When Tam first arrived at Strixhaven, she was baffled. Where was the rest of it?

It was so flat, so short, that she got lost on the first day of classes because she thought her next lesson would simply be up a floor. But no; she wandered the campus's wide walkways, traversing in place of ascending. Even the dragon motifs confounded her. Weren't the sphinxes of home more appropriate stewards of knowledge? The one positive that stood out was her first time feeling truly alone. Back home, the signs of her maker were everywhere. He surveils, for our own good, she told herself. But at Strixhaven, no matter how flat it was, Tam felt seen but never exposed.

Now, though, in Hexhaven, the only place she finds solitude is in her dormitory, which is hexed to the nines with every seal she knows (and two she invented). Tam sits at her desk and looks out the broad, round window. She sees the stadium in the distance, the battle arena for use at graduation—a graduation that has not happened yet, or ever before.

Her dormitory is in Theorix, overlooking an inner courtyard, the only one with a tree. Here, Hexhaven's walls and pathways run perpendicular to each other. The Theorist and his tower prefer gravity as a fluid concept rather than a strict rule; the tower bends and curves depending on which part of it you're in and what direction feels best for the discipline that resides in it. Tam takes note of the silence. Strixhaven was always loud and full of chattering students. Here, the cadets are quiet. Reclusive. Even the early evening is quiet, save for the rustle of a cockatrice near the lonesome tree.

There's someone outside her door.

Tam opens it, intrigued, eager for company and conversation. It's an azra cadet—Theorix, same as her. The young woman stands attentive but blank, as if waiting for Tam to speak first.

"Can I help you?" Tam attempts.

The cadet takes a moment to respond. "Would you like to study with me for our shadow numbers exam?"

Tam hides her discomfort. No, she would not like to study with a stranger immediately before bed. "I think we should be turning in for the night, but … what do you like to do other than study?"

The azra girl does not change her expression. "Study."

Sensing the end of their conversation, Tam winces and nods. "Night," she says, closing the door.

The interaction was … chalky. All her chats with other cadets tend to feel the same, like talking to a rock spelled to wiggle every now and then. Nothing feels deep.

The door safely closed between her and any further socialization, Tam's eyes are drawn to the drawer of her desk.

She pulls out an empty page, wets her pen.

She's not sure what she's doing.

Dear Abigale,

I'm sorry
I know you thought I was a friend, and that was my fault
You need to stay where you are. Something dangerous is about to

I know the probability of you forgiving me, and it is low. You should know that while I acted of my own volition, there is something critical in me that is missing. I don't know if it simply isn't there or if I need to find it. But that absence is real. I sense it when I lie in bed at night and cast a spell to increase the likelihood of our friends surviving.

I wish you could help me sleep. I can't do it anymore, and I don't want to ask my maker for help.

You could forgive me for my nature, right? That I was made? I had no choice in the matter, but I'm proud that I was created. Can you forgive me for my actions? I understand if you can't. I just want you safe.

Can you forgive me for something that hasn't happened yet? Please try.

With everything I am,
Tam

She reads over the paper. It doesn't make her feel better. She turns the knob of the oil lamp at her desk and removes the glass case around its flame. The letter ignites quickly, quietly, and burns easily in the waste bin.

Its glow illuminates her dormitory.

Tam sees the courtyard beyond, how it's smothered in moonlight. No birds to be seen, thank goodness. A paradox curls high above. The campus sighs in tranquil night. It is beautiful, and so is she, and both of them are fake, fake, fake.

Solitary Cell | Art by: Andrea Piparo
0149_MTGFRA_MainUP: Solitary Cell

There isn't anything alive in Liliana's cell except for herself. The silence is maddening—the only heartbeat is her own, the only swill of life whatever bacteria roil in her gut. She can feel them gurgling around, too tiny to be useful. She listens to nothing. It is a cloying silence where every noise is not only self-produced but loud enough to prickle her skin and wriggle discomfort in her neck. Her own skin cells aren't alive enough to be dead enough. Her only food for days has been fruit. Liliana is denied all footholds of necromantic power here; she weighs screaming for the sake of something to do.

