This is a fan translation of School Oversight (Школьный надзор) by Sergei Lukyanenko and Arkady Shushpanov. The novel is a spin-off of the Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko.

I claim no rights to the contents herein.

Note: Footnotes can be found at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 4

It was impossible to forget one's moment of initiation. Especially if one went through the ritual as an adult, when the intensity of experiences wasn't as deep, but here the emotions went wild, as if one was still a child. As Dmitry was able to confirm, the second time wasn't as impressive. He'd already known what was going to happen. But he still felt himself a little stunned. As if someone had hit him over the head with a dusty sack, producing such a cloud of dust that the world around him was almost gray.

Because of that illusory stun, the literature teacher barely remembered the process itself and the sensations when Anna was reading the Fuaran spell over him, leaving a drop of blood from a vial onto the notebook's page. He didn't immediately understand why it was necessary and what exactly had happened.

"Enter the Twilight yourself," Artyom Komarov said in a commanding tone.

Now Dmitry lifted the shadow from the brick dust himself and stepped into it.

He was standing in front of the same balustrade of the Granite Terrace, but it looks as if in an old photograph. Farther away ran the gentle slope down to the pier on the shore of the Great Pond, and in the distance, separated the gray water, stood the Hall on the Island Pavilion.

But something had changed. Dmitry didn't realize what right away. He even stepped out of the Twilight and entered it again.

Anatoly Klyushkin and Stas Alekseyenko giggled.

Then Dreher realized what it was.

He didn't count how many statues there were on the terrace. But he could see only one on the slope. A man's figure in a toga, with his hand stretched out a little to the right. The memories implanted by Strigal told him that it was the sculpture of a Roman emperor.

There were more statues in the Twilight. There were three on the slope. Emperor Nerva, who turned out to be in the middle now, was the shortest of them, with the other two towering over him from both sides.

Nothing in his guidebook memories told him about these two unknown sculptures. But Dmitry, with his newly regained senses of an Other, knew that, being seen only in the Twilight, they served as part of the same composition and had appeared a lot earlier than the statue of the Roman.

The Twilight sculptures were also facing away from the terrace. It remained unclear who they were portraying. The figures were dressed in long clothes that fell down in folds and strange-looking hats. Their hands—left on one, right on the other—were also stretched out to the side, as if they were making magical gestures. The positioning of the fingers, clearly visible from Dreher's spot, also hinted as specific thoughts.

One statue was made of light-colored marble, the other from dark.

"You should see yourself, Mr. Dreher!" the eternal optimist Anatoly Klyushkin chuckled, appearing on the first layer.

The other Dead Poets followed him and appeared around Dmitry. Only Artyom Komarov had remained there after the Overseer's initiation.

"How long have they been here?" Dreher indicated the statues of the Light and Dark Others.

"We don't know," Karen answered for everyone with the important look of an experienced historian. "Probably already stood here in Catherine's time."

"There was a tsar's toboggan here that led straight to the island," Dmitry quoted his internal guidebook. "The Bronze Emperor was placed later. Which means that these two were standing on both sides of the toboggan."

"Humans didn't see them anyway," Anna noted.

"Are there any others like it in the park?"

"More than you think," Karen said and pointed behind them. "And not just statues. There's a Twilight pavilion on the Parnas Mountain. From there you can go down underground. There are tunnels under the park, which can only be accessed in the Twilight. One even has rails!"

"I was told there are many discharged artifacts here. Like at the Museum of the History of Religion."

"You weren't told the important part," Artyom Komarov said.

"Which is?"

"Take a look at the aura."

The Twilight was suddenly filled with… no, not with color. With flashes, oscillations, glints. The teacher felt the Power flowing around him. He felt as if he was being hit with sprays from an unseen fountain that was located nearby. He could also feel currents. Directions, lines of Power that seemed to be passing near him.

"I don't understand," Dreher admitted.

"It's one giant artifact," Anna said. "The entire park, both parks even. With the palaces and everything else."

"There are special relay stones here. In the palace walls, in the monuments, in the bridges, in the ground itself," Karen explained. "If you close the entire circuit, then it'll look like a huge magical symbol. A Power accumulator."

