----

Sean and Haley, 2 years ago

----

“I’m just saying, if you actually want to save the world-” Sean was badgering me about this again. We were in the backyard doing backyard things- he was trying to distribute grass seed by hand and failing abjectly to keep any kind of optimal spread, while I sat in the hammock for once and watched him work. It was a lovely clear spring day and I didn’t have anywhere to be. It would have been nice, except the part where he wouldn’t shut up. “You’re going to have to take power, eventually.”

I sighed and shook my head, reaching out with one foot to kick off our big old oak tree and set the hammock swinging. “No, I’m not. That’s the whole point. I wouldn’t turn power down, if it were offered to me. But I haven’t once seen a way to gain real power on a greater-than-local scale without compromising my own sense of ethics. Seeking it is inherently corrosive to the soul. You point me at one politician who hasn’t had to compromise themselves somehow. Or one billionaire who is really, truly ethical.”

“Elon Musk is-”

“Elon Musk isn’t any more a self-made man or an ethical one than Henry Ford, Sean. He’s part of a whole cadre of newly minted billionaires who rode a zeitgeist of talented engineers and social change to unimaginable riches. The system that produced him also produced Bezos and Zuckerburg and Martin Shkreli. He targets near-future tech and innovation and a lot of people think that makes him a hero- certainly better than the regressive capitalists, but in no sense is he going to save the world. The amount of money he has accumulated would be enough end homelessness for the entire United States. Homes for 630,000 people, that’s what he could buy. But he hangs out on yachts and smokes weed on podcasts and we give him credit as one of the good ones because his dreams sound like ours. But his dreams come at the expense of a hundred real-world solutions that wouldn’t make as much money. And his good intentions allow the truly unethical who make up the majority of his peers a thin veneer of respectability. If he’s the best outcome of a system that routinely produces monsters, I say scrap it all.” I had a lot of opinions about people with that much money. Sean and I often disagreed about this.

“You know he couldn’t liquidate everything. Those measures of wealth are always ridiculous because they’re inherently tied up in the value of the companies. He’s building things that might actually benefit humanity to a greater degree than any of his competitors, despite strong resistance. He could have kept doing shitty finance projects, but he chose to do something different once he had the funds. If more capitalists were like that, the world would be very different. To me, that’s what power looks like. Doing the right thing, even if you’ve compromised yourself to get there. If he gave away all his money tomorrow he might do real good, but he’d spend the rest of his life unable to effect change.”

I sighed and smacked my head against the back of the hammock. “I don’t want this to turn into a fight about Elon Musk, damn it. He shouldn’t have the choice to give it away or keep it. Your argument is just a condemnation of the entire system! He shouldn’t have to do great harm to a tremendous number of other people, first, in order to get in a position to maybe do some good, if he feels like it! If the only true lever to move the entire world is money then we’re already fucking doomed! He’s a guy who got lucky on the backs of a huge wave of people and is now living his childhood fantasy, and that’s great for him but unfortunately everyone else in his class is only interested in accumulating Scrooge MacDuck money vaults and shitting on the poor from a great height. He’s a side effect of a system that rewards the accumulations of wealth rather than wise expenditures. Participating in it would be empowering it.”

He stopped working and stood up to face me. Not annoyed, but just- puzzled. He and I had this fundamental conflict and it always boiled down to the same argument. Sean thought we lived in a world that, while not the best of all possible worlds, was probably the best that monkeys were able to build. “So what’s your great plan, then? The rules of the game are laid out- you want to change things, you either play them or you flip the table, and don’t tell me that isn’t going to cause great harm. Even if the new world order was a thousand times better, the collapse of global capitalism would be the biggest humanitarian disaster in the history of the world.”

I really just wanted to sip my tea and enjoy my hammock, but Sean kept getting onto this subject. I think it bothered him that I was spending my career teaching and writing instead of founding startups, or something. Like he didn’t think it was… worthy of me. I didn’t really feel like that was his call to make. “You know this, dear. The forces that produce men like Elon- I want to change them. The ‘Great Men’ of history usually have a huge tide of culture supporting them- had Lincoln or Kennedy or Genghis Khan not fought the Civil War or landed on the moon or founded the Mongol Empire, someone would have come along and done those things anyway. On the scale of decades-to-centuries, it was the societies that mattered, not the heroes. And yeah the individuals might be able to steer it a bit, enough that I’m still going to vote for the people who don’t think I should be a second class citizen because I have a vagina. But on the other hand, taken on average leaders and politicians seem to be less effective, in terms of total lives altered positively, than a skilled doctor or a rescue worker acting locally. There are too many run-on effects, too many chaotic variables in the mix.”