For the first few hours after she woke up, Liliana tried that—the screaming. She tried coaxing the leg of a dead bug in the corner to do something. She tried nicking her finger in case there was something dead in there she could use, all to no avail.

It's been ages since she was bound to another's will, and it isn't a feeling she was excited to experience again. Dozens and dozens of lines in the floor mark where Jace (is there enough of Jace left to still call him Jace?) placed a multitude of hexes to prevent anything alive from coming close. Within the cell itself is the sphere that contains her, a complex network of stone and wood with intention running through every beam. Nothing gets out without disabling the hex switch by the bars.

Which is why she watches, carefully, as a very alive mouse skitters at the edge of her cell. Liliana leans forward, eyes intent.

"Die," she wills, but the intruder merely pauses to clean his whiskers. "Die. Diiiiiiiie."

It's so alive and so small. If it were dead, she could command it to skitter up to the master hex and break the spell, or clamber up the other Liliana's leg and gnaw her stupid smile off, or sojourn up in Jace's tower and riddle him with mouse diseases. Anything! The mouse patters closer to one of the lines of the hexes, and Liliana tries one more time to kill it with her brain. She grits her teeth. "Keel over. Do it. Do it, you filthy little furball. Die, die, die!"

But the second its paw touches one of the lines in the floor, it is bathed in a blue glow and immediately bolts through the bars.

A voice outside the cell gasps with delight. "A mousey!"

For a moment, Liliana tries to kill the source of that voice with her brain, too.

But no, life is endless suffering, and Liliana's doppelgänger, this Multiverse's version of her, peers through the bars. Liliana hates that this other one has clearer skin, has taken better care of her ends, blinks with perfect eyelashes. At least her personality is terrible. Liliana can just make out suggestions of the other's white gown, glimmering with Benalian glass, and her perfect, poreless skin as she preens. "Did you see the sweet little mouse?"

Liliana wraps her hate around every word. "Yes. I saw the mouse."

"One moment." Her double ducks away from the bars. A gentle and prismatic glow briefly illuminates the hallway. She returns a moment later. "Poor dearie. He had irritable bowel syndrome."

"Do you need something?" Liliana spits.

In this world, her double is Professor Opal, and in this world Professor Opal is dreadful. Her smile is saccharine. "Only conversation."

The last thing Liliana wants in either Multiverse is conversation. Her captor explained what Opal is. Not a being purposefully created the way Tam was, but a product of Jace's project functioning correctly. "This Multiverse blooms on its own," her double said when they first met. "Now that I see you, I understand why I am who I am. I am the you who made the right choices."

The healer, the calm and radiant noble, the insufferable snob smiles at Liliana now with venom on her lips. "Do you wonder what it will be like? Me overwriting you?"

The necromancer rolls her eyes, and her head joins them for the ride. "You know, change of plan. Can you just kill me instead?"

"I might," warns Opal. "When I overwrite you, it does seem most likely. Matter from one Multiverse overlaying the matter of another. Do you think it will be messy? My matter overwriting yours? Or do you think that the fabric will displace the weave of the old Multiverse, just nestle me right in your place? I wonder if you'll even know."

"I will raise every rat that has ever died in this dungeon so we have an audience to watch as I strangle you to death."

Opal smiles politely. "I think your life of suffering is what gave you your humor." She leans closer to the bars, and Liliana can make out pleading earnestness in her face. "In my Multiverse, our brother lived a full and healthy life. I chose a different path, and I saved him. Do you want me to save you, too?"

Liliana is about to growl something insulting when her chest suddenly seizes and her left arm goes numb.

