Cold silk clung to my skin.
No—his skin.
Jafar's skin.
For half a breath I couldn't move. Not because the body was restrained, but because my mind was trying to reject the shape it had been poured into. Long fingers. A heavier spine. An older throat that carried authority like a blade.
Then the room snapped into focus: the Cave of Wonders' inner chamber. Gold stacked like sand dunes. The air thick with incense and ancient dust. A lamp on a pedestal, small and unimpressive against the obscene wealth around it.
And in my right hand—
A staff.
Not the lamp.
Good. That meant the sequence was still intact.
Across from me, Aladdin stood with that idiot courage, braced like he could stop destiny with his bare hands. Abu chattered somewhere behind him—tiny panic, tiny heartbeat.
And beside me, Iago shrieked something that didn't matter.
The only thing that mattered was the lamp.
Because I knew what came next.
I knew the exact moment.
Jafar would seize the lamp, call it forth, and speak the canonical wish:
"I wish to become an all-powerful genie."
And the universe would answer in the way it always answers sloppy power-grabs—
With a chain hidden inside the gift.
A lamp. A vessel. A collar dressed up as "cosmic law."
Servitude. Ownership. Compulsion.
A being of vast power… that could still be commanded.
I swallowed, and Jafar's throat complied. The sound was dry, controlled. His body was steady in a way my mind wasn't.
But I had the advantage he never did.
I had canon.
And I had time measured in seconds.
The lamp sat there like a trap with a smile. I could already feel it—something old and predatory inside the metal, an intelligence bound to rules it would never explain unless forced.
The genie would try to twist words. Not maliciously, necessarily. But because the magic was a machine: you put in a sentence, it outputs the most literal reality that satisfies the letter while preserving its own scaffolding.
And that scaffolding was built from restraints.
So the wish had to do three things at once:
Grant top-tier power potential.
Remove every form of bondage—direct or indirect.
Still fit into a rule-based system that wouldn't collapse into "I win forever."
Loophole-resistant. Explicit. On-page.
I stepped forward, robe sweeping across coins. The movement felt natural—Jafar had practiced being inevitable.
Aladdin's eyes narrowed. "Jafar—"
I ignored him. I ignored everything.
I reached for the lamp.
The instant my fingers touched it, the metal was warm.
Not warm like sunlit brass.
Warm like skin.
A pressure pushed back against my grip—like the universe testing whether I had the authority to claim what I was about to claim.
I tightened my hand anyway.
And smiled, because I could feel it now: the wish-magic didn't care about morality. It cared about structure. It cared about clauses.
It cared about precision.
I lifted the lamp and rubbed.
Smoke erupted—violent, theatrical. A spiral of blue-white that punched upward and filled the chamber like a storm given shape. Coins trembled. Flames flickered. Shadows stretched and recoiled.
A face formed in the smoke.
Eyes like lightning behind glass.
A grin that promised both delight and disaster.
The Genie coalesced into towering presence, arms folding as if he'd been waiting centuries just to enjoy this moment again.
"Well, well, well," he purred, voice echoing off gold and stone. "Looks like we've got a new hand on the handle."
His gaze dropped to me—to Jafar—and sharpened.
Oh, he knew. Not me, specifically. But he knew when a wisher wasn't behaving like the script.
"You've got three wishes," he said lightly. Too lightly. "No wishing for more wishes, no killing, no bringing back the dead. You know the drill."
I held his gaze without blinking.
This was the hinge-point of the entire timeline. If I hesitated, Jafar's habits would take over—arrogance, theatrical cruelty, sloppy phrasing.
And the lamp would become my prison.
I brought the lamp up, close enough that the reflection of the Genie's swirling form bent across the brass.
Then I spoke clearly, slow enough that every word landed like a nail.
"I make my first wish as follows, and the full wording is the wish."
The Genie's grin twitched. "Oooh. Formal. I like formal."
I didn't give him room to interrupt.
I said it in one continuous declaration—no ambiguity, no "and also," no trailing implications.
