"It's because my wife is Eingana," Josephine replied. "She is the person who can travel through worlds."

Raegan's mouth was wide open. "Eingana... the goddess?"

I found a little sad how there were, apparently, so many humans who took the godly powers for themselves. And how people like the Circle were still keeping it a secret, even though there were those who knew, and profited from it.

"And because of this," she added. "I am able to let you contact Vitaly. I know he's reaching out to you with the last straw of his powers as Jophiel... Not that he's having less magic, it's just that he wants to use less of it."

"He told us," I confirmed.

Josephine smiled, and on the ground we found a portal waiting for us in the middle of a small pond of water, sand all around it like it was a very little oasis.

"Is this from Vitaly?" I asked. I hoped I didn't show the hope I had, for one moment, on my face. Portals always reminded me of Edgar.

"Yes," the woman simply replied.

When we entered the portal, we ended up in a room that looked very much like the one where we met the Awakened, but this time they weren't there.

With his eyes open, but his body in complete white, Vitaly was creating the Void.

Since he could decide how he looked to us, his hair was long and wavy like it was when he was young. The only difference was that it wasn't reddish brown — the spell made it white like the rest of his body.

"You look like a printer running out of ink," Raegan said.

Vitaly scoffed.

"Why did you contact us?" Jeff asked.

Vitaly looked concerned. "I felt like you should know the truth before you completed the quest. Congratulations, by the way. I didn't want you to find out the truth in a hard way, and I figure oaths of secrecy matter less in a war of those proportions. I didn't know the goddess would take Edgar hostage. So, I'm here to tell you everything I can."

After weeks where nobody would tell us what was going on, this was enough to shut us up.

"So, I'll tell the story from the start.

As you know, I have been a friend of Samuel ever since I was a little kid. But I was also a friend of his brother Nathan.

Nathan was Sam's older brother and he got along very well with their father. He was basically the perfect son. He didn't play with us most of the time, but I knew him very well.

Then, I turned twelve. I was kicked out of my house and started living with my aunt and uncle. Which meant that, really, I always stayed at the Winter's. Daniel Winter didn't like me. Once, he caught me while I was trying on makeup and from that moment on he started liking me less and less. The same thing happened when I started wearing women's clothes.

Samuel accepted me the way I was and often fought with his father about it. Mister Winter also understood that I saw Sam as more than a friend, while to him I was a little brother. He already had an older brother who was better than him at everything, he wanted a younger one who admired him.

When Sam and I became well known and started hanging out with Brady, Nathan started becoming famous for his talent as well. He was older than us, but he was also more gifted."

"But this doesn't make any sense!" Jeff yelled. "My grandfather never mentioned another son! I can't have an uncle I know nothing about! He's not even in the book Famous Enchanters."

"No, he isn't," Vitaly confirmed bitterly. "He wasn't that famous back then. But he's in many other books, in your grandfather's private collections. That's why they're private.

Anyway, Sam became obsessed with finding the Empty Mirror. He never told me why it was so important to him. But he even contacted the Awakened so they could help him understand whether his coordinates for KI were right. He never said why it mattered so much to him. We didn't ask.

When I say we, I mean Nathan and I. Nathan decided to come with us, he still wanted to live a big adventure. To have the chance to go on a quest. Most Enchanters don't get to go on one."

He stopped.

It wasn't Brady who went on the quest with them, then. That's why Jono Mitchell didn't know him.

"Being in the world of a fairytale, without the Reapers after us, was like a game to us.

But before it was too late to turn back, Samuel told us why he wanted to find the Empty Mirror.

He told us that, back in Brighton, he started experimenting with black magic and read all the legends of the gods he could find. He became obsessed by the idea that the gods didn't deserve their powers --- that it was either humans who had stolen it from them and kept carrying the torch, so to speak, like the Arcanes, or that it was even worse. He said in a world where gods exist and you know how to strip their powers from them, you should.

He was convinced that the Empty Mirror from those myths who were more like fairytales, the ones people read as children, was a real object and he went almost crazy trying to find it.

He said the gods had become too political for their own good, and this was why they, or whomever had the power, lived in England. Because they started doing so in the Middle Ages, where magic and wizardry was at its apex.

Not that we believed him. We laughed. Then, Nathan understood how serious he was, and the two started fighting."

Vitaly stopped again.

"Go on," I urged him.

"Then, everything went wrong. I wanted to save what I could, but I didn't know how. Sam had already contacted some friends of his, from his circles of black magic. I didn't even know how he could know so many people that I had never seen before.