She gasps in agony. She sees that same awful magic, white and colorful and tasting of ozone and cloying rose water—

Her chest—

Her heart—

Opal tuts. "I turned down the contract, too. Rude, nasty demons. Now, my job isn't to save you, but it is to keep you contained. Want me to take care of that?" she says with a soft and sour tone, a snide offer, as Liliana clutches her heart.

The pain vanishes. The light vanishes. Liliana catches her breath, and Opal makes a pleased sound.

"I think you'll just start to disappear," she says. "All that pain you carry, all that hurt you bear, all of it will float away in the air like fluff from a cottonwood. Don't you want to be free of your pain?"

Liliana grits her teeth and shakes off the heart attack. "My pain is mine."

"Professor Opal?"

A voice echoes through the hall outside. A voice that can only belong to the one other visitor she receives. Liliana guards herself. The girl is not dangerous, but she is weird.

Opal gives a final wink before stepping away from the bars, her heels clicking down the hallway.

A few minutes later, Tam appears in her place, and Liliana startles as she does every time she sees the person Jace created.

Human ears hide behind tendril-like braids, scales flush close enough to the skin that they're unreadable from afar, but the weirdest part isn't her species or even that she was made—it's that so much of her is just him. Her face, her goddamn face, his face peers back from a tumble of hair. She's furious to look at because there's no reason why he would want to make her. To replace his own gorgon? If so, why give her his chin and his stance and his talents? Does he see her as his heir? His partner? His secretary? What is wrong with him (many things, Liliana knows quite well), and why would he go to the lengths it takes to magically generate a person? Why do it when the cost is so high?

Does Tam know what it costs to make a person? Did Jace?

"Are you okay?" asks Tam.

"So, is Jace your father or your boyfriend or what?" Liliana interrogates from her prison chair.

Tam seems taken aback. She frowns. "What a horrible question."

"What about your god? God-boyfriend? Father-god?"

The girl's frown deepens. Her nose flares in irritation. "None of the above."

"Is it because the gorgon left him? He made you to take her place?"

"No!" Tam's voice echoes in Liliana's cell, and for a second, even that sounds familiar. "If you're going to try and tell me who I am, then I'm going to leave."

A powerful sense of déjà vu raises gooseflesh on Liliana's skin. All I am seeing today are doubles, she thinks.

She leans back and crosses her arms. "Fine. Then what do you want?"

Tam unlocks the bars, walks to the wood and stone sphere, and holds up a hand. Blue geometry dances briefly around her fingers, and the lines on the floor gleam. She's dim in the light of the magic, but her gorgon eyes still glow in the dark. Liliana sits taller in her chair. More torture?

"I need you to see something," the young woman says.

Worse, a heart-to-heart.

Liliana nervously steps across the lines of her cell, one foot in front of the other, and doesn't look up as she passes the stupid stone head of Gideon that Jace put there for whatever reason—perhaps to taunt her, haunt her, remind her of her failings and selfishness. Once she reaches the other side, the girl who was made takes her hand and leads her down the hallway. A symmetrical bracelet of thin blue lines connects their hands, and Liliana knows it's useless to try anything now.

They don't go far, just a few doors up from her cell. Liliana notes one other captive—the woman's snores rumble down the stonework—and counts how many doors there are on either side as she passes.

Tam leads her to a room and ushers her in. Liliana's eyes are immediately drawn to the high ceiling.

"It's a real-time copy of the orrery in his sanctum. This is what the new Multiverse looks like," Tam explains. She waves a hand, and an identical illusion of the orrery appears just beneath it. She twists her hand, and one gently slides over the other. "This Multiverse is unstable. The Theorist believes we need to overwrite the existing Multiverse to make it permanent. You're from there … what do you think this overwrite will mean?"

Liliana takes a moment to think. "Why ask me?"

"Your mastery is death," Tam says. There's curiosity in her voice, but fear, too. "What will happen if a Multiverse is overwritten? Truly?"

