This was one of the reasons people feared makers. They didn’t think in terms of the impossible, only in terms of how something might be done. What Merritt was describing was unconventional thinking that, to most people, bordered on madness.

“But you could change the person you turned into a Confessor back, right? I mean, if—”

“Change them back?” He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Once I altered them, the power would become an integral part of the person, inseparable from who they become. Once altered in this way, they would forever be a Confessor. There could be no going back. Once done, it can’t be undone.”

Magda was feeling sick to her stomach. “So how would this power you would invest in a person actually work?”

“When a Confessor unleashes their power into someone, the Subtractive side of it would destroy who the person was.”

“It would kill them?”

“No, not really, not in the conventional sense.”

Magda leaned in with a frown. “What does that mean?”

“I mean, no, it wouldn’t kill them.” He gestured, seemingly reluctant to explain, but finally he did. “The way I’ve created the web, it’s narrowly targeted. Fine threads of Subtractive Magic would burn through the target person’s mind like lightning crashing through a tree, all the way down through its roots, to obliterate their identity.

“So, in that sense, who they once were would be dead. They can never regain what is eliminated with the Subtractive side of the Confessor’s power. They are alive, but who they were no longer exists. What it means to be that person is gone.”

“So what would exist for them?”

“In place of who they were, in place of what the Subtractive Magic destroys, the Additive Magic would at the same time flow in behind, filling the void to create in them total, complete, blind devotion to the Confessor. The Confessor would become the center of the person’s universe, the only thing that matters to them. The Confessor would become their identity, or the object of it, to be more precise.

“In that realm of total commitment and absolute compliance, they would feel the overpowering need for the object of their fidelity—the Confessor—to give them direction. That would be the only purpose of their life. It would be a terrifying emptiness in their existence to be without the direction of the Confessor who touched them with this power.