He told us that, behind our backs, he founded a cult, full of people who were ready to destroy the gods. He wanted them to be named after a Tarot Card, so he called them..."

"The Reapers," Jeff finished the sentence.

Then I remembered what Jono Mitchell had told us, as to why he didn't want to help us stay alive 'Why would I do that? To see one of you become the most evil Typhons of all time?'

He was never talking about Vitaly. I felt stupid for not realising it before.

"When Samuel wasn't there to lead them anymore, I took the leadership," Vitaly continued. 

"So, the Reapers had really started out against the gods," I commented. I imagined it was Set, then, who killed Samuel Winter. How was Jeff feeling at the idea that his father's own men, as bad as they were, were now working for a higher power, someone who murdered him?

"The easiest lies are based on truths," Vitaly said, almost winking at me. "When the Reapers spread the news that they were looking for the Empty Mirror to strip Set of his powers, it was believable because it had happened before.

But we were talking of the quest. The quest was a failure. Nathan died here, on KI. After that, Samuel was not the same anymore. He knew it was his fault. His mood swings became impossible to handle.

That very same night, I ran away. I thought that whoever would have to go on the quest after us, needed to know the truth though I was forced to secrecy. So I contacted some people and decided to leave clues. But I knew somebody was chasing after me. It was the Awakened. They wanted to kidnap me."

So, that's what the Awakened meant when they said they didn't want anybody else to die in vain. They were talking about Nathan, not Samuel.

I wanted to start screaming that this was all a lie and that he wasn't the real Vitaly — it must have been a trick the Reapers or the Awakened played on us.

But everything made sense.

Mister Winter who hated us for getting into trouble and who hated quests so much, Vitaly who had told us 'he knew something that I didn't know, because it turned out the threat was real enough. They came looking for him. And I didn't know what to do anymore'. Even the Awakened who didn't want to tell us about what happened on the first quest and who made Vitaly promise he wouldn't tell. Nobody had ever lied about it to our face, they had just... withheld information.

"Then the Awakened managed to kidnap me," Vitaly went on. "There was a crazy man between them back then, named Declan Simon. He wanted to experiment on me. I wanted to try and disband the Reapers while I still had time, but they tortured me instead. Electroconvulsive therapy, mental and physical abuse, sensory deprivation. They understood that, with the right preparation and power, I could create the Void and they wanted to use me. Secretly, I feared the day they would let me go. I didn't want to face how everything had changed."

"They couldn't keep me out of space and time for all of those days, so they locked me in an abandoned warehouse in the middle of nothing," Vitaly added.

"But the thing I feared the most was that I didn't know what I would have done if and when they let me out. Was I supposed to tell the world the man I loved was now the leader of a cult? Was I supposed to stop him from killing the gods? I didn't know yet whether he had found the Empty Mirror.

Then, one day, they let me out. I didn't know how many weeks had passed since I had last been out in the world, surely not many of them, but the whole world had changed.

Samuel and his friends had started wearing black masks and black clothes and started using aliases from different religions and folklore.

They certainly took this idea from the gods — you see, Samuel always pointed out to us the gods' names were from different mythologies, so that everyone could connect.

Everyone was afraid of them. And, other than the Awakened, Jeff's grandfather and I were the only ones who knew the truth."

This didn't come as a surprise. It was obvious Daniel Winter knew — this was exactly why he wanted to forbid Jeff to use his powers too much, and he was afraid that fame could go to his head.

"Why did you join the Reapers?" Raegan asked.

Vitaly started speaking again.

"My freedom didn't last long. As soon as the Reapers noticed I was still around, they kidnapped me because I had seen too much.

They used their 'special plan' to recruit me --- torture, basically. They wanted me to be one of them, and be named after an angel, so Samuel suggested I tried taking the power from Jophiel and became the next one in line.

I have learned, in fact, how an Enchanter can do such a thing, but I'm not telling the three of you, because it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I don't want you to repeat it. 

Samuel knew I didn't want to kill people, nor other gods, so he made me their Ductor and everyone feared me. They thought I was the mind behind their plans, when really all I did was use my power of the Void to stop space and time when they wanted me to.

Doing it made me feel awful, and it still does, but it was the least I could do. After the way they'd spilled my secrets, I felt hopeless — Sam knew that I loved him. And maybe, I still loved him back then. Maybe I wasn't hoping to save him only to stop all of this but because I still cared about him. I'm not proud of it, but that's how it was."

My head was aching. How come I had never thought of it before? There were clues everywhere.

Like when Vitaly was horrified when we accused him of siding with those who killed Samuel and begged us to understand that he had always been on Sam's side all this time.