For a moment, Liliana considers lying. Flatter the girl, earn her trust, and manipulate her into letting her out. But even if she lies, the truth will hurt far worse than anything she can conjure up. Tam's earnestness is cloying. She genuinely wants to know. Liliana swallows her instincts and considers the question. She knows nothing about the physics of it all, but death is as close to her as her own bones.

"Within all living beings, there is a spark or a power or a soul or a literal candle—something that makes them alive—and when a being dies, that intangible part leaves. The body stays, however, and can be reanimated by borrowing the power of someone with my kind of talent. But if something is overwritten … that is an act of suffocation. The part that was ignited must be snuffed out to be replaced."

"So overwriting means replacing the original, not merging?"

"Complicated things happen when two spirits are in the same body. There must be something empty or half-empty for the rest to fill it, ideally from the same source. But these doubles don't quite have full spirits. They're like you. They're not people, not all the way. The doubles would need to overlay an empty vessel. The old Multiverse must die for this plan to work."

The gorgon is noticeably quiet.

Liliana deliberately aims at a weak spot. "Your friends will be overwritten, Tam."

The young woman returns her gaze, and it's Jace's same kicked-kitten broken heart staring back.

"It won't tear them apart, but layering one Multiverse on another will smother the souls of everyone in the original. Your friends will spiritually suffocate. And what reanimates them will be someone else."

Tam seems frozen in place; she looks past Liliana as she breaks the news. Her braids jitter. "That's not necessarily true. They could be woven together under the right conditions. Laurier's thesis says—"

Liliana scoffs. "He gave you his stubbornness."

"I'm trying to find a solution!" Tam snaps. "Our cause is noble, and if we can eliminate suffering for existence, then we should—"

Liliana puts on her Professor Vess voice. "If we betray the people that mean something to us, then we betray ourselves."

Tam gasps. She seems genuinely shaken.

Liliana isn't one to comfort, but she is one for perspective. "Look. It isn't done. No one has died yet. Let me try to talk to him." The gorgon looks back with an eyebrow raised, not buying it for one second, and Liliana can't help but laugh. "Fair. Then it needs to be you. He'll listen to himself."

Tam takes Liliana's hand once more, the bracelet of magic still around their clasp, and walks her back to her cell, picking up a basket from a cart along the way.

"You're all him," Liliana says to Tam. "You only look like her. I don't know her well, but I know she thinks she's always right."

"I am," Tam deadpans.

The necromancer chuckles. She hates that she likes the girl, but also, of course she likes her. She liked him.

Tam must be able to do some mind reading of her own—a delicate look softens her face. "Liliana, can you tell what he gave me?"

In the glow of the hallway's magelights, Liliana smiles sadly. "From what I can tell, the best parts of himself." She sighs. "His cleverness, his creativity, where those two virtues collide. You reek of it."

Tam considers that, and as she does, Liliana wonders how a person could get by just being a part of a whole. "What's in the basket?"

"Fruit."

"Damn. Told you he gave you the smarts."

The girl who was made doesn't say anything for a moment. She doesn't seem to feel better.

Tam guides Liliana back to the sphere inside her cell and sets the basket inside it. Liliana settles into place once more, straddling her chair with a heavy sigh.

"Is there a word for arrogance that comes with the actual talent to back it up?" Liliana asks. Tam shrugs. "That was always Jace's real problem. He's talented, and it scares the hell out of him."

Tam seems to think about that for a moment.

Liliana catches her eye and winks. "Tell my ex it's a bad look to keep a woman locked in a dungeon. It's the kind of thing that dragons do."

Tam nods, a heavy weight clearly on her shoulders, and locks the bars behind her. Liliana rises and peeks in the basket of extra food. It is indeed fruit, but also unyeasted bread, a satchel of edible seeds, nuts. Nothing remotely dead.

She groans in agony as she takes some apple butter and smears it over the bread.

