Strange Optimism

In the light of the morning sun, I snapped the control wand in half, then I broke it again. I ground between my palms into dust and threw it into the open flame of my campfire. I braced myself for some kind of recoil or other drawback, but nothing happened. I still lived, and I was not in horrific, terrible pain.

Missol had been telling the truth. Then again, I don’t recall her ever outright lying to me. Unlike Javier or Adelbardo, she only ever seemed upfront to me. But that was in the past, and hopefully, I really would never see them again.

I did still have worries about what social repercussions I’d have to deal with by having a slave mark. That was something I’d need to plan for.

My greatest surprise was that my half-baked plan worked. As Javier had admitted that his powers had the capacity to be wrong, and the implication that he didn’t see just one future, but a possible future, implied to me that it was prescience. He wasn’t being shown the future from a higher power, rather, he was taking all the information he was exposed to and was simulating a possible future.

The likelihood of that future was the strongest vision, but even so, he seemed to be capable of seeing many. But that also meant that he had a blindspot: He couldn’t predict that which he didn’t know about. By his absence in the audience chamber, I guessed he did not know about Taresa, and that manifested by Missol’s confirmation that Javier hadn’t said a word about that.

That meant that I could make up a false, probable future that only included the variables he knew, and not an outside context variable, like a stranger from outside the Monastery. If everyone is focused on stopping me, and not them, they would scramble in panic to deal with this new, unexpected problem. It worked better than expected, and I imagine that now that he knows about this weakness, Javier will do what he can to prevent this from happening again. A halfbaked plan like this might not work again.

But the greatest surprise was of my future that he had never seen, never even been hinted to at all: The admission that I was from another world. More curiously, was the fact that none of his visions of the future changed to adapt to this new information. Could it be that there is a higher power interfering with him, preventing him from seeing what it doesn’t want to see? Or that secret is so outside of his field of understanding that he cannot formulate a mental model? Maybe it is simply that he cannot properly model a modern earthling mind, who has a completely different system of thought and ethics from the people here. Hopefully we never meet again, so that these remain questions that are never answered.

I gazed out into the distance, and saw that the Castillo de Trazmos was well into the distance, far beyond the horizon. Where I stood, the mountains sloped into plains and marshlands, and a city could be seen in the distance.

Finally free, my heart was filled with a strange optimism I hadn’t had since I was a child, so long ago.

We’ll see if the world truly was as terrible as the Stone Solari said it was.

And if they were right all along, I'd still kill them anyway.