"I wish that, effective immediately and permanently, I become the supreme wielder of a defined wish-based magic system that grants me the maximum possible magical power and growth potential available to any being in this universe, while explicitly and irrevocably ensuring all of the following: I am not and will never be bound to servitude, obedience, ownership, mastery, or compulsory fulfillment of commands by any other being, force, artifact, rule, or magic; I am not and will never be contained in, anchored to, or dependent on any physical container or vessel such as a lamp, ring, bottle, or equivalent; no being may claim, transfer, inherit, or enforce any right of control over me or my actions; and my power functions only through clear, consistent rules of cost, limits, and learning that I alone can access, interpret, and improve over time, without granting me omnipotence or automatic solutions."
Silence hit the chamber like a held breath.
The smoke around the Genie tightened—like a fist closing.
His eyes narrowed, and for the first time his expression wasn't playful.
It was… assessing.
Like he'd just met someone who understood the game better than he did.
"That," the Genie said softly, "is… a lot of words."
"That is the wish," I replied.
Behind me, Aladdin shifted—confused, wary. He couldn't tell if I'd just doomed the world or saved it. Neither could I, not fully.
Because now came the most dangerous part:
How the universe would interpret "supreme," "defined system," "maximum possible," and the clause that tried to forbid any rule or magic from enforcing control.
If the system needed cosmic enforcement to exist, would it interpret that as "control"?
If it couldn't, would it gut the power to satisfy freedom?
The Genie's grin returned, but it was thinner now—less showman, more lawyer.
"I can do it," he said. "But you're trying to carve out of the deal the very framework that makes genie-magic genie-magic."
"I'm carving out my chains," I said.
The lamp in my hand vibrated.
Not physically—something deeper. Like a concept being rewritten.
The chamber lights flickered.
The Genie raised one hand, palm outward, and the smoke around him stopped swirling. It crystallized into geometry—lines and circles and symbols that hovered in the air like a blueprint.
A magic schema.
A system.
I felt it pressing against my mind, probing for openings.
The Genie's voice dropped into something older.
"Then hear me, wisher," he said. "A system requires axioms. Axioms require enforcement. Enforcement looks a lot like restraint."
My pulse didn't quicken. Jafar's body didn't allow it. But my thoughts sharpened.
"Enforcement of rules on power is not ownership of me," I said immediately. "Costs, limits, learning—those are constraints on output, not commands on my will."
The Genie's eyes flashed.
For a heartbeat, I thought he might refuse.
But genies didn't refuse. Not really. Not unless a rule forbade it.
He exhaled, and the entire chamber seemed to inhale with him.
"Fine," he said. "Loophole for loophole."
His hand snapped.
Reality snapped back.
A shockwave slammed through my bones. Not pain—information. Structure. A lattice forming behind my eyes.
Something clicked into place in my mind like a lock turning the wrong way… then the right way.
I felt a new presence—an interface without visuals, a set of principles written directly into intuition:
FUNDAMENTALS.
COST.
SCOPE.
LIMITS.
MASTERY.
And below it, one word that made my mouth go dry:
DEBT.
The lamp in my hand went cold.
The Genie's form wavered, then steadied. His grin returned, wider now, almost admiring.
"Congratulations," he said. "You're free."
The word free landed wrong. Like a coin that didn't ring true.
Because freedom granted by a genie always had a shadow.
I looked down at the lamp—
—and the lamp was just metal now. Ordinary. Empty.
No pull. No tether. No hunger.
Good.
But then I felt it.
Not from the lamp.
From the world.
A pressure, subtle but immense, like the sky noticing it had a new predator.
In the air above the gold, the geometric symbols hadn't fully vanished.
One remained, hovering like an afterimage.
A circle.
A line through it.
A seal.
And I understood what it meant without being told:
Flux locked. Output capped. Stabilization required.
The system had given me maximum potential—
—and immediately throttled what I could actually use.
Not because the Genie controlled me.
Because the rules did.
And rules didn't care that I was in a hurry.
The Genie leaned close, voice low enough that only I could hear.
"One more thing," he whispered. "You didn't ask to be safe."
Then he smiled brightly again, turning toward the chamber like a performer returning to the stage.
"So!" he announced. "Who's ready for consequences?"
The seal in the air pulsed once.
And somewhere far beyond the Cave of Wonders, something ancient and awake turned its attention toward me.
I tightened my grip on the now-useless lamp.
Because I could feel it clearly:
I had just rewritten the hinge of canon—
—and the story had noticed.