Her climb to the top of the tower is long and heavy. The sun shines thin and milky through the windowpanes. For the first time, Tam registers that there is no scent in these halls, no musk of old books or dust in the hanging tapestries. No corner of its impossible hallways bears comfort.

The tower twists upward, in, upon itself. She's gotten used to it now, has learned the best way to not feel queasy is to look down at her feet. The stairs curve and warp, physics answering to the will of this world's maker. Tam knows the shape well; it's what a mind looks like on the inside. The tower reminds her of what she sees when she mingles with probability; when she toys with the future without knowing the results, it appears to her in geometries as well.

The stairways are busy. She can see a Stingerquill student at the end of a hallway full of yelling cadets and turns the other way. Tam isn't in the mood to walk within the range of a soulbreaker.

She spots a woman in blue on the staircase to her right, high above, gravity pulling the wrong way. The woman is walking with coolheaded ease, focused strictly on the path in front of her. Tam knows her, has always liked her. In those early days of learning the world, her cryomancer mentor always took the time to explain how and why something was the way it was. Even now, her blue goggles glint in the light.

"Hello, Chandra," Tam calls, but Chandra ignores the greeting. She's not one for hellos. Tam wonders what she was speaking to Jace about—something important, of course. The two are close colleagues.

Tam continues, but the journey is not a lonely one. She is trailed the entire way by another vision. Lluwen again. He sucks his teeth in disdain.

"There's no other you, so you'll be fine," he says. "Do you think we'll feel it? Why do these half people get to win when the real ones have to die?"

She doesn't bother to walk faster. At least one of her friends has been nearby for the last few days. It's been useless to try and them away. She can feel her eyes twitch with tiredness, and just as she reaches the stairs to the tower, Tam is drawn to the window.

It's a moment between classes. Cadets flock to and fill the inner courtyard that runs the vertical length of the tower. They move as a mass, colors and shapes and people of all different silhouettes scattering to their destinations. Tam's gut feels like it's full of lead. Every one of them has a double in the other Multiverse, a doppelgänger of their own with a full life—friends, family, pets, dreams, faults, crimes, struggles, favorite foods, and songs stuck in their heads. These versions, the ones walking the courtyard of Hexhaven, what do they have? They were made months ago by a Multiverse churning them out. They are only sort of people. Just like her. Sort of people aren't people. But her friends are.

Tam balls her fists, feels her braids rise in agitation. She bounds up the spiral staircase to the Theorist's sanctum and storms through the entrance.

Inside are a handful of Theorix cadets checking proofs at a central chalkboard, and beside them, the Theorist studies their work. All turn—several blank stares and one discerning frown.

The Theorist lowers his brow, and the magic in his eyes flashes. "You talked to Liliana."

She shoves back, pushing a wave of faces toward him, every person she passed in her time at the true Strixhaven. At a loss for words, she weaves in her emotions. Shock: Every person? Every person must die? Anger: Why do I matter more than my friends? Sorrow: They matter to me. All those people matter to me. Why is the potential of life worth more than the reality? Tam wants it to hurt. She doesn't hold back as she hurls her feelings at him.

The Theorist flinches, lip curling like he slugged back a bitter liquor. He flicks a hand at her with a glare of his eye. "Enough."

Tam takes a seat, her mind at ease, but the sorrow in her chest is still present. Only a quiet, distant part of her recognizes what he just did, what she could not defy, what was easy to obey and as natural as breathing. The Theorist does this, sometimes, when she acts out of line. The Theorist kneels in front of her.

He gestures to the Theorix cadets, and they leave the sanctum silently.

"You're torn up, aren't you?" he says.

Tam feels herself start to cry and wills the urge away. "The original Multiverse has to die for our experiment to succeed."

The Theorist leans forward and catches her in a hug. Tam doesn't cry—not one tear, no sir—until suddenly the white cloth at her cheek is wet. She gives in and pulls her maker close.

