He was discovering, in a way for the first time, what it felt like to truly be a Magician King. That fat bastard he’d been when he was sitting around Castle Whitespire, playing with swords and getting drunk every night? That was no king. This was a king. Master and commander. This was the culmination of everything that had started the day he’d walked into that frozen garden in Brooklyn, all those years ago. He had at last come into his own. Maybe all he’d needed was Ember’s permission. You have to have faith.

The ritual he’d done to ramp up his senses was actually working: he was so wired, he could feel where people were through the walls—he could sense the electricity in their bodies, the way a shark does. Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody. He was getting it all back now, everything that he’d missed and more. Poppy was right, that time on Earth, it had been an adventure after all. It wasn’t just blundering around, it was the buildup to this. And this was living. He would live like this from now on.

“This is me,” he whispered. “This is me.”

He trotted up the front stairs and through a series of grand rooms. When people approached him, objects flew at them and battered them to the floor—chairs, tables, urns, chests, whatever he could get traction on with a spell. Lightning struck and stunned them. Lazily, he stopped a thrown ax in midair with one outstretched hand, and sent it back the way it came. Breathing in, he sucked the oxygen out of rooms until the people in them choked and passed out, lips blue, eyes bulging. Pretty soon they began to run when they saw him coming.

He felt altered, like he had grown physically giant. It didn’t stop the spells pouring out of him, one after another, effortlessly. The enemy troops were mixed, human and fairy and a few exotics: a stone golem of some sort, a water elemental, a red-bearded dwarf, a rather tatty talking panther. It didn’t matter, he was an equal-opportunity hero. He was a gusher, a fire hose. He barely even felt the wound in his side anymore. He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him. All he had to do was be who he was: the Magician King.