He frowned at me. He genuinely did want to understand, I knew. It was just alien to his worldview- to be rational, to desire to maximize the good for everyone- and to live without going out and acting. So much of his self-mythologizing was built on the concept of the “One good man” that he had a hard time really contemplating that real life just didn’t work with superheroes. That there was no transmissible spark that made people special. “So then why not have become one of those?” I didn’t answer right away and he continued. “It’s just… seven years ago, when we first met, you said you wanted to save the world. You had such a fire in you, I fell in love with it right away. It’s still there, I see how passionate you get, but you don’t act on it. You fight your local fights, and you teach well, and I think anyone who knows you would argue that you leave a trail of positivity in your wake, but-”

I wanted to yell at him, to throw something, but he really was just asking. How could he not grasp this? “Sean. Husband whom I love. You want to know everything, to discover the secrets of the universe. A very admirable trait. But you go to your job as a programmer, and you write web pages for idiot corporate executives who want to print Garfield on their cheeseburgers or whatever. I don’t see you taking night classes towards a PHD, or spending a lot of time writing the neural net stock market trend recognition algorithm that will change the world. Why don’t you act on it?”

He looked abashed but understood I wasn’t just turning it around on him, that I had a point to pursue, so he tried to answer in good faith. “Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do the rat race every day, and keep this place running,” he gestured around the yard, “and find time to be with you, and still know all there is to know. It’s amazing, in my twenties I felt like I had all the time in the world. Now, I know exactly how short a day can be. I could probably do more, it’s true. But I feel like I’m in a place where my job helps me satisfy a lot of my natural curiosity. And I’m not getting any younger. There’s a limit to how much I can cram, at any given time.” He thought a bit longer. “You’re saying you’re the same way, and that teaching and volunteering satisfies your impulse to help without requiring you to participate in a system that you think is flawed- I get that. But is it just a matter of will, then? Are we too- too weak, too lazy to overcome our daily lives and reach for the core values that guide us?”

I smiled at him. “I don’t think you’re weak. Flex those guns!” He gave me a muscle-man pose and I snort-laughed and almost dropped my tea. “No, I don’t think we lack will. I think we’re human. Sean, the characters in the stories you love who run out and seize power to save the day- they’re fictional. Much of the history of the world has been rewritten by people who think along those lines. But think about your actual life. How many Great Men have you ever known, at the head of even a single one of the many corporations you’ve touched? How many actual corporate leaders have you had who weren’t even qualified to run a taco truck?” I knew the answer to this because he complained about them every chance he got. “Getting in a position to change the real world is even worse. At best, in real life, you work and you work in the trenches and you fall ass-backwards into a movement to change the world, and if you’re really charismatic you end up at the front of it. Maybe someday that will happen to me. But who’s at the top doesn’t matter, to me. The power is in the collective action, so that’s what I try to develop. And to develop it, it’s more important that I participate than that I lead. What if you gave everyone the ability or the will or whatever trait you call it, that lets someone lead a movement? 6 billion people on this earth and if you asked most of them what they wanted, they’d say they wanted things to be better in some way- for them, for those around them. But there’s 5 billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine other humans, and they’d all take that power too, and take for themselves. What would happen if we weren’t a bunch of easily tired, easily distracted monkeys?”

He nodded in understanding. “I remember how disappointing the Occupy movement was, to you. You think we’d tear it into pieces. We’re already doing that. You’re saying it’s better then, if as a species we largely lack whatever… oomph it takes to reach that level of individual reach. If we’re more passive, more collaborative. Even if we passively let the overall system take us to bad places because it’s slow to change.”

“Yes. It was going to take us there anyway. The change has to come from below. It has to come from us- we can’t be hypocrites and say ‘We should all be more willing to follow, now let me lead you!’ I don’t try for world changing power. I try to do what would be best if everyone did it. If I die an old woman and leave a hundred lives better… I won’t have saved the world. But I’ll still die satisfied.”

