My December’s ever-increasing ride of weirdness started in November, actually. Strange, right? Yeah, get used to that. Penrose, my mentor, asked me to help him retrieve a soulmark from Ideworld, found by Beatrice, the seer I “rescued” a month prior from DeMarco’s hands. Rescued is used loosely here, as she was placed under the watchful eye of Phillip himself—something I wouldn’t really wish on any of my friends. But we will come back to this later. I promise.

  The start of the actual December was pretty damn hectic. I decided to focus on training how to use my abilities instinctively instead of relying on conscious thought, and Damien did his best to help me with that, offering daily sparring sessions in the morning and occasional additional tasks when the occasion arose.

  One of those tasks was a trip to suburbia in Ideworld with his son Nick. We were tasked with retrieving some rare herbs and stuff from there so they could make their famous magical dishes. What we met were angry snow-spiders, wretched tree-shadows, and one lost boy, Malik, whom we saved from the monsters mentioned in that very sentence! Are my sentences running on too much? Well, that’s how I like to talk, so please forgive me.

  With Malik under our protection, we moved further, meeting a wave of strange void-like spirits. I, against any better judgment, decided that it would be a good idea to get right into the middle of them, and it changed me on a profound level. One of my soulmarks morphed into a better version of itself.

  Nick decided to get the stray boy under his protection for the time being, while I returned to Earth—just to be tasked by Penrose with infiltrating Edge of Tomorrow, a mage guild posing as a tech company, or the other way around.

  I moved in as Elle Erikson, and with the help of another person—Bobbie—who also worked there, I learned that they had a real zoo of shadow monsters in their basement, where they conducted some highly immoral experiments. Who’d have known?

  In the meantime, my relationship with Jason hit a low, as he learned that my schedule doesn’t really work best for him—or maybe that it was my lies that I constantly fed him? It depends on whom you ask. Most likely it was the latter…

  Anyway.

  That led to his abduction by a monster called the Unreflected, who took him into Ideworld to change him into the Shattered—a more humane version of itself. I somehow took it as an affront to my very being and decided to rush through Ideworld to get him back, right through Chinatown and the Mirrored City. We fought some strange things on our way, before I was ultimately forced to confront his abductors and call it quits, when my power was unsubstantial.

  By we, I meant Nickolas, Peter, and Malik, who’d joined our rag-tag group after I helped him deal with his brother, the Rhythm, a bit earlier. They had a very complicated relationship, those two. But nothing as complicated as me and Penrose, who—due to Beatrice’s lucky streak—found out that I managed to save the Domain-stealing necklace for myself instead of giving it up to him. I told you that I’d get back to it, right?

  At first, us falling out of each other’s orbits gave me a real shock and scare. I thought he’d kill all of my friends in retaliation, but that frantic chase through Ideworld with the guys gave me a much-needed breather, and after that we managed to work out a mutually beneficial deal with Phillip. Beatrice also left the picture for good, due to Penrose’s power over money. He told me that it wasn’t really the soulmark he was after I mentioned at the beginning of my recap—but a Domain of Magic he himself could use.

  Peter also managed to join a Domain of Water that his parents were previous users of. And Malik proved to be quite a fighter with his Domain of Echoes. Overall a lot of new Domains started appearing around me.

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  After a brief regrouping and preparations, we decided to go to the Mirrored City again, which was a bit thwarted by Peter being stopped by the FBI, who sniffed around Jason’s disappearance. This meant that me, Nick, and Malik, with the help of Dam’s former work colleague’s protégé—Caroline—were going after the Solitary Twin, the source of the Shattered’s power and the place where Jason was taken. Her Domain was that of Dogs. Another one, right?

  It was then that one of the Shattered, who goes by Joan—a pretty manipulative archmage of the Domain of Nature (I leave the counting to you at that point)—recruited me into their network of assets, acknowledging my power over space. They steered my nature against me, giving me a task of retrieving one of their engineers from the hands of Edge of Tomorrow goons—something I managed to do later, for which I was rewarded with a Domain fragment that allowed me to progress my own power to the point that I was able to teleport to things holding my authority. I also finally managed to learn how to be more instinctive with my Authority application, and even how to do it remotely. Big wins altogether, right?

  In my quest to retrieve that engineer, going by the name Victor Bohr, I managed to acquire my own lóng—a Chinese type of a dragon—that I named, or he named himself, Liora. I gave up a memory to get him. A memory that was returned to me later on by Malik himself—one of him confessing love for me. I felt a bit bad for him, so I took him on a little investigation trip into Shiroi’s basement. You remember this guy? He could turn someone to shreds with just a touch. We’d been working together for some time, since my fight with Eveline.

  So much stuff happened, right? Yeah. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

  What followed was just a freight train of things crashing all together.

  Malik, disturbed by the man we found in Shiroi’s basement, decided to save him alone when no one was looking. This man was his brother’s mob boss, and he thought that by saving him he’d free his brother from his influence. Big, damn mistake. I learned about his plan through my watchful friend Anansi, who prompted me to follow an unmoving eye-card I’d left Malik with. I connected the dots and quickly found out that he was indeed in Shiroi’s basement—and that both he and the man were missing. Nick and I hopped onto Shiroi’s bike and followed after Malik, which unfortunately led him to lash out against his brother, turning everything into a bloodbath. For a second Malik seemed to have the upper hand, just to be literally crushed by his brother.

  I tried to save him by giving him access to an artificial brain I’d created for myself earlier, but it was all in vain, and Malik died, leaving me with just the memories he held before he moved on.

  We organized a beautiful ceremony to say our goodbyes.

  It was around that time as well that I learned that Joan had been manipulating me.

  I also forgot to mention that I had visited Boston with Thomas prior to that, where he was supposed to deliver a message to the Guild headmaster. I met another mage of artistic creation there, Natalie Weber, who tried to seduce me with the power over her art. But I somehow managed to convince her to give me a chance to join the Guild.

  Overall, a slight success.

  Right before trying to save Jason from One World Trade in Ideworld, I decided to visit Ideworld’s concrete jungle again, where I trained and killed a drake with the help of Peter and Nickolas. I also found a soulmark in his corpse, and another one further in the jungle, hidden in some reality-forgotten temple and guarded by its guardians.

  Saving private Jason was not an easy task either. Using a brief time window when the God wasn’t home, I went in fully naked, pretending to be one of the Shattered, fought with one of them, killed Jason’s shadow, and using farewell rites sent his soul away—finally unlocking Jason and allowing me to send him home.

  All good and rainbows, right?

  Nah. Wrong.

  I was used in a power struggle between Joan and the Solitary Twin and his other Shattered, where I averted a tragedy only due to my quick wits and my own manipulations.

  Then Jason, instead of being grateful, called me a serial killer and a wretch. He might have used other words, but the message stuck.

  To blow off some steam, I finally made a tattoo of my Domain and other useful stuff on my back and found a way to Malik’s Domain, to take his grandma there—and all of my friends—after Christmas supper. Just one last way to say our goodbyes.

  And when I finally thought that maybe, just maybe, things were going in the right direction, Jason touched Malik’s crystal and disappeared.

  Will I ever get a proper win?