"There shouldn't be any Others here." Dmitry recalled what Owl Head had told him. And he had to know his artifacts, being in charge of their main vault in the Old World.

"There weren't any," Karen said. "When we came here, the circuit was ruined. Probably from the war. We had to change a few things, place new points. Anna recreated the diagram with all the magical circles."

Of course, where would you be without her? Dreher thought. He gave Golubeva a piercing look through the Twilight, checking to see if her seal of the Punishing Flame was still intact.

There wasn't a trace left of the seal, just like his own.

Anna also looked at him, realized where his gaze was directed, and looked embarrassed.

"I was also initiated a second time," the girl said. "Only Fuaran doesn't seem to work for me the way it does on the others. I was a jinn before and still am. But I no longer have a 'color'."

Dmitry could see that too. He once again studied each of the Dead Poets. Their aura really was neutral. No Darkness or Light. But there was also no Gray shade like with all the Inquisitors either.

Dmitry knew that such phenomenon was known. It even had a name: Own Fate. But, as a rule, Own Fate was seen extremely rarely and only with weak, barely initiated mages. But here it was with everyone. And they weren't weak, as Dmitry could clearly see the intensity of their auras.

Darkness damn it, they were all Higher ones. Except for Golubeva.

The Poets laughed.

"Mr. Dreher, did you really think we were lying?" Komarov inquired.

"No, of course not…" it was Dreher's turn to look embarrassed.

"We wouldn't have made you an Other if we were. By the way, your aura is also white now, without any Darkness or Light. And you're a Higher one too."

"I don't know if I should thank you for a gift like that…"

"Consider it a repaid debt. With interest."

"Then you've restored the circuit?"

"Yeah. We've completed the renovation," Karen informed him proudly.

"How did you even learn about it?" Dmitry glanced at Anna.

"It was Stas." The girl nodded at Alekseyenko. "When we went to the museum, the one about religion, he flipped through many books on the displays. He found a mention of the Lyceum. While we were riding in the train, he told me, Anatoly, and Karen. Then I asked him to write it all down on paper, read it, and… First I copied this book, then recreated the others."

"So while I was in Prague, you were doing your 'malaria'," Dmitry summarized sternly.

The girl lowered her gaze.

A Twilight aurora was shimmering over the Granite Terrace, the Great Pond, the meadows, groves, and alleys. Like fireworks for entertaining royal guests that was continuing for nearly two hundred years.

It had also continued when there was a Nazi cemetery coming down to the pond, when there were mines hidden in the soil, and when a flag with a swastika was fluttering over the Catherine Palace.

If wind was blowing somewhere, sooner or later someone was going to place a windmill there. But who had placed this one and what was it supposed to mill? More importantly, why hadn't it milled anything?

"Fine, nothing to be done about that," Dmitry sighed, producing steam from his mouth, which always happened on the first layer. "Did your books say when the circuit was created?"

"Not when it began," Anna replied. "But the first time it was closed when the Lyceum stood here."

"By whom?"

"Can't you figure it out?"

"Don't tell me…"

"Our school wasn't the first," the girl said. "Didn't you know?"

"No." Dmitry shook his head.

He couldn't believe it. But… then again, he had believed himself after figuring out who Alexander was.

"We thought you went to the Lyceum because you knew. That's why you were looking for us there."

"It can't be," Dmitry said. "The Imperial Lyceum was not a school for Others. Only humans studied there, they spent their entire lives in plain sight!"

"That's just the official version," Artyom Komarov chuckled. "You know what it's like to trust official versions. After all, our school isn't located in the Twilight and is also supposed to be an elite learning institution. For the particularly gifted. Graduates receive normal human diplomas."

"Our boarding school is out of the way, on the outskirts, in a forest. In a provincial city, not across the street from the imperial palace! The Others of the nineteenth century were no different from the Others of the twenty-first. They didn't reveal themselves to humans, they didn't rule countries!"

"But they always interfered," Karen pointed out.

"That's a very big interference!"

