I am Mouvar, Kelvin, and I am not what you see. What you see is the way I have chosen to appear to people in this frame and in others. The large head, the webbed fingers, even the pointed ears were typical of ancestors that your people would find most acceptable. As for my messages: I had to leave something that you would identify with and that would exclude those not meant to use the transporter. As for my pointed ears, look carefully.
Kelvin blinked, and in the course of the blink Mouvar's pointed ears changed to round. He looked better with pointed, Kelvin had to think, but possibly that was due to an early preference.
My kind gave up a dependency on bodies. We now roam the cosmos and the frames without form or in any form we feel like. I am what you must consider truly alien, and yet I am of your essence, of the essence of many races, some of them human. In this way I am similar to but otherwise unrelated to a race that is your enemy as well as mine. The creature who called himself Professor Devale was of the enemy—a reverse polarity of mine.
"But I never knew any Professor Devale! I fought against a dark warlock with horns!"
You knew his nature. If Devale the creature exists anywhere it is on a world not much different from Earth or the world you grew up on. To you as to your father, your world was all there was, all there could ever be. If Devale is anywhere, there also will I be.
"But why was I the hero?" Kelvin protested. "You provided me with gauntlets and the boots, the levitation belt and this weapon. Why couldn't you use them yourself?"
It was your battle, Kelvin; your fight. You were what your people needed. What you call my magic wasn't really that. Yours was the true necessary magic after you were properly forged.
"You worked on my... essence?"
You did that, Kelvin, as necessity determined. All I did was give you what you needed and could then apply.
"My children?"
Needed and therefore were.
"Everything in my life—everything planned?"
It was your choice. Always your choice.
"But I never chose to be a hero!" Kelvin protested. "I never wanted it! I just wanted to live my life as what I was, an ordinary ignorant farm boy!"
The Mouvar image frowned. That was the point. You were ideal.
"How could I be ideal? I was the worst possible hero!"
I see I must clarify another aspect for you. Devale and I have been playing a game, over the millennia. The winner of each round then accepts a handicap for the next round. It is the sporting way. Devale won the last, so this time he had the handicap. He lost his awareness of the point. Because of that, I was able to win this round.
"Round? As in roundear?"
The image smiled. That, too. We regard it as a cute touch, round ears and pointed ears. But mainly it is that the point of the game is the game itself. It is an entertainment, and it remains interesting as long as the issue is in doubt. Once it is settled, one way or the other, the game is over, and there is nothing to do except start a new one.
"I don't understand. What issue? What point?"
We take turns assembling and dismantling the empire. When Devale succeeded in fragmenting the last empire into seven or eight smaller kingdoms, the victory was his. Now I have succeeded in assembling a new empire, using the least likely of heroes. Needless to say, the less qualified the hero, the greater the victory. Anyone can make an empire with a superhero, but real skill is required to do it with a bumbler. Devale was sure I could not succeed with you. You weren't even an ordinary yokel; you were to be the son of a soldier rescued from a foreign world who refused to believe in magic. What a farce! But I did succeed, amazingly, and I never interfered directly, and so this is my greatest coup yet. Devale will have to try to dismantle this empire with someone even less likely, and that will be his greatest challenge yet. I look forward to interfering with it. I will of course be allowed to break the rule against direct interference, since I won't know the point, this time.
The meaning was percolating through Kelvin's mind. "All this adventure—the Prophecy, the Roundear Hero, all the battles and carnage—a game? Only a game?"
Mouvar shrugged. It does relieve the boredom.
"But this is callous beyond belief! To toy with the lives of real people, to make and destroy kingdoms—"
This is the stuff of history, Kelvin. Real people are always the victims of empire making. We merely manage it for some diverting purpose, instead of allowing it to be normally chaotic. You hardly have cause to complain; but for this, you would indeed have been unremarkable, and would probably never have met and married Heln. You would have had to settle for a loutish village girl who would soon have grown callous and fat. Your children would have been as dull.
"But you say the game has ended!" Kelvin exclaimed, horrified. "Are you going to destroy my family?"
Mouvar smiled. By no means! It will take Devale at least a generation to fashion a new prophecy and set up a new hero. "A Pointear there shall surely be, Dividing One to Two and Three..." Doubtless you and yours will be gone by the time that manifests. After all, this time Devale will be aware that the joy of the game is in the playing, while I will be the one who thinks that preserving the empire is important. He will be the one to make some deliberate errors, merely to prolong it a bit more, as I did this time. So live in peace, hero; you will probably be happier if you do not tell the others about this, and manage to forget it yourself.
Kelvin was disgusted, but had to agree. What good would it do to let the others know that they were merely pawns in a game which was now finished? At least they could live out their lives in innocence. "What now?"
A parting. Do it, Kelvin; don't think about it. End the game. Deprive me of my knowledge of the point.
With dawning comprehension Kelvin saw the green dwarf start a by-now familiar gesture. Mouvar was smiling, but no words had ever been clearer to Kelvin.
This time it was he, not the gauntlet, who pressed the trigger.
Dwarf, gauntlet, and weapon were gone. He was alone in an empty place with Horace.
But what of the orc's opal? The opal was not a Mouvar gift. The opal, like necessity, existed where it had to exist, just as did the required courage and basic goodness. It should still be inside the dragon. They could use it.
