“Are you busy?” Max asked one afternoon, strolling into our room.

I scowled at the letter I was trying to write. It ws straightup impossible to secretly tell Chelsea and Melissa what was going on. Our crude context-dependent ‘code’ hadn’t accounted for anything that was currently happening. “Not with anything that can’t wait. What’s up?”

Max shrugged. “Just felt like going for a walk in the sun. You seem like you need a break.”

O… kay? “Uh, sure. Where in the sun?”

“Not fussed.”

So we went to my favourite little island, where I’d met Terry and Mae. As we strode out onto the beach, Max asked, “Can I borrow your tablet?”

I handed it to him. He turned it off and handed it back.

“What are – ?”

“Do you have any electronics on you?”

“Um. No? We can’t bring them into the school, remember?”

“We’re not allowed to bring them into the school. But you’ve successfully brought an electronic tracker and a polaroid camera in before. I just wanted to be sure you didn’t have anything on you right now.”

“I’m not some kind of tech smuggler. I don’t have anything, but why …?” I glanced at the deactivated tablet in my hands, then back at the cave we’d just walked out of, leaving the range of the school’s intranet. “You think we’re being spied on.”

“No, probably not. I mean, I don’t have any reason to think we are being spied on. We certainly weren’t last semester or we would’ve been stopped before getting to that labyrinth, and I doubt a school has any system in place to just randomly start monitoring specific students. But, well. Last semester I tried being less cautious, and that didn’t work out particularly well, so I’m going back to excessive caution.”

“That’s… fair. What did you want to talk about that requires ‘excessive caution’?”

“That lake of empowered water. The one over the heart of the spell network.”

“What about it?”

“You’ve ended up in it twice. Do you think you could find it again?”

“Uh, yeah. Probably. It wasn’t that far from the valley we arrived in, so – ”

“Do you think you could show me where it is?”

I stopped walking. “Why? You’re not going to do something… reckless, are you?”

Max laughed. “You’re asking that now?”

“Seriously, you – ”

“No, Kayden, I’m not going to jump into a magical lake and fight off a bunch of tentacle monsters or whatever you’re envisioning.”

“One tentacle monster.”

“How do you know there’s only one?”

“… Good point.”

“That room was the heart of the labyrinth. It stands to reason that the lake above is probably the centre of the school. I want to re-orient my maps around it.”

“You’re still mapping the school? You already found out it’s a giant runic circle. What more could you want to know?”

“I haven’t mapped most of that runic circle yet, and even if I had, that’s a nice step forward but it doesn’t in itself give us a proper map. I have a theory that they may have anchored the translocational – ”

“Okay, okay,” I said before he could launch into a lecture about whatever fascinating bit of magical cartography had caught his interest. “I can take you right now. Come on.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were entering the caves where I’d seen di Fiore meet with his forger. Max crouched by a stream of empowered water and let it run over his fingers, fascinated. “There really is rather a lot of it, isn’t there?”

“Um, yeah. A lakeful.” I started leading the way downstream. “My running theory had been that there’s some kind of natural wellspring of empowered water here, somehow. Like how sometimes nature will make bits of glass or soap or whatever? I figured the higher-ups in Skolala Refujeyo had stumbled on this huge supply, and moved the school over here to take advantage of it and claimed they’d created a secret industrial process and that’s why nobody’s been able to discover or replicate said process. But lately I’ve been thinking that doesn’t really make much sense.”

“No?”

“I told Saina about this and as she pointed out, there’s no reason to move the school for that. Building this school into a mountain was a massive operation, and yes, there’s a lot more to the school than just empowered water, but when you’re looking at a project that all full of complications and costs and probably a lot of property and political disputes, I don’t think a natural reserve of empowered water is going to factor into your decision-making process. Easier to build some kind of industrial outpost here for it. That can’t be the reason the school is here.”

