Jabari had heard the boy’s mind on his return and the first thing he’d done was lie.

The trail was not clean. In fact, there was a steady contingent searching through everything for them. He knew they wouldn’t find them, though; they had neither the skill nor manpower for the endeavor. Still, he lied.

When the boy touched the Tachi and his mind split to best execute The Draw, Jabari dissuaded the urge to nod in acknowledge. It was a dissuasion he’d been engaging for the past few days.

Passing the tree he had set the boy to, Jabari touched it casually, infusing it with a sliver of his reia so that it would continue to withstand the power of the achi. Without that, even in the hands of an unsouled child, the Tachi, Masamune—it had been named by its creator—would have split the tree in half even with a clumsy draw.

Walking over to the log he’d been using as a seat for the past few days Jabari sat and waited. He listened to the child as the boy forgot his training to have a conversation with himself, his minds playing tricks as was the case with those new to a split mind.

In time, the boy would come to realize what was truly happening. Perhaps, unlike most, he would master all the new fragments of his mind and it would make him stronger as a soul mage or it would consume him. It could go either way. Mastery of the mind was, after all, not a necessary path in the future Jabari worked towards. Thus, the boy’s mastery of his minds was secondary.

That said, he spared the future a scant probe. Finding it unaltered, still treading the path it always had, he ignored it.

The timeline of this world was on a constant shift. This Jabari knew better than most. A child intended to live to the pinnacle of the soul arts could so easily die in the span of ten years simply because one timeline shifted, collapsing another. The future—unlike most diviners would have most people believe—was nigh unpredictable.

Such was the reason Masamune, the creator of the Tachi being swung by an unworthy child, still lived.

When Jabari had met the man many years ago, the blacksmith had just had his future divined for him. It was filled with blood and gore and curses born of the weapons he would forge in fire. In the culmination of it all was his death at the hands of his own blade. Jabari had cared nothing for the man but had intervened for no more reason than his disdain for soothsayers—diviners of fate. He’d befriended the man in three days and pried the divination given to him from his lips.

The diviner had been powerful and had spoken true, but there was always a flaw. Diviners saw a future and told it. Rarely ever did they look upon it from all angles. And even those who did never saw it clearly enough. The existence of two types of future, after all, was a concept most of them ignored: the probable and the inevitable.

All futures seen account for variables in the present. They split infinitely on the whim of infinite circumstances as well as decisions. There were the probable futures—some more probable than the others. In this, the future is split one step further. Some futures occur more definitely than others. However, the difference between both exists in the walkway of fate as unidentifiable. Seers rarely see the difference. This is a secret no diviner will spill, a secret most diviners do not even know.

In a simple example, Jabari had used Masamune to demonstrate simply because he had been able to.

A man walks up to a diviner and requests his path be followed into the future. The diviner, in their arrogance, trails this path, tracking him in fate as a hunter does his prey in the forest. He soon comes to a point of certainty and concludes that therein lies the answer. This answer he gives as a finality. Masamune is given the future not knowing it is naught more than a future.

What the diviner has failed to account for is the fluidity of the future. He has seen a future and has failed in understanding the path he has followed, only glimpsing the end. This diviner has failed to understand that the future exists in two faces. One is a fixed probability, the other, however, wavers.

The question becomes: did the future seen account for the possibility of the important parties being aware of it or not? Did the diviner see a future that happened now that he and Masamune were aware of it or did he see a branch of the future where he did not tell Masamune? After all, only one of both futures would be correct.

There exist futures only brought to life by the variable of a diviner’s attempt to see them. The very action of looking into the future is a new variable that creates a branch of the future that would rather not have existed.

In looking into Masamune’s future, the diviner had created another timeline, one in which the future shifts because he has looked. However, this was not the future the diviner saw. No. The future he saw was a second shift created because he informed Masamune of his future. If the diviner had not looked, Masamune would’ve died twenty years later. If he had not informed Masamune, the young blacksmith would’ve died fifty years later. These were two probable futures the diviner had been unable to see because his mind was veiled by his confidence in his ability. His blind arrogance, innocent as it may have been, had brought him to see a future that would not happen. A future where he hadn’t looked. A future where he hadn’t told Masamune.

The second kind of future was almost as unidentifiable as it was inevitable. It was a threshold Jabari had needed years of wisdom to discern.

The number of lives lost in order to attain the knowledge of it was countless, and peoples had died in the path to its attainment when they didn’t need to. Even now, Jabari could not bring himself to be remorseful for those that had died because everything had led to this very point—every loss, every tragedy, had guided him and continued to do so.

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Countless probabilities had led to a single action. And a single action had brought about the birth of an inevitable future. This future was one that existed regardless of who peered into it or what decisions were made. This future cared naught for what happened in the past, present, or the future after it. This future was inevitable. But to find it, one had to be on the right path. They had to be looking for it, and even then, such futures exist too rarely. Jabari had only seen four of such in his long years on the path of the soul arts.

He couldn’t imagine a mage existed who had seen more.

