Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-1186783-20140817151538/@comment-1186783-20140820050637

@Banning:...wow, I really do need to revise if you missed that (I can see where my hints were probably confusing as hell, and WAY too subtle). The idea was supposed to be that every member of the Dawson family performs a sacrifice based around a Fibonacci number every 10 years to magically slow their aging, and preserve their powers. In the case of Peter his number is 144, so he puts 144 people at risk of death (each member of the family designs their own ritual, and he saw the number as significance because its 3*4*3*4, which is why only one-in-four have to die)

Michael, on the other hand, is normally an Axe-crazy serial killer who uses magic to cover his tracks, whose sacrifice is to ONLY kill one (1 is a Fibonacci number) person (Mr. Wiseman) over the course of an entire year. So, he isolates himself to avoid the temptation. At the end of the story, he CAN'T kill the protagonist, because it hasn't been a full year yet, and it would interrupt his sacrifice, so he gives him a head start of a few days. The idea of the alternate ending was that it would be the first time Michael had taken the time to savor the hunt, and so he decidd he wanted to keep hunting that one target (while probably slaughtering lots of other people along the way).