Oscar sat Gray at a table, and poured him something in a cup. "Will this heal my arm?" Gray asked, swirling the clear liquid with his healthy hand.

"Uh, no," Oscar replied, shuffling through a drawer. "Not usually,"

"What's it do?"

Oscar picked up a large, odd looking branch, and began scraping it's bark off into a stone basin. "It keeps the body from dehydrating. Turns urine clear-"

"It's water, isn't it?"

"Yes. It sure is," Oscar nodded awkwardly, as he pulled some long white fabric out of a drawer. He looked up and saw Gray staring at him, then wandered to the other side of the table, so that his back was to the newcomer.

This is exactly how Oscar had acted in the book. Shy and fidgety, with absolutely no people skills. Yet another thing to add to the list of everything that his favorite story never explained.

"Why are you like this?" Gray asked, watching him carefully.

"Like what?" The skinny man sat down nervously at the table with the smooth stick and long fabric. But he didn't meet Gray's gaze.

"Why are you so..." Gray hesitated "off?"

"You mean, why am I so me?" Oscar corrected him, while answering his question. "It's who I am, Gray. Why are you the Child of Stone?"

That was a good question. Why was he the Child of Stone? "I don't know," he admitted, he'd just kind of accepted the fact, because it seemed like the only possible explanation of what had been going on. "I really am the Child of Stone?"

"You set Scary free, did you not?"

"Yeah but..." Gray hesitated.

Oscar interrupted him with a wave of his hand. "Have you ever noticed when strange things tend to happen around you?"

Gray thought of the rock that flew out of nowhere and saved him from Jack Houston. The sidewalk refusing to kill Micheal. They were signs. The universe giving him signs of who he truly was.

"I always thought the Child of Stone would be like, this big, powerful, prince of sorts. Not a normal guy like me," Gray admitted, softly.

"It wasn't the job description to be big. Or powerful, or anything else. Setting Scary free is what makes you the Child, nothing else. It's who you are. And who you're destined to be," Oscar told him "Now, let's fix that hand,"

"Is that your wand?" Gray asked, pointing at the stick.

"No. I'm not a wizard," Oscar chuckled. "That's a stick. I'm making you a cast and a splint," he glanced at Gray. "This might hurt. I'm not extremely experienced with this kind of medicine. You should try to keep your mind on something else,"

Gray grasped wildly into his head for ideas, but all he could think about was how Scary refused to help him. How he didn't care about the pain he was in. How his hero, turned his back on him.

"How does magic work?" Gray asked.

Oscar began snapping the twig into different sizes, to test out on Gray's hand. "That's an extremely controversial subject," he replied "but I guess I could give you my view on it,"

Oscar went into a sort of teacher-mode as he tended to the broken hand. "There are some who believe that magic can be given and it can be taken. As if it were some object like the wand that creates the magic. Their reasoning for this comes from the family tournament,"

"Every wizard family has as many children as they can within an eight year span," Oscar explained. "When the eldest child reaches the age of 19, the tournament begins. What the tournament entails, depends on the wizard family who runs it. But the outcome is always the same. The top three finishers are the winners of their family tournaments,"

"Yeah, I know all of this," Gray yelped as Oscar took a hold of his hand. "What kinds of tournaments have you heard of?" He asked through gritted teeth.

"Oh, races. Mazes. Written tests. Even fights to the death. Because the punishment for not finishing in the top three, is to lose one's magic, and be abandoned in the human world forever. And many prefer death to that kind of humiliation," Oscar shook his head sadly. "But the top three finishers gain every ounce of magic that their brothers and sisters lost. First place gets the majority of the magic. Second gets what's left. And third gets to keep the magic they already had. Which leads some to believe: if you can lose magic like that, and have it given to another, than there must be a way to gain and lose one's magic at will,"

"What-OUCH-what do you think?" Gray asked.

"I think that there is magic in all of us," Oscar told him. "But not all magic is the same kind of magic. When you lose your family tournament, you have the same amount of magic as those who won it. But your magic changes. It becomes a different kind of magic. One that you were not taught to use. You still have the same amount of magic, it's just different now. As for the winners. Their magic doesn't grow. But their amount of unknown magic, changes, proportionately, into known magic,"

He looked up at Gray's uncomprehending look. "Um. Okay," he leaned back and thought for a moment. "Imagine we each had one orange, and one apple. And we only know how to eat oranges. Now say we were fighting for them and I won. Now my apple turns into an orange, and your orange turns into an apple. In effect, they didn't switch places. I didn't take yours and suddenly have more than you, leaving you with nothing. Your fruit changed and so did mine. But now I'm having a grand old breakfast and you don't know what to do,"

"But I could still eat," Gray nodded slowly "I'd just have to learn to core a fruit rather than peel it,"

"Exactly," Oscar smiled for the first time since Gray had met him. "Nobody is losing or gaining any magic, it's just turning into something that they don't know how to use, or vice versa,"

"What kinds of magic are there?" Gray asked.

