Fate began by moving things around on the table. Her cup and the plate of biscuits were placed to one side, and Yenna helped in kind by clearing her cup off to the side as well. Then, Fate placed the black book in the middle between them and opened the book to a shockingly empty page. The very thought of an empty page in the midst of an infinite book with infinite events gave the witch a sharp sense of existential dread, but Fate moved on too quickly for her to really ponder the implications.

“First and foremost, the worst possible outcome of your decisions here.”

The kesh reached over and tapped the blank page with her fingertip.

“I don’t understand what this represents.” Yenna attempted to decipher some meaning from the blank page, but there wasn’t so much as a single mark. “Is there some risk of failure to this process?”

“Not quite.” Fate gave a sigh. “Yes, but also no. Fate, as an institution more than as myself, exists for a variety of reasons beyond the role of guiding reality away from oblivion. I smooth over time paradoxes and ease the strain against the cosmic machinery of physical laws. I have no ability to change the way the world works, and especially cannot do so while that machine is in motion—all I can do is act as arbiter for what should happen when unpredictable edge cases occur, nudging them one way or another.”

“But if you have access to knowledge of all future events, have you not already prepared for every eventuality?”

Fate laughed. It was a surprisingly ridiculous noise for the gravity of the situation—even her laugh was fairly plain, an inelegant bark and snort that could have belonged to anyone.

“Yes, of course! But, if I am gone, and reality stops following my expectations, then what happens? Come on, Yenna, you’re smarter than this.”

Yenna’s cheeks burned with embarrassment at the prodding. How can she have prepared for all future eventualities when the future diverges from the script? “Yes, I think I understand. Then, if this becomes a possibility, is there a way for us to… stop it? To mitigate this risk?”

“No, not really.” Fate gave an apologetic half-smile, too sorry to be able to truly force an appearance of levity. “As a conscious force, I can prevent actions that would lead to the destruction of your reality. Without it, the only thing stopping sentient beings from wiping themselves out entirely is their own sense of self-preservation and responsibility to one another.”

A cold shiver ran down Yenna’s spine at that thought. Even in the towers of Aulpre’s most prestigious universities, even amongst the smartest, kindest master mages she knew, Yenna could easily imagine how many times Fate had interceded on reality’s behalf—how many experiments could have flattened Sumadre, disintegrated all living things, or ended all life in myriad other ways. Even the most well-intentioned of master mages could perform acts of great evil in ignorance or acceptance as cost. Was Yenna willing to allow that kind of reality? For all the good masters in Aulpre there were countless others with villainous intent—omnicidal or nihilistic maniacs that may well take this as an opportunity to finally carry out their schemes.

“In this regard, I am a safety net. It’s what I was always meant to be, really.” Fate ran her hands across the blank page, marking the thin paper with moisture from tears she had wiped away earlier. “But, I think the possibility of stumbling is well worth it. Free will—true freedom of action—that’s worth it. To be able to say that your choices were no mere flourishes in the middle of someone else’s story, but that they were wholly your own? My only regret will be that I won’t be around to be surprised by the ingenuity of mortals released from the confines of my control.”

Yenna resisted the urge to take Fate’s hand, to clasp it and tell her everything would be alright—mentally, she was trying to work herself up to performing that dreadful act, and feeling warm skin in her hand and offering comfort to someone she planned to kill only served to make it all that much harder.

“This is not all though, is it?” The witch looked up and met Fate’s eye. “You said ‘first and foremost,’ so, what else am I giving up?”

Fate nodded. “Yes, well. This blank page is the greatest risk of leaving the world without a guiding hand of Fate. But there is another option you could take here, one that circumvents this risk and rids the world of me in the same stroke.”

“Another option? But you said–”

“I said there was no third option. You have not fully considered what the second option entails. Look, over there.”

With a sweeping gesture, Fate directed Yenna’s attention to the centre of the platform—the place where the pillar of books had been. There was nothing there now, not even the impression that something had once stood there. Yenna furrowed her brow and looked back, confused.

“I’m not exactly sure what you did,” Fate explained slowly, “But if I had to guess, you completed the ritual. You centred it on yourself, denied the Ledger the chance to become Fate. Which means…”

“That… I’m Fate?” Yenna opened her eyes wide. Fate quickly shook her head.

“Not quite, no. However, it means that only one of us can walk away from this table—and in both circumstances, it is you who does so. How you walk away is the option here. Either you kill me, granting every living being the option to exercise agency in their life, or… you become me. You take my place, my powers and knowledge, but do not inherit my restrictions or my responsibilities.”

“I would… become a god.”

“No, Yenna. You would become everything.” Fate balled her fists up to stop her hands from quivering. “Do you see why the Ledger wanted this so badly? I am currently powerless to stop you from doing this—if it succeeded in its ritual, if you hadn’t destroyed every single moment where it could have possibly won, it would have instantly changed the world into its image. Its world of perfect good. I was made with my restrictions for a reason—because I too, if told to make the world good, would have done the exact same thing.”

