A fluttering of wings, a song, a set of sets, a tensed surface, mechanical frames, a false statement, a stellar body, an interrupted vision, a satellite photo, and bone were all recurring elements of the papers. Their arrangement and full structure were only discovered after the declassification of the archives. Taken together, they formed the basis of a vast and undisturbed canon. Several counter-explanatory theories collapsed into one overnight, which caused some consternation among the scholars, but eventually cohered into an assumption that the magician was once real.

Small instantiations dotted their early oeuvre: familiars, inexplicable items, simple disembodied voices in space. Maturity through greater subtlety in manipulating people and events, incorporating new technologies like the pantograph and the telephone. There then came to be a recognition of the process that all objects, and thus their magics, are embedded in, where by similar acts in different spaces one may bring about distant and parallel ends. A theory of sympathy, in other words, which in other doctrines is treated as a speech act or an echo. Near the end of the papers, the assumed magician sets about instigating a process of instantiating themself.

Consensus dictates that the magician has succeeded, or we would not be speaking of them thus. Details on name, gender, and genealogical origin could not be precisely established (recall where they describe their passing into "a flat black smudge"). Nevertheless, as it is more plausible to attribute a single cause to these anomalies than hundreds, thematically concordant yet causally separate, it is consilient to think of them in the singular. No coincidence that although their work gestured towards a panoply of futures, it is a known fact that we only live in one.

Perhaps the subtlety of this final act was to establish a relay between the magician's singularity and ours. We cannot help but allow the magician to exist, as a mirror makes known the fact of the human face.