Bob snorted. “Is there a nobler cause? He was going to kill me. Of course I did everything I could to prevent it! All those other things were just positive externalities… which I’d always planned from the start,” he added quickly at the Black Reach’s cutting look. “I’m sure a better dragon would have put the world peace stuff first, but as I keep telling you, Julius, I’m not a better dragon. You’re the nice one, which is why you—not me—had to be the lynchpin. No one else would do, because no one else would be foolish enough to spare Bethesda, or to form a council when he could have taken the Heartstriker clan for himself. No one else in our family would have worked with Katya instead of bringing her in, or won the trust of a human mage dedicated enough to become the First Merlin.”
He reached out to pinch Julius’s cheeks. “That was all you, you darling boy, which is why I never told you to be anything but yourself. You were already the Nice Dragon I needed you to be. The only problem was you were too nice to use your power. If I hadn’t been constantly applying pressure, you would’ve happily run a magical pest control company in the DFZ until Algonquin’s purge caught you. But I knew you had the potential to be a lever large enough to move the world. Once I’d tested your conviction to be sure you wouldn’t break, I got you into position and used you exactly as you needed to be used, and just look how marvelously it all turned out!” He hugged Julius again, almost crushing his ribs. “I am a genius!”
“So much for the epitome of humility,” Chelsie said, reaching down to save Julius from Bob’s stranglehold.
“I’m the epitome of many things,” the seer replied, releasing Julius reluctantly. “So,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “What do we do now?”
Everyone gaped at him.
“You mean you don’t know?” Julius cried.
Bob shrugged. “I am unquestionably brilliant, but no seer can see past their own death. All my visions of the future ended thirty seconds ago.”
“What about your plan to keep us alive?” Svena demanded. “You owe me my survival at least after I so benevolently spared you.”
Amelia snorted at her. “Benevolent my tail. You couldn’t bring yourself to kill Julius any more than the rest of us.”
“For your information, I was going to go around him,” Svena snapped back. “I am perfectly capable of stabbing Brohomir full of ice without putting a scratch on Julius Heartstriker. However, Katya’s words make me consider the larger picture, and I decided killing your cut-rate seer was no longer worth my time.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself,” Amelia said, shaking her head at Svena before turning back to Bob. “But seriously, what are we going to do? I don’t like the sound of a single future with no free will, but I’ll take it if that’s the only choice. I didn’t fight my way out of death just to get killed again the very next day.”
“My original plan is still an option,” Bob said, lips curling into a smile. “But it might no longer be the only option.”
“What do you mean?” Marci asked, glancing up at the Leviathan, who looked exactly the same. “What changed?”
Brohomir turned to grin at the Black Reach. “He did. By making a decision he never would have made before I intervened, the Black Reach kicked off a cascade of shiny new futures. There are so many possibilities in front of us now, I don’t even know where to start, so unless you want me to sit here for a few days while I follow each new path to its conclusion, you’d do better to ask him.” He nodded at Dragon Sees Eternity. “He’s the seer supercomputer.”
That was the best thing Bob had said yet, but when Julius turned hopefully to the Black Reach, the construct’s face was dour.
“My decision to spare Brohomir has indeed created a host of new possibilities,” he said. “Unfortunately, none of them improve our situation. We are still under siege by a Nameless End, a power that acts on a planar level. It’s not something we can simply defeat.”
“But do you have a plan?” Svena said, butting her way forward. “I agree that Brohomir’s idea to lock us all in a static future was unacceptable, but it’s the height of foolishness to shoot down a strategy unless you have an alternative.”
“He has to have something,” Amelia agreed, moving to stand beside her best frenemy. “He’s the guardian of the future, and there’s not much future to guard if we’re all dead.”
Both dragon mages glared at the construct, but where any sensible creature would have cringed before their combined fury, the Black Reach merely looked annoyed. “I have not been idle,” he said irritably. “I saw this coming as Brohomir did and prepared accordingly, but though I am and always shall be the better seer, even I can’t work miracles. Brohomir’s plan was desperate for good reason. There are no good options in this scenario, and while I was not so insane as to court a death of planes”—he shot the pigeon on Bob’s shoulder a nasty look—“I’m not certain you’ll like my solution any better.”
“I knew you had a plan!” Bob blurted out. When everyone looked at him, he shrugged. “I knew he had a plan. What kind of guardian of the future doesn’t plan for the future?”
“If you knew the Black Reach was planning something, why didn’t you go with that instead of messing with our lives?” Marci asked irritably.
“Because I didn’t know what his plan was,” Bob said. “I’m supposed to be dead right now, remember? And I don’t see how you have room to complain. You came out of my plans very well, Miss One-in-a-Million-Chance-Merlin.”
Marci put her hands up in surrender at that one, and the Black Reach sighed. “I would encourage you not to get your hopes up too high. As I said, I did make arrangements for this inevitability, but even I wouldn’t call them salvation.”
“Our options right now are death by Leviathan or spending eternity trapped on Bob’s string,” Chelsie said with a shrug. “What could be worse than that?”
Instead of answering the question, the construct reached into the pocket of his silk jacket and pulled out a golden orb the size of a softball. A very familiar golden orb filled with flecks of golden foil that glittered like tinsel in the glow of the broken porch light.
“Hey!” Marci cried angrily. “That’s my Kosmolabe!”
“A powerful and useful instrument,” the Black Reach agreed, rolling the delicate ball between his fingers until the spellworked gold foil that covered the orb’s interior fluttered like leaves in the wind. “I’ve been angling for this one in particular since I saw Estella bringing it into her plans a decade ago. I would have taken possession of it sooner, but the mage who was most likely to become the First Merlin was quite attached to it. The emotional impact of removing it would have sent inconvenient ripples through a very delicate phase of my plans, so I decided to wait until a more appropriate opportunity presented itself.”
“You mean until you could steal it,” Julius said, unexpectedly angry. “I knew you took Marci’s bag! Did you think about the emotional impact that would have on me?”
“Why did you even want it?” Chelsie asked at the same time.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Amelia growled, crossing her arms over her chest. “Why does anyone ever want a Kosmolabe?” She narrowed her eyes at the construct. “He’s going to run.”