Fate’s tears began to flow freely once more, her shoulders shuddering as she suppressed a sob. “It’s the only logical end goal! If I can reshape the world, and I want it to be a world where everything is good, I would make that shining, golden world of everlasting good—that world where nothing bad ever happens, because nothing happens! It would be as good as death, and it is exactly why I was restricted from arriving at a stagnant reality.”

“But, if I was Fate, could I simply not do that?” Yenna ran her hand across her face, clutched at her chin—this was all becoming quite overwhelming. “I could stop all of the big, evil acts, all the worst of it, and then let the rest happen.”

“Then, at what point would you stop?” Fate’s hand shot out and grabbed one of Yenna’s, holding it almost painfully tight—she wasn’t strong, but her grip was insistent. “Once you have prevented the atrocities of annihilation, cleaned away things like famine or war, what then? You prevent murders, and all the horrible, violent crimes that you and yours consider abhorrent. Then what’s left? A new ‘worst’ thing that you must shave away, and another and another, until the very act of living, the very violence of existence itself must be excised until you arrive at the final conclusion—the perfect, still world.”

“Could I not set myself limits–”

“No, Yenna! That is the point I am making!” Fate was nearly screaming, her voice hysterical. She stopped and wept for a moment before bringing herself back with a shuddering sigh. “Yenna, there is an old phrase. It comes from elsewhere¹, outside your scope. It goes, could a god create a boulder even she couldn’t lift? It’s a paradox—an omnipotent being can do anything, but could they do something that would prevent them from doing another action? Unfortunately, I know that the answer is no. You cannot limit yourself. You would have all of eternity to consider your actions, and all of eternity to second-guess them. You could never stop yourself, do you understand? It always goes that way.”

A silence fell between the two of them for a time as Fate wiped her face clean and collected herself. She blew her nose on a handkerchief while Yenna sipped at her rapidly cooling kaffe. The witch did her best to avoid it, but a creeping sense of empty dread hollowed her out.

“What’s to stop me from… changing the world, to make it how I want, and then ridding myself of the role of Fate after all? Of destroying the very concept, as you are now.”

Fate looked up at Yenna, and for once held an expression of surprise.

“It is possible. You could do that. Yet, therein lies the same risk—that once you have shaved off the edges, you discover smaller, finer edges, and continue until the logic fizzles out into a sterile, empty world. Or perhaps…?”

Both of them realised it at the same time.

“You could change those things.” Yenna gasped.

“One final act. But what?”

“I… would remove the damage caused by the Ledger.”

Fate looked up at Yenna, her mouth open. She began to speak, clenched her teeth and looked away. “... I’m so sorry. I can’t.”

“What…? Why?”

“Do you understand how long the Ledger has existed for? It is old, so very old, and it has been preparing for this moment for an extremely long time. To undo even some of its most recent actions would push us into a time paradox—an event where you, Yenna, are not sitting here to ask me to do this. I physically cannot do this. I already interfered enough to reach this moment.”

“You… interfered? How so? …Wait.” 

A dreadful feeling tugged at the witch’s thoughts. A feeling she had been pondering for so long. There was one event in Yenna’s life that didn’t make sense to her—something that seemed so out of character that she could not possibly have made that decision on her own. Was this what Fate meant?

“Yenna–”

“No, I need to know. Did you make me go with the expedition group?”

The witch stared hard at Fate. It would be so easy for her to just nod, to say, yes, it was a necessary contrivance, but it would still hurt—to know that the biggest decision of her life was made for her. Yet, it would make so much sense.

“Yenna. You can answer this question for yourself. Trace back your journey to that moment, and see the truth of it.”

Invitingly open, the black book, the record of all that could have been and could yet be, awaited Yenna’s hand. The witch gulped, and turned the pages back—back to the start of her journey.

—

All travels start at the home, the place most familiar and comfortable to the traveller-to-be. Yenna’s tale began in her hometown of Ulumaya, the sleepy little community that only earned its place on the map by virtue of its magic school. The school year had ended, Yenna had just said farewell to her students, and yet they had one more gift for her—a reason to step outside of her comfort zone, to wade into the crowds and see the new excitement in town. To meet the people of the expedition.

During Yenna’s adventures, she had wondered—if things had gone differently, would Sanri and Myell have gone with the expedition instead? Her students, the ones who had encouraged her to go, the ones who had brought together the class to see Yenna off, cheerful Sanri and thoughtful Myell, were they not better suited? Adventuring was a young kesh’s game, Yenna had always thought—it seemed that it would have been ideal for Yenna to play the role of the mentor, equipping her young charges with all they needed to take on the world.

