"Sweetie, your new man lives in a ruined castle in a dangerous forest, and nobody will go there because of all the strange magic. He is totally a Dark Lord."

"Your boyfriend lives with his mother."

"Touché, sweetie. Touché."

— Dating on the Dark Side, A Cathy MacCurty adventure

"You're usually more entertaining than this." Strife, the god of conflict and protection, was bored and grumbling. Instead of trying to win, his opponent had bottled up the battle in layers of defense that made assault impossible. Strife hated deadlocks.

"I want to have a conversation," said his opponent, "and that's hard to do when you're crowing about every little capture."

"Humor the mortal," said Feythlonda, goddess of fertility. "After all, you brought him here."

"To play chess," grumbled Strife, "not this. But fine, ask your questions, young Taylor."

"Are you really okay with me publishing this new magic system? It's going to change the world."

"The world needs changing, boy."

"But does it need this change?"

"You could always ask Mallus. He's offered to help you before."

Taylor didn't have anything against the god of oracles, but he didn't like fortune-telling in general. His personal theory was that a true prophecy formed a causal loop. One could not receive the prophecy if it weren't already true, so maintaining one's freedom was incompatible with having one's future told. Fake fortunetellers were fine to mingle with because he could laugh at them. The real ones were best avoided by anyone who valued free will.

"I don't want to bother him. I'd rather bother you."

"Coward," grinned Strife.

"Don't goad the boy," chided Feythlonda, "he'll just ignore you and do what he wants to anyway. Taylor, I can see you are very conflicted about this." The gods could read his mind while he was in their void-like realm. That they bothered to let him talk out loud was a kindness.

"Even if I keep the system close, and I only teach it to people I trust, it will get out eventually. It worked out well the last time I did this, but Tenobre was ready for it. The situation in Aarden is different. People here still think the stars are the souls of dead heroes."

"Not all of them," Feythlonda reminded him, "some of them are on the right track."

"And get laughed at."

"That's not your real worry," suggested Strife.

They played as they conversed, each attempting to break the present deadlock in their own way. Taylor placed pieces in the future, aimed at Strife's back lines. Strife moved the few pieces he lost into the past, to haunt Taylor's center.

"I don't want to wreck the world in the name of saving it. Looking back at my last life, I had almost ideal conditions, and I still ended up in a twenty-year war against Hyksos slavers."

"The rest of the world turned out fine, didn't it? Take the win." The game teetered on the tipping point, when Taylor's future moves would start to land in the present and break the gridlock.

"Victories must be worth the losses incurred," said Taylor, quoting himself in a past life, "or else they are not victories."

"Things are going to break," Strife told him. "They have to break, or they can't change. The world can't go on as it is now."

"I think it was easier when I knew less." Taylor saw his position would never get any stronger, and dropped the first of his future pieces into the present, to begin savaging Strife's back line.

The rest of the game was pure carnage, right to the end, when only a few pieces remained on the board. Taylor bled Strife's forces nearly dry but still lost the game. The god flexed proudly after his win, as if thrashing a mortal were some unparalleled joy.

Taylor – Midway

Taylor blinked. He was back in the mortal world, and no time had passed. His shelf of gods stood before him in their little diorama, the gods of mystery, libraries, growth, and a few others he prayed to daily. He didn't have any of the major gods: nature, craft, order, chaos, or magic. The magic requirements to make the major gods had always been too high for him to attempt it, but with what he knew now, it might be possible. He hadn't tried it yet because he didn't want to get it wrong and die in the process.

His attic room at the boarding house was large and private, with dormer windows for light and enough room for all the workbenches and drafting tables he could want. A large tome sat on one writing desk, with the dimensions of an atlas and the depth of an encyclopedia, rendered in regular paper and ink. It was the draft of his new magic system, which he called Alchemy.

This would be his second new magic system in Aarden. The first was aimed exclusively at measuring and manipulating mana attributes, and was trivial by comparison. This new system would let a magician bend the rules of chemistry, thermodynamics, gravity, light, and nearly every other physical law.

Next to the desk with the finished draft was a second writing desk, stacked with sheets of monster skin peeled and smoothed into thin layers, pre-trimmed and pre-creased with a series of small holes in the folds, ready for binding thread. The pots of ink were just as rare, made from dyes and minerals capable of holding impressive quantities of mana. Every stroke of the pen was a permanent mark on the fabric of the world, a declaration of intent attached to glyphs never before seen in the world of Aarden. A hefty stack of finished pages lay on a nearby table, grouped into signatures and awaiting the thread that would bind them.

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He had worked on the new system for half of winter and into spring. Much of the Alchemy system was working, and Taylor was days away from completion. Every finished page acquired a metaphysical weight and permanence, literally heavy with meaning. When it was finished, the Origin of Alchemy would be hard to move by conventional means and even more difficult to destroy. He planned to stick it into his magic satchel and leave it there until he could build a proper vault.

That it was nearly finished was remarkable for such an important work, but that was the advantage of simply doing something over. It was a little boring to repeat himself, but he knew exactly what he was doing.

Fortunately, the Alchemy system could work together with the Attribute system and Aarden's native Magic Circle system. As long as the user's intent was clear, mixing systems was allowed. However, it was best to keep each system in its own layer of work. Some of the characters between the three systems looked similar, but weren't.