"I can sense our chance of success," Tam says quietly, "and it is small, Teacher. We can't do it if we don't destroy the original."

Her maker hugs her back. She looks over his shoulder at the sanctum, the looming presence of all those mage-rings, and realizes this room, too, was made to make them feel small.

"Those feelings you have are the source of aberrations of your own," he says with gentleness, "You have all the knowledge you need to deal with them. You know your theorems. You can cut yours out, too."

Tam stiffens, repulsed. "I don't want that."

"Then purge yourself of doubt," he says, giving her shoulders a gentle squeeze, a projected wave of lavender calm and comfort. "Excise it until all you taste is bile. We are scientists, Tamira."

She sniffs. He's right. They are scientists. What they want doesn't matter as much as finding and upholding truth.

"But I see how you suffer without them," Tam says in a small voice, thinking of the Theorist's other parts. She sends him the image of every time she saw him tear one from his mind, every time he tried to remember something they took with them. She doesn't like calling them aberrations.

The Theorist sits back. "I thought if I cultivated focus, the connection between myself and my spell would grow more firm." He pauses, and briefly, his mask slips. "In my first life, I had to be so many people. Hide so many parts. Hard to remember who me was."

Tam wonders if she'd be better cutting those parts away from herself, too, but she doesn't think she could. It would mean not seeing her friends again, even if only as visions of how they hate her.

"As for the old Multiverse, I need you focused. Remember what we are doing this for. Some perspective might help you understand."

"There was something Liliana said—"

"Liliana knows everything of death and nothing of life. Death isn't an ending, Tamira."

She sees him now, surrounded by his myriad mage-rings, orrery overhead. He seems so powerful, so strong. The avatar of reason, bathed in thin autumn sun and wielding his mind as a weapon of good. Tam wants to be like him. Tam wants him to meet her friends. He is powerful, and he is reasonable.

"I was trying to calculate a way to safely contain the map of the Multiverse," he says sheepishly.

Tam glances at the chalkboard the Theorix cadets were working at. It's a mess.

"In my state, I can't contain it safely. I wish Loot were …" He sighs. "Our grand project will get there, but not yet. Maybe some time away will help you recover until we can solidify it."

You mean erase the other one? she thinks.

The Theorist stills. The light seems to dim, his shadow grows long, but Tam doesn't budge. He does this … creates illusions without meaning to.

"You won't understand until you see it yourself." The Theorist tilts his chin. Tam feels heavy. It draws her gaze to the floor. "Strixhaven is infamously pleasant. The rest of the Multiverse is much, much more punishing."

He creates the illusion of a rucksack, gives it a tap to make it real. He hands the pack to her.

"Go to Innistrad. I need its planar dimensions, including extraplanetary bodies. Record the data, observe its nature. See what an unfriendly plane looks like."

Tam puts the pack on, belts it around her waist and chest. "Same rubric as the others?"

He turns back to one of the chalkboards. "Yes. There's some money in the side pocket. Stay at this inn and be back by tomorrow. If you do, I'll teach you the trick to solidifying illusion into matter."

"Proft's theorem?"

"The very same."

The Theorist creates the illusion of a piece of paper with the information mentioned, grabs it with a flick of his hand, and passes it to Tam.

With his total control over the Echoverse, the Theorist opens an Omenpath in the center of the sanctum. The real Innistrad is on the other side, and Tam knows it's solid. She doesn't say anything when she notices the Theorist rub the bridge of his nose a bit, nor when the orrery above winks part of its map away into nothing.

"Goodbye, Teacher."

"Hey," he calls. Tam pauses. "Stay safe. Understand what we're fighting for. You can do this."

Tam doesn't quite smile, but she does nod. As she walks into the Omenpath and emerges into a pitch-dark field in Innistrad, she lets out a long, shuddering breath.

When her maker was more than just the Theorist, he was still a person, still full of emotion and memory and heart and pain. But now that he has whittled those away, he barges into her mind more often. Gives her commands that aren't her will. Would the old him have done that? What were his other selves holding him back from before?

