Author's notes: This aftermath chapter is in 4 parts, released over 4 days, starting Tuesday, December 26, 2017. Be sure you've read any previously posted chapters. Sorry for the late post, fanfictiondotnet is broken and not accepting new documents so I'm relying on a work-around to post for the time being.

Aftermath - Headmaster

-Abra cadabra.

"This boy…does not have a soul."

The room erupts in silence. After letting the shock sink in for five seconds, he activates his Eye and the world becomes light. 'Now' appears as a slice—a thin edge of reality that stretches backwards into foggy threads of possibility. The boy, in front of him, stretches far back into the past as a knot of motion all throughout the busy castle. The hat atop his head, much like the wand in his pocket, sits in stark stillness, next to the tempest of the boy's energy.

'Now' inches forward as he steps towards the boy and lifts the hat from his head, plopping it on his own. The threads of possibility crystalize—his reach into the past becoming clearer, and every edge sharpens. He slips the wand from the boy's pocket in jittering advancements of the 'now', and the worldsheet bends.

Yawning blackness surrounds him on all sides. Only pinpricks of light punctuate the lives around him, which thread forwards and backwards in time off to distant, fuzzy horizons. Undulating currents ripple off of his soul as he tears into space, leaving the castle far behind. Velocity is abstract, malleable, so he breaks it. Energy crackles round his winding path to the stratosphere—out past cloud and deep into sky. Blackness intensifies, but for distant stars and the streaking earth as it stretches threads of magickal life in tremendous spirals around the sun—through voids of nothingness.

Entropy frays the edges of the threads on the horizons, so he focuses his gaze. Even here, so far away, the boy's thread is visible from the beginning—his soul. No obvious breaks mar the thread, but the boy's pain stains it. Only fleeting hints of joy blossom along the thread—minutes, maybe hours total of life, and Alvin falters. Unless he finds it, the outcomes are clear. The boy's threads arc off into violent fractal ends—many already lifeless. Many already lost.

ALVIN.

"No," he says.

EVEN I CAN'T CHANGE THIS.

"Unless I act now, the boy is lost."

VIOLENCE TO THE FIRMAMENT WILL NOT SAVE HIM.

Each thread has a texture—a coarseness to it. Raveled and unraveled, he sorts through them from his cosmic perch, looking, desperately searching for the singularity—the puncture in the boy's soul. Every passing moment is but another nail in the boy's determined fate. Dread bubbles in that tiny, still-human part of Alvin, as he narrows his search. As it narrows down to a pinprick of time, dread twists into panic. Loose threads weave through the boy on a far distant roof—still as glass in a slice of spacetime, points of rain frozen around him—and the threads wind suddenly into nothingness. Violent edges emerge from nowhere and pick up in their place nanoseconds later. It's an interrupt in his soul—a dead thread from nowhere, hijacking his destiny.

"No," Alvin whispers again, as he reads the firmament, and recognizes the enormity of his failure.