Alex Verus Alternate Ending 1: Total Victory

(This is part 4 of an 8-part series on the ending of the Alex Verus novels.  The master post with links to all the other parts is here.)

The world of the Alex Verus setting isn’t fair.  There are massive disparities in power and privilege between the members of magical society, and those on the top don’t much care about the people on the bottom.  The good guys don’t always win and the bad guys don’t always lose.  Alex and his friends try to do the right thing, but they’re operating with very limited resources and it’s often all they can do to protect themselves.  

A lot of readers were hoping that the ending would change all this.  They wanted Alex to stop ending up with mixed victories and win a total victory, and use that to become some kind of transformative figure who would reform magical society into something fair and just.  

So what would that look like?  

Well, in this scenario, Alex doesn’t withdraw into exile at the end of Risen.  Instead, he takes advantage of his new abilities to take possession of one of the recently-emptied seats on the Senior Council.  

Being a member of the Senior Council makes Alex pretty safe in terms of personal immunity, and as a voting member, it also means that he can influence Council policy going forward.  Things wouldn’t get transformed overnight, but there would be gradual, subtle shifts towards better treatment for non-mages, a reconciliation between mages and adepts, etc.

But we did say this was the TOTAL victory ending.  So why not go all the way?

Let’s say that Alex doesn’t just join the Senior Council, he gains control of it, using some combination of appointing people who’ll do as he say, blackmailing existing members with the information he can access via November, or just using straightforward “do-this-or-else” coercion.  From this point on, between his personal and political power, Alex is pretty much free to do whatever he wants.  He can chase down and either exile or kill off his Light and Dark enemies, reform the Council, order that from now on adepts and apprentices will have equal legal rights to mages . . . the whole nine yards.  

What all this does is transform the overall shape of the series.  At the time, most of the Alex Verus books featured him struggling just to survive, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and see each book as a step in his gradual rise to power.  The whole series becomes an ascent where Alex goes from underdog to overlord. 

We could go into more details as to what Alex does with his new power, but it isn’t really important.  The point is:  Alex wins.  What he does from that point on is entirely up to him.

The end.