Author

The Author is the penultimate step of the path, and its name should be taken literally. The bearer decides how the story unfolds: where the heroes will go, how it all ends, and whether anyone gets a happy ending.

He has three powers, and the first is Imagination, which is the turning of fiction into reality. It works not only with reason and the Sea of the Collective Subconscious, but also touches the Astral World, where concepts and symbols converge, and therefore is able to temporarily pull an abstract concept into reality. Simply put, the stories the Author writes or tells aloud come true.

The second is Recognition, which grew out of the initial power over the Sea of the Collective Subconscious. It grants an unpleasant trait for those around: everything said about him becomes known to him. And the more a person knows about the Author, the more the Author knows about him — and about everyone he has dealt with.

The third is a share of power over the Mind: he controls the minds of living beings and makes them act according to his will, and they barely feel the interference and are sure they are acting on their own.

To this are added two abilities:

Waking Dream — the Author weaves sleep with reality so that the phantom and the material coexist and are hard to tell apart; the true god Adam used this technique to create the Garden of Eden, which served as the stake of the advisors of the Psychological Alchemists;

Coincidence — power over chance: the Author turns seemingly random astonishing events into echoes of the mind and summons them whenever he pleases.

The limitation of all this power is literary and therefore especially curious: the Author's "stories" cannot be illogical, otherwise they would disrupt the reading. Therefore, a "reasonable course of events" always unfolds around him, and every living person turns out to be merely a word written by his pen.

The advancement ritual is a direct continuation of this idea and, perhaps, the most horrifying on the path.