She walks under the shining silver moon of Innistrad toward an inn in the distance.

Once Tamira leaves, the Theorist immediately storms downstairs to the prison cells. This can end tonight. He can do it on his own.

He walks with intent, hell-bent on finishing the experiment before his student's doubt becomes contagious. But everything he sees betrays the faults of this Multiverse. The smell of musty stone is still wrong, the way the light shines is too muted, the happy and blank looks of the staff he passes … all of it is missing a soul.

Did one of the aberrations have mine …?

He casts aside the hypothesis. A soul, a spark. Why must such meaningless factors turn out to be the most critical ones? And yet. And yet.

He storms down the hall and yells for Professor Opal to leave. As she does, the thoughts of their two prisoners skim through his head.

One thinks a litany of swears, punctuated by a rasping yell—"Keep your lids open, or you'll see with Urza's eyes, Beleren!"—which he ignores.

But the other makes it clear she already knows what is about to happen. Showtime, he hears from the cell in front of him. He is without a weapon; the Theorist does not need one to kill.

He opens the lock and steps inside. Jadzi, the oracle, awaits with a straight back and a combative glare.

"Well?" she groans. "Get it over with."

He stands there. Uncertain. "Is there a chance I'm wrong?"

The oracle scoffs. "See for yourself." She leans her head forward, an invitation.

The Theorist's eyes burn bright. He dives into the oracle's mind and crashes into an absolute mess.

Both Multiverses are imploding. One Multiverse is turning the other into a spaghetti of disrupted matter. One Multiverse rejects the other, and it disintegrates. Jace has failed. Jace is victorious. Jace lives to forty-seven and dies of a tumor he can't wish away. Jace lives forever. Vraska comes back and says she's sorry. Vraska leads the charge against him. Tam fights at his side. Tam betrays him. Jace carves away the last of the aberrations until all that's left is the part of him that remembers how to hold a fork. Jace gives himself an accidental aneurysm. Jace succeeds in overwriting the Multiverse and immediately gets a different aneurysm. One Multiverse overwrites the other and trillions die in the process, or maybe they all live, or maybe it's painless, or maybe it's excruciating, or maybe it's all a bad dream, or maybe every atom in both Multiverses turns to ash, or maybe—

The Theorist gasps for air. He feels like he's drowning in potential.

Jadzi laughs. "It's fun in there, isn't it?"

The Theorist feels his headache coming back.

He readies a command that will kill her. He will force her to bite off her own tongue. He will make her strangle herself. He will have her stick her head in the door and pull the handle on repeat.

Jadzi, the oracle, must die, and he must watch. He must for the experiment to succeed. He needs to ride her consciousness back, to see how the plane of Arcavios was born, witness the collision, the fusion, of two planes. He must take that knowledge and use it to bind his Multiverse to the original.

The Theorist holds out a glowing hand and knows all he has to do is tell her to smash her head into the ground.

"So do it," she says, and with one foot in her mind, the Theorist sees his decision of how to kill her appear in the oracle's consciousness. "Why wait?"

He's going to do it.

"You've lost the nerve, haven't you, with so little of you left?"

He's going to do it.

Jadzi leans forward. He sees what she sees, sees as she looks too closely at him, too closely and too carefully—

"Don't," he warns, sensing her futuresight secondhand.

The oracle inhales sharply with surprise. He feels her look directly at his future. "You really do want to start it all over, don't you?" she says.

He pulls his hand away sharply, his resolve shaken.

He was going to do it. He really was.

The Theorist sees in Jadzi's mind a single image—himself, dropping his hand—and she sees him see it in turn.

So, he does.

The oracle grins. "Fail or succeed, no one will remember what you achieved. Existence will not thank you for your ambition, mind sculptor."

The Theorist turns, embarrassed, furious, and slams the cell door behind him.