"There has to be a point to all this."

"There has to be a point to all this."

"When we got our books, it was like discovering the cheat codes for the universe. The least we could do was heal wounds and move objects, call and dismiss fire, make it rain or shine. We were going to fix the world. God and Allah and Buddah and Vishnu were going to look at how we used our gift and nod, saying "well done!", and we would prove to be better..."

"...better than this."

"There were five of us, then. Richard and Darryl got in a fight that got Washington involved. Kelly chose Landon over me, and the bastard left her to die in a demiplane when the Templars got tired of him dropping meteors on whoever or whatever he felt was a threat to his 'new Golden Age'."

"He tried to go back to when he was a child. Tried to reverse time so he could fix things, give himself a head start on magic. I don't understand exactly what happened, but he got the incantations and calculations wrong. I found him weeping in a smoldering crater where his house used to be."

"Then he... blipped out of existence. Gone. Not just dead. Some sort of temporal paradox. My days since have not been pleasant. Sometimes Kelly comes over to my empty house, wants to come in, disappears when she walks across the threshold. Sometimes she's already in my bedroom. I can't touch her. She won't look at me. She just stares at a corner."

"One time she was crying."

"I had to erase my parents memories of me. That was my deal with the Templars. To my mother and father, I died when I was 4 months old due to a genetic defect."

"Kelly follows me. Sometimes she's... there enough to ask questions. Over and over. Sometimes she just says "help", and I want to help her... but..."

"Time travel is forbidden. Case in point, Landon. But I will get it right. I will."

"There has to be a point to all this."

"There doesn't have to be a point to all of this."

"Bad things happen. Little girls get run over by cars and die, newlywed couples have their houses catch on fire and they die, and five children try to make the world a better place with magic books and NO SORRY have two dead friends, one that never existed, and one that only exists sometimes. Oh, and an ENTIRE organization breathing down your neck and doing "I told you so"s when NO ONE told me a goddamn thing."

"No, there doesn't have to be a point. God is making popcorn, and our lives are so much channels he flips through, trying to find some brief amusement in eternity."

"Landon didn't get erased entirely. Some people remember things he did and said, events he was in, but they can't remember his name or what he looked like."

"One of the templars explained Kelly's condition as bi-planar temporal distortion- her time-line is split between here, which exists, and another place she was bound to by Landon, which doesn't exist anymore, because Landon doesn't exist, so reality forgets and remembers her."

"Could I save one person, God? Is it so much to ask that I salvage one good thing?"

"There has to be a point to all this."

"There has to be a way to fix this."

"We can't go back and undo what Landon did because it never happened, even though it did, so we can't undo Kelly's condition the normal way."

"The one glimmer of hope was that maybe, when one of many apocalypses or ends of the world occurred, one of the gods would right her because dealing with her glitching in and out of existence would be inconvenient for them."

"She was conscious and aware for a whole hour today. She knew what had happened. We hugged, and she begged me not to let go, and I was telling her I was going to fix this. They took her to get a blood sample, something to hold onto."

"She disappeared, and the vial her blood was in was empty. She came back for a minute, and it reappeared for a minute exactly."

"If we get Landon back, I'm killing him again."

"His plan was to bind her timeline to a demiplane, then alter events to make him an emperor of earth. Fucking megalomaniac."

"She thought she was going to prevent 9/11. World War 2. Lying sonofabitch."

"We were going to cure cancer. I found the cure. Templars won't let me, because there are other groups who are a lot less polite than them who will exterminate every last mage, because treatment is more profitable than curing."

"I got an email from Kelly's parents again. I promised if I ever saw her, I'd tell her to come home."

"Lying is okay in the Templar's book. People can't handle truth, they say. Honesty is a code among them and no one else."

"I will fix this. I did not learn to shift atoms and bend energy just to watch some idiot's folly damn me and everything I love."

Cool

"I found the point."

"All of this was a test."

"They offered me one chance to save her, to save Landon, to save Daryll and Richard, and all it would cost was that I never existed."

"I said yes. They went to convene, in one of their locked rooms that makes me itch if I get too close."

"They told me Metatron said I passed."

"All of it is gone. Landon and Kelly are together, but don't remember me or the books. Richard and Daryll settled their differences in a boxing ring at the gym. Mom and Dad had a daughter instead of me."

"One out of five, approximately, is fit to be a mage. One out of five is willing to die to make sure the rest survive. I am the 20%."

"We're testing another group soon. They want me on hand to be a confidant to the successes, if we have any."

"My old name doesn't matter. I was never born. Therefore I was never christened."

"I will call myself Foris. Latin for 'outsider'."

"And we will ever so slightly nudge the world until it is ready to accept the wonders and the responsibility."

"That's the point to all of this."

Hidden gem thread

>Tried to reverse time so he could fix things, give himself a head start on magic.

...paracausal powers over time and space, both of those ruled by horrifying things, things that prey on people seeking...

BE WARY FORIS

Nice.

