Free Gather the Sentient by Amalie Jahn Page B

it didn’t take Patrick long to begin associating marker patterns with events taking place in people’s lives.  Stock market volatility was one of the first correlations he made, noticing fear markers were indicative of decline while confidence markers brought about positive gains.  It seemed strange that people’s emotions drove the economy and not the other way around, but he took advantage of the valuable insight the markers offered, directing him to buy and sell at the most advantageous times.  Each day he would transfer his conscious onto the astral plane, prying into the minds of large stakeholders to get a sense of their emotional state with regard to their finances.  Were they confident?  Patrick would preemptively buy.  Were they pessimistic?  Patrick would sell before prices dropped.
    Through this strategic investing, he amassed a financial empire in less than two years, but by the time he began swallowing up major corporations, including his father’s, into his massive corporate conglomerate, even that wasn’t enough power to satisfy him completely.  He wanted more from life.  He needed more.  He longed for a life without limits, and that is when he fully realized what it meant to be part of the prophecy: he could control the fate of the world and thereby his own fate.  According to the prophecy, a life without limits is what the dark prophets would usher in for the seven dark psychics. 
    Evagrius Ponticus, an early desert father from 300AD, was the first to identify and spread the idea that there were seven evils one needed to avoid – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.  It was thought these evils lead ultimately to the moral decline of a man.  This suggestion was laughable to Patrick in so much that he believed life was at its finest when each of the seven was embraced instead of scorned.  For what other purpose was there but to indulge in all of life’s pleasures?
    What the religious called ‘sin’ and atheists called ‘the moral truth,’ Patrick called repression.  As far as he was concerned, both dogmas were established by man for the sole purpose of avoiding chaos.  But what if chaos was what made the drudgery of life worth living?  It was accepted in modern society that murder was objectionable.  But why?  To oppose death one must inherently value life, which he did not.  Therefore, if there were people whose lives he did not value, what should stop him from killing them?
    That he was forced to live in a society in which he did not fundamentally belong infuriated him.  Being required to obey laws he did not subscribe to was beneath him.  Therefore, on his 25th birthday, he committed to redoubling his efforts in an attempt to locate the remaining dark psychics.
    The result of those efforts was on her way now, and he knew it would be difficult to adequately describe to her how meaningful it was to be one of the seven dark psychics, just as he had done with each of the others at their first meetings.
    He was still mulling it over when the town car arrived.
    “She’s here,” he announced, clutching his hands together at his chest.
     
    Less than five minutes later his personal assistant slipped her head through the doorway to announce Akantha’s arrival.  “Send her in,” he commanded.
    He wasn’t prepared for the woman who now stood before him.  No longer in her immodest grass skirt and tribal face paint, she was outfitted in modern attire – a pair of jeans and a red cotton t-shirt with the Manchester United crest on her chest.  Although the bone had been removed, a gaping hole in her nose’s columella remained, as did her wooden earlobe adornments.  She was close to six and a half feet of pure sinew, which was clearly visible, outlined beneath the clinging cotton of her shirt.  She towered over both he and Javier, rousing the slightest pang of inferiority in his carefully-crafted persona.  He wasn’t used to being at a disadvantage,