Magda nodded. “Yes, you asked me to take the book, through the sliph, to your secret, private library. When I was gone, you killed yourself. How could I forget such a thing?”

“That journey you undertook was a portion of the part I was able to play in setting the future on a course that gives the world of life a chance in that future that you have now made possible because you took your path. Had you not undertaken that task for me, the world would have been doomed. Now, if the right choices are made by the right people for the right reasons at the right time, then mankind still has a chance to escape the fate that Sulachan and Lothain tried to impose.

“But until those others can be born, I had to let you save what we have. I could see that the only part I could play if I lived would be to keep you from blossoming. I saw that I had to die in order for you to undertake the journey you took to search for answers, fight the dream walkers, take up the oath, seek me in the underworld through a spiritist so that you could discover that the dead down in the catacombs were serving evil, then choose to find Merritt, help him find what he needed to create the key, and in the end come to understand why you would choose on your own to be altered to become a Confessor who was able to unmask the corruption in a way that all could see it.

“Had I lived, none of that would have happened. I had to let you take the path that would save the world for now. That allows you and others to live to fight another day.

“My death gave you the drive to find out why I sacrificed my life, which in turn opened your own truth. In that search for truth, you would expose what I could not, in a way I could not, to accomplish what I could not.

“You think of me as a great man, Magda. In your eyes I may be, but I was just a man. I had faults, I had weaknesses, I had limits. I couldn’t do everything. But I like to think I had a noble mind, and with that reasoning mind what I saw when I was at the Temple was that what needed to be done, I could not do.

“But I also saw that you could.

“Merritt is similar to you in that he has a unique chance. There is no one else who has the knowledge, creativity, and skills that he has. No other ever envisioned what he first envisioned. No other ever would have. Only Merritt could have envisioned and created the Sword of Truth, and only Merritt could have envisioned and created a Confessor.