“And yet it’s certainly an unusual way to store manufactured empowered water,” Max said. “You think it’s a natural source and they coincidentally found it here and decided to actor it into building? Or they manufacture it and let it run through a network of streams for some obscure reas – oh.” He rubbed at the mage mark on his arm. “You think this is what the corridors are generating energy for? On top of maintaining the portals and ventilation systems and intranet and whatnot, you think they built the school like this to… make cheap potions?”

I grinned. “Yep!”

“That’s a very… hmm.”

“You think I’m wrong?”

“I don’t have anything to dispute the theory, I suppose, it’s just sort of… well, who creates a secret esoteric web of corridors and puts a bunch of students in it to secretly harvest magic from their movements to mass produce potion ingredients? That’s such a boring reason!”

I burst out laughing.

“You know what I mean! I just feel like if you’re going to go to that kind of trouble, you should be motivated by something better than manufacturing efficiency! You should have a world domination plot or, or be pursuing secret forbidden knowledge, or something!”

“It is a world domination plot,” I pointed out. “Potions used to be unbelievably difficult and expensive to produce. Now we can make them on a whim, as practice, because empowered water is so freely available. Potioncrafting is a major industry that’s entirely dependent on one source of empowered water – this source. Most potioncrafters don’t even learn to empower their own water any more; it’s just not practical. Everyone relies on this place, and whoever controls this source controls the most portable and versatile form of magic practiced in the world.”

“Okay, fine, but it’s just a boring economic world domination plot. They don’t count.”

“Well if you’re really lucky, I’m entirely wrong and it’ll be something way more sinister involving long dark robes and a, a glowing chalice. And chanting.”

“There had better be chanting. If we’ve risked our lives so much and we don’t even get to see any sinister chanting I’m going to register a complaint. I – oh.”

We’d reached the lake. Or at least, we’d reached the end of the tunnel, where it opened high above the lake – I wasn’t going to walk over the edge and fall in again. The stream of water under our feet flowed out and down, down into the water below. The light from our tablets bounced as feeble beams off the surface, illuminating basically nothing.

“That’s, um, big,” Max noted.

“Believe me, I know.”

“And below there…”

Below there was a cavern with somewhat gelatinous, semitransparent walls, full of junk that, if the presence of my rock climbing equipment was any indication, had been thrown or lost in the lake. Below there was a skeleton etched in exotic runes, and the stuff we’d had with us on our journey through the labyrinth of dreams, and nothing that Max had expected to find.

“Well,” Max said. “That’s, um… okay. I can use this as a, a centrepoint. Thank you for showing me this.”

“No problem.”

He stared out over the water for a bit, then gave himself a little shake, and we started to head back. When we got close enough to the cave entrance to navigate without the light, I deactivated my tablet and put it away.

“So,” I said, “while we’re still out of range of the intranet… any thoughts on that creepy prophecy from when we were down there?”

“I have been considering the situation.”

“Is that Max-speak for ‘I still have no idea’?”

“No.” Max didn’t elaborate right away. He walked out into the sunlight of the valley, stroked his beard and said hesitantly, “After everything last term, I got the impression that you didn’t appreciate me acting on my own for your protection.”

“Well you certainly got the right impression, then! Don’t do that again.”

“Right. I just… I have a theory, but it’s… just a theory. And I really don’t think you’re going to like it. I’d rather not tell you, to be honest, but, well…”

“Is this something I have a right to know?”

“… Probably, yes.”

“Then tell me.”

“Well. Uh. Let me just find a copy of the prophecy…”

“I know the prophecy, Max.”

“Sure, but the specific wording of a prophecy is important, so if you misremember – ”

“In a time that’s mostly been, a Hero dreamed a thousand dreams. A goal, a wish upon a star, a kiss blown to travel far. In a time that’s partly been, a Child screams a thousand screams. Imprisoned in the buried heart it pushes, presses, tries to start. In a time that’s not yet been, the Hero dies, the Child free, Breaks mirrors, chains, and crushes pearls, to rise from the top of the world. The Hero’s life cannot be saved, the Child will not be enslaved. But jailers have a chance to choose just how much they wish to lose. Safety has a simple price – a single Child sacrifice. Prepare its heart in offering, and be the music – climb, and sing.”