Yet, here in a space where Yenna could check, the mage found no evidence of that. In all the metaphysically ‘near’ timelines, it had always been Yenna who had left. In some of them she had one or both of the pair join her for a time, occasionally even another student altogether—yet, they didn’t last long. Where events converged around the finding of the black book, incidents occurred that led to them leaving the expedition—turning tail for Ulumaya, fleeing into the night or worse. In one especially heart-breaking set of alternatives to the tale, one of Sanri or Myell found the black book first, and fought so bitterly over possession of the artefact that it irrevocably ruined their friendship or even brought them to blows.

Reading through these retellings brought an interesting observation to Yenna’s mind. While later parts of the story refused to acknowledge Yenna’s presence, earlier parts did it with ease. There was a kind of trailing-off effect, as the individual paths mentioned her less or arbitrarily stopped altogether—attributing acts that Yenna remembered performing to others, or not mentioning them at all. It brought to mind Fate’s talk about ‘flourishes’, where the end result of a particular moment was all the same regardless of Yenna’s intervention. It was difficult for Yenna to wrap her head around it—her actions had absolutely changed the way events had played out, yet there were glaring gaps in the descriptions in the black book that omitted her parts.

Yenna looked up, and asked Fate about it.

“It is difficult for me to explain, precisely because those gaps are there,” Fate sighed, giving a slight shrug. “I would suppose that, having removed yourself from my design, any action you took with a greater impact would necessarily have to be ignored—its consequence remains, but not the action itself.”

“Wait. You suppose?”

“I am not omniscient, Yenna. I am everything, in a sense that is impossible for me to fully describe in the crude terms of the spoken word, but even you must have parts of yourself that you are unaware of.”

The witch looked down at herself, down at her hands—her quicksilver dagger had appeared unbidden. Yenna cringed and dropped it, the thin blade making a quiet tink as it hit the edge of the table before tumbling out of sight. The dagger was something that had been within her all along. Now that she was here in this moment, its existence only made the inevitability of her choice here more real. Fate’s design, and the expression of my soul…

“Did you make the dagger?” Yenna gestured vaguely off to the side, to the space where the stiletto had vanished.

“I made that dagger as much as I made you, Yenna Bookbinder.” Fate gave another small shrug. “I did not give you red hair, or pointed ears, or hooves or a soulbound dagger, not specifically—it is the consequences of millenia of small actions and tweaks that brought us to this moment. I did not create it, but I made it come to be—intentionally or otherwise. It is not written in my record. It is outside of my design… yet perhaps it is part of it?”

Fate seemed momentarily lost in thought. Yenna liked it when she made that expression, a softer and more comfortable face of a person no longer contemplating their own demise—Yenna had to remind herself that such feelings would only make this harder.

“I did notice something else.” Distracting herself from the thoughts of potential murder, Yenna poked a finger at the pages of the book. “In every telling of events, the black book is there. This book. And I always end up with it… one way or another.”

There were several variations where Yenna had taken the book and run off with it, or severely injured someone for possession of the tome. In one telling, Eone had found it first along with Tirk—that timeline’s Yenna had killed Eone for the book and ran off into the night with the young boy. The very thought that a thread of possibility could have brought her there was enough to bring Yenna a deep sense of shame.

“That is my interference.” Fate sensed Yenna’s discomfort, and her face dropped to match. “It causes problems, in many timelines. I’m not meant to interfere like this, not so overtly, but these paths were within the limits of my rules. I’m so sorry that it had to be this way—so many of your tales end in tragedy because of this, and it’s all my fault.”

Fate began to cry again, but Yenna stopped her. “You interfered, to make sure I would get the book? Why?”

“Why? Because it leads you here.” Fate frowned, thought for a moment, then frowned harder. “... But how would I know that?”

“What else did you do, to interfere?”

With a hand on her chin, Fate stared down at the open book, her expression hardened with thought. It took her a moment to come out of her reverie, though Yenna realised the appearance of Fate’s thoughtfulness amounted to the performative show of this representative—Fate itself was an unknowable being, one that didn’t get distracted by simple things like chewing over an odd little puzzle.

“I limited my interference, but ultimately it had to be done. It had to be done?”

Once again, Fate gave an expression of confusion. An odd, blurred outline surrounded Fate—a slight effect, akin to a mask slipping from a person’s face. Was this actually confusing the being that oversaw the direction all of reality took?

“Fate, please,” Yenna tapped the table impatiently. “When did you interfere?”

The woman across from Yenna snapped to attention, and the blurring at her edges vanished like eyes coming into focus.

“I interfered three times, and gave you three things. The book, the mentor, and the angel.”

---

¹ - There is no verifiable record of this exact phrase in any historical text I could find in Aulpre, Milur or any surrounding states or regions. There are similar phrases, but the exact wording here is unlike them.