Thorn hurled his awareness into the void, an expanding bubble of consciousness that raced away from him at the speed of thought. His perception embraced the incandescent fury of stars, the gentle drift of dust and gas, and everything in between. In this version of reality, his daughter was dead. That was a truth. But it wasn’t Thorn’s truth. His truth was what he made it. His universe was the one he shaped around himself.
So, like a potter with clay upon a wheel, he began to shape and nudge creation. He drew power from the infinite reservoir of the ether, the place where magic lived. It was a task both delicate and monumental, altering all of reality to bring back into existence one little girl.
He paused, frowning. It wasn’t enough. This wasn’t like bringing Trixie back from extinction, because she was an AI. For despite all, she was a thing. Incredibly lifelike, but ultimately lifeless. Nor was this like changing the way an Alcubierre drive worked, or rebooting the universe to one where he could move fleets with his thoughts. All of those things were just matter and energy. None of them were alive.
But his daughter wasn’t just matter and energy. She had thoughts. Dreams. Things she liked and disliked, for no reason more complex than because she did. Things she had come to—or had started to—believe, others that she disbelieved. She’d begun to craft values for herself, things that would come to inform and shape her life.
Some might say she had a soul—whatever a soul was. It might just be a name for the totality of who and what a person was. It might be something more, the actual spark of life that turned matter and energy into a living, vital being. Thorn didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do.
Thorn reached out across the gulfs between the stars. He swept up handfuls of elementary particles, of the emanations of stars, of actual star dust itself. These were the building blocks, the things from which all other things were derived. When he’d gathered a vast cloud of this stuff of creation around him, he reached out again, this time for the savaged ruins of the planet called Nebo.
There. A scorched, blasted surface, bedrock scoured bare by the fury of fire and shockwaves. He remembered how he had seen it from the Hecate’s orbit, pocked with massive impact craters, some of them still glowing. But he also remembered how it appeared in the Vision, verdant and pastoral. The kind of place where a little girl should be able to grow up and grow old.
He focused now on the girl herself, in those gentle, innocent moments before the world literally ended.
His daughter.
Thorn began to knead the stardust and other things he’d drawn to himself, pushing creation into a new truth. The only truth. His truth.
Substance took form. Form evolved, becoming identity. From nothing, Thorn built everything that was, and would be, the person known as—
Morgan. Her name was Morgan—
Daddy?
Like him, she drifted among the stars. Otherwise, she was exactly how he remembered her from the Vision. She was whole. She had always been whole. That was the truth, the only one that mattered.
He smiled at her across the Void. I’m here, Morgan, he said. I’m here. Daddy’s here.
Daddy, I can’t see you!
That’s okay. I’m right here. We’ll be together soon.
It was working. He was bringing her back. He would make her whole again and, in the process, make himself whole. Make Kira whole.
Thorn grinned as bright as a thousand stars—
But it faded, like the cooling residue of a supernova.
As he shaped and chipped and carved reality, smoothing it toward the final shape he sought, he hesitated. Morgan was a Starcaster, because of course she was. How could she not be, considering who her parents were?
Daddy, where are you?
I’m here, Morgan. I’ll always be here.
But I can’t see you! I can’t find you!
We’ll be together very soon, I promise.
A Starcaster, and a powerful one. Her death had resonated through the ether, propagating across it in a wave of anguish and terror. A powerful ’caster. As powerful as he was. A Conduit, like him, and only like him. There were no other Conduits, not so far. She could accomplish great things, monumental things, with her powers—
But.
But she was just a little girl. And that was probably why the squids had killed her. They’d somehow found out about her and knew they had to strike before she got her Starcasting feet under her. Even then, untrained and unaware what magic really was, she’d managed to outright stop the Nyctus KEW strikes on Nebo. For a time, at least. Grown into a full understanding of her power, she could prove decisive in the war. The squids couldn’t let that happen. So, they’d killed an entire planet, all to kill a little girl before she ever became anything more.
Images erupted from Thorn’s memory and flashed through his mind. Some were fragmentary, like still photographs, some like bursts of video. After he’d been taken off Cotswold and placed into the care of a bureaucracy never designed to handle literally tens of thousands of orphans at a time, he’d skipped and bounced from one place to another. Every time, his uncontrolled manifestations of magical power had mired him in trouble. He started fires. He caused small floods. He caused things to fling themselves across rooms. Foster parents and orphanage staff, at first suspicious, reacted with ever-mounting fear.
Thorn would be thrown out of one place, then shuffled to another, often on a different planet. Sometimes he just ran away. Twice he found himself alone on the cold, neon streets of a vast and unfamiliar city. Sometimes he was beaten.
Once, he’d been seized and taken away by dour police in the middle of the night. He later learned that a scheme was starting to coalesce, one that would see Thorn die under apparently accidental circumstances.
It was the Twenty-Fourth Century, and he’d almost been the victim of a literal witch hunt.
And all of it had eventually led him to where Kira had found him, expecting to end his days mucking toxic sludge under cold, leaden skies.
But it would be worse for Morgan. Magic wasn’t something stuck in the transition between superstitious fantasy and hard reality anymore. Magic was well known. It might still be poorly understood, but its potential was clear. Thorn had demonstrated it himself, many times.
Morgan would be seen not as a freak of nature, to be feared and shunned and despised.
She’d be seen as a weapon.
Morgan didn’t deserve that. Morgan deserved a chance to be a little girl, to grow up, to lead a normal life.
Daddy—!
Almost, Morgan. Just a little bit longer.
Thorn began to reshape part of this new truth, nudging it from where Morgan’s inherent nature was taking it, diverting it somewhere else. He would remake her, but not as a Starcaster. Not only would he bring her back without any access to magic, but he would also take away any desire to be a ’caster. He would ensure she would live a long and happy life, because wasn’t that a father’s ultimate duty to his children?
Daddy—
Nearly there, Morgan.
Daddy—it’s different. It’s wrong. It’s wrong!
Thorn pushed harder at the clay of creation, but it resisted him more and more. Something was stiffening it, rendering it ever less pliant, making it push back against his will.
She was fighting back. Maybe not deliberately, maybe because she was driven by primal instinct to protect these things that were part of her. She was fighting his efforts, and she was very, very powerful—