(Diary of Adrian Corbin, well before the events of Roll the Bones)

So it’s true. After a day of walking around, a step here and there to look at different people, I know without a doubt. The four ivory dice that I—I suppose I have to say enchanted—have the power to sense any kind of emotion, not only fear.

In spite of where it all… came from…

Let’s start again.

Confirmed: the magic the four “Bones” can carry seems to “pulse” with the various emotions around me, or it does when I focus my thoughts on it. The power they hold is limited, but it can be restored again with… well, the same method as before.

Just knowing that method, I can never look at ivory the same way again. Or unsee where I learned it from, or the rest of it.

Or look at people the same way.

Faces aren’t faces anymore, when I have this magic. They’re like doors, the kind on a holiday that someone hangs up with wreaths or messages or kitschy plastic figures or leaves to be all scratched paint and dirt… except to me the door is always half open. So easy to step through and see what’s really inside, behind all the show of what someone wants me to see.

Well, I catch a glimpse of what’s there at that moment, anyway. And to go from feeling someone thrashing with the frustration of waiting to their sheer floating joy when their call’s answered, it teaches you something about judging too soon.

But, off track again. What I’m trying to work out is what it means, that I can make these, use these—after what I survived, and Ray didn’t.

So the thing down there isn’t coming for me. It’s just me up here, and this weapon, and everyone else that’s wide open to me.

I could… I could be something different from just Adrian Corbin, the way this pulse can read what people want—or even make them feel what I want them to, just enough to let them fool themselves. I confess, I tried doing that too.

After everything I saw, caused, down in the tunnels, I was still enough of a bastard to try that. Even when the pulse itself is always echoing warnings because of all the traces of that one coldest emotion that it always picks out, fear.

—Why is it fear that overshadows everything else it feels, that makes that Scarecrow’s killing power possible? Even the ivory itself is fiercely cold to the touch, too cold to carry around all day without some kind of help. I’d like to think that’s all something he did to the magic, but it feels like there’s something more to it. I don’t even know if there’s any other power like this, anywhere.

And I’m the one who has a piece of it now. I can’t take back what happened to Ray, and I.. can’t pretend I’m strong enough to go back and take on the Scarecrow, nobody is. I could use what I have to make myself a new life, but I can’t forget.

No, I can’t. I can’t hide from that anymore.

So… it won’t be my life I try to rebuild. It’ll be the people around me—and not by recklessly shoving into their emotions, or trying to make them something they aren’t. It’ll take practice, learning, everything I can to learn to see what someone feels just by matching those outward signs to what I can sense, what I mostly shouldn’t need to sense in them. To find people whose lives are being held back by secrets they need someone to say, or threatened by lies. Or they need someone who knows about this magic, if there’s more of it out there.

Sounds like being some kind of detective, when I write it out here. But maybe I can learn enough and make enough of my own rules with this to make up for what I’ve done. Because I have to.

Sounds like I’ve got a plan.