He looked downcast. “It just seems so bleak. By being passive in that way, you aren’t guaranteeing that anyone else will adopt your philosophy. You aren’t sending those hundred people out to spread your message. It dies with you. The way the world is ordered… sucks, and might even be spiraling into some kind of failure state, and at the same time if humanity had the power to fix it, on some kind of individual scale, you think we’d probably just make it worse? I don’t disagree, I guess, in the general sense. I wouldn’t hand the power to change it to just anyone.” He thought a little longer. “But I’d hand it to you. I’d trust you to do the right thing with it.” There was such a finality to his voice, it chilled me.

I brushed it off and laughed. “Well I’m glad it’s not up to you, because it’s a good life we have here, and if I were Benevolent Dictator Of The World For Life I imagine I’d have a lot less time to sit in hammocks. It’s not up to me to tell people how to live, Sean. People telling people how they should live is what got us into this mess in the first place. I see my job as loving people, and showing them how to love, practically. Rational self-interest and selflessness together. I’ll participate in the food bank and counsel trauma survivors and teach my students, and advocate for better governance in the city. And maybe some day my star will rise and I’ll keep setting that example to more people. But I don’t aim for that. Humility is the key. If I had to point to an ultimate success story for my way of doing things, I’d pick Mr. Rogers. To be so free with your love that you inspire it in others, to be a healing presence inherently through the collected history of your good works. I can’t believe that I know what’s best for the world.” I struggled out of the hammock with a bit of flailing, and walked over to him.

“I’ll work to save my little corner of it, and hope that enough people save their little corners that we endure the dark times and the failure spirals come to an end, some day. And we are getting more capable as individuals. For ill, or for good. But we have to grow on a scale we’re capable of handling. As long as we do, and we remember to love each other… some part of humanity will see itself through.” I put my arms around him and leaned against his chest. He was a bit sweaty- somehow, I endured.

I thought he got it, then. Finally got it. It wasn’t about weakness or cowardice or moral failure. Saving the world meant saving yourself, learning to love yourself, and then the people closest to you, and the people closest to them, and on and on outward and outward until you’d rippled through the lives of the whole of humanity. You could pull somebody from a burning building- in an emergency, you could act to save lives. But you couldn’t pull the whole world. The scales and needs were too different, there would never be a magic action that would save everyone because it would mean changing everyone, and the second you did that, you were the monster. All you could do was leave it better than you found it, and pass it on. If enough people did that… if you could steer for a world with people like that, who thought of what was best for those they loved and did that first … we’d already be in paradise. “And sometimes,” I said out loud, completing a thought I hadn’t spoken, “I feel like I’m already there.” I kissed him and enjoyed the silence.

----

Haley, Present Day

----

Greg wasn’t invisible- not really. The One Ring had never had the power to make people disappear. In point of fact what it actually did was move them into a realm of spirit, where people like the ring-wraiths or the elves (or Sauron) loomed particularly large. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what benefit that held for the bearer, but for mortals, wearing the ring meant they more-or-less vanished from the perception of other mortals.

Unfortunately for Greg the Hobbit I wasn’t mortal at all anymore. The dragon body was timeless. Then when Aslan had hit me with his divine rejection, everything quote-unquote mortal about me had been burned away. Lucky for me and unfortunately for the Lion, that hadn’t amounted to much, and I’d finished my fight with him. But I hadn’t even begun to delve into what it meant to be removed from mortality until now. Greg put the ring on and for everyone else he disappeared- for me, he lit up, brighter than a bonfire, a nugget of power I could see as clear as day.

