· INTERLUDE ·
ENDS
It happens slowly over the course of the decade, Alexis trying to save the others until gradually, she can’t. Cancer. It happens to medeians too, a mutation that can’t be predicted, that could probably be stopped or slowed, only she doesn’t catch it quickly enough—she assumes the fatigue to be something related to necromancy itself, or the house, which is draining Atlas, too, albeit not as quickly. Not as thoroughly. Alexis’s magic goes first, and after that she’s just a soul inside of a failing body, so Atlas runs her baths and reads her books and tries all over again to love someone he can’t save.
She was always fed up with living. Not really a fan of dying, either, though. “Just don’t waste it,” Alexis says. Atlas knows she means his life, that he should go out and do something beautiful with it. He knows this—he can read her fucking mind—but he willfully misinterprets her last words, betrays her most cruelly right there at the end. Because when she says don’t waste it what he hears is fix it. He tells himself he can save her, he promises to do it over, to make a new world, a better one. (Maybe one where he never existed at all, which is the worst thing because it’s selfish. It’s wish fulfillment, the fantasy of a broken mind.) It’s technically the same plan he promised for Ezra, but no longer a rosy-tinted quest for societal betterment. Now the burden is different, because it’s Atlas’s alone.
By then Atlas has discovered Dalton Ellery, chosen by the Society, and because Atlas understands some things implicitly about the world, he knows that what Dalton can do is something deeply and violently disturbing. But also, by then Atlas has achieved enough success—he is just arrogant enough—to believe that certain minds and futures can be altered. There is a life cycle to power, the rise that comes before the fall, and when Atlas is at his lowest, he mistakenly thinks he sees a peak. He sees a chance and he takes it.
Ezra Fowler, who has missed all of the baths and noodles and accusations, dismisses the danger in the obvious signs: the way Atlas remakes himself, changes everything about his clothes, his voice, his perception. Ezra doesn’t see the way that Atlas quietly blames him—not for what Atlas has done, but for what Ezra has unknowingly failed to do by not killing Atlas himself. Ezra misses the way that Atlas now believes the right outcome is the one everyone else failed to organize: that Atlas Blakely himself is the one who ought to have died. (Many friendships end on invisible slights so really, none of this is a stretch. Besides, unfortunately for telepathic friends of time travelers, the loop is already closed. Even if Ezra amicably came to his senses much sooner, some futures are already too late to stop.)
It isn’t hard to plant ideas. Manipulating a mind takes work but it isn’t actually hard, not the way grief is hard, or the way living slowly becomes impossible. The most difficult thing in the world there is to do is to wake up in the morning and keep going, and the only way Atlas manages it is by manifesting his life into a single outcome—a single defining goal.
Let’s be gods. You understand what it means, don’t you? It’s not some childish request for glory or riches, because wouldn’t omniscience mean knowing everything—knowing every kind of sadness, every kind of pain?
Atlas Blakely does not do blessings; he doesn’t care for benedictions. What he wants is control. The ability to rewrite the ending—and surely you of all people must understand that compulsion. You, of all people, must understand.
Weren’t they all gods in some way because they were unnatural—because they were preternatural—and didn’t that give Atlas Blakely a responsibility, a purpose, a reason to go on? You’ll forgive him his blasphemy—they’re the words of a man born to a dying world, a man who thought having knowledge was the same thing as having answers. But you’ve come this far, you’ve listened this long, so you already know, of course, that Atlas Blakely is nothing special after all.
You have your own pain, your own regrets, many of which are impossible and futile, most of which engulf you whenever you’re most vulnerable—resilient only for another opportunity to bring you low. You can close your eyes right now and destroy yourself with them if you want to, and because you can do that—you, and everyone else who has ever been born—none of this is the moral of the story, nor is it even the story. People live and people die, and the why of it is never enough to make a difference.
You already know that your loss is an ocean, Atlas Blakely a speck in the sand.
