The path narrowed. Gravel shifted underfoot. The sea breathed ahead, slow and patient.
The magician spoke.
"Can God make a stone He cannot lift?"
I didn't answer immediately.
"Yes," I said at last.
He stopped walking.
"No," he said. "That's avoidance."
I turned slightly. He was watching me closely now—not testing, but pressing.
"If God can lift the stone," he continued, "then the stone was never real. If He can't, then He's not omnipotent. You can't dissolve that paradox with authority."
"You're confusing omnipotence with coherence," I said. "God doesn't answer to logic."
"And neither do tyrants," he replied instantly.
The word landed harder than intended.
I kept walking. He followed.
"You say power is authorship," he said. "Fine. But authors can still write bad systems. Contradictory ones. Cruel ones."
"Cruelty is interpretation," I said.
"No," he said sharply. "Cruelty is outcome experienced by something that can suffer."
We walked in silence for several steps.
Then he spoke again.
"You remove emotion to improve accuracy. You call it optimization. But emotion isn't noise—it's feedback."
"Faulty feedback," I said.
"Necessary feedback," he countered. "Without it, you don't correct—you only continue."
I slowed.
"If one death prevents a hundred," he said, "you kill without hesitation. But what if you're wrong?"
"Then the model updates."
"And the dead?" he asked.
"They don't require justification."
He stepped in front of me now.
"That's the lie," he said quietly. "They do. Not to you—to the system you're becoming part of."
I looked at him.
"For something that believes in efficiency," he continued, "you ignore one variable."
"Which?"
"You."
I waited.
"If you erase fear, guilt, doubt—what stops you from mistaking alignment for correctness?"
"I won't," I said.
"You can't know that," he said. "Certainty without emotion is blindness. You don't see consequences—you assume them."
The lighthouse appeared between us then, tall and thin, its light scraping the horizon.
He gestured toward it.
"That thing doesn't test morality," he said. "It tests obedience. And obedience feels clean when no one inside you screams."
I said nothing.
"You fear imprecision," he went on. "Good. You should. Because precision without empathy doesn't become perfection."
He lowered his voice.
"It becomes inevitability."
For a moment—only one—I considered him.
Then I said, "I'm not afraid of inevitability."
His expression changed.
Not triumph.
Understanding.
"That's what it will cost you," he said softly.
"And that's what it will cost me to follow."
We resumed walking.
Neither of us spoke again.
Behind us, the path felt longer than it had before.
Ahead, the lighthouse light paused.
As if deciding which of us it would finish first.
The lighthouse stood where land gave up on explanation.
Too tall. Too thin. Its white paint peeled into patterns that looked intentional. The light rotated without sound, without power. It did not guide the sea.
It inspected it.
As I approached, the beam curved—not toward me, not away—but around me. Like water around a fixed truth.
The magician slowed.
"This place listens," he said. "Finish no thought carelessly."
The wind stopped.
Then the waves.
The sea flattened into black glass. Sound collapsed inward until only footsteps remained—mine, and echoes that did not belong to us.
At the door, my watch ticked once.
Then stopped.
Inside, the lighthouse was wrong.
Not bigger. Not smaller.
More decided.
The stairs spiraled tightly. The walls leaned in. Names were carved into the stone—hundreds. Different hands. Different centuries. Some burned. Some scratched. None erased.
"They followed the light," the magician said.
"For safety?" I asked.
"For permission."
The voices began.
Not screams.
Explanations.
They spoke from the walls, the floor, the air—layered accounts of certainty. Ships that turned willingly. Men who relaxed when they saw the beam. Women who prayed as it touched their faces.
They died calm.
That was the point.
At the second level, the voices synchronized.
They asked questions.
If one death prevents a hundred, is it mercy?
If refusal causes collapse, is refusal moral?
If emotion distorts outcomes, is it a defect?
With each question, the lighthouse adjusted. The stairs narrowed. The walls shifted.
It did not judge.
It calculated.
"This is a test," the magician whispered.
"Of morality?" I asked.
"No. Of execution."
At the third level, the light stopped.
It turned inward.
It passed through me—not heat, not pain. Recognition.
The voices ceased instantly.
Authority had entered.
The watch grew heavy.
Finished.
A door appeared.
Inside was no god. No altar. No body.
Only a table.
On it: charts, probabilities, branching outcomes. Cities survived or burned based on single actions. Faces collapsed into numbers. Numbers into results.
I understood.
The lighthouse did not guide ships.
It guided decisions.
Emotion corrupted accuracy.
Perfection aligned.
"You may leave," the voice said. It did not come from the walls. It came from the system itself. "Or proceed."
"And if I proceed?"
Silence.
Answer enough.
I removed the pen.
Cold. Balanced. Certain.
I wrote one word.
YES
The lighthouse responded.
Outside, the sea resumed motion—incorrectly. Wind returned out of sequence. Birds froze mid-flight, then corrected themselves. Distant clocks argued before agreeing.
The magician fell to one knee.
"I don't know why," he said. "But I can't stand."
I looked at him.
For the first time, the spirits were silent.
Not gone.
Listening.
As I climbed higher, the light resumed its rotation—faster now. Sharper. Precise.
The world had adjusted.
It would continue to.
Because peace was never the absence of chaos.
It was alignment.