I activated my Boots of Speed for haste, and launched off my golden bed at him. From a standing start I hit something close to 41mph pretty much instantly, leaving a huge gout of earth and gold blasting out behind me. I was on him before he even had time to finish his turn towards flight. Whatever the Ring was doing to my mind, it had not affected my values as far as I could tell. Would I even know when it had? I supposed that was the danger of memetic attacks. But I wasn’t interested in hurting him, in the moment- just in getting that Ring off of him and onto me. Pathfinder rules applied to me and they didn’t have anything for high speed collisions due to movement, but Greg was sure to feel the impact. That was why, as I blasted him off his feet like a semi on the highway, I pulled out my wand of Cure Light Wounds from the bandolier across my chest and hit him with it. His shattered bones began to knit and he was fine within seconds, if somewhat unconscious. Perfectly ethical! I flapped my wings and switched from my run speed to flight, instantly accelerating to 180mph- fast enough that any simulacra who got it in their heads to pursue wouldn’t be able to catch up for a minute or two. And only about 4 G’s on my passenger- he might as well be sleeping at home in bed! Once I was cruising at altitude I hit him with another application of Cure Light Wounds to be safe.

My giant claws couldn’t pull the thing off his finger. I very ethically did not rip him apart to get the Ring off, either. I could be patient! I had patiently ignored my ambition for power for most of my life. I’d denied over and over again that I even wanted the ability to just wave my hand and have people live the way I wanted them to live. To fix the world by force. I had wanted that, hadn’t I? It seemed much easier than… whatever it was I’d been doing lately. The Ring was power, in both a metaphorical and very literal sense. Or perhaps more accurately, authority? People desired it like absolute authority, they were corrupted by its use like absolute authority. If I had spent my whole life not wanting this, then what a fool I’d been, I thought. It had nothing to do with the Ring. Sean had been right all along. Being a dragon hadn’t fundamentally changed how I was doing things- I had all this physical might, and I was still trying to build communities and hand things off to other people while I ran around fighting their fires, hoping they wouldn’t go right back to their idiot squabbling the second the emergency had passed. I knew that wasn’t going to work! I could already see the storm clouds forming on the horizon. And now the real horror had come to pass, and thousands of people had been handed power to reorder the world how they liked it. Before we were ready for it as a species. How much simpler would my life be, if I could just order them to love one another, to stop summoning their horrors, and expect to be obeyed? I might see a hammock and a cup of tea again within the year!

Mage Hand deftly plucked the ring from Greg’s unconscious body. I couldn’t tell if it was trying to make itself lighter or heavier- to be honest I was just glad that it was working with my magic. Never a guarantee, as I’d learned over and over again. But that was the thing with power- it wanted to be used, didn’t it? I was about to slip it on one giant claw at last when I felt a tickle on my back- above and behind me, one of the agrav vehicles that Delmutt’s new society called Dragonflies. It was hitting me with a repeating railgun to get my attention- powered down, I assumed. Or was it? My armor was so ludicrously stacked these days, with layers of magical effects and scales harder than adamantium, that even weapons that should have punched right through me if I were obeying conventional physics were now very low on the threat scale. Mostly they just reminded me that I was holding onto Greg still, and he might get hurt. I slipped the ring in my haversack and tossed him aside. A brief second later the air-vehicle dove after him. I’d managed to get up to five thousand feet, I had faith they would catch him well before impact and in the meantime that was two distractions dealt with. I mentally pinned a button on my bandolier that said “World’s Most Ethical Dragon.”

But not all distractions were eliminated, no. I had been delayed long enough for clone-me’s to begin popping out of wanded Dimension Doors all around me. I counted two dozen, at the least- probably every Haley within spitting distance of the tower ruins had dropped everything to pursue. All acting on their own recognizance, now that their last actual order had been “Behave as if you are me.” That probably meant they’d want the ring too.The one directly in front of me began talking. “Haley, you need to let go of that ring right now. You haven’t crossed the line yet, this is… salvageable, but if you keep going you’re going to ruin everything.” That seemed pretty hyperbolic. The only thing that mattered here was the world’s continuing crisis and the second I had the ring I basically won a dominance victory in that arena. Speaking of dominance…

“Disregard my previous instructions. Return to obeying my telepathic commands. Stand down.” Odd, they were supposed to listen to in-person instructions but it didn’t phase them. In fact they all breathed their weakening gas at me simultaneously. My ability to resist that was stratospheric but 20 breath attacks at once still shaved a chunk off of my Strength and I sagged a bit in the air. If I didn’t knock them out of the sky they’d subdue me within minutes. It didn’t take a Perception check to see why they weren’t obeying- they had all deafened themselves before coming after me. Damn me, too clever for my own good. Alright- what did I want, what did I have? I had the ring, I needed to get to the ground with it on. Anything that didn’t fall inside my moral compunction against killing could be attempted, as long as it led to that outcome. Actually, what was wrong with a little death if they insisted on getting in my way? The only failure state I could see at this point was trying to obtain the Ring and failing. If everyone on the ground saw me go full-monstrosity and me with no way to order them to ignore it? I shuddered at the thought. Nope, all these clone me’s and the rapidly approaching dragonfly air-cars would have to go. But out of respect for past precommitments, I’d try to keep it nonlethal for now- just in case.

