Yes, I know, it's a little bit more than a week, but to say it in a rational fashion - the future in which I actually manage to get a university degree has strictly higher utility than the one in which I update the story regularly. Fear not, though, for this chapter certainly is a mouthful - or eyeful, as the case may be.

To be honest, I didn't intend to chain scenes together and have the end result be larger than the whole story so far, but that's how it worked out in my mind. Only later did I consciously realize what I was going for and chose the title - motivations.

Also, since the story is now officially longer than 10000 words, authors' notes notwithstanding, I will reiterate what I said in chapter one - reviews would be greatly appreciated.

And finally, I promised to experiment with switching viewpoints mid-chapter and it's here. I'll still be marking it clearly though, no need to confuse people.

Harry Dresden

"Dresden, have you come to scam us out our money again with your fancy talk of magic?"

Karrin Murphy gestured to the exit as she said that. I scowled. It seemed that Special Investigations was under fire yet again. After Murphy had been demoted to sergeant, life for the department was never simple, not that it ever had been. Not only did they get to go face to face with some of the more nasty supernatural denizens of Chicago, a line of duty which has claimed many a casualty over the years, but on top of that, they had to make up lame explanations for the benefit of their bosses, because writing "assaulted by a troll" in a police report would only gain them a psychiatric evaluation. Dangerous and underappreciated – a kind of work I was all too familiar with.

"Come now, Murphy," I said in an insufferably polite drawl. "You know that I only come here to see your lovely face."

She glared at me. On any other five-foot-nothing blonde, you would expect it to look cute. Murphy's expression, though, promised that she would break every bone in your body. Given that she was a black belt in aikido, she very well could.

"Chauvinist pig," she said as she was closing the door, but smiled right after that. "Let's talk outside."

I noticed that she was carrying a folder, but didn't want to comment on it before we were out. We went down the stairs and out of the police station that housed Special Investigations without saying a word. One could never be certain which walls had ears in there. There were a few battered old wooden benches around the parking lot, in tone with the battered old building. No one was there, and the surrounding space was open enough that no one would be able to listen in undetected. We sat on one of the benches, which was covered in scribbles and missing a few boards.

"Is SI in trouble again," I asked.

"Yeah," Murphy said heavily. "There is a new cult in town and pretty much everyone in Chicago PD is scrambling. Take a guess which department is most under fire by Internal Affairs."

"New cult?"

"Take a look at this," she said and passed me a photograph from the folder.

I took it and began to study it. The shot was of a grey concrete floor, tones muted by the artificial lighting. Taking most of the space, the focus of the image, was a figure drawn in crimson paint. It was star shaped, similar in construction to a pentagram, but with, I counted carefully, thirteen points instead of five. It was enclosed in two circles, with candles at every point of the star where it ended in the outer circle. The dead woman was right in the center of the inner circle. I stared, trying to remain as detached as possible. She could not have been more than twenty years old. She was wearing workout clothes – a white t-shirt and blue shorts. Her face was contorted in agony and fear. And there were at least a dozen metal spikes driven straight down into the concrete through her body.

"Who did this," I asked, very softly.

"We don't know, Harry, and that's why I wanted your help. Do you think there was magic involved?"

"It doesn't look like the deed of a bunch of wannabe Satanists," I said. "It's too well executed; the shapes are done with absolute precision and there's only one use case that I know of where you need to be this careful."

"Ritual magic," Murphy asked and I nodded in confirmation. She sighed. "That's what I thought. Can you tell what the spell was supposed to do?"

"This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm not an expert in driving spikes through people. I will look into it, though. Maybe I can dig up something."

"I hope you can, Harry, because this mess is only getting worse."

"Worse? Has there been another killing," I asked, my stomach turning a little at the mental image of that girl.

"Not that we know of, but strange things are happening all over town. There's an influx of missing persons reports, sightings of strange hooded people, and besides, there's this sign."

She gave me another photo, this one of a wall most likely in the same room. On it, written with blood in crooked and twisting letters, was a message. "The time of power-hungry mortals scurrying uselessly about is past. You will all burn with your world, and only ashes will remain. Only ashes, to portray how useless you are."

"At least it wasn't in archaic English," I said. "Gee, Murph, we always manage to attract the biggest lunatics in Chicago."

