“She is the Prophet!” Alessya raised her voice.  “She has foreseen our every move. She knows our thoughts, she can anticipate our attacks.  How can we hope to defeat such a foe?”

The white-haired man fiddled with his mustache with one hand; the other flipped an hourglass over the wooden table, again, and again, and again – never letting the grains quite settle on either end.

“How can she tell, if the future is ever changing?” He asked.

“She can, because it does not.” Intervened the cat-man, his brutish armoured frame leaning against the wall, fully blocking the view of the door he purposed to be guarding. “You assume it is ever-changing, because you do not know. You make a decision, and you think you could have done otherwise, you feel that as true as you feel anything, but you cannot – it is a lie perpetrated by the universe upon your mind.” His whiskers twitched. “Were we to rewind time as many times as you flip that timepiece, you would choose the same, again, and again, and again. Had you perfect information about all that is – each particle of dust, each humour flowing inside you body – you too, would be able to foresee.”

“So, Jagger, you mean to say, then, that the Prophet knows us better than we do, ourselves?” Asked Alessya, shaking her blonde mane. “That’s… Depressing.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. And it is not depressing,” added the cat-man,  examining the extended claws in his right hand “it merely is.”

“Hum…” The white-haired man let the grains fall all the way to the bottom. “But what if, when we strike… We are not ourselves? What if, indeed we are someone who never existed in this world…?”

Jagger and Alessya looked at each other. They didn’t speak, but the pair had been together long enough to be able to read each other’s eyes. We found ourselves a loon.

“I’m quite sane, thank you for the vote of confidence.” Said the man. “You didn’t come to me for conventional answers, did you? You don’t hire magi for those. You want your Prophet down?” 

He flipped the hourglass again, throwing it at Jagger in the same movement. The cat-man grabbed it with the usual deftness. 

The grains were moving up.

The magus grinned. “Same hourglass, different grains.”