Sera looked at his ageless face. “You might still die young.”

He laughed again. “I might indeed.”

“You’re not what I expected, you know,” Sera told him.

“Oh?”

“You’re far too irreverent for the Grim Reaper.”

“And you’re far too kind-hearted for an abomination of magic,” he replied. “Do not allow yourself to be defined by the names others have chosen for you. Choose your own name. Seize your own destiny.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit ironic coming from you?”

He shot her a curious look.

“You’re telling me to seize my own destiny and yet at the same time you’re trying to force me to fall into line, to follow your way,” she said.

“But our two destinies are aligned, Sera. Everything that has happened has led us to this point in time, a convergence of our minds. Of our magic. We were meant to find each other, to save each other.”

“How romantic,” Sera commented, not bothering to go easy on the sarcasm.

Alden laughed. He sure was doing a lot of that. “This is something greater,” he told her. “It’s magic. And your magic is the solution to the problem.”

“What problem?”

“The chaos destroying this world. How many monsters have you killed, Sera?”

“A lot.”

He nodded. “I bet you’ve lost count. Because there are so many. They just keep coming. But where are they coming from?”

“I don’t know. No one does.”

“I do,” he said. “Chaos. They are born from the chaos in the magical tides of this world. Think of magic like the earth’s tectonic plates. Magic is in everything: mages, vampires, fairies, the Otherworldly…even in humans, though in them it is just small footprints, echoes really. There are just so many of them—millions of tiny drops adding up—so it’s enough.”

“Enough for what?” she asked.

“Enough tension to create earthquakes.” The table began to shake. “Conflicting magics rub against each other, they split, they break.” The table let out a groan, then cracked down the middle, dumping its contents onto the ground. “And then monsters are born from the opposing forces, from the strife.” Pink frogs emerged from the splattered cake icing.

Sera jumped up, reaching for her sword, but it wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. This was a dream—and Alden was at the helm.

He stood. “The humans hate us. The Magic Council has done a half-decent job of hiding us over the centuries, then, more recently, of showing the seductive side of the supernatural world. But deep down, the humans still hate us. They envy us. Because they can never possess magic. They realize that, much as they’d like to pretend collecting flaming tennis balls from mage firefights will make them more magical. By now, they’re starting to overcome their own denial, to realize that if that were true, it would have happened already. The most they can hope for is to die and become a spirit, a being trapped forever within the spirit realm, forced to do the bidding of demons and Spirit Warriors.”

He folded his hands in front of him. “And the supernaturals are caught up in their own power struggles. The mages are in conflict with the vampires who are in conflict with the fairies. Everyone is ignoring the Otherworldly, a grave mistake. They are more powerful than people realize.”

He gave Sera a sad look, that of a mother alarmed by how much her children were fighting. While many supernaturals acted just like children, the Grim Reaper was no mother.

He did love to lecture, though. “And within the groups, supernaturals cannot get along with one another. Look at the vicious competition between mages for high ratings in the Magic Games. Or the way the shapeshifting vampires fight the demon-powered vampires, and how they have both made the common vampires their slaves. Friction causes strife, which breeds monsters. This system does not work, Sera. It’s never worked, and millennia of beating a dead, decomposing horse has only worsened the stench.”

“And I suppose you have a solution?”

“Of course. We work together, not against one another. We strive for harmony, not discord,” he said. “You’ve seen my loyal followers, those who have embraced the heavy task of making the world a better place. Mages and vampires, fairies and ghosts, centaurs, unicorns, and every other imaginable magical being. They get along. It works.”

“I hate to break it to you, but your followers are on the far end of insane. In fact, they passed the line of sanity so long ago that they don’t even remember what it looks like.”

“It does take some of them awhile to adjust to the new magic, to the flow and exchange of power. But they are working together. They don’t fight one another. They breathe the same mission, drink in the same victories. And they do it together. As a team.

It was a nice speech—so nice, in fact, that the Mad Hatter and the March Hare had stopped waltzing across the lawn long enough to listen. But Sera knew what she felt from the supernaturals that Alden had converted. They were harmonious all right, united in their madness and impulse to stomp down on anyone who didn’t submit to their master’s vision, doing so with the ferocity of a gardener killing weeds in a rose bed. Except Alden’s people were the weeds—stronger, more resilient, and invading. The world wasn’t perfect, but its current state was preferable to the eternal night of the Grim Reaper’s rule.