I found him as good as dead, slumped against the wall next to the wood-burning stove in his house. His hand curled delicately around the butcher’s knife in his gut and he stared blankly ahead of him, his mouth gaping like that of a fish. Blood covered his fingers, chin, and floor. I approached him and crouched down at his side in the dark room. He didn’t seem to see me there. His eyes seemed fixed into space, his overall expression one of disbelief.

I bent down, whispered some words into his ear, and touched his face with my right hand. His face turned toward mine, our eyes locked, and the world shifted.

I looked into my eyes from his, and I felt his bewilderment, which was so strong that I could barely keep a grasp on my spell. His mind was a jumbled, harrowed mess, and it took a moment to figure out what was going on.

He was in pain, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He was a little frustrated, both from his efforts to try to sort out what had just happened to him and from his inability to breathe cleanly through the blood flooding his throat. But the worst were his efforts to try to believe he was so badly wounded, or rather, his efforts to not believe it. He was willing against his pain, against the memory of his killer’s angry visage and vicious knife-thrust, against the wet feeling of his blood on his body. He was hoping against reality, and trying to believe it was a dream or vision.

None of this was particularly unusual. People often try not to believe when terrible things happen to them. The funny thing here, however, was he wasn’t growing any dimmer. His consciousness was still in full force and had full reign over his body. In fact, he seemed to have more control than most people in their waking hours.

His disbelief was keeping him alive.

There was nothing arcane about it, unlike the spell I had cast on him. He simply seemed to be able to not believe he was dying, and by that act of unbelief, his body followed suit. I delved deeper into his mind, wandering around the flows of mental activity, and tried to see how it was that he could do this. I explored for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only about thirty seconds. I found nothing.

Indeed, I found nothing.

It is normal in the human mind to try to believe in reality, even if we don’t necessarily want to. There is an innate part that strives for truth, and that finds fulfillment in knowing truth. When we try to disbelieve anything, it will nag at our minds. We can try to ignore it, but inevitably, we always believe it on some level.

This man lacked such a mechanism to nag at him.

Somehow, this gave him greater dominion over the reality of his own body. Normally, the manipulation of reality is a power reserved for practitioners of the arcane. A magic user gains dominion over elements and entities through his studies of ancient incantations, and it is these incantations coupled with his personal authority as a magician that grants him power over aspects of the universe. To the mage, both are crucial. If he attempts to cast a spell without the authority gained through study, his spell is futile. He cannot so much as utter the incantation. The reverse is also true: if he does not know an incantation, all the understanding and authority in the world will yield him nothing.

Not so with this fellow. He had no incantations, no knowledge of the arcane, and yet he had full power to exercise his authority over his body. His body would not die simply because he believed it would not.

At length, I withdrew from his mind, contemplating how this might be applied in the arcane arts. I would have to do extensive research to find the proper incantatory components and ideological premises, which could take months or even years, given the lack of texts we had at our disposal. Still, it would be worth the preservation of life.

I glanced quickly around the room, uttering an incantation to aid my quick search for clues. Nothing especially interesting, not even signs of a struggle. The killer had done his work quickly and cleanly. But he could not keep his face out of this man’s memory, and that was all that really mattered.

I left the man as good as dead as I headed out to find his killer.