Jabari could still see it. Even now, a future where a man in his shredded cassock and goldsteel axes faced off against a battalion of soul artists remained unwavering. As is the case with inevitable futures, the man’s victory or defeat was not certain, and the actions leading up to the point where as rigid as lines drawn in the sand sand—with a breath they could change. But the man would still stand there. His cassock would still be shredded. He would still bleed from cuts and bruises and lacerations, goldsteel axes in hand. He would still stand there, a hotspot upon which all variables of the infinite futures would converge, bound, before splitting again into infinity.

To find such a moment in time was to see the future.

For Masamune, Jabari had merely moved the man from one path of fate to another by sending him to a different land.

Masamune had then gone on to found his own sect as a soulsmith and ascend to the authority of Ethnarch. It was in this authority that he’d crafted Masamune, the blade of the anti-mage. And Jabari had stolen it on his search for an inevitable future.

Now it was in the hands of Seth, draining him of every drop of reia in his unsouled body until he was truly, in the most perfect of senses, no more than flesh and blood.

Jabari felt Seth’s mistake a moment before he’d made it. It drew him from his reminiscence.

Conversing with fragments of the mind, especially when unsouled, drew on the tiniest of ambient reia present in the world around, forcefully converting it to generate mind reia. To do so while holding a weapon of an anti-mage, especially one forged of moonlight ore known for its rejection of reia, was a madness no soul artist with a fractured mind would be caught doing.

But Seth was no soul artist. He did not know better.

He was somewhere in a conversation with his mind when his hand touched the hilt of Masamune.

Jabari felt the boy’s mind break even before the boy himself. The crack was loud, reverberating in Jabari’s spirit sense. Each fragment did not fracture further into more fragments, though they would in due time, rather what happened to them was something else.

A fractured mind is like a cup of water capable of regenerating. Each time it fractures, it is like a piece falling out of its hold. Painful, though it is, there is a benefit to it. The fracture seals up, containing the water where it would’ve spilled, healing as all living beings can. As for the broken fragment, it regenerates, growing into an entity of its own like an earthworm, or the Manarvian soul beasts of the Calcified mountains.

For Seth, one of his cups hadn’t broken. What happened was more akin to having the water in each cup freeze over at the same time, then break. It wasn’t the quantity of the mind that had broken but the quality of it. It was a concept that scarcely made any sense. Jabari often found that people who understood this often had a propensity for insanity.

Still, Jabari took his time to rise even as the boy dropped to his knees, writhing in pain with his single working hand covering an ear, most likely to shut out the sound he thought he was hearing in his head. Jabari didn’t blame him. Very few people survive a broken mind for very long, and those that do rarely ever grow further in their path of the soul arts.

Very few ever died from it, though, but the number of soul artists that were saved from it with their minds intact were… Jabari scratched at his memory, poring through every archive he knew for certainty. Yes. They numbered in the single digits. But this was because those with sufficient enough power to save them were never there when it happened.

He approached the boy without worry, curious of how long the boy would last.

A whisper of fear touched his mind for the boy’s sanity but not the future. Mad or not, the future would not change. A man would still face off against a multitude, come what may. As cruel as it seemed, he did not care for the boy, he cared for the future.

It was only when the boy screamed that he acted. He waved a gesture with his hand, throwing a barrier around them with a diameter as wide as a palace. The translucent dome kept the boy’s screams trapped within but Jabari knew some of it had gotten out. It was enough to be heard by the Silver soul mages combing the area. They were not a threat, though. Jabari could end them easily. However, they would be a waste of time. So with a tired resignation, he approached the boy.

The boy’s lack of physical contact with Masamune was a good point for him in this moment as the Tachi lay discarded in the sand. It allowed reia, despite how miniscule, seep back into him. Perhaps the boy would follow the trickle to sanity, Jabari reasoned. Perhaps not.

The idea was of no import as he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“That’s quite enough of that,” he told the child, before pulling the boy’s mind back together with a thought.

Mend.

The command was infinite, bending reality to seal his mind.

Sound eluded the boy in an instant, cut of immediately his mind was fixed, and his screams died. Though it took a while for his mouth to close.

Jabari left his hand on the boy’s shoulder for a while. He confirmed everything was in order before the boy slumped forward and fell face first in the sand. Jabari hoped, for the boy’s sake, that his mouth had closed by then.

Certain the child’s sanity was there—more or less—Jabari cast his spirit far and wide. He reached beyond the raised barrier in search of their trackers. He wasn’t surprised to find their organized search had ended. Now they converged as a single unit. Their path led to one objective: Them.

Jabari returned his attention to the boy without looking at him. There was much left for the boy to learn, and this territory was a conducive enough place to learn what he had to teach. But to do that, they could not afford the interruptions. He was in no particular mood to end lives, despite how insignificant they might be. It made his decision a tricky one to make. Elsewhere, the boy would struggle to learn quite desperately.

This was not a disadvantageous thought. Struggling, after all, was important for the path he intended to place the boy upon. The boy’s future and gains depended partly on how much he could struggle before he became souled.

With a quiet and unconscious child and a group of armed mages converging on them, Jabari was left with two choices. He could travel further or call down the red hand of death on men who did not necessarily deserve it.

It didn’t take him long to make a decision, and he made his choice without remorse.