Chapter 10
Marci considered herself pretty well traveled when it came to the metaphysical. She’d been through portals and to the dead plane of the dragons. She’d been trapped in Algonquin’s Reclamation Land and inside a spirit. She’d died, fought her way out, and then journeyed across the Sea of Magic. At this point in her life-slash-death, being able to keep on trucking despite industrial levels of weirdness was a point of pride, but no matter how jaded the insanity that was her life since she’d met Julius had left her, it was impossible not to stop and stare at what was waiting on the other side of the Merlin Gate.
From the outside, the wooden door had looked deceptively simple. As simple as anything leading into a giant stone pillar rising from the floor of the Sea of Magic could be, anyway. But the moment she stepped over the threshold, everything changed. There was no more dark, no more swirls of nauseating magic. Even the grave-like cold of Ghost’s wind vanished, giving way to a warm, tropical breeze blowing down from what could only be described as paradise.
She was standing in a circular courtyard paved with rough-hewn interlocking white stones at the foot of a verdant mountain. At the paving’s edge, tropical plants grew in wild abundance, creating undergrowth so thick, a cat couldn’t have squeezed through. But while the jungle surrounding it was a wall, the courtyard itself was clear and open to the blue sky, and standing at the center was Shiro, the conjured servant of the ancient Merlins who’d turned her away before.
Seeing how she’d let herself in, Marci fully expected him to tell her to get right back out, but the shikigami made no move to oust her. He didn’t even say anything when Ghost, Amelia, and finally Myron came through the door—which looked like a massive iron gate on this side—after her. Only when the iron slab swung closed again did the shikigami finally make his move, stepping forward and bending at the waist in front of Marci in a deep, formal bow.
“Welcome, Merlin,” he said respectfully. “To the Heart of the World.”
“Merlin?” Marci took a step back. “You mean I did it? I’m finally a real Merlin? Like officially?”
“You can be nothing else,” Shiro said as he straightened up. “The Heart of the World was created by and for the Merlin Circle. Its door opens only to those deemed worthy, and it opened for you. That makes you a Merlin by every possible measure. As I am a servant bound to the Heart of the World by order of the Last Merlin, Abe no Seimei, it is now my duty to welcome you and your guests.”
“If it’s your job to welcome us,” Ghost said skeptically, crossing his arms over his transparent, shadowy chest, “why did you turn us away before?”
“That was my duty as well,” Shiro said. “I only welcome the worthy, which is a title your mistress had not yet earned when she first knocked.”
“But has now,” Amelia said, tapping her claws thoughtfully. “I wonder what did it.” She looked at Marci. “Did you pass a test or something?”
Marci shrugged and looked at Shiro, who shook his head. “I’m not privy to its logic, so I can’t say what exactly you did that caused the door to open, