What had the fog just made him say? Owen tried desperately to lie, to take back everything he’d just spouted out, but the fog filled all of his thoughts, arranging them like soldiers in a line, ready to march out the door of his mouth and into battle. And no matter how much he ordered them to stop, they just kept marching.
Or something like that. It was honestly a little hard to think of analogies with his brain so magicked.
The Magister’s eyes bore in on Owen. “I’m sorry, my boy. You didn’t just suggest that we don’t actually exist, did you?”
Kiel tapped his own arm. “I feel fairly solid to me. Could we get back to more important things now?”
The Magister closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “The spell is working. Somehow he actually believes that we aren’t real.”
“You’re not real,” Owen’s mouth said. “You’re just characters in a book.” He frantically tried to bite his lips closed to keep from saying anything else, but his lips just pushed out into a fish-face expression to escape his teeth. Ugh, those clever lips of his!
“He’s probably been science brain-cleaned, washed, whatever they do,” Kiel said. “Charm told me about it. They use their electric lights to flash your eyes until you believe whatever they say.” He shrugged. “Science people do weird things for fun. Magi, I need to find the Seventh Key—”
“Why would you think us not real?” the Magister asked Owen, giving him a quizzical look. “You can see us standing in front of you, and you are responding to my magic. Could an unreal person have cast such a spell?”
“Apparently!” Owen said. “I know you’re not real because I’ve read about you in books, especially Kiel. I’m a huge fan. Everyone is! We know all about your quest to find the Seven Keys to the Vault of Containment, then use the Source of Magic’s power to defeat Dr. Verity once and for all. But there are things you don’t know yet. Like the Magister was actually born on Quanterium, and Dr. Verity was born on Magisteria, and they were switched as some kind of peace offering, to let each side experience the other’s culture. See? I couldn’t have known that except that it’s in the books.”
The Magister took a step back, his eyes wide. Kiel turned to him, one eyebrow raised. “That isn’t true, is it, Magi?” he asked quietly.
“No one knows that,” the Magister said quietly. “It happened thousands of years ago! No one alive still knows apart from Dr. Verity. How could you—”
“It’s all in the books,” Owen’s mouth continued. “Just like how Kiel found out he’s a clone of Dr. Verity in the fourth book, and that the parents he’d always been searching for never actually existed. Which made him wonder that if he was actually from Quanterium, like Dr. Verity, how could he do magic, since no one from Quanterium’s ever been able to do it.” Owen paused for a breath, while inwardly he screamed at himself to just shut up already. “Obviously, you’re from Quanterium, Mr. Magister, and you can do magic, but he didn’t know that part yet. Not that it matters, since Dr. Verity was from Magisteria to begin with anyway. And remember how you originally told Kiel that his parents were killed by a time bomb that Dr. Verity sent, since you didn’t think he was ready to know that he’s a clone of Dr. Verity? You thought that’d turn his life upside down—”
“And it did, at the time,” Kiel said quietly.
“Enough!” the Magister shouted, and Owen’s mouth clamped shut. “There is no way you could know these things!”
“None of this changes anything, as . . . surprising as it might be,” Kiel said. “If you really know what is happening here, why not tell us what Dr. Verity has planned?”
“Oh, he’s going to blow up Magisteria using a huge science bomb,” Owen’s mouth said. “That’s what I read on fan sites, at least. Someone went through and pieced it all together from various threats. And somehow, it’s going to be your fault, Kiel. That’s what I read, anyway.”
“My fault?”
The Magister gave Kiel a quick glance, then turned back to Owen. “Tell me how you know these secrets. I must know!” He gestured, and the fog became even thicker in Owen’s head.
“I read them!” Owen said. “I told you! There’s a guy who writes all of your books, Jonathan Porterhouse. He made you up. I don’t know how you’re here now, trust me. That’s all Bethany’s thing. Somehow she has the power to jump into books like they’re windows or something. Not that you’d jump into windows usually, but you know what I mean—”
Kiel tapped the Magister on the shoulder. “Did you hear what he said? The part about Dr. Verity blowing up the planet—”
“This Bethany girl,” the Magister interrupted. “She travels between your world and this one? My world? The one you claim doesn’t exist?”
“Yeah, because she’s half-fictional,” Owen said. “I don’t honestly get it at all, but she said that her father was fictional, so, you know, imaginary, and somehow he came out to the real world and married her mom or something, but then he disappeared, so she wants to find him. But she can travel between here and there, yeah. Between fiction and the real world. Nonfiction? Would that be it?”
“She brought you here the first time,” the Magister said, turning away and rubbing his temples. “She could take me to your world myself, and I could see if these wild statements have any truth to them.”
“Didn’t you bring me here?” Owen asked. “Why don’t you just go back the same way?”
“I borrowed a bit of her power,” the Magister said absently. “When I first met the two of you. I meant no harm by it, and solely wished to learn about her abilities. However, I used up what little I could take, bringing you back. To do more, I would need her at hand, if not taking me herself.”
“I don’t know why you’d ever want to leave here,” Owen said. “You’ve got magic and time machines and dragons and—”
“I would wish to meet this . . . writer,” the Magister told him. “The man you mentioned, Jonathan Porterhouse. The one who knows my deepest secrets, who has recorded my entire life.”
“He’s not really recording,” Owen said. “He’s making it up in his head. There’s kind of a difference.” Okay, really? That was the point he had to keep driving home here?
“Magister, we’re all in danger!” Kiel said, but the Magister just waved him off.
“That shall wait, Kiel!” he shouted. “I must learn the truth of this! If what this child says is true, none of this might be real! We would have been fighting a war that never should have happened.” He sighed, leaning against his spell book. “All my thousands of years of life, learning everything I could, seeing the impossibilities of magic . . . all those years, dreamt up in someone’s head?”
“It can’t be true,” Kiel said, shaking his head. “That’s all there is to it.”
“I put this boy under the Fog of Truth spell,” the Magister said. “Everything he has said is objectively the truth as he knows it, or his brain would collapse like a dying star.”
“Really?” Owen said. “Cool!” Stupid truth spell! Okay, it was cool, but it was also scary! Apparently, scary wasn’t objectively true enough to be said by a truth spell, though.
“We need this Bethany girl, then,” the Magister said, turning back to Owen. “When will she be returning here?”
“Oh, she won’t be,” Owen said, finally happy to be saying good news. “She hates me now, and wants nothing to do with me. You’ll never see her again. She’d never—”
Bethany’s face popped out of nowhere right in the middle of the air.
Kiel shouted in surprise, grabbed the Magister’s spell book, and banged Bethany over the head with it. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she tipped forward, but Kiel grabbed her head before it could fall, then helped her the rest of the way into the room.
He laid her gently on the floor, only to back out of the way as the Magister gestured. Bethany’s body glowed with magic, then stood up on its own like a puppet, her eyes still closed.
“Perfect,” the Magister said. “And you,” he said, pointing at Owen, “shall wait with Dr. Verity beyond time and space until I return. You won’t need to eat or drink, as your body won’t actually exist as anything beyond a possibility until you come back out.”
“That’s all well and good, but what about bathroom breaks?!” Owen shouted as the Magister mumbled a spell. “Seriously, that’s an important question!”
But neither Kiel nor the Magister answered, and Owen began to disappear. The last thing Owen saw was the Magister reach out and take Bethany’s hand as Kiel took the other.
“Take me to your world,” the magician said to his puppet. “And then I shall take us to this Jonathan Porterhouse writer.”
The unconscious Bethany body nodded, then jumped the three of them right out of the book, just as the entire room disappeared into nothingness.
Owen sighed. Bethany was totally going to blame him for this.