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The book closes with a final excerpt from the handbook's back-matter — not, this time, an instructional Q&A about the dimensional package, but a reprinted essay from a different volume entirely. The header attributes the piece to *My Lives: An Autobiography of Cecil G. Bagsworth III, The First Interdimensional Wizard™*, published by Frugal Wizard™ Press in 2102 at $39.99, with signed editions reserved for paying members of the Frugal Fans™ subscription club. The promotional copy is, as ever, woven seamlessly into the page; the reader is meant to be moved and to upsell at the same time.

The essay itself is titled *The Wizard's Burden*, and Bagsworth frames it as a confession he offers reluctantly, *not to depress or discourage* — a caveat he is careful to repeat — but to prepare the prospective customer for an emotional cost that the rest of the brochure has been at pains to avoid mentioning. The life of a wizard, he writes, is a strangely lonely one.

From there he takes a small detour through cosmology. Ever since scientists found the perimeter of the universe itself, the species has been pressing its face to the glass and asking what lies beyond. The answer, Bagsworth is pleased to report, is *more.* There is no end to reality, just as — he flatters his reader — there is no end to human ingenuity. Earth is only the beginning. The dimensions are a road, and the road has no last horizon: a person of sufficient substance level can travel to places no one in his immediate species-lineage has ever stood. *The infinite highway lies before you.*

The pivot follows. After enough of those horizons, Bagsworth confides, a traveller may begin to feel something like solitude — a regretful, peculiar kind, particular to those who have crossed the kind of distances Frugal Wizard™ sends its customers across. So many worlds, so many villages, so many countless people living out their lives convinced that their little towns are the centre of the universe; and the wizard, walking past, knows that they are not. He sees them in their homes with their families and finds the picture quaint. He cannot quite explain to them what he knows. He cannot quite share it. To know something they cannot is, he writes, to *bear a burden.*

He repeats his disclaimer in a slightly more legally-protected form. He does not raise the subject to depress, or to discourage, or — by clear implication — to entitle the reader to a refund. He raises it to warn. The buyer should expect this loneliness. The buyer should brace for it; the burden of knowledge will come, and will bring its own particular solitude with it. The book — and, by extension, the rest of Bagsworth's catalogue — is here for those mature enough to handle it.

The piece resolves with the sentiment that has been the brochure's quiet thesis from the title page on. You can have no equal, Bagsworth writes. And so you can know no peer. *You are a wizard.*

The rhetorical move is familiar from earlier excerpts. Throughout the handbook the prose has worked the same hinge — flatter the customer's sense of distinction, hint that the cost of distinction is borne in private, then steer the resulting flicker of doubt toward the next purchasable product. *The Wizard's Burden* runs the same play at autobiography length. Its anticipated objection is solitude; its proffered remedy is the rest of the Frugal Wizard™ ecosystem — books to read, editions to collect, fan clubs to belong to, fellow wizards (also customers) to recognise across the dimensional aisle.

Whatever the reader makes of the prose, the excerpt is the last word the handbook gets in the novel — a deliberately ironic counterpoint to where John West has just been left. Where Bagsworth argues that a wizard's destiny is dimensional solitude — a self that no one else can match and so no one else can really know — John has chosen the opposite: stay, walk the country, hold someone's hand on a wooden pier, accept being one ordinary man among other ordinary people. The brochure pictures the wizard alone with his secret; the chapter just before pictures him kissed in front of a god. Bagsworth's *infinite highway* is the marketing copy; the small dock at Maelport, with Sefawynn leaning against him and Logna mocking him at his back, is the rebuttal. The publisher, presumably, considers both outcomes premium-tier.