Max stared.

I shrugged. “I’ll forget my own name before I forget that prophecy. You had a theory.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “You remember the first time you heard the first half, in Duniyasar? You came up with a theory about the identities of the Child and the Hero then.”

“Yeah. I thought it was my and Kylie’s spells. But that was disproven.”

“No – the part where you thought it was about your spell destroying Kylie’s was disproven. Your logic for identifying the actors wasn’t. And now we have more context.”

I frowned. “You think this is about our spells?”

“I think that the Child is your spell. Being imprisoned in a heart is a pretty clear reference. Pushing against such a prison as it ‘tries to start’ is self-explanatory, I think.”

I nodded. “The spell’s going to awaken.”

“Exactly. It takes place ‘in a time that’s partly been’, so I think we can interpret that as it being at risk of awakening at any time during a period that had already started, but was far from over, when the prophecy was given. The obvious possibility is you being at Refujeyo, but it could refer to any number of situations.”

“Bringing us to the time that’s not yet been – the future, where it awakens. Quite violently, it sounds like. So who’s the Hero, then? If my spell’s not a risk to Kylie’s, then it’s not hers, right?”

“I… I think the Hero is you, Kayden.”

I took a moment to digest this. Shook my head. “That… that can’t be right. It always calls me the Heartbo – ”

“It’s a prophecy. It will call you whatever it needs to call you to get it point across. Just because it’s called you the Heartbound in two prophecies doesn’t mean it can’t ever call you something else. We got the complete prophecy almost immediately after you were, as those other prophecies put it, ‘chosen by Destiny’. If I wanted to come up with one word to describe somebody chosen by destiny, ‘Hero’ wouldn’t be too bad a description.”

“M-maybe. But it’s not a good description, either. Just because Kylie’s spell happens to be called the Destiny, calling her familiar a ‘hero’ is… it’s not even good wordplay. It’s reaching enough to be actively deceptive.”

“It wouldn’t be the first thing that Fionnrath’s Destiny has done that could possibly be actively deceptive, would it?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I don’t think…” but I couldn’t help remembering, down in the labyrinth, a mirror image of myself invisibly restrained, claiming to be my spell and wanting freedom. I still didn’t think it was actually my spell – my spell was dormant, and even if it hadn’t been, the chance that I also had a spell powerful enough for that kind of coherence would be a coincidence bordering on the ludicrous – but… but that was an illusion created by spells, with help from my own brain. So did that mean that that kind of characterisation, a spell trapped and ‘screaming’, made ‘sense’ to the spells? That a prophecy, trying to communicate, would choose that kind of description?

I put a hand on my heart. And felt nothing, of course.

“I’m a bit confused about dreaming a thousand dreams, though,” Max admitted. “I don’t know what the prophecy is trying to tell us there.”

“I do,” I said quietly. “During the Initiation, that thing made of prophecies said… a lot, actually, most of it nonsense. But it warned me about the Destiny, as you know, so if it communicates in the same sort of way as the Destiny… well. One of the things it told me is that a collection of thoughts is a dream. So, dreaming a thousand dreams would be just… thinking, conceiving of things. Having thoughts and experiences. Living.”

“In a time that’s mostly been,” Max said.

I nodded. If we were parsing this right… my life was mostly over. The time I was in danger, was now. And it would end with a curse awakening, probably quite violently.

“So we just have to find a way to stop it,” Max said. “These prophecies are warnings, right? They can be stopped.”

“I’m not the one being warned,” I said. “The hero can’t be saved, the child won’t be enslaved. The spell awakening and my death is a foregone conclusion. The warning is for the ‘jailers’, who apparently lose… something… if this is allowed to go ahead. Probably my spell is one of those really dangerous ones that’s going to kill people when it awakens? The prophecy isn’t about saving me; it’s about what to do to save other people.”

A single Child sacrifice. Prepare its heart in offering.

The way to stop the “Child” from awakening was to kill me.