"You were the one who told us that the Inquisition had sanctioned the arrival of the Nazis," Anna parried. "No German soldier would've ever set foot in here…"

Dreher recalled Emperor Paul, who hadn't been allowed to become who he could've been out of higher considerations.

"After all this, you don't believe us?" Artyom asked.

This time the teacher recalled Strigal, asking if he was going to refuse after everything he'd seen.

"They couldn't have all been Others," Dreher said. "You can't conceal something like that. Nearly all members of the first graduating class left some trace on history. There are biographies, documents… So many of them became Decembrists! [Footnote 1] Can you imagine an Other who wouldn't have been able to escape from the Third Section?" [Footnote 2]

"No one said it was all of them. Only seven. Three Dark and three Light ones."

"The numbers don't add up."

"And one more with an indeterminate aura. He was accepted as a potential Mirror. You know what that is, right?"

Yes, the Inquisitors were taught that. A weak mage with a clean aura, who hadn't managed or hadn't wanted to lean towards either the Light or the Darkness. If one of the two sides in the great rivalry began tilting the odds dangerously in its favor, the Mirror would, against its will, come to the aid of the other, restoring the balance. Afterwards it would vanish into the Twilight when it became dangerously powerful itself.

"So who was that… potential Mirror?"

The Poets again exchanged glances.

"Him," Karen said. "The one you thought."

"That can't be. He was human. I know that for a fact. I'm an Inquisitor, after all!"

Dmitry recalled Alexander reciting "The Demon" to him when they were on their way to catch Chizhov and his buddies. A typical recruitment strategy of the Dark ones, he'd told him.

Of course, considering everything the alleged curator from the Inquisition had done and said, he might not believe him fully. But then why would Alexander have even talk about that?

"If someone was human their entire life, it doesn't mean they couldn't be an Other."

Dmitry once again thought of the owner of Saint Michael's Castle. Then he remembered Pushkin's words, "I have seen three Tsars: the first ordered my little cap to be taken off me, and gave my nurse a scolding on my account…" [Footnote 3]

"Let's go take a seat," Artyom offered. "There's a bench over there. We'll tell you everything we know."

They came out of the Twilight and sat on the bench closest to the terrace on the Ramp Alley. Dmitry noted that the sky was beginning to grow dark.

This was probably the most saturated day in his entire life, especially in terms of the revelations he'd experienced. And the day wasn't over yet.

Dreher turns out to sit exactly in the middle. To the right of him was Artyom and Golubeva with Karen and Alekseyenko sitting on the left.

Klyushkin informed them that he'd already sat plenty.

"Where are the others, by the way?" Dmitry asked. "Ivan, Masha, Bureev?"

"On patrol. It's their turn," Komarov replied and asked in the voice of a professor administering an exam, "What do you know about the Lyceum?"

"I've told you what I know. An institution of higher education unique for Russia of that time, meant for royal children and future government officials. They wanted to raise enlightened European-level figures, and, oh, they got them…"

"Does it remind you of anything?"

"Should it?"

"Of a typical attempt of the Light ones." Artyom glanced at Golubeva. The girl grimaced but said nothing. "This isn't taught at the school, but we Dark ones talk about stuff like that a lot. Between us."

Dmitry pictured a kitchen, where dependable vampires drank coffee (they couldn't tolerate alcohol, after all), smoked, and talked about life, like typical office workers.

"Very well, then give me a history lesson, as one Higher one to another."

"What's there to teach? The first such serious attempt to change humans was the French Revolution."

"The Light ones didn't start it."

"They supported it, the Inquisition allowed it, and the Dark ones didn't object. As usual. Well, back then it wasn't as usual yet. But it didn't work out with the revolution, plus the Light and the Dark ones did manage to get into a fight. Then they decided to move the testing ground somewhere farther away. Where no one would care. To some far-off northern country with bears. Especially since changes were coming there… Only this time they realized that the Light and the Darkness couldn't defeat each other easily. So they decided to try to teach them live with each other in peace. Again, does it remind you of anything?"

"It does," Dreher agreed gloomily.