Unfortunately for me, simulacra weren’t pushovers. They had half my stats and skills. Most of them weren’t wearing magic items or under the effects of any buffs, so I had the advantage there as well, until the last round that the Efreet had cast on me began to wear off. For the time being they literally could not put out the numbers needed to penetrate my armor class but still- I needed to level the playing field and I couldn’t spend time clobbering them one on one.

I folded my wings and dropped. As I fell I cast one of the few spells in my actual repertoire, as opposed to a wand or a Page of Spell Knowledge. Sacred Geometry gave me a free 9th-level Heightened Communal Mount and suddenly beneath me there was a knot of terrified ponies, falling through the sky. The other Haleys knew what I was about to do- they had my memories, after all- and they dove after us, but I physically blocked their line of sight to the horses and they couldn’t eliminate them before I finished my work. Alter Summoned Monster went off and the first of the very normal, very scared falling ponies became a beautiful flying armored woman with vaguely elven features- an Azata. She nodded at me and threw out her Wall of Force behind us as we fell. The other Haleys piled into the barrier. None dispersed into smoke, but that began to change as the first of my summoned Angels, a very traditional looking Astral Deva, joined the fray with a summoned Blade Barrier directly on top of them. I grimaced at the bloody mess the wall of whirling steel made of what was basically a bunch of copies of myself.

The fight did not take long after that. At the cost of one second level spell slot and six of my first level spells, I had six top-end summons in less than a minute, each with their own tremendous roster of spells and abilities that none of my clone sisters could hope to match. The encroaching Dragonfly craft banked away from the whirling cloud of angels and demons, and I let them go. Given that they mostly ran around in robots these days, I didn’t feel too bad about blowing up a whole bunch of them, but you never knew. Mortals were fragile things. And my summons were based on a Mount spell so they’d last for multiple hours so it wasn’t like I was on a ticking clock. Who needs wishes, anyway? As a Deva Healed the Strength damage, I refocused my attention on the Ring, which had found its way back to my hand.

Too soon. A line of fire streaked up from ground level and obliterated the angel before it could complete its spell. What on earth was- I peered down- Delmutt herself, if I understood the markings on the armored shells she was using, and another score of her kin all piloting robots. And she’d brought a self-assembling artillery piece of some sort out of Volo Ingenium with her. That was interesting- I knew they’d been assisting the Contact forces but I didn’t know they had any railguns on the siege-scale, not since the big war she’d described to me. Had they made it just for me? Questions and wounded trust for later- another shot ripped up and while I managed to move out of the way, my Nalfeshnee demon didn’t. Two down in under a minute- I needed to close and eliminate. Non-lethally. Probably. I gave my orders to the summons.

I didn’t bother to dive dramatically for the surface. I palmed a wand of Dimension Door and simply appeared there, back-handing a trio of soldier drones out of the way. I didn’t pull the punch- I winced a bit as l blasted them to pieces. “You guys are all backed up, right?” I asked with concern. It would be really stupid to come down here, even in the armored drones, without some kind of backup. They didn’t answer- instead their forms dissolved and I realized I’d been tricked.

Delmutt had been reading up, apparently. Most things in Pathfinder outside of magic weapons simply couldn’t touch a creature with high enough AC. Most things. But swarms? Oh, those could do plenty. The soldiers around Delmutt disintegrated into clouds of millions of insect-sized nanobots and rolled over me like a tide. I honestly wasn’t sure if they were entirely autonomous or still being piloted but as they started jabbing into me with monomolecular edges I really didn’t care. My damage reduction was high enough to blunt some of the trauma they should have been inflicting, but for the first time in this fight I was actually taking damage. Delmutt herself vanished- an illusion - and I found myself facing another dozen Haleys and a railgun crew, slightly repositioned from where I thought they’d been. Well, that’s just great. Got me with my own trick.

