The Honcho Experiment

The magician walks out of the home slowly. Even to casual eyes, he is what he is. Magic is the place where desire and need join with will to become something wider and deeper by far. To be a magician is to walk the world of small wonders; to be the unseen shadow and the gentle secret hiding from the wider world. To make the world a better place without being known.

This magician has gathered pain into fire that dances about his hands, visible even to ordinary vision. Done so with an ease that speaks of long practise. Power crawls about him like a cloak and noose both. He carries purpose and necessary will about him the way others carry their dreams.

“Where am I?” He demands, the power of his voice a weight all its own.

“Earth. Not yours, but an earth.”

“I should not be here. I cannot be here. I am Nameless, beyond the pale art of summoning. You WILL tell me how to return.”

I blink. Sigh. “Nathen -.”

“That is not my name!” And he hurls power with that. I am amazed he held back until now.

I catch it, ground it. It bubbles up; I toss it toward Charlie. She winces as she eats the energy, eyes widening.

Nameless stops. Grunts. The magic that he calls forth twisted and twisting, made of things I’d rather have never known. Death magic, the kind designed to unmake a fae. The kind used for other things. Because once you start doing those hard, necessary things no one else will do – perhaps because no one else can do them – it isn’t something that you stop.

I ward it off as well, then bind it for studying later. “Magician. Quell your foolishness. See me,” I snap. I don’t need to put power into my voice to speak truths that cannot be ignored.

He freezes. His silence is as wide as his eyes for a moment. “Me. You’re me.”

“After a fashion. I am the wandering magician. You are something else entirely.”

“You will return me to my world. Or else.”

I sigh. “I thought we might talk first, you and I.”

“You have something of the fae about you. It is nothing to me.”

“Mmm.” I smile. Charlie vanishes; I sense Jay take her elsewhere. For all Jay’s amazing knack for oopses and accidents he has amazingly good instincts for when to run when he has to have them. “If you truly believed that, I would be dead and the truth pulled from my corpse.”

“I am no monster.”

“Ah. But close, I imagine. You met an Outsider once. A vampire boy. Tell me about that.” I don’t make the words a question, but I’m far more subtle than he has ever been and he doesn’t notice the slight push of power.

“It tried to bind me. I forced it back Outside. It was dealt with by other Outsiders and destroyed. Like you.” He gestures, then. It isn’t magic, what he has become. Death hurls through the air, and I bind it. The power of the Nameless unmakes it.

I bind it again, reaching. The Nameless is dangerous, but careless with that. Too long without failure. Too long being a Power that nothing can oppose does things to the ego. Even if you wish it otherwise, power can’t help but corrupt. Every use of power corrupts: the trick is finding other things to lessen that. And the further problem is that, if no one can defeat you, you never understand how to use defeat in order to win.

Even Jay knows that.

I reach, drawing power from Jay. He could do anything, if he really wants to. Calling a Nameless version of me into this place is possibly simply because Jay had no idea it wasn’t. He does bindings on levels so deep that nothing else exists on them. The Nameless is very powerful. He is very good at killing. But he isn’t me, and I use the power from Jay and bind his energies between moments.

The Nameless lets out a small, wordless sound. Draws from death. Hundreds of dead magicians at his hand. An untold number of fae. Magic harvested and drained from a universe of worlds. A wandering magician who is clever can become absurdly powerful if they’re foolish. Or hungry. His hunger rises up, the sheer weight of his power something far beyond me. But not beyond Jay’s binding.

“You aren’t doing this. You can’t do this.”

“Oh, the power isn’t mine. But the shaping of it is.” I reach, and touch his mind. He turned the fae into a wall to protect the universe from the Outside. Killed every magician in his world, every one he could find. Touched every world, because a wandering magician draws power from where they go. The only reason he didn’t draw from this world is that he was too arrogant to believe he could be summoned. The fae summoned him, and broke him. And he murdered them all. Not to protect the universe. But to prove himself.

“What happens when you die?”

“The universe will have no magicians. It won’t need them any longer. I have done what the fae had no courage to do,” Nameless says. “And you are foolish to think death has dominion over me.”

“You are still human, for all you’ve done. You’ve been too afraid to be more than that. Too afraid to even be human, in the end. Because being human is about connection. About belonging. About understanding.” I step away. “Only there is no point in trying to explain this. I will just tell you this, Nameless: you murdered an eight year old Outsider. A confused, alone creature needing a friend. I did not.

“The child you murdered has a mother. Who will one day seek you out. And if you think that everything you have done can stop her, ponder what her child can do. Ponder her anger. Learn, for once.” And I banish him back to his own dimension, just as easily as I would an Outsider back Outside the universe.

“Jay.”

Jay appears behind me. Hiding in my shadow, because it’s Jay.

I turn and look at him, raise an eyebrow.

Words spill out: “I was making another fever because Muffin needs one and I thought I could make another Honcho only it was hard to find one and everything went funny and it wasn’t you and he was scary so I hid under the bed, and then hid with Charlie and I’m really sorry like a Jay!”

“I know. And it’s okay.” I reach over, ruffle his hair gently.

“It is?” he asks in a small voice.

“He won’t come back. And I think he learned a lesson.”

“About jaysome?” Jay asks.

“No. I don’t think he would ever understand jaysome. But he might understand some other things. Now get Charlie: we’re going to see a movie and think about other things. Deal?”

Jay grins, and vanishes to get Charlie. It takes a couple of seconds, and in that time I manage to get my fingers to stop shaking. It may be a good thing to see what you could have become, but I’d rather it had never happened at all.