"There weren't really Watch school yet. One in Saint Petersburg, one in Moscow, and one in Kyiv. They taught the old way, master-and-apprentice style. And here they were establishing the Lyceum. Naturally, our people aren't going to stay on the sidelines. So someone produced a brilliant idea to teach mages among humans, an even number of Dark and Light ones. In order to move theirs up in the world without a lot of brainwashing and enchanting humans. After all, not all Others were nobility back then. Let the future elite of the Watches to study along with the human elite. In order to create a harmonic nation which both had a constitution and kept to the Treaty.

"The Watches are led by the Great ones," Dreher said and then immediately thought about the current weak Night and Day Watches of Saint Petersburg. Then again, it wasn't he capital anymore.

"All six were potential Higher ones."

"Who?" Dmitry thought that his heart would skip a beat for the umpteenth time today when Artyom spoke the familiar names.

"Unknown," Anna said instead of Komarov.

"How is that possible?"

"Easy!" Anatoly Klyushkin picked up cheerfully. "History is silent on the matter."

"We can only guess," the girl went on. "The book… well, the one Stas saw at the museum, had a reference to a memo sent to the Saint Petersburg division of the Inquisition. I managed to… draw a copy of it. There aren't any names there. Not even which of them was the Mirror…"

"Then why are you messing with me?!" Dreher nearly leapt to his feet. He had a phantom hope that everything but Fuaran and the Deinitiation would turn out to be made up.

"Mr. Dreher, let us finish telling you," Anna said quietly. "Then you can decide for yourself."

"Fine," the teacher slumped.

"Long story short," Komarov spoke again. "There was a problem with the Others at the Lyceum. They became friends. They also realized that the difference between them and humans is in choice. They all studied together, except the Others had additional courses when everyone else was resting. No one knew who didn't have to. There were so many Spheres of Inattention there. Basically, they decided they had to unite the Dark and the Light ones. For the common good. It was the Lyceum's motto. Even the Dark ones were patriots back then, not like now…"

"Many Dark ones fought the Nazis," Dmitry said.

Yes, that was taught in history. Vampires went on recon missions through the Twilight, sometimes even earning medals. Village witches would hex the occupiers or sent Hitler's squads into the wilderness and swamps. Werewolf guerillas tore punitive expeditions to shreds in the woods, and there were many cases of voluntary initiation.

"They had a course on substance magic, they taught them how to make artifacts," Artyom went on. "One even turned out to be gifted in math. He calculated how everything needed to be placed, so they began to secretly charge everything up. Especially since a part of the circuit was already in existence, someone else had done that under Catherine and before her. Napoleon was on the march, they wanted to build a magical weapon against him at first. They wouldn't send them to fight, so they wanted to hit the French straight from the school."

"Do you remember: the army flowed behind the army…" [Footnote 4] Dreher recited. "But they didn't use it, did they?"

"This park with the palaces is like a giant magical lens. It can be focused on something and send any spell there. Or it can be made to spread in ripples. Like a blast wave."

"Hold on," Dreher realized suddenly. "They didn't have the Fuaran spell!"

"It's way easier to take an Other's abilities away than to give them to a human," Anna said.

Dmitry knew that perfectly well too. One of the lightest sentences for crimes against the Treaty was either total or partial deprivation of magic. Then the Inquisition placed a special seal. It liked placing seals.

"It's just that even I was able to do that with Fuaran…"

"So why didn't they do it?"

"That we don't know. They were probably discovered. Their abilities were taken away and their memories wiped."

That was humane, Dreher thought. To live an entire life knowing that one used to be a wizard wasn't something even an adult might be able to handle. And those had been teenagers.

Then again, when had the Inquisition ever cared about being humane? More likely, the memory block had been necessary to hide the design of the artifact. This wasn't a static portal. That was also why all Others had been removed from Tsarskoye Selo. Owl Head himself had probably made sure of that, taking the most valuable stones back to Europe. At the time, the Bureau hadn't been headquarters in Prague, and it hadn't even been called that. It was the Old World Chancellery.

Then Dmitry had an epiphany.