"Honestly," Oscar hesitated. "I don't know. There could be millions of kinds. My magic mostly happens in the things I create. Only a touch like mine can make them do the things they do. It's the magic that I know how to use. In theory, I could get a wand and teach myself wizardry if I knew how to learn, but I don't. There's Craftsmanship, which is what I know how to do. Wizardry, which Scary knows. Dare knows Sorcery, and there's so much more. Shape-shifters. It all just depends. And who knows, maybe the raw strength of having multiple abilities could be enough to kill someone. We may never know,"

"That's cool, but how does wizardry work? Why couldn't Scary heal me just by using a spell or something, like he did for Luft?"

"Wizardry isn't as precise an art as most wish to believe," Oscar informed him quietly. "It resides heavily on emotion. When Scary and Rivet fought, I assume there was a lot of bickering. Witty insults and the like,"

"Yeah," Gray shrugged. He immediately regretted the decision and vowed not to try that again. "I thought it was just normal, hero-villain smack talk. Storybook style,"

"To an extent, you're correct," Oscar nodded. "Verbal assault is something every wizard is trained to master. Because the core of magic resides in the core of oneself. Oftentimes, the ability to make the opponent hesitate for even a fraction of a second is the difference between victory and failure.

"That is why Scary doesn't like to display feeling. The less emotion you have, the more precise your magic is. But also, the less effective. Anger fuels your destruction. You cannot destroy and you cannot kill, if you have even the slightest regret or sympathy directed at the thing or person. Fear can effect your powers incredibly. It often can disproportion the spell's effect, or even cause you to completely miss your target,"

Gray thought of how Scary had thrown him against the cave wall when they first met. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he wanted to move me, but his fear threw me aside instead.

"And pity. Caring. Love. Sacrifice. That's what heals the wounded," Oscar said. "Scary cares about Luft. As little as he wanted to show it, he truly does. But if he refuses to show the emotion that he feels towards his friends, I'm afraid that cuts and scrapes are the extent of Scary's healing abilities,"

"So, showing emotion is good and bad?" Gray asked.

"No," Oscar shook his head. "Showing emotion is good, and concealing it all the time is bad. You see..."

He pulled out a jar. "Imagine that this is your core. When you hide away an unwanted emotion-" he took a small ball and placed it in the jar "it fills up a little bit. And when you let your emotions free through magic-" he poured the jar out on the table. "It empties out again. But, if you never empty the jar-"

Oscar began stuffing ball after ball into the jar in quick succession. He filled it all the way to the top, then crammed them down and filled it more "you will keep holding all of these negative emotions inside until one small tap-"

He took a tiny hammer and rapped the side of the jar lightly. Crack! CRASH! The balls flew across the room when the jar shattered from the inside force. "And you finally break, and all that negative magical energy destroys you, and everything around you,"

"Is that... Scary?"

Oscar hesitated. "Yes. I believe it is. Or... it will be," he shook his head. "You're better off not being around him anyway,"

"That's impossible! Scary is supposed to take down the High Committee!" Gray exclaimed.

"Says who?" Oscar inquired.

"The book-"

"Your book was written by someone I knew, Gray," Oscar told him. "She knew no more than any of us how this would end, she was just an optimist. That's why Scary loved her,"

Gray stared at him. "Sara McKinney..."

"She was part of the circle," Oscar nodded.

"What happened?"

"Nobody knows," Oscar replied. "After we lost Scary, we all went into hiding, in various ways that preserved our ages. Simon was Shifted into a tree. Luft went back to the dimension he was born in. I preserve myself with some of these Crafts I created. But Sara disappeared. Just like many of our other friends. We were being hunted. Nobody was sure who the members of the High Committee were. All we knew was that they called their leader Life. So we didn't know who we could trust. Especially after Dare-"

Oscar lowered his head and pinched his eyes closed. "You may know everything that happened in that book of yours, Child, but the story has yet to be concluded. Nobody knows how it will end,"

He finished wrapping up Gray's hand and stood up. "You need to get home. Do your best to forget this all happened, but be aware. Rivet has seen you, and only God knows what those people will do to beat Scary at this point,"

Oscar handed Gray a small orb. "Shake that. It should have just enough juice left to keep you from being detected on your way home,"

Gray shook it, and watched the little orb begin to glow a bright green. "Thanks Oscar," He glanced down at the cast. "And thanks for this too,"

He stepped out the front door, and realized just how different everything looked. And not just because he had no idea where on earth he was.

He really had told Micheal the truth. There was magic out there.

Gray turned back and called to Oscar through the door: "I'm not sure why everyone hates you after reading the first book. But when I get home, I'm going to start you a fan club,"

"Thank you, I- wait what?"