She didn't comment on my quip.

"How long will it take you to dig up information on the ritual?"

"Until tomorrow at least. It would help me if I were to take a look around the crime scene."

Murphy shook her head. "Not a chance, forensics is all over it. Maybe I could get you in for a few minutes, but not before tomorrow or the day after that."

"Well, then, can I keep the photos at least?"

"Take the whole file, I made a copy for you," she said and gave me the folder. "It's not much, but that's all we have on the cult."

"Thank you."

"Got to get back to work now," she said and stood up. "Call me when you have anything."

And with that, Murphy left me. I considered going through the file, but my detachment was already wearing thin and I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier at the thought that someone would commit such an atrocity and to a woman no less. Yes, call me a sexist bastard if you must, but when I see a woman being the target of violence, some primal switch in my head flips to the "smash stuff" setting. I sat on the bench for a minute, breathing heavily, until I finally felt my emotions subsiding a little. I decided that I wouldn't be getting any better than mildly angry, so I stood up and went to the spot where I had parked my car. My blue beetle, ever faithful, was waiting for me there. Calling it blue wasn't anything more than a nod to the past, really, because there weren't many parts left of the original Volkswagen. It had been clawed, mangled, attacked by a walking tree, chewed on by demons, et cetera, each time requiring me to get a part of it replaced, which didn't match with the rest because I didn't have enough money to repaint it. It was my car, though, and I wouldn't ever trade it for a fancy new ride, possibly because said new rides that were made past World War II tended to break after fifteen minutes of exposure to me.

I got a compass out of my pocket, which was pointing straight to Ivian, because I had laid a tracking spell on him. I know, that isn't the biggest show of trust in the world, but I really needed to explain to the boy what he was capable of and possibly teach him some control before I let him loose in the world. The needle was pointing somewhere to the north, and I wondered if I should check what he was doing, but my stomach argued that lunch was more important. As I was leaving the parking lot, I noticed the compass changing direction visibly. Strange, that meant that Ivian wasn't very far from me. There was some distant sound, I thought, and listened in. I caught the end of a high-pitched scream.

"Stars and stones," I muttered, "he's even better at the getting into trouble part than I am."

Ivian

I was reminded of Harry Dresden's statement that so-called vampires liked human blood when the one that was chasing me stooped to the floor and literally started licking the drops from the cut on my leg. I made a mental note to avoid looking backwards so much when running in alleys, but that was for another time. I was more than glad to use the distraction unwittingly provided by a trash can's sharp edge. For some reason, though, I doubted that the creature would remain satisfied for long with just a few drops.

If your definition of long encompasses the time length of two and a half seconds, then I was wrong. I would have rather defined it as a few minutes, though, or even better – a few hours. I threw a fireball in front of the thing to slow it down, igniting a couple of bags filled with rotting food. I also observed that I thought of the action of throwing a fireball as, well, normal. It was becoming a habit and I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. Unfortunately, flames in real life tend not to behave like impenetrable walls that stick around for ten minutes even though there isn't anything that can fuel the fire. All in all, the net effect of my little display was not much bigger than to anger the creature even more, and it responded in a properly predatory fashion – by charging me. Harry didn't mention anything about the physical abilities of what he termed vampire, so I took an estimate. Sixty miles per hour at least, weighing at a hundred kilos, plus the swing of a professional boxer… solving differential equations while running and at the brink of physical exhaustion isn't my specialty, but let's just say that however many orders of magnitude my estimate was off by, the hit would still leave me splattered on the floor with a dozen internal hemorrhages and three times that many broken bones.

The point of impact, I decided, would be within two seconds. I had to time it just right, and the burning in my lungs and legs wasn't particularly helpful to my concentration. My mind made a decision to raise the priority of physical exercise. I made it shut up, because it wasn't relevant to my current situation and tensed. I managed to jump sideways within ten milliseconds of the creature hitting me. I would very much like to say that it was due to my exceptional rationality skills, but to be fair, I had tried to deliberately overestimate it and leave myself a leeway of a second. Apparently, I had to revise my model of vampires yet again.