Kelvin wanted to be home with his loved ones, and so did Horace. The dragon's copper-colored tail swished and they were there.
Epilogue
It was a great day for a picnic. The children were running and shouting and taking delight; the birds were whistling and singing. The dragons, kept away by Helbah's magic and the presence here of Horace and his family, were roaring lustily in the distance. Kelvin's young grandson hugged his dragon cousin while Ember, a worried mother, looked on as if wondering if she could trust them.
"This is one heaven of a place!" St. Helens enthused, his arms tight around Nellie's now incredibly bulging waist. They had gotten married, finally, and now progeny was to follow; thus was always the way.
"I think it's too good for dragons alone," the still-blushing Mrs. said. Then, probably thinking she saw a stab of disappointment in Ember's atypically gentle dragon eyes, "I mean it's better than anything elsewhere. The mountains, the water, the air—the flowers! It's the perfect place to share."
"Agreed," St. Helens said. "The only reason I'm not making a fortune selling this place to sunnymooners is that I don't own it and I wouldn't want it crowded."
Kelvin knew what he meant. He and Heln, Glint and Merlain, Glow and Charles, Ember and Horace, and now decrepit old father-in-law and his shockingly young bride had shared exquisite moments here. There was something in the air—something Helbah had said she had reduced in intensity but not entirely nullified.
"Dear," his beloved said, taking his hand, "do you think that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will someday come here? It could become a family tradition—a sort of reward and remembrance for what you've accomplished. Kathy Jon may be next. She's so pretty and mature for her age that I expect—"
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"Kathy's just a child!" he said defensively. "She doesn't even like boys! She told me herself that—"
"How old was Jon when she and Lester wed?"
"Too young," he grumbled. "And so were we."
"Really?" Her eyes widened intriguingly, forcing him to remember.
"No," he admitted. "No, we weren't. We were just young. But you know what I mean—Kathy's a tomboy."
"As was your sister."
"Yes. Very much like her, in fact."
"Only the two of you were adventuring."
"Yes, it seemed as if we had no choice."
"Let me see it again, husband."
"Right here? Right in front of everybody?"
"Yes."
"It's so embarrassing. Doesn't seem proper, even."
"Please."
"Oh, very well."
He reached in his left rear pocket and brought out the small box he had been awarded ceremoniously amid cheering hordes both present and watching via crystal. He flipped its top, revealing the Alliance's specially struck medal with its single word: Hero.
Heln touched the coin-shaped medal almost reverently. Her eyes grew misty looking at it. "Do you remember, dearest, how it started? You and your young sister adventuring? It was like something from a storybook."
"We used to talk about Mouvar. The legend, myth, story character. We pretended that he was real and that we were fulfilling some great, planned destiny." And he would never tell the truth about that: that even when it became real, it remained pretense, on another level. Mouvar's game. Mouvar and Devale were real; their worlds, the worlds Kelvin and others had visited, the Flaw, all reality as they knew it and perceived it to be, existed as but a greatly expanded chessboard. He, his companions and friends, witches and warlocks, dragons and chimaera were but playing pieces or accessories in a game he never would comprehend.
"But dearest," Heln said earnestly, "it was real—your adventures. You defeated the royal Rud army and freed Rud from a tyrannous woman. You defeated her a second time when she reappeared with a helper from another frame and more magic. You defeated the witch who held me captive in Aratex. You defeated Zady twice. Because of what you did we're united, all of us. All seven kingdoms, including the orcs' and Rotternik."
"I don't deny it," he said, forcing back the madness. "But you know I'm not certain how I accomplished any of it. It's selective amnesia, I guess. I remember doing it, I know it happened, but I don't know how I managed it."
"Tell me again, lover. Tell me how you broke free of your bonds and saved your sister from Zatanas and Queeto."
"I don't know how it happened. I don't know. It was as though I had magic."
"Are you certain that you didn't?"
"No. And when I pointed at Melbah and she somehow flamed herself—I don't know, it was as though I returned her evil to her. The same thing happened later with Zoanna, and—"
"But do we have to understand? You did it. It was through you that it happened."
"I'll never understand, never. I believe I used my father's laser weapon and jetpak at one time, but I can't honestly remember using either. It was as if I flew when I needed to fly and reversed magic when I needed it reversed. Zoanna, and later Zady, obligingly made ashes of themselves."
"You did it. You did it, hero."
"Yes, I have to accept that, but the circumstances, the handling of what happened—I simply don't remember. It was as though there was a goodness and a badness, and as though the goodness had to be reached and the badness put down. Does that make sense to you, Heln?" He hoped it did, because maybe then he could begin to truly forget.
"Yes," she said. "It happens. It's necessary."
"Yes," he echoed her, perplexed as always. Mouvar had played a game, but there was much that couldn't be explained by that. Such as Kelvin's father's appearance in this realm. Perhaps things were not quite as Mouvar believed. It would be nice if that were so.
He watched his grandsons circling, the two-legged one holding the four-legged one's copper tail. There was so much joy in the world that was possible, with or without magic. So much goodness when badness was kept vanquished or at bay.
It was, most obviously, a wonderful time for young and old and those in between. A near-perfect time had dawned for those present and the many not present.
It was a great fine time for the Alliance.
Piers Anthony, Mouvar's Magic
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