“Potential,” the dragon interrupted with a grin. “Seers draw their power from time, and time is infinite. Unfortunately, that’s a very difficult sort of power to leverage since, as your highly perceptive mortal pointed out earlier, time marches at a fixed rate. No matter how far you can see down the line of time, you can’t go out and gather it up, because it hasn’t happened yet.But, until a future event actually does or does not take place, there is always thepotentialfor it to occur, and that potential has a certain amount of magical weight when you’re talking about two seers fighting over a future.”
“You mean, if two seers are fighting over two possible futures, the one who has the timeline with the highest potential will win?” Marci asked.
“Precisely,” the dragon said, nodding happily. “But—and here’s the trick—that seer with the winning timeline doesn’t actually have to cash all that potentialon that specific future. Strictly speaking, when it comes to seer magic, the magical weight of any given future is interchangeable. It can be applied anywhere, anywhen.And if you gather enough of it together and invest all of it in one specific chain of events, then you can create a futuresopotentially likely that nothing—not other seers, not even the decisions of those involved—can keep it from coming true.”
The dragon finished with a proud flourish, but Julius was utterly lost. “I don’t get it.”
“I think it’s like a magical version of potential energy,” Marci said, tapping her fingers on her chin. “Like, if you’re a seer, and your powers are entirely based around seeing and manipulating the future, then any event thatcouldhappen carries a magical weight based on its likelihood. Normally, seers increase the potential of a specific future by going around and influencing events in the present, but this one seer found a way to cheat. Rather than trying to influence what will happen by meddling in what’s going on right now, he just looked into his own future, grabbed everything that was likely to happen, and then used the massive weight of all those potential events to reinforce the one timeline that he actually wanted until no one else could move it.”
“Brava,” the dragon said, eyes gleaming. “Youarea clever mortal, aren’t you?”
Marci preened under the dragon’s praise, but Julius’s mind was whirling. “I think I get it,” he said. “But if future events have magical weight based on their potential, and you use that magic to force the futureyouwant over all the others, what happens to that potential? It seems to me that, if you’re burning something for power, it’s going to get used up.”
Dragon Sees the Beginning sighed. “And thus we come to how things went wrong,” he said darkly. “You are exactly right, young Heartstriker. At its most basic level, what our rogue seer discovered was a way of trading the vast potential of multiple possible futures for one specific chain of events. As you might imagine, it takes an absolutely enormous amount of potential futures to force even a minor guaranteed happening. And the more resistance you need to overcome—either from other seers fighting back or because the timeline you’re trying to force was already extremely unlikely—the more power, which is to say the morefuture, you need to expend to push it through.”
“So it’s a terribly inefficient exchange,” Marci said. “You have to slash and burn a ton of the future to get even a minor guaranteed outcome.”
“Precisely,” the dragon said. “At the time, of course, no one saw a problem with that. After all, there’s only ever one actual timeline that comes to pass. That means all other potential futures are destined to be wasted by definition, so why not use them? Also, time is infinite. Who cares if the exchange rate is inefficient when there’s literally no end to the power you’re exchanging?”
“So how did it go wrong, then?” Julius asked. “I’m assuming all the seers started doing this?”
Dragon Sees the Beginning nodded. “Every single one. It was a revolution. Why scrabble around influencing events in the present when you could just buy an outcome with a potential future you weren’t even using? Within a year, every significant event—births, deaths, wars, even the outcomes of races—was determined by chains of events bought in advance by seers and paid for with the future. When two clans clashed, victory no longer belonged to the cleverest or most cunning, but to the seer who was willing to pay the most. This went on for centuries, and then, without warning, the future began to run out.”
“Run out?” Marci said. “How is that possible? You just said time is infinite.”
“Timeis infinite,” the dragon replied. “But a seer’s reach is not.” He looked back to Julius. “In their desire to win, your ancestors recklessly burned all of the future they could see until, eventually, there was no immediate future left. Every potential outcome, every possible future where dragons existed that the seers could reach had been grabbed and leveraged until there was nothing left, and when that happened, our world ended.”
“Ended,” Julius repeated. “You mean, time just stopped? Just like that?”
“Just. Like. That,” the dragon growled. “By the time the seers realized what was happening, we had less than an hour left to evacuate. The dragons you know are the descendants of those who escaped, the ones smart enough to run. The rest—the ones who ignored the warnings or who refused to leave their lands and hoards—simply ceased to exist, along with their treasures.” Dragon Sees the Beginning turned to gaze up at the blood-red moon. “Of all the futures of our world, only one second remains. As guardian of the past, I stayed behind to stretch out that moment as long as I could. That is the time I exist in when no one else is here, the reason I, too, am not sucked into the void beyond worlds. Everything else—the desert, the sky, the future represented in these chains—you brought in with you, a construct of a lost home taken from your racial memory. When you leave, it will vanish again, and I will return to the frozen stillness where nothing exists but memories. The last figment of our once great home.”
The great dragon said this with a sadness Julius felt to his bones. Having been born on Earth, he’d never given much thought to where his ancestors had lived before that. Now, though, despite only seeing a shadow of a fragment pulled from memories he’d never known he had, Julius felt the loss of their home like an ache. But it was thewaste, the greedy, reckless gall of what had been done here, that made him shake with rage. “I never knew,” he said, clenching his fists as he stared up at the giant dragon who wasn’t a dragon at all. “How did I not know this!?”
“Because dragons are proud,” the guardian said. “They would rather look to the conquest of a new land than remember how they destroyed the old.”
“That’s not pride,” Julius spat. “That’s arrogance.”
“That’s dragon nature.”
Dragon Sees the Beginning chuckled as he said this, but Julius didn’t think it was funny at all. They’d had a home, a place with no spirits trying to kill them where they could live without displacing anyone else, and they’d burned it to the ground. The story of how his ancestors had destroyed their own future trying to one-up each other was the most entitled, draconic,stupidthing Julius had ever heard, and given the way most dragons still acted, he could absolutely see it happening again. Itwashappening again. Right now, Estella had traded who-knew-what to chain his clan to a future of her choosing just so she could beat Bob, and the whole thing was so petty and wasteful and stupid, it made him feel ill. It also gave him an idea.
“You remember everything that’s ever happened here, right?”
Dragon Sees the Beginning nodded. “All history is my domain.”
“So do you remember a seer named Estella the Northern Star who came here last month?”
The dragon’s expression darkened. “I do, but I would not suggest following her example, young Heartstriker.”
“I have no intention to,” Julius promised. “But is there any way you can tell me what future she bought?”
The dragon lowered its head with a thoughtful growl. “No,” it said at last. “As my name would imply, I look backwards, not forwards. But Icantell you that, whatever timeline she bought, she traded all of her potential futures to do so.”
“All?” Julius said, horrified. “How could she tradeallher futures? Wouldn’t that mean she would die at the end?”
“It does,” the dragon said. “Though I don’t think she considered that an issue.”
“How isdyingnot an issue?” Marci asked.