Now, I was pretty sure the creature expected me to jump. Predators have the nasty knack of predicting their prey's behavior, or else they'd starve to death. I was hoping, though, that its evolved or otherwise acquired instincts did not include coping mechanisms for when potential food decided to throw a fireball in its face. For once, my estimation actually turned out to be correct. As I was flying through the air, I stretched out my right hand and when it passed less than two inches from the creature's face I visualized a fireball, but instead of the picture I had used before, I decided to go for a mix of napalm and thermite. This wasn't a conscious decision, or a calculated one, because creating a compound like thermite out of thin air, while not impossible, would require a fusion reactor with the intensity of ten suns and I'm pretty sure that I didn't have one of those. Nevertheless, the creature's face exploded in flames so hot that they were unbearable even after I landed a couple of feet away. I crawled away from it and realized that it wasn't screaming, even though having your face melted in the quite literal sense should be pretty agonizing. I guessed my attack had been super effective.

I climbed to my feet and turned around. The black thing, and looking at it close I was pretty sure it was exactly what Dresden described as vampire, didn't have a face anymore, or a head for that matter. It didn't look like it would take a long for the rest of the body to follow. I sighed. Had I really just created a fire several times as strong just by imagining napalm and thermite? The visual confirmation was certainly there. The sanity confirmation was on strike and refused to comment.

"You're just as persistent as my master warned me," a voice said, which was followed by a clicking sound and the feeling of something pressing against the back of my head.

"Turn around, slowly."

Great, the situation just couldn't have gotten any messier at that point. Well, alright, it could, but I would have much preferred if it didn't. I complied with the instruction and turned to see a hooded figure holding a freaking Desert Eagle pointed at my head. My imagination treated me to an image of myself with a marble-sized hole in my brain, which needless to say didn't contribute much to my mental health.

"You, young man, are rapidly turning into more trouble than you're worth," he said without any emotion whatsoever.

"And what, exactly, am I worth," I asked, unsettled.

"You wouldn't even comprehend the arcane forces that are rising up around us," he said and it sounded a bit reverent.

Great, a generic response. The smartass part of my brain was beginning to reassert control, which, under the circumstances, wasn't a very healthy idea. I was helpless to stop my words though.

"Well," I said slyly, "if I can comprehend electromagnetism, I'm pretty sure I can handle the 'arcane' forces."

The hooded man snarled in anger and before I could've blinked once, he flipped the gun in his hand and swung it at me. And while a professional swing of the hand looked pretty fast on a perceptual level, it could not even contend with the firing of a few hundred thousand neurons. Now, in my stream of consciousness I didn't have time to be more than mildly startled, but the other parts of my brain which I didn't have deliberate control over seemed to have an idea of what to do. I suddenly felt drained and exhausted, remarkably similar to the last few moments that I remembered of the previous night and the man toppled forward. He screamed in absolute pain and started writhing, though in my state I barely registered it. I stumbled towards the exit of the alley. There was a distant sound, barely a whisper to my perception, which took me a few tries to process.

"Ivian! Ivian!"

Harry Dresden

"Excuse me while I puke my guts out," Ivian said and opened the passenger window of the Beetle. I turned my head around while he was making retching sounds and looked at the alley where I'd found him. All that was left of the event were a few red drops, a pile of ash and a patch of molten concrete.

"I feel like crap," he said. I started the engine and kicked the Beetle into motion.

"Well, you should," I told him. "You've just expended a ridiculous amount of power and I'm really surprised that I didn't find you unconscious or worse."

"How reassuring. What did I do to that man?"

My mood suddenly darkened.

"You overloaded every pain receptor in his body and tried to fry his brain," I said evenly. "All at the same time."

If Ivian had looked sick before, it paled in comparison to what my words did. His face completely drained of blood, turning it almost ghostly white. His eyes widened in shock, so much in fact that the pupils grew to twice their normal size.

"Oh," he said, almost inaudibly, but with a clearly distinguishable tone of repulsion. "Oh crap," and that's all the words he managed before sticking his head out of the window and puking even more right on the street as the car was moving, though I knew not where his stomach found the extra material. A few pedestrians looked at him in disgust, but no one called out. He slowly turned back towards me.

"I," he said, "that… that was really…" and then he passed out.

