"There's no higher payment that can be made."

[Tobiasscrabble]

Exactly

Because not only would u die but so would tons of others regardless of if it was intentional or not and I don't think that u can be forgivin for that deep of a betrayal and you know afterward dairine ordeal would have flopped and the mobiles would have been the cause of a new deadly wave of entropy that none could fix

[FragmentsofReality]

(AWoM spoilers ahead!)

Something higher than lifeprice, something that a human cannot pay...

Well, when I initially read this a couple of options sprang to mind as to the "higher price":

1) True death. Not just loss of life, but dying. Finality. The end. To understand this, look at AWoM - Mamvish tells Carmela that, "there's dead and then there's really dead" and Nita herself talks about deceased wizards when she's looking up Rosaun's status: "Recall. Nitat had seen it often enough in the listing of wizards from Earth, both those whose lives had been lost in the line of duty and those who had died in other circumstances. The implication seemed to be that once you were a wizard, maybe you never stopped being one unless you really wanted to - and even after you were dead, or what passed for dead in the Real World, the Powers That Be nonetheless still considered you to still be on some kind of duty. It was, in a strange way, reassuring." What if the price higher than lifeprice is true death? Not recall, but the finality of termination.

2) Loss of soul. Not just the end of physical existence, but everything, spiritual and emotional as well as corporeal. The energy return would certainly be higher - but I'm not sure of how Timeheart would affect or be affected by that, assuming loss of soul would invoke any change in one's Timeheart status at all. I do think that being asked to give up admittance to Timeheart is possibly the highest price that can be paid, but how it plays into the "what is loved" concept I'm not sure. That idea would require a bit more studying and possibly some explanations from the Bosslady.

3) I really like PK's earlier postulation on the whole "loss of self/incorporation into a spell" idea that our guest elaborated on. Human beings aren't meant to not be human, and everything about humanity is tied up in identity. There is nothing any human values more than their own sense of self, and to have to give that up - it's be terrible. Or the guest's idea about being forced to devote your entire concentration to a spell so that one lives without actually living - that seems pretty awful too.

4)One other thing that occured to me that no one had mentioned yet - What if the higher price was the ability to build a future? The ability to have kids? The Powers are all about Life - I think not being able to further Life by bearing one's own children is an extrememly high price, with the wizard essentially paying the "cost" of the life of each unborn child, the spark of potential of new life they held. While this seems a bit darker than what the Bosslady usually goes for, if each unborn is counted as a seperate life that is certainly higher than one individual's lifeprice. I don't really see the Bright Powers accepting this as payment, but it's something to think about.

I did consider loss of wizardry and turning to the Lone One, but both of these represent further energy losses, not payment, I think. Especially the second option. And I don't think the powers would demand some else's life as the lifeprice - their value is essentially equal to your own, as I don't think the Powers value any one being above another. If they did, Ed would not have been allowed to substitute for Nita because his lifeprice would have been different. Thoughts?