was controlling things would need to make a decision.

"And I don't know if it's a true story, because it seems like there's the third option of fate just smashing it with a hammer and telling them to fuck off, but I guess maybe they would have been okay with that outcome too since that would still be fate making a choice - in fact, since it would by definition have to do that before any of the actual fate magic triggered I guess that would answer their question."

"So what happened?"

"As the story goes, fate was so confused it had to take physical form, but then it took over the device and everyone realized they'd made a huge mistake because now fate could use it to control things a little too well, and then everyone panicked and blew it up. Sounds about right for that kind of story, seems like they always end with people regretting whatever they did that challenged fate or the gods or whatever."

"I assume the author had some specific point in mind?"

"So did you finish the chapter about fate in spells?"

"Kind of. It got too technical, so there were parts I skipped. But basically the idea is that if you piggyback on fate with your spell you give it pretty much infinite range and duration at the cost of knowing for sure how it's going to play out. Oh and also at the more literal cost of shit tons of mana, like more than any one person can control. Plus you can't see it, unless you're me I guess, so it's hard to tell if it's working right."

"Do you think any of the threads of fate attached to you are spells?"

I stopped dead. I'd put very little thought into that. "I... don't think there's a way to tell? Hang on, let me see if I can... uh... no, I can't get them to show up here. Oh! Wait, come back to the camp with me."

I led Katrin back out of the memory, into the hallways, and then into room zero where I could see us sitting by the campfire. We'd left the barge the day before, and with some grumbling from Hugh had turned to head roughly towards Sentortzi. He had his own mount, a different sort of moskar with more of a wedge-shaped forehead, an axe compared to the hammers our own sported. He hadn't named it, so I was calling it Bashful since it didn't seem to like mingling with the others. Hugh appeared to be sleeping against a fallen tree though I suspected he was still fairly alert, and Errod was doing dinner cleanup. Thankfully he wasn't gossiping with Hugh, though I couldn't bring myself to be mad at him for slipping up before. Hugh had waited until he was distracted and slipped something about probability into the conversation, and Errod had accidentally replied in a way that confirmed I had it on a Dumine. Since I'd already told Hugh I had thought, spatial, and divination this put us in an odd situation, although so far Hugh hadn't commented on it.

I could feel my mana draining away a little faster now that I was observing myself, but it wasn't too bad - so long as I kept close and there were no walls between me and my body it was very manageable. Making the fate lines appear wouldn't take much more, so we'd be good for at least a little while.

"Okay, I'm not certain this will work, but it should. I'm going to turn on my view of the fate threads, and then you can look at them in real time. Technically the divination is tied to spatial magic and the fate threads aren't physically there so if it doesn't work that'll be why, but this place is also tied to my perception and everything so... Anyway, here goes."

I sat down on top of myself, so that my imaginary body lined up with the real one. I'd been practicing with being more aware of my real body while meditating, and it was getting to the point where I could blur the line just a little bit. It didn't seem super useful by itself, but I felt like it would be handy for this sort of shenanigans.

I heard Katrin gasp a little behind me, and opened my eyes to look around - sure enough, there all the threads were.

"Oh this is great - can you make them bigger?"

"I... don't know? Maybe I could make us smaller, so they're bigger by comparison?"

I tried for a moment with no success, then realized I knew a memory that had a magnifying glass in it and ran off to retrieve it. When I came back, Katrin was in the process of making a mental list - I knew because she had a very specific facial expression for that. I let her finish and then handed her the magnifying glass so she could examine the threads in more detail - I suspected a magnifying glass wouldn't work right in the real world, but with the sort of dream logic in my mind it was perfect.

"Anything interesting?"

"They're not entirely featureless, but I don't think it means anything. There's some... striations of some sort? But it seems like the kind of thing you'd see on any material, not like a language or any kind of decipherable marking. They're different, though. I could probably learn to tell them apart if I needed to, like learning the markings on the moskar. Can you use divination on them, see where they lead? For the ones that don't just disappear into thin air, I mean."

"It's on my list. There's so much I want to learn. As it is, no - I don't think I can. I tried on you, actually, while you were in that jail."

"That's a shame. Well, hopefully you'll be able to spare some 'points' as you say since we'll eventually need to... wait. What's this one?" She was examining one of the threads extending from me into the distance, and she looked excited. "There's a spell here! I think, anyway. Look."

I came over, but it didn't look different to me. Katrin tried to point out what she was looking at, but it pretty much boiled down to "look!" which wasn't helpful. Finally she made me look at a normal one under the magnifying glass and then back at the odd one and I did, barely, see what she meant. There was a barely visible translucent layer over the thread that had a hint of shimmering color to it. Without the magnifying glass I didn't think I ever would have spotted it. Excited, Katrin checked all the others and found the same oddity on the thread attaching her to the spellbook. The others, even Errod's glove, didn't have that trait - or if they did it was too subtle for us to spot.

"Mana is getting a little low, this is your ten minute warning."

"Okay. I don't think there's anything else I can learn right now anyway. Oh, unless you can feel a difference between the spell ones and the others? Like, have you tried just holding them or something?"

"I can't hold them. Well, I mean. I guess I can here but it's not real."

"Ugh, just try."

"Fine. Okay, here's the control group. Um. I guess I can feel something, sort of? Could be my imagination. Some sort of... vibration? Yeah, that's it. And it's not like music or whatever, just a really faint something."

"Try another one, see if it's vibrating at a different speed or something."

"Yeah, sure. And... no? No, I think it's the same frequency. I don't know, it's hard to say because I'm not even really sure I'm feeling anything."

"Fair enough. Now try one of the spell ones."

I grabbed the one extending from me, and tried to feel that vibration again. It was there, but... stronger? And pulsating, somehow. It felt like when you grabbed a metal pipe and could feel the water rushing through it, but somehow I was sure whatever was going on there was something going both directions. Stronger in comparison to the other threads didn't mean a lot though, so I still felt like there was a chance I was imagining at least part of it. I tried to zoom in somehow, to focus on whatever that rushing sensation was, and the clearing around me vanished.

I was standing in the woods still, but it was different. The trees weren't the same type, the smell wasn't the same, and it was colder. I couldn't control my body which should have scared me but it felt... familiar, somehow. I could feel unfamiliar clothing, and my breath was blowing back onto my face as if I was... oh. I was wearing a mask. I watched as I ground up some sort of vegetable and added it to a pot of water, and then mid-stride I stopped dead and stood very still. A hoarse voice whispered from my mouth.

"This connection is for me to spy on you, not the other way around. I wonder, do you know whose eyes you are looking out from? You stumble around, so stupid. So careless. Do you know anything at all? No matter. It is time for you to leave." The wild mage stepped back to the cookpot, bubbling over the fire, and stuck her knife just under it into the flames. I felt something about the connection change, and when I tried to break away nothing happened; she was holding me there, in her body. I knew my mana was almost out, so in theory the connection would fail on its own unless she could somehow force it to use up my life mana as well.

Slowly the wild mage pulled the knife out and pressed it against the skin of her arm. It was agony. I was sure that I was thrashing around like an animal in a trap, but at the same time my body was calmly burning itself without flinching. I could feel, distantly, someone shaking my actual body by the shoulders. A slap on the face. Water splashing on me. They were trying to wake me up.

"I will come to you, when it is time for you to die," that scratchy voice whispered, "until then you will not spy on me. Do you understand?"

And I was back in the camp, collapsed on the ground and gasping for air.