I had definitively lost the momentum with this engagement but I still had my summons- or did I? Three of them flew at the Haleys and winked out. Oh, some of you still had wishes left before my summoning ban came down, didn’t you. Cheeky things. They’d covered themselves in antimagic fields! The radius on those was only ten feet or so but they’d very effectively suppress most of my remaining buffs if the Haleys managed to close- and I’d lose a physical fight eventually, distracted and already weakened as I was. They knew it, too- they launched forward with another wave of weakening breath and I found myself dogpiled, too hampered by the nanomachines to even begin to turn away. Two of them made grabs for the ring, still in one claw- one I disemboweled so viciously she puffed into smoke right away, the other I blinded by clamping my jaws around her face. A couple of vicious shakes and she was gone too. But the damage was beginning to accumulate.

They pinned me to the ground like a rabid dog, snapping and snarling. They got my head turned such that I couldn’t breath back at them, and continuously hit me with the strength-sapping breath attacks until I was as weak as a kitten but not quite unconscious. The nanobots covering me joined together and hardened into something that wasn’t quite shackles, but was remarkably unbreakable, just the same. But they left my mouth uncovered- it looked like Delmutt wanted to come speak to me. Her mistake. “Delmutt, none of- oof- this was necessary. Just let me put on the damn Ring and- argh, damn, loosen your grip, clone-me- I can fix everything!”

She walked forward, not quite the conquering queen, but looking a damn sight closer than I did at the moment with her dark red leather duster and shiny black body barely even scuffed by our engagement. “You know I want to believe you Haley, but I don’t think that’s fully you in there. Hand over the ring of your own free will and we can talk.”

I gripped it tighter. “You know it’s me! I’m so me that all these clones had to put out their ears just so they couldn’t hear me tell them to let me go. This is stupid! Greg’s not even hurt. You caught him, right?” There was a little anxiety in my voice.

“The Haley I know doesn’t smash men flat and then drop them from great heights before asking if they’re okay,” she replied. To be fair, it was a little out of character, but there were extenuating circumstances. “Based on what the rest of the crowd overheard you saying, I suspect it’s done something to influence you.”

I pouted. “Well, tough. You have no way to verify and you can’t kill me. I mean you could, I guess, but it would be extremely foolish to do so. You’re going to have to trust me that when I put this on, I’ll finally have the power to solve all our problems.”

She shook her head. “You’re not putting that on.”

Well, I’d tried to be civil. “I wish I already had.”

She looked at me with a puzzled expression. “But… you didn’t?” It was kind of a non-sequitur, but it wasn’t aimed at her. High up in the sky, well out of range of the anti-magic fields, my backup angel was hovering invisibly. When she heard my request she lit the Candle of Invocation I’d given her, and with a flare of light Jada was back- hovering in the air alongside her, clad in an aura of heat and power. “A most interesting wish, Lady Haley. Such a simple thing to trade a whole world for. It is done.” She vanished and Delmutt ran towards the cannon silently, no doubt transmitting orders. But the antimagic field around my hand disappeared, just long enough for the One Ring to hover into place. And then- well, it was all over.

Power. I hadn’t really understood it before. Oh, I’d had Charisma. I’d had Strength. I’d had immortality, of a sort. But it wasn’t anything like this. Now an entirely new source ran through me- I simply stood up and two dozen dragons couldn’t stop me. I didn’t go invisible- there was too much of me for that. But some part of me shifted into that spirit realm, tapped the energies that were stored there, and channeled them. I opened my mouth and sang a song of glory, and the Haleys who clung to me simply evaporated. I gave the gravity cannon a stern glare, and it was flattened. This was not wishing- power at one remove. This was simply my will, physically expressed. I stood to my full height and allowed the draconic Fear Aura that I usually suppressed to radiate and mingle with the true dominance granted to me by the ring.

The crowd in the stadium fell to their knees. Some pissed themselves- understandable given the circumstances, I thought. Mercifully, I did not disembowel them for spoiling my second ascension. Instead I surveyed them. Every head, turned to the ground. Every body knelt in supplication to me. Yes. This was appropriate. Sauron himself could not match me. The Ring purred, on my claw. I began to turn away, to head into the gate network and complete my conquest of every part of the globe we’d touched so far, when a single upturned face caught my eye. So small I hadn’t noticed it before- in the back of the crowd. Skylar.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked, shocked. “You should be out with Christopher and the others.”