The teacher once again thought of Alexander. Had he been the one to name the institution "Lyceum" after the school of his teacher Aristotle when the project was being discussed at the Inquisition? That would explain why Aristotle's portrait was hanging in the office of their Director Sorokin in the line of the great teachers of the past.

He wondered if Sorokin knew.

"There's no way to prove any of it," Dreher said. "We can't consider the book and the memo. They appeared the same way as Mr. Hyde's serum made up by Stevenson. Sorry, Anna, but your abilities don't distinguish between creating truth or fiction."

"I know…" Golubeva agreed with a strangely guilty expression.

A lot of it made sense, though. He could even take a guess at the identities of those seven demoted Others. The same structures of the central nervous system that were responsible for magic, usually caused the development of other abilities when without "power". Was that where the delicate diplomatic talent of the future Chancellor of the Russian Empire Gorchakov had come from? What about the poetic gifts of a number of his friends? Was Pushkin's superstition a relic of his ability to see probability lines? One also shouldn't discount the source of Power that was anomalously beneficial to the Ingrian swamps.

It even fit together with Alexander's comment about "The Demon." Only the higher ups of the Inquisition and the heads of the Watches had probably been aware of a social experiment of such magnitude. Zabulon himself had lived in England at the time, while Gesar was in the East. Some of the rank-and-file Dark ones might have seen the young poet's unusual aura. Or maybe even realized that by his poetry. And then decided to tilt him to their side following the usual scenario. They'd probably been invited to the Saint Petersburg Inquisition and told, "Dear sir! We insistently request that you leave your attempts at inducting the young man into the Others, as well as any communication with him. The young man in question is under our covert surveillance…" Or maybe they hadn't even explained anything.

"We have no intention of trying to prove anything," Artyom's voice interrupted Dreher's musings. "We'll just do what they couldn't. And no one is going to stop us. Even if they drop a bomb on Tsarskoye Selo, it's not going to reach us. You can tell that to your bosses."

"All right." Dmitry finally rose. "I will."

"Mr. Dreher, please don't come here again until it's all over," Karen said. "Or you're going to lose all your Power."

"It's okay," Dreher replied. "Wouldn't be the first time."

Just then, he could've opened a portal, or at least tried to. But he didn't, instead walking back to the Catherine Palace and the Cameron Gallery. He didn't even look back.

The raven once again cawed somewhere in the branches.

Strigal was waiting for Dmitry in a small park not far from the Egyptian Gate. Dreher felt a small measure of respect for the former Overseer's bravery, as the Dead Poets could've easily struck him. And yet the Inquisition had come personally instead of communicating via the Twilight while remaining at the conference room in Saint Petersburg.

They also sat down on a bench. They could see the monument to Pushkin from there.

"Did you know?.." Dreher asked.

"I was aware," Strigal replied.

"But decided not to tell me."

"I'd need Dunkel's authorization for that. He didn't believe in the seriousness of it all until the last moment."

"Then you know what's in there."

"Show me everything, teacher Dreher."

Fighting against his own reservations, Dmitry sent Strigal the mental image of the encounter. It took the Inquisitor only a few seconds to decipher it.

"So all they're waiting for is for the circuit to charge and achieve full power," he said, staring past Dreher. He was probably talking to Edgar or even Owl Head himself. Or maybe with the entire assembly at once.

"I need help," Dmitry said. "Then I'll be able to convince them. I have to know what they don't. Why didn't the artifact work back then? Why did the Lyceum stay open instead of being shut down? They stayed there, within the circuit…"

Strigal slowly turned his head to him. Something was different in his gaze, causing Dmitry to fall silent.

It was as if the Inquisitor had forgotten how to blink.

"Young man!" Strigal said. It was as if his mouth hadn't even opened.

"Grandmaster!" Dreher asked with a dumb expression.

"Konstantin has graciously agreed to serve as an avatar. He won't hear our conversation. No one will. Enter the shadow, young man."

Dmitry obediently followed the… no, it wasn't a request or an order. A decree, there was no other way to put it.

In the Twilight, the former senior Overseer of the school looked even more like Dunkel, as if someone had applied makeup to him. Not a hundred percent, but at least eighty.

