I want to save this for later. I’m nowhere near ready to write an ending for The Soft Doctrines of Isaac Magnin, but I mean to get there eventually. Morgan Cooper and Naomi Bradleigh will be among those to get a shot at “happily ever after”, but the sorcerer who manipulated them and the rest of the world, Isaac Magnin, will lose everything.
Despite Isaac’s efforts, the seals with which Morgan had bound him held. He could no longer draw power from the Sun; all his thaumaturgy was lost to him. It was just as well, he decided upon reflection. This was the victory he had hoped for, an end to the tyranny of demons, and the necessity of playing the opsimath and learning to walk the earth as a mere man was a small price to pay. Perhaps he would find some poor wedding guest to regale with tales of his life and crimes.
No, I couldn’t resist alluding to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
You can blame Michael Valiant for this. He had put up the following prompt on January 3.
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#Opsimath
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While I had had to fit my response into 500 characters, the loss Isaac Magnin will face goes beyond his former power as one of the ensof, the demons that feed off of stars, black holes, and quasars. All of his earthly wealth, authority, and influence will be stripped from him as he is forced to stand trial for his crimes, including his role in Nationfall.
He will be left with nothing and no one, even his own daughter (Naomi Bradleigh) will turn him away, and even he will acknowledge that she is right to do so.
Nevertheless, this is when the second verse of “Shock Me” by Baroness will apply to him.
In a dream, a great calamity
To stone my heart and firm resolve
And render nerves to steel
The polestar wheeled about my head
Until such time it grew
A deep well of despair I found
The day my dreams came true“Shock Me” by Baroness, from Purple (2015)
Despite his despair, this outcome will be more than he had dared hope to achieve.
There are small dark lines on my heart tonight
From all those times that I crossed the line
Hallmark scars that were left behind
Memories never fade
I know I should never be forgiven
Given all the little lies I’m living
So I suffer those lines as a warning sign
That never goes away“Small Dark Lines” by Threshold, from Legends of the Shires (2017)
Now he has time to begin erasing all of the small dark lines on his heart. It’s a better ending than he deserves, but his death would herald the Earth’s last and longest winter.