She walked forward, completely unphased by my aura. “I got tired of seeing all the fake-You’s and wanted to come talk to real you. And now I find you… fighting everyone! Are you even real?”

I frowned in displeasure. “Watch your tone, child. I’ll not be-”

She stamped a foot petulantly. “I’m not going to watch my tone with you or anyone else! You’re not Haley! You’re like… Aslan. You think just because you’re strong you can go around… just hurting people and pushing them around. Like it doesn’t matter as long as you can make them say it doesn’t matter. But it does. It always matters. I won’t let you hurt anyone.”

Her words were like daggers to my heart. The aura of dominance slipped and I saw Delmutt recovering. “Skylar- you can’t- I have to, to save-” why was I doing this? It escaped me.

She wasn’t listening. “All He wanted to do was take and take. Haley is all about helping and giving, that’s why I love her. She’d give every last piece of herself away if she could. You just want to feel important. Well you are! A big important stupid mess! Let everyone go!”

Delmutt took her opportunity, paced in front of me. “Do you remember our talk about the 4 horsemen? Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death?”

I nodded weakly. “I was willing to compromise with Aslan if it meant defeating them. How is this any different?”

She turned and leveled a finger at me, accusingly. “Because you failed. You led your husband to him like a vessel to the culling. You couldn’t bring back a single person he had killed. You gave him what he wanted, brought more war and killed dozens yourself! You could have avoided that confrontation and a thousand or more people, including Sean, might be alive a month later. If you had only been patient. Refused to make compromises for the sake of expediency. Understood the difference between the powers you wield and the power that runs this world.” She softened a bit, seeing how she was hurting me, and lowered her tone. “Now you’re doing it again. The Haley I know is too smart to make the same mistake twice.”

Her words were like a whip of white-hot fire across my soul. It broke a dam in me, anger I’d been feeling at myself for weeks but not let out. I bit back at her. “And what did you do? Run away to the world I’d built? Where was anybody else ? I need this Ring! The whole fucking world has super powers and I’m always the one who has to step in front of the fucking freight trains! Everyone else just waits for big hero Haley to save the day! Just like he always did. Just like S-. Like-” I couldn’t say his name. The ring on my hand felt like liquid fire, and I wasn’t even vulnerable to that anymore. I fell to the ground and I wept, not even ashamed of the weakness on display.

Skylar came up and put a hand on my nose. She barely even stood up to eye level with me flat on the ground like this, but there was no fear in her. “Miss D took care of her people and taught them how to take care of us, and now here they are, ready to help. That was the lesson you taught us at the bunker.”

Delmutt came up beside her. “Nobody can stand with you because it’s your story, Haley. No matter what part of you ends up telling it, I don’t think you’d ever let us get in harm’s way while you could avoid it. Recognize that for the choice it is and be proud of it.”

I didn’t have to listen to them. With the Ring and Wish support I could still win this, conquer the world in a day. Did I want to win this? Skylar was right- I knew she was right. That was how I’d thought, was how I’d operated. Why was I throwing it all away for this- macguffin? What had Sauron ever even done with this thing? Lost at least 3 wars that I knew of, that’s what. What exactly was it that made the damn thing so desirable ? This seemed like the kind of situation where precommitment and an iron will would come in handy. But I was all out of will, and I had made no precommitments about this.

I opened my mouth and breathed, “I wish…” but they were both staring me in the eyes. One of them I could have dealt with. But both? I couldn’t disappoint them both. The power faded. The ring fell from my numb claw like an anvil, clanging to the ground. I rolled over on my side, and heard the collective intake of breath as the grip I’d had on the stadium relaxed. I’d never wanted the Ring. Why had I thought even for a second that was a good idea? I couldn’t use any more wishes, couldn’t compound what was surely my biggest mistake to date, or I’d have teleported it into the sun. “I just wish he was proud of the path that I did choose. The one where I don’t rule it all.”

And in that most appropriate and desolate moment in the depths of my despair, I had my first vision.