What's this?

I like it

...

> Based writefaggotry.

This is a exercise for my novel.

Under rated thread

Based OP. Thank you god, today OP was not a faggot!

Just wanted to say, bretty gud op

OP here.

What is the price of learning magic?

Will you pay in mana? Or will you pay in friendships, discarded as a gulf between what your reality is and what your friends' reality is becomes wider and wider, until your rules don't bear any resemblance to theirs? Will you try to share your gift, and then have to destroy the monster you created, when they decide might makes right and take whatever they want?

Will you pay in reagents and time? Or will you pay in family, as your schemes and your plans fold in on themselves and opposition goes after the ones you love, with you assuring yourself with those six, sinister words that herald doom, "for the good of the world"?

Will you pay in simply keeping secrets, or will you pay in a childhood lost, dealing with things at 16 that would make grown men go mad and tear out their eyes? With that once vague God or Goddess in the sky now real and tangible and looking at you with suspicion, wondering if you will be the rare fleck of gold in muddy waters, or if you will be like so many others who tried to tear down all creation just to see if it could be done?

Will you have to pay in covering up a colleague and friend's suicide when he or she found out something they couldn't handle for the sake of the world seeing another sunrise?

Will it be you, kneeling before a group of stern and hardened templars, books burning before you, a rune-covered axe raised, your last words a hoarse and muted apology for your probing the forbidden arts because you, in youthful arrogance, thought you could handle it?

Will you die, one day, horror upon horror laid at your feet, thousands dead, friends damned or annihilated, simply no more, falling at the feet of your deity and saying, whimpering, "I have no excuse", awaiting damnation or annihilation... only to be told you have served them beyond all their expectations?

The Price is never the same. But you will pay it.

A man surges through history. Nothing breaks his marathon stride, not war nor poverty nor love's remorseless absence.
He will appear in the records of every turning point until he arrives at your door.
Run, Foris. Run.

I suppose I had that coming.

How powerful are your templars exactly? They better have some pretty potent bullshit to back them up when a few kids faffing about with some books managed to do all of that, and we're capable of so much more from what you're saying. It only takes *one* willing to give up or endure some of those things you listed, and if the only defense you've got to hide behind is that no one's been willing to betray their friends or push family members under the bus for greater and greater power, then everything's fucked.

Very.

Think dealing with some jackoff trying to assassinate/aid/replace Hitler every week as if it were a routine.

That's good. Having more to defend the world than just the pathetic hope that no one would be willing to watch as everything and everyone they love burns in their mad grab for ultimate power is pretty sensible.

Kudos on your writefaggotry and good luck on your novel.

Love the concept. If you can maintain that sense of mystery this will be great. Keep us posted OP. I'd like to read more.

learning to magic must be ridiculously hard

it's like learning to code, except you don't have the option of debugging programs. if you make a single mistake ever, that's it. you're either obliterated, erased, or driven insane.

Not that severe, with the lesser spells.

You can injure yourself, but healing magic fixes that right up. You just do learn to get the gestures and words right.

I have... roughly 172 pages of hard writefaggotry now. It's going good.

You did well user. Very well. Do you have a title so we can look this up when it becomes a hardcover book thing?

The Price

edit:

The Price: Awakening.

Ideally, the series will start from the moment the protag finds the books.

Don't expect world-ending catastrophes right off the bat. It will graduate from personal costs to greater costs to outsiders as the series progresses.

Whens it expected to be out? are you targeting a publisher yet? I need to know what to plug into my google calendar,

I'm proofreading and looking for beta readers before I harass a publisher.

A date user, I need a date! I will hunt this shit down because I desire good fiction with robust character development and coherent themes.

Just wanted to chime in and say this is really good. Looking forward to reading the finished version!

I appreciate (and am slightly frightened by) the enthusiastic response.

I'm still making sure the point I've cut off the first book at is good. Nothing would be a greater disrespect to anyone who wants to read my stuff than to throw something out there that looks like half-baked grimdark original character donut steel harry potter fanfiction.

Anyone who wants to beta-read my stuff, that I can use.

This is just an offshoot blurb of how things can go down in the world.

Foris' story will get told later in the series, just to show how doing more than dabbling in magic can turn your life upside down faster than a fight on a basketball court in West Philly.

It sounds like OP doesn't even have an agent yet, let alone a publisher, so you're almost certainly looking at a multi-year timescale before this gets to a printing press. Also, if OP hasn't even spoken to a publisher yet, they can't possibly have a date when this will be purchasable.

Ok. Fine. I'll throw down for 2019, with another reminder for 2020 and a pic of this. I can respect your wanting to have a good finished product. I work in film, QC haunts my sleep.

Godspeed user.

Thank you all for critiquing this little outburst of wfing. I'll be back with details as this project progresses.

I'd buy a novel of this.

Entering this thread, I was hoping the book was already out.

11/10 Would buy in hardcover.

...

This pleases me.