It was Eric’s turn to splutter over his drink. He wiped the liquor off his chin with the back of one hand and wagged a finger at me. “Nice try, but we’re a long way from April Fool’s Day.”
His protest didn’t fool me. A shadow had fallen over Eric’s eyes, and his easygoing smile had wilted into a worried frown. Doubt aspects blossomed in his aura like gray flowers. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, instead looking out over the city below us. Though my friend was in pain, I knew this was my best opportunity to convince him none of this was real. There was no pressure yet, so I pushed him a little harder.
“Do you remember when we fought our way to the Umbral Forge?” I asked.
“Of course,” Eric responded. “You’d hired Grimaldi’s men as muscle. But Sanrin tricked us and paid the gangsters to hold us prisoner. It almost worked, but then your mother attacked, and everything went crazy. Abi got hurt, you killed that sage...”
Eric’s voice trailed off. His brow furrowed, and he stared more intently at the sprawl of lights strewn below us. He said nothing for a minute, then shrugged. He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I don’t remember the rest of it. Everything after is a little foggy. Maybe Kincade rang my bell a little harder than I thought.”
“You don’t have a concussion, and you know what that hole in your memory means,” I said. “You can’t remember what happened in the Umbral Forge, because you haven’t lived through it. None of us has. Not yet.”
“How does it feel to be so smart?” Eric snorted and poured himself another stiff drink. “Don’t answer that. Let me ask you this, then, genius. If it isn’t real, why does this whiskey taste so good? Why does my eye hurt from the punch I took in the fifth round? Why can I still taste the lipstick from the influencer who laid one on me in the dressing room?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I don’t have all the answers. Not even most of them. But I do know that I need your help to finish what we started. It’s like Clem said. We all have to be there to see this thing through.”
Eric swallowed the last of his drink and refilled the glass. He sipped at the whiskey, sighing contentedly as the burn worked its way down his throat to warm his belly. He faced the house while he finished that glass, too.
“You don’t need me,” he said. “I remember how close we are to the Forge. The worst is over. Go on, fulfill your destiny or whatever, but I’m staying here. I’m done chasing monsters that want to kill me. Just leave.”
It was hard for me to believe that Eric meant a word he said. He was a fighter, always had been. I couldn’t see him giving up on anything, much less something as important as our quest. “You’d turn your back on everything to stay here?”
“This is everything I’ve ever wanted,” Eric said. “I’m the best, man. Maybe this isn’t real, but it’s real enough for me. This is my destiny. Would you give up your future to save people who won’t care what you sacrificed for them?”
Those words struck home, and I suddenly understood how Eric felt. This was his dream, and I was asking him to burn it all down to have a chance to rewrite the Grand Design. Even if everything went the way we’d planned and we succeeded, his destiny would change along with everyone else’s. I had every faith that Eric would be the champion, no matter what the Grand Design said about it. But that was a leap of faith too far for him to take when he was already living in his perfect reality.
Saving strangers wasn’t enough. Getting him to leave this place would take something more personal.
“What am I like, here?” I dreaded the answer to that question, but had to ask it, anyway.
Eric hid his hesitation by pouring himself another glass and taking a long pull from it. He set the glass down on the railing to his right, then looked me in the eye.
“No offense, but you’re a monster,” he says. “Adjudicator Hark had you locked up after what happened to the sages. She never planned to let you see the light of day again, no matter how Clem defended you. You had other ideas. In the middle of the night you just... vanished. No one heard anything from you for years. It was like you’d never existed.”
As Eric spoke, my Vision of the Design technique filled in the gaps in a memory I hadn’t had a moment ago. My mother’s followers had rallied to my banner after I’d escaped from prison. They hid me in their vaults on the Far Horizon, far from the realms of man. I mastered dark arts that twisted jinsei into foul knots. I didn’t just rewrite the Grand Design, I unraveled parts of it and stitched together entirely new ones to banish my enemies and return my allies from the lands beyond the grave. Sanrin, Hagar, and Hirani all returned to serve as my lieutenants. We built our forces...
“And then you came back,” Eric sighed. He pointed one trembling finger out toward the ocean. “You built a lair out there. A base for your armies. A tomb for your enemies.”
The world had tried to stop the future me, but by the time they recognized the threat I posed, it was far too late to stop what I’d put in motion. I’d written a new destiny for myself as a conqueror, a warden, a god who ruled his world with an iron fist. Any who stood against me were cast down into the dust. One