Chambers knocked politely on his door. "Young Master? Breakfast is ready."

"Thank you, Chambers!" Other than an occasional meal and one bath, he'd been shut up for weeks. He checked himself in the mirror on the back of his door, noted he needed a bath, and put on a mask before joining everyone else downstairs.

His need for a mask at this point was more emotional than practical. The curse that made people hate him was well under control. But after years of hiding his face, he didn't feel comfortable being seen by mortals. In truth, he didn't need to worry about his curse, so long as he wore his double-strand of beads.

They looked like prayer beads, but each one was a praxis that absorbed a specific type of monster mana and converted it into force mana. The beads themselves were unusual, being half a veined white mineral and half a deep purple stone. They were threaded with a mana wire alloy. If he needed to, he could use the strand as a weapon or tap the stored mana to replenish his own.

He sat with the five boarders who currently rented rooms in the same house. Three of them were suspicious: they had taken the place of other boarders who moved out unexpectedly. One professed to be a writer but lacked any whiff of ink around him. The second was a mill worker, but the new sores on her hands didn't match the calluses she already had. The third was supposedly the millworker's daughter, who went to the local school. But their faces were nothing alike; she was too pretty by half and kept trying to flirt with Taylor.

If anyone at the table was going to try to kill him, it was the pretty, inexplicably friendly girl.

"Are we going fishing today?" Kasper always wanted to be outside, doing anything other than studying. "It's already spring, and we've barely been anywhere."

"Don't you and Tristan go out?" Tristan was Kasper's bonded animal companion and one of the tallest horses in town.

The wolfkin boy mumbled into his eggs. "It's not the same without you."

"I want to, but I need to finish this project. If I stop, it takes a lot longer to finish."

Kasper sulked through breakfast until Taylor promised they could spar and then visit a bathhouse after. It wasn't as good as getting out of town, but it cheered the wolfkin boy.

"How is school coming along?"

"Okay, I guess. But they don't teach any of the good stuff there." By good stuff he meant magic and fighting.

"You need math for magic circles, and letters for everything else. It's not a waste of time."

"But I can skip history, right?" He looked so hopeful, it was sad.

"Alas, you can not."

The boy groaned. "But it's just a bunch of dates. Who cares what year King Big Head sat on his throne and then died?"

"When a leader dies without warning, there's a high chance of war afterward. If King Big Head didn't have a good succession plan, millions of people might care. It's what happened because he died that's important."

"Mr. Unster doesn't teach that. He just says, "know this thing happened on this date."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Taylor didn't want to badmouth Mr. Unster in front of Kasper, but it sounded like he wasn't any good at teaching history. Maybe he needed a tutor who could make history interesting.

He could find out if Ophelia was available. She had tutored Taylor for a while. Maybe she could do the same for Kasper. It would be nice to have her around again.

Too nice. How sure was he that he wasn't using Kasper as an excuse to bring Ophelia close? He had missed her when they were both in Temer last fall, because he was in hiding and not receiving her letters. Since then, they had exchanged a few letters but never met up in person. But there were good reasons to bring her into his orbit, besides his enduring crush on her. She had an impressive breadth of knowledge and might be useful to have on his side. His main worry was that making her a piece in his game to save the world could put her and her extensive family in danger.

Then again, if the empire turned against arcaic people, she'd be in danger anyway. Overall, it was better to have her on his side than out of reach. And, of everyone in the empire, Taylor was the person most likely to bring her closer to her dream of returning to Archome, the lost homeland of her people.

"I'll try to find you a tutor for history," he told Kasper. "Someone who is good at it."

After breakfast, Kasper and Taylor were in the small yard, taking turns practicing their throws. A light rain made skin and fur slick, and the boys laughed as their hands gained and lost their holds. Soon, they were covered in wet sand and soaked to the bone, but they kept to their practice until they had run through their set of stances, blocks, and throws.

Kasper was right to drag him outside into the rain. Caught up as he was in bending the forces of nature to his will, Taylor often forgot the simple pleasure of locking arms with another person and striving with them. For a long time, Taylor had been quite alone in the world, and the old habits tended to take over when he spent too much time alone. These days, he had Kasper, his spirit companions, his sister, and several others who considered him a friend.

He had a lot to live for. It was also a lot to protect.

"Young Master," Chambers interrupted them. "You have guests. They are from the church." She held out a card in her trembling hand. It had the symbols of the Giving Goddess on it, and a name: Domine Erasmus of Home Priory. He was only a priest, but he was a priest from the church's center, and he was permanently assigned there.

"Do what you can to make them feel welcome while I make myself presentable." He looked to the roof where the dormer windows were. He was pretty sure at least one of them was unlocked, which meant he could clean and dress himself without parading through the house while he was a wet, sweaty mess.

"Very good." Was that a shadow of a smile? When Taylor first met Chambers, he used to think her face was locked in a state of contempt. These days, she seemed far happier. Or at least, not unhappy.

Cook, Blake, and Chambers rented the building and ran it as a boarding house, with the understanding they would move as soon as Taylor settled on a more permanent address. For the time being, he had convinced them to accept a token amount of rent money and lodge him as a boarder, but they treated him with an obvious preference above their other customers. At heart, they were his dedicated servants, and they looked forward to the day he bought a home of his own so they could move there.

"You could even serve them the good tea, if we have enough of it. I'll be down soon."

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