And other people who knew about this tried to help us understand it. Not only the Blasted Tower, but even Brady Doyle tried to help us too, like when he said:

'He loved your father until the day he left us'.

Or

'Unluckily, horrible things happened to Sam and Vitaly. Things that shouldn't happen to anybody. And they reacted in two different ways, but they never left each other'.

I was beginning to feel sick.

"Thank you for telling us the truth," Jeff finally said, surprising everyone. "The Awakened didn't want to tell me. Were they afraid I would join the Reapers? Or that I would want to keep the Empty Mirror to myself and kill a few gods while I was at it?"

"Your grandfather was certainly afraid of the latter," Raegan pointed out unkindly. 

I didn't feel like going back to our quest, so I decided to take some time asking something that had been in my mind for a while.

"Did Set went on a rampage and kill those people sixteen years ago because he was battling the Reapers? And if it's so, why did you come back now? Do you always plan to move when Set comes back on the council, so that you can take away his powers?"

Vitaly looked thoughtful. He was clearly looking for the right thing to say.

"We never took different paths after the murders. We just spent several years trying to learn everything we could about black magic, or the legends.

Then I heard a new magic user, mysterious and powerful, joined the Academy of Space and Time. You see, disappearing from the world like I did, I hadn't heard rumours that my cousin had passed away, nor that she had a son who lived now amongst humans. I understood it was time for me to go back into the world to begin my plan. Unluckily, when I started hanging around in the world again, so did the Reapers."

"So, the people who died recently... it was my fault," I said.

"Don't think of it this way. If it makes you feel better, you were my last hope. When I heard about you, I knew you were the one I had been waiting for. Your arrival also made me realise that while I had been hiding away from the world, Samuel's son had become a young man. You and him together could have had a chance. So, the Awakened helped me and I started my plan."

I couldn't understand whether I blamed Vitaly or not. It looked wrong under every point of view, but what could he have done differently?

"And why did you wait for us?"

"After they kidnapped me and made me one of them, I couldn't leave. Sam would have understood what I was about to do. And the Awakened didn't trust me. When they were torturing me, they mocked me for being in love with Sam. They laughed and said that I could pretend all I wanted, they knew that if I had the Mirror I would have given it to Samuel so that he would have loved me back.

They would hate the idea that I told you something about the mission, for they resent me even now. That's why they don't know that I contacted you. They don't want this quest to have anything to do with me, even though the plan was originally mine."

We remained silent for a while.

Jeff was trying to look tough, but tears were streaming down his face. Raegan looked confused. I wondered how I looked. I hoped I didn't look too smug — it was nice to have some of our questions answered. But I was hoping to find out who my parents were, and I still had no answers. And I even felt guilty about it — it was better to be an orphan, I thought, than to find out your father was the one who founded the Reapers, and, judging by all accounts, a fierce Typhon when he died.

"Speaking of the Reapers — you have to bring them to the authorities when all of this ends. And I'm afraid you'll have to turn me in as well," Vitaly said. "Tell me when you are ready to get back to the quest, you are so close to finding it."

"If you are in danger, tell us," I insisted. "Like when you contact me through my dreams."

"Dreams?" Vitaly asked, dumbfounded.

"So you're not the one who's sending me messages through my dreams...? I dreamed about your past on different occasions. I thought these dreams were messages from you."

"No, I never did anything like it," Vitaly frowned. "Like I said, you must be very receptive. You catch these signals on your own."

"If we find the Empty Mirror, do we destroy it?" Jeff asked. "You are the one who told us not to give it to Set, nor the Reapers. And now that I know that my father's men changed sides, I am sickened by the idea they thought I would help them."

He got up on his feet. He was ready to go. I admired the fact that he was trying to think positive thoughts and planning ahead.

Vitaly replied, "Yes, destroy it. Burn it. I don't care. I might not be the biggest fan of the gods, while being one, but this isn't how powers should be distributed --- taken by force, and perhaps poured elsewhere."

This was exactly what happened when an Enchanter hosted a god, I wanted to say, but what did it matter? It was obvious some of Vitaly's oaths still stood, and his less than cheerful voice everytime he spoke of his godly power made me ask whether Samuel had forced him to take over Jophiel.

Still, I wanted to point out that the Awakened had asked us to hand the Mirror over to them when everything was over, but I didn't. How could I trust them after my dream? And I didn't like the idea of this object not being destroyed.

"One last thing," I said, for it was bothering me. "Do you have any news of Edgar?"

"He's safe. He will join you shortly," he replied. "And so will I. And your next stop... is the final stop."