Poor fellow, I thought, he's in way over his head and don't you know what that's like, Harry. In an act of self-defense, Ivian had broken one of the laws of magic and come very close to breaking a second one. The council was going to be very much pissed if they ever found out. But was I going to tell them? I was, after all, a warden of the White Council and it was my duty to report any such violations, yet there was a part of me that didn't want to get this boy into any more trouble after what he had already gone through.

I decided I would postpone any judgment until I confront Ivian about it, which, given how he had managed to completely exhaust himself twice in the span of 24 hours by using too much magic, might not happen for some time. He certainly needed rest.

The drive home was uneventful and I managed to avoid the rush hour at the end of the work day. I parked my car in front of the old boarding house that contained my apartment. It was made completely out of wood and was one of the few such buildings in Chicago that had managed to survive until now. Yes, it had the occasional leak, and the wooden walls creaked whenever it got windy, which in this city was pretty much all the time, but the rent was cheaper than most other places. Besides, it was the only apartment I've held onto for more than a few months since I started living on my own. I was used to being here.

I got out of the Beetle and came over to the passenger's side to pull Ivian out. He was skinny, true, but tall enough that carrying him would be impossible. I did not want a repeat of last night when I almost broke my neck trying to move him down the stairs. We stumbled slowly and very carefully on the way down to the basement and managed to get to my apartment without any broken bones. I laid him down on the couch and went to the bathroom to get a shower. I didn't have a water heater in my apartment, or any other work of modern engineering for that matter. Wizards and technology don't really mix well – it has something to do with the field of magic surrounding them. If something about a piece of equipment can go wrong, it most certainly will when a wizard's around. I preferred not to have the water heater explode in my face while I showered, so I endured cold water instead, not that I wasn't used to it.

After a refreshing shower and a change of clothing, I returned back to the living room to find Ivian awake and sitting. I stared at him, disbelieving. He definitely should not have had enough strength to remain awake. Either he had ridiculous magical talent for a newbie, or much more likely I had overestimated how exhausted he had been.

"You're upright," I said.

"Yes, for some reason I couldn't sleep," he said and rolled his eyes for ironic effect.

"Are you feeling well?"

"Well? Certainly, I'm feeling as well as one can be after torturing another human being to death," he said, disgusted.

"You didn't kill the man, Ivian."

"Really," he asked and perked up. I nodded affirmative. "Great, so I only caused an incalculable amount of suffering instead of twice an incalculable amount. I feel so much better about myself."

"You can feel angsty all you want," I said, "after we've finished the conversation."

That made him pause. He looked up at me for a few moments and then shook his head.

"You're right, Harry, I gain nothing from complaining about causing harm that I cannot undo now." He thought for a moment. "The best thing I can do is make sure never to inadvertently use that again. And I would very much appreciate it if you answer a few questions."

I had never seen anyone compose himself from an angsty teenager mode in the span of five seconds. I told Ivian to go ahead and ask, a bit of uncertainty creeping in my voice. I didn't really want to waste another fifteen minutes reformulating my answer a dozen times.

"I'm not an expert neuroscientist," he continued," but I can reasonably conclude that if what I did to the man acted in the fashion that you described it would be pretty fatal. What happened after I spaced out?"

"I was in the same block as you on business with the Chicago PD and had just started on my way home, when I heard the Red Court vampire," I said, omitting the use of the tracking spell. "When I arrived there, you had already done most of the work and I saw the man screaming and writhing on the ground. I managed to stop your spell before it had done too much damage."

"I would ask how you did that," he said and sighed, "but I think that it would be a very drawn-out conversation. More importantly, did you find out who my attacker was?"

"No, he blew himself up."

Ivian raised his eyebrows.

"Are you sure you're not exaggerating here?"

"Well," I said, "he didn't really explode, just said something in the line of 'you will never find out my master's secrets' and used some talisman which disintegrated him to dust along with all the evidence."

"Generic villainy response plus seppuku," Ivian said, shaking his head, "and here I thought that one could only find that in literature."

"Fanaticism and wits don't mix really well."

"Good point. One could also apparently extend that to self-preservation in the more extreme cases."