"I don't want the children to be hurt, Grandmaster."

"They will if they do what they plan to. We all will. All Others and all humans."

"How were they… stopped?" Dmitry wanted to say "Lyceum students" but couldn't, but Carmadon understood him perfectly.

"They weren't stopped. They refused on their own. Moreover, they were the ones who ruined their own creation. Once they realized that they'd opened Pandora's Box, they gave up their Power and abilities to close it. After that they became ordinary humans. The Inquisition felt it necessary to wipe their memories."

There it was, Dmitry thought. The Dead Poets were restoring an artifact that had been sealed away by its own creators. Indeed, it didn't seem likely that they'd be able to charge up such a powerful and power-hungry thing on a natural source of Power. No, they'd been simply breaking through the lock placed by the students of the first mixed school for Others.

"What is the Twilight, young man?" Carmadon asked randomly.

Dmitry thought about it. He had a ready answer, of course. The courses in Prague hadn't added anything significant to that answer, only providing the knowledge that there were more layers in the Twilight than Cadet Dreher had imagined.

Personally, Dmitry was used to thinking of the Twilight as one of Earth's spheres. There was the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere. So there had to also be a… magosphere.

But Owl Head wasn't asking without a good reason.

"Another dimension," Dmitry guessed.

"A dimension of what?"

"Reality."

"What reality?"

"Ours…" Dreher felt himself get dumber and dumber.

"Not ours." Carmadon was still speaking with the mouth barely opening. Then again, the Twilight erased the difference between the spoken word and the thought. "The Twilight is the reflection of the human reality. Only human reality. Just like Power is the derivative of life. As you know, the Others also emit Power, but that ability is due to their relation to humans, nothing more. Just like the ability to feed our young with milk relates us to many living beings. The Twilight was borne by humans. We Others have been speculatively studying it for thousands of years, accumulating the information, but only the bravest of us have come close to understanding what it is. It's a reflection of humanity, but not a direct one. Like a mirror that shows the back of your head, whichever way you turn. The Twilight is the agglomeration of everything humanity can't use. Perhaps it's a consequence of man being created in the image of the Creator… But a single mortal is too small and too sinful to create a new living world. But they managed to do that together without even knowing it. Each added a piece of themselves. Maybe this new world carries within itself knowledge of all the humans that had ever lived, their dreams, thoughts, etc. We Others can only extract it…"

Dmitry thought about the jinns. Was that their secret, the mysterious mechanism of their gift? Carmadon was probably thinking about that too.

Then Dreher recalled the story about the initiated and defleshed Saint Petersburg. And that cities with the population of over a million were capable of becoming Others, attaining self-awareness. There were a lot more than a million people on Earth. So if even a city could become a sentient wizard, than what was there to say about the entire planet?

Which meant that the Twilight…

"That is exactly right, young man," Carmadon informed him. Of course, Dmitry had no intention of shielding his thoughts. "The Twilight is a thinking substance. A meta-Other, if you will. Humanity's illegitimate child. The only one it turned out to be capable of creating in its own image. Maybe if humanity was even a little different, the first layer would've been significantly warmer."

"I assumed that we were humanity's children," Dmitry said. "Maybe we're the next step in evolution. As far as I know, there weren't any Others among the Neanderthals. At the very least, none of them lived to the present day. The venerable Hena is a Cro-Magnon, isn't he?"

"Hena remembers the Neanderthals, young man. There were Others among them too. Just very few. Vanishingly few. That was why Hena's people came out on top. But not because there were shamans and werewolves among them… there hadn't been any vampires in those distant times yet. [Footnote 5] But the Others already realized that they were Others. Children of humanity… Sure, it sounds noble and speaks of the lofty nature of the one to think up that image. But… some human healers still make use of medicinal leeches. These creatures helped save the lives of many people, but no one calls them children of humanity. Just leeches. Well, we're basically such medicinal parasites."

