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Nora had left magic behind a long time ago. She’d intended to never look back.
She’d built a life for herself. A normal, human life. She was a doctor, she helped people, she had friends- fine, so she had one friend, but Lynn was a good friend- she did not need magic in her life. She did not want magic in her life. She was quite happy forgetting the thing existed.
And then she’d had that car crash. What exactly had happened, Nora didn’t remember, all she knew was she had been driving home and then she’d woken up in the hospital.
Her bones might have healed, but she just didn’t have the strength in her hands to trust herself to be a surgeon.
And to make matters worse, John Constantine had shown up at her door.
John had been the reason she’d been able to leave this world behind.
She’d known before he even started speaking that there was only one reason he’d be asking her to come back.
Esrin Fortuna was older than she looked. She was a good teacher though. Nora still had some memories to fall back on, but not the magic Esrin taught.
And not enough of it.
It was late when Nora made her way up to the attic of Winter’s Mill, to the library she’d seen part of but not all.
It was quiet, with only a few flickering lights, and Nora pulled a book she could sense the dark magic radiating from off the shelf and headed to a desk.
A man had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, with a friendly grin and shaggy hair and he held out a bag of something.
“Chip?” he asked.
“You’re the Librarian?” Nora asked.
She tried to hide the book.
“Time magic, huh?” he asked. “That’s dangerous, I would not recommend it.”
“Esrin uses it,” Nora said.
“I figured, but I also figured it’s not really my business,” he shrugged. “You’re Nora Darhk, right? Damien Darhk’s daughter?”
Nora nodded.
“Family’s tough,” he shrugged, a massive oversimplification for Nora’s current situation of her father escaping his prison, restructuring the last shreds of the cult she had been raised in, and planning on releasing the demon Neron and causing untold chaos all in the pursuit of eternal life.
The worst part was she still loved him. John had asked for her because he needed to be stopped, and Nora had the best chance, but she still wasn’t sure how she’d react when coming face to face with her father for the first time in two decades.
“I’m Behrad,” the man introduced himself.
“Nice to meet you,” Nora said. “You want me to put this back, don’t you.”
“Me, no, I get it,” Behrad said. “I got curious too when I first got here. My sister and her best friend went missing when they were kids. I wasn’t old enough to even have that many memories of Zari, but I know how much it still hurts my parents that they never got an answer. So, I went looking for one and stumbled into magic, I guess. And I got here and found a book on time magic.”
“Did it give you your answers?” Nora asked.
“I didn’t use it,” Behrad said. “I wanted to, but my friend Jax, Lily who was Zari’s friend, her dad was Jax’s godfather so they’re basically family too, anyway, he’s a scientist and he brought up all these thoughts on paradoxes and split time streams and other stuff that I didn’t really get but apparently Martin- Lily’s dad- wrote about before he died and Jax just made it sound scary enough I thought I’ll go through every other book before I try that one. And then I think that might have been a test or something because Esrin seemed impressed I didn’t get tempted by scary time magic and offered me the librarian job.”
Nora nodded.
“It’s really tempting,” Behrad said. “The idea of being able to go back to the point it went wrong and fix it. But everything that’s happened so far has led you to where you are and who you are now.”
“What if I don’t like either of those things?” Nora asked, looking at her once again trembling hand.
“Then you have two choices,” Behrad said. “You can go back, change that, and change who knows what else, potentially causing a paradox that could destroy the universe, though I think that was Jax’s worst case scenario, or you can make the next choice and the next and try and move forward just like everyone else has to do.”
Nora nodded and looked down at the book.
“It’s up to you,” Behrad said. “I won’t tell if you don’t tell Esrin I’ve been eating in the library again. Deal?”
He offered Nora his hand with a friendly smile.
She shook it and smiled back.