It made no sense, though. Not the man's behavior, but the fact that Ivian had been attack by red court vampires twice in the span of the day, and encountered a fanatic of the on top of that. To call that a coincidence would be to stretch the term so far that it rips open and bleeds to death. I got a queasy feeling at the thought of this new cult being in league with the red court. I was still missing a lot of the pieces.

"Is there something that you're not telling me," I asked Ivian.

"Given your tone of voice, I suppose you mean - am I lying about my role in recent events?"

He could be pretty direct about it, I'll grant him that, but the penchant for strictness in one's expressions was getting slightly annoying.

"I assure you that I don't see any gain in hiding information from you, considering how you saved my life. Besides, I do not lie, as a matter of principle and not having to juggle a few hundred 'realities'", he said, the emphasis on that last word almost making it sound slightly contemptuous. "But no, I don't have any physical evidence to convince you, so it's up to you to decide on how to test each possibility."

Of course, if he had been lying, he would've used exactly the same argument. I remembered how he had acted when I told him what his spell had done, though. It's pretty hard to fake such a reaction and seem genuine about it. Well, there was one way to find out, but not yet.

"Ivian, about the spell that you used," I began and considered whether he would believe my words. There didn't seem to be any way to tell, really, so I continued. "You broke one of the laws of magic."

He looked at me - just that. A brief glance at his eyes revealed that he was considering it. No angry objections, no immediate retorts, no anxious responses. He would question and scrutinize every little detail, but he refused to act like one in denial of the supernatural. He was certainly a strange fellow.

"My Occam priors cringe every time you mention casting a spell," he said. "I'll attribute some of that to irrational emotions. However, in the interest of me not storming off in anger, I do hope you mean legal law and not a physical one."

"What does physics have to do with magic," I asked and he shot me a murderous glare. Before he could respond, I continued, "but you're correct. It's one of the laws of the White Council – governing body of wizards," I added the last part hurriedly in anticipation of the question.

"Alright, you obviously do not want getting told that your plausibility is rapidly diminishing with every word. I'll let it slide, temporarily. So what, exactly, does the law state?"

"It's the third law of magic," I said. "Thou shalt not invade the mind of another."

Ivian raised his eyebrows.

"Well, that didn't sound entirely unreasonable… a bit overly archaic, though. What is the penalty for breaking it?"

"Oh, you know," I said conversationally, "beheading with a sword."

Ivian gulped.

"How very progressive – what is it, a remnant from the middle ages?"

"It hasn't changed since then," I told him. And indeed, no one had seen the need to modify the seven laws of magic since the White Council had been first established. They were few enough not to require maintenance and important enough to withstand the changes in society.

"Provided that you can convince me of the existence of said White Council," he said, "which, I might add, would not be achieved by scowling at me and showing a condescending attitude, then theoretically, what would one do to keep one's head on one's shoulders?"

I considered. There was but one exception to the verdict. Alternatively, I could just hide the truth. It's not something that I could do lightly, though, and for a very good reason. Twisting another mind with magic is not a particularly safe process, as such things go. A powerful spell like that cannot be used without affecting the mind of the caster as well. It doesn't matter whether you had good intentions or had done it accidentally to begin with, the end result would still be one evil warlock and a lot of debilitated victims. Unless, that is, it was not yet too late for Ivian, and that's where the way for being certain came.

"Ivian," I said firmly. "Look into my eyes."

We locked stares – he was scowling, of course. Before he could voice a question, though, there was a tugging sensation and the soul gaze began.

Eyes are the windows to the soul. Just looking into someone's eyes for a few seconds is enough to be considered an act of intimacy and creep out most strangers. When a wizard looks, though, this is taken to a whole new level entirely. You get to see the most private parts of the other person's being – their soul, the things that guide what they do. In return, they get to see you in the same complete and maddening detail. A soul gaze can be a truly jarring experience and the memory of it never fades. You can always recall the event perfectly, as if it had happened five seconds before.

My apartment vanished from view. In fact, everything vanished, leaving only me, Ivian and total darkness. A few moments passed, and lights began to flicker to life, impossibly small and distant. They looked like stars but I could not recognize any familiar patterns.

"Not single stars, but galaxies and clusters of galaxies," Ivian said.

That literally made me jump. Had he just read my thoughts?

"Yes. The connection that you just opened works both ways, Harry."