"I don't understand, Grandmaster…"

"Maybe the Twilight did exist before humans came to be, like a thoughtless natural entity, like a creation of the Power being exuded by other organisms. But when humans appeared, it changed. It became more like humans. I doubt it would've become self-aware on its own. At first, there were a lot fewer humans than now, and the Twilight still had a lot of animalistic in it. No wonder nearly all the ancient Others are either weres or shifter shamans. And believe me, there's almost no difference. Then the number of humans kept growing, which means the amount of Power they produced grew too. Especially when world history began instead of just a bunch of tribes fighting. The Twilight needs a lot of magic, but far from all of it. If you like, it won't be able to digest it all and will vomit it back into our reality. That's how great turmoil happens. The Biblical flood, the destruction of continents…"

"But it's intelligent. It has to understand!"

"A child of humanity can't be better than humans themselves. Besides, children can't control themselves as well as adults yet. The Twilight is growing and developing. It didn't always have this many layers. Maybe in time it's going to adapt to the billions of humans producing this much Power. But all this time we've been helping it. Yes, young man, the Others. Medicinal leeches sucking out bad blood. It needs all of us. Vampires, healers, jinns, Light and Dark ones. All kinds. We drink the blood of humans, sacfirice them, biting their throats, and removing their strength of spirit. But even this way we protect humans from a far greater evil. We protect them from their own Shadow."

Dmitry thought about the Dead Poets and Anna's serum. If an Other could have a Twilight double, then why couldn't all humans put together?

"If all of us are medicinal leeches, Grandmaster, why do we need 'colors'? What's keeping us from being like humans, just with magic?"

"Because our struggle is what's creating the tension necessary to restrain the Twilight. If we lived in peace or, on the contrary, split up into a multitude of tiny alliances, we'd be using a lot less Power. We need a great rivalry, great goals. The Light ones need to fix the world, the Dark ones want the freedom to do whatever they want. Look at human history. Minor clashes of tribes turned into wars between kingdoms and then into rivalries between nations. The greater the powers fought one another, the more they needed for that. War is an expensive thing, but it's also highly destructive. So a truce is more beneficial. Not peace. A truce."

"A cold war," Dmitry added.

"Yes, in the end, even the humans came down to the truce between two worldviews rather than nations. The Others also didn't immediately separate into the Dark and Light ones, and it took even longer for their rivalry to produce the Treaty."

"Wars restrain humanity."

"Young man, it's still permissible for you to speak in slogans. But is that the case? Only half a century ago, during the so-called Cold War, humans overtook the Others in their capabilities. A few decades decided what millennia could not. Humans even learned to fly to the Moon, while to us it still remains merely a shadowy celestial luminary. And who goes to the Moon now that the world has returned to internecine wars?"

Dmitry didn't answer. Instead he raised his head. The moon had already risen, its disk white with dark bluish blots of its waterless seas. He'd never really been interested in space.

His work hadn't let him look into why humans hadn't built lunar cities in half a century, even though they could go into orbit when a single computer was the size of a room.

In Strigal's body, Carmadon held an understanding pause before concluding, "To erase the difference between the Light and the Dark ones is to throw us back to the time with many small and hot wars instead of a single cold war. When the Others begin to choose like humans and the same thing as humans. And while we're doing that, there won't be anyone left between the humans and the Twilight."

Footnotes

1) The Decembrist Revolt took place in Russia in December of 1825 following the unexpected death of Emperor Alexander I, as a result of the heir apparent Konstantin privately refusing the throne but not making it public and his younger brother Nicholas accepting the succession. Approximately 3000 soldiers attempted to stage a coup in favor of Konstantin but were soundly defeated by the loyalist troops. Many of the surviving Decembrists were hanged, jailed, or exiled to Siberia.

2) The Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery was basically the secret police in 19th-century Russia.

3) This is from a letter written by Alexander Pushkin to his wife Natalya regarding the ceremony for the future Alexander II.

4) This is from Alexander Pushkin's 1836 poem "It Was Time: Our Holiday Is Young…"

5) This is contradicted in Sixth Watch, which was pushed the following year, which states that vampires were the first Others to appear in the world, followed by the werewolves. In fact, the book's main character runs into a Neanderthal vampire.