Chapter 286: Chapter 286

“And the reader chose me!” I said, with a dramatic pause.

Silence.

“The… reader?” said the Simurgh, breaking its silence in its singsong voice.

“Yes!” I said out loud and confidently. “The reader!”

“Caspian…” said the man formerly known as Madness. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I am okay,” I said, quickly. “It was you who was in the dark. So close yet so far. You came all the way to the penultimate step of Annihilation, but because you didn’t realize the true nature of this world, the true insignificance of this bird in front of us, you were stuck inside it. Even if you had taken the Book of Annihilation, you would never have been able to leave this world!”

The man formerly known as Madness stared at me resolutely. He met my gaze and held it for a long time, unblinking, before finally opening his mouth, “What did you find out, Caspian? What did you learn about this world that made you go so insane you stole the domain of Madness from me in an instant. I didn’t even feel a pull. I didn’t get to engage in the tug of war that happens when an Immortal pulls against another’s domain. You simply took it. How, Caspian? How could you descend to such pure, unadulterated Madness?”

I began to laugh. It was a familiar laugh except it was wilder, warmer, and coming from my mouth. “This is not insanity. I have merely recognized reality. A reality that you shun. A truth that is beyond your reach.”

“You sound insane to me,” said the man formerly known as Madness.

“Einstein would sound insane to Anaximander,” I said, knowing my friend from the same world would understand this reference. Even if he did not, I believed that he would, and I would declare that he did and so it would be. “Did you never reflect upon the structure of this world? When Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage, he must have been on to something. He knew the way we put on an act with one another, performing a play in our daily lives. But look at this world. It isn’t a play. Our life here isn’t mundane, it isn’t boring, it isn’t normal! It seems like an epic tale, no less than Gilgamesh or the Song of Roland.”

“Are you saying you think this world is a story? A sort of novel or an epic poem?” said the man formerly known as Madness, his eyes widening. “You know how ludicrous that sounds, right?”

“Yes, I know. It sounds exactly like a fantasy version of Don Quixote! All that is left is for me to jump onto a pathetic pack animal and try to joust a windmill,” I said, still smiling. “But I know that I am not deluded. I know this world is a story.”

“How?” he asked.

“Because I can feel their gaze,” I said, softly. “I can feel their eyes on my words. I can sense their discomfort at being referred to directly. They think things are going off the deep end. They are wondering what is going on and why they should care and that is the best affirmation I could have asked for.”

“You’re imagining things!” he shouted.

“No I am not!” I shouted back. “If you will not take my word for it, let me reason with you. Tell me, and this time I will allow the Simurgh to speak, what is the foundation of magic in this world?”

The Simurgh blinked. Words came out of its mouth, “Knowledge and Wisdom.”

“What have you done to the Simurgh?” asked the man formerly known as Madness.

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“Still have some residual feelings for your pathetic beloved?” I chuckled. “I did not do anything to the birds. Listen to what they said though. Knowledge and wisdom. The foundation for magic is knowledge and wisdom.”

The two of them looked at me with a confused and careful expression.

“You thought this was because the domains that you used contained the sum total of all knowledge about a topic,” I said. “Knowledge was the domain itself and Wisdom was your ability to use that domain to your advantage. That was how you decided to frame your brand of magic.

“But when you told me about Knowledge and Wisdom, I decided they had nothing to do with the Knowledge and Wisdom you would bestow on me through your domains. Instead, I questioned the origin and fundamentals of knowledge and wisdom themselves! I dug deeper! And I found a kind of magic that let me cast whatever spell I could imagine, as long as it followed the principles of knowledge and I had enough energy to cast them.

“Eventually, I realized that was limiting. I realized that this system was weak and inefficient, so I came up with a kind of magic that required ‘justified true belief’ in order to collect what I thought was true knowledge. I would run experiments and use them to justify a carefully reasoned belief, which would then become a spell through wisdom. It worked wonders and I had made a system of magic that was incredibly efficient and powerful!

“That wasn’t enough! I went further once I realized that I did not need to justify a belief in this world if I had already justified it in my old world. It was just one more step from there to conclude that any bit of knowledge that had been put through a rigorous academic process was enough to be used in my new magic system. I was able to use all sorts of spells that I could never have dreamed of before and the only real limit on my power was the amount of energy that I could use. This was my new magic system, and it brought the Immortals to their first ever defeat at the hands of a mortal. Wasn’t that amazing?

“But you have realized it, haven’t you, man who was formerly known as Madness. Yes that is a mouthful and no if you want a better name you should come up with it yourself. You should think about that after you panic about what you have learned about the nature of magic in this world.

“When I say Knowledge, whose knowledge am I talking about? When I say Wisdom, whose wisdom is at play? Think about it. The Immortals were using domains that contained all knowledge in this universe. They were able to do whatever they wanted within the domain they controlled.

“Except of course, that this wasn’t true! I was using knowledge you had no access to. Knowledge that came from another world and which was justified in the eyes of this world even though it had never been verified here! It was as if the world did not possess this knowledge, and yet it acknowledged that this knowledge existed.

“But if it didn’t exist in this world itself, then where did it exist? And how did this world know that it existed? I racked my brains about this during the process of Annihilation. I could only come up with one answer, an answer that was verified when I jumped onto the sixth step and felt their gaze.

“If a tree falls in a forest but there was nobody to observe it, did it really fall? There are all sorts of variations of this question, but the point I am trying to make is that a real, sentient observer is a powerful thing. It justifies experience and understanding, or wisdom and knowledge.

“No matter what you did, it wouldn’t matter because my Beloved wasn’t watching you. The events might occur, you might live your miserable existence, but you could not change Knowledge or Wisdom itself. For you, it was static. Perhaps it would not have been so if you had not immediately shed your outsider status and absorbed the stale knowledge of this world.

“You confined yourself to only what the Simurgh knew. I have liberated myself with all the knowledge at the fingertips of my Beloved. Even if they do not know something, they can easily find out. Or they can believe me. Yes, they can believe me. They can brush past an unverified name, a reference that sounds official but may just have been a word conjured up out of thin air. It doesn’t matter.

“My Beloved controls this world and I control what my Beloved believes, everything that they know, I narrate the story, my dear friends!” I pointed down at them with a bent finger and a devilish grin. “And now I narrate that you find this incredulous and you decide to band together with the former Evil Eye as it shoots out of the ground behind me.

“The three of you will try to fight me and you will lose. You will lose very badly. And then I will strip you of all of your domains and I will disperse them to this universe, freeing the potential of knowledge and wisdom and letting the sentient beings of this world prosper without your help.

“Then I will say goodbye to my friends one last time, grab the man who was formerly known as Madness, and I will complete the seventh step of Annihilation, which will finally free me of this world.”