His voice had gotten more refined, more musical and definitely more serene. Where actors usually failed, he conveyed an incredibly deep wisdom.

"Deep wisdom. Everything is connected. Infinity is a number – an infinite number of infinitely stacked numbers."

Yeah, precisely that effect. He smiled.

"No, I would rather not be equated with deep wisdom if you would. Knowledge must be straight-forward, one inferential step at a time. Everything else might as well be a contest in obfuscation and needless display of verbal prowess."

It made sense, but arguing semantics even during a soul gaze was absolutely insufferable.

"As a general rule, Harry, I do not tolerate misunderstandings because of laziness. The human brain has a remarkable tendency to cache pretty much every thought that you repeat a few times. It saves a great amount of thinking, but also makes people not appreciate the steps taken to have the thought in the first place. It also makes us lazy and indignant about re-evaluating what we deem basic knowledge."

Good points or not, I saw no reason for Ivian to tell me that.

"Really – no reason whatsoever? Helping you on the path to rationality, while desirable, is not something I would attempt to do in a subjective minute. But there's something more obvious - have you forgotten the nature of this connection?"

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again, remembering that there wasn't any point. You get to see the other person's soul, I thought. For a moment, amusement flashed in Ivian's eyes.

"Ah, yes, the Christian soul," he intoned. "Actually, Harry, you get to see the thought process and values of the person. So, what in probability theory's name do you think that I'm doing by getting around the strange visual format and directly spelling out some of the concepts that guide my decisions?"

Oh, I thought, and my brain decided to leave it at that.

"It's not the most important reason why I'm engaging you in a conversation directly. You can figure out the actual core values by looking around or simply asking."

Engaging in a conversation. I have had mental images address me directly during a soul gaze, but to have someone fully aware of the soul gaze and read my thoughts to boot - I didn't know that such a thing was even possible. It's not like people usually went about sharing the details of such an intimate experience, but still – not a single mention of mind reading?

"You're right, of course, "Ivian said. "Such a feature would be well documented if it was common, but the situation with you and Ivian is somewhat unique. I estimate that the probability of such an event happening for anyone close to you again is, as you will most likely phrase it, 'not bloody going to'."

Well, what made this such a special case, then? Also, had Ivian just referred to himself in the third person? It seemed like…

"An awfully big swell of ego? You can't avoid thinking about it after the fact, Harry. But no, it isn't that. I cannot tell you details, for I am already straining the link that you call soul gaze. Even though sharing information is something I hold very highly, not destroying your sanity outweighs it."

Gee, that didn't sound creepy at all.

"I'll say this – I am Ivian, in the sense that I share the same core concepts and terminal values. I am not, however, the nineteen year old boy that you know, spacing out on your couch at the moment. A refined algorithm, one might say, and let's leave it at that."

Ivian, or, well, whoever he was turned around and looked at the galaxies. They had gotten close enough that their shapes were easily discernable – ellipses, spirals and scythes, even some bizarre forms, all colored in splotches of yellow, white, blue and purple, with a few more exotic hues here and there. It was a truly dazzling display, which managed at the same time to make me feel both wonder and insignificance at the sheer size of the universe.

"Beautiful, isn't it, Harry?"

I nodded. He couldn't see me, but I knew the message had gotten across – mind reading and all that.

"One last thing – and the real reason why I am here in the first place," Ivian said, then turned around and looked straight into my eyes. "Protect Ivian, please. He is both innocent and a crucial piece in the events unfolding at the moment."

And I knew the words to be true. I knew, and not because of a vague sense of intuition or some false feeling of certainty appearing in my head – in that instant, I saw inside the other Ivian's mind and into the details of the last few days. I saw who Ivian was, how he was leading a life unaware of anything supernatural. I saw his interests and his studies. I saw how he had been in the wrong place and at the wrong time last night. I saw details of the attacks which I was not aware of – how he had unwittingly attracted attention the second time by experimenting with magic, how he had dealt with the second vampire. Most importantly, though, I saw exactly what I wanted – everything that my brain asked for was freely given, in honest and crystal clear detail. And if there is one good thing about a soul gaze, it would be fact that lying is not possible.

The instant passed, and after I blinked, Ivian was gone, leaving only the backdrop of space. I expected the soul gaze to end right there, but it did not. Instead, something weird happened – the galaxies started shifting around, rearranging in different patterns. They flickered and churned, completely chaotically. This went on for some time, unsettling in its weirdness, and I was starting to wonder what the hell was going on, when Ivian appeared again. Not the clear and authoritative image that had spoken to me a minute ago, but a semi-transparent, disheveled young teenager, wearing an absolutely ridiculous sweater. He was holding a felt-tip pen, complete with a transparent white board in front of him. He started scribbling furiously on it, d over d t, something or other. It made no sense to me, but I guessed it was math as it had that distinctive form. In the background, the chaos started dying down - the galaxies stopped flickering and changing appearance, and began moving in a more orderly fashion with each stroke of the pen.

It didn't take long for the picture to become relatively still again. Ivian, however, did not look satisfied. The image of him paced back and forth around the whiteboard.

"I need a better representation," he muttered.

Ghostly white lines began appearing all around us, making some sort of a net, stretching out infinitely in space, like a perfect grid. Then it started bending, not just anywhere, but around the shapes of the galaxies. Ripples started flowing along the lines and the tones of the picture shifted a bit.

"There," he said with evident satisfaction. "Thank you, Einstein."

Both Ivian and the stars vanished. For a few seconds, the darkness was absolute. Then, with the same complete lack of forewarning with which everything had disappeared, a ridiculously large hall appeared. I looked around and examined my surroundings. The style was modern, with unremarkable dark tiles covering the floor and walls and artificial white light coming from glass slots for lamps in the ceiling. While the decoration of the huge room wasn't anything impressive, though, the contents of the room were certainly capable of raising a few eyebrows. There were shelves and tables closely packed together along the whole span of the 300 or so yards of the hall. Some held neatly organized books, maps and charts of every description. Most of them held electronic equipment, though – computers and various other pieces of technology that I wasn't familiar with. Nothing exploded in a shower of sparks in the imaginary room and - relieved that in there at least I wouldn't break anything by virtue of my presence - I turned my attention back to the room and spotted Ivian walking along the tables. At some of them he stopped and hit a few keys on a computer, or pulled out a map and made a few adjustments. He slowly made his way towards the middle of the room where I was.

"What is the point of all that," I wondered out loud, "and why do you so diligently keep it up to date?"

Ivian gave no indication that he was listening to me. Whoever the other, more serene Ivian had been, he no longer seemed to be there. I was back to seeing a normal soul gaze, if anything happening around that boy could be called normal.

"Having an accurate map of the territory," Ivian said, "has proven to be quite effective for winning."

That almost made me jump. The image still didn't give any indication that it recognized me, but that last comment was suspiciously close to a direct answer to my question.

"Winning what," I probed.

My attention was drawn to a large screen on a table a few feet away from where I was standing. It flickered to life, displaying a picture of Earth. It started spinning furiously and the view zoomed out to show the whole solar system. Little dots started moving away from Earth, only a few at first, but rapidly increasing in number. Some of them orbited around in space, others landed on the rest of the planets.

Was that the real reason – colonizing space?

Something flashed in Ivian's eyes.

"Not that, just a means to an end," he said, now standing right next to me, and dismissed the image on the screen with a wave of his hand. It was instead replaced with more equations. He was still conspicuously ignoring me, looking everywhere else instead. "I want mankind to matter. To explore the world and use the resources for solving every important problem."

Suddenly, he stared at me directly.

"I want us to have Fun – until we have exhausted every single bit of useful energy in the universe, even beyond that if there is a way."

With a rushing sensation, the hall blurred and shifted back to my living room. I blinked several times, getting used to the real world again. Ivian had a wide-eyed expression of shock frozen on his face and for once, he was actually speechless. I didn't count on that lasting long, though.

"Alright," I said. "I'm even more confused than I was a minute ago, but I know one thing for certain – you are no dark wizard."

After that experience, I was pretty certain that there wasn't any need to report Ivian to the council. I had to teach him enough self-control for him not to call upon mind magic again by accident, but other than that I saw him posing no danger. No, he may have been a lot of things, but twisted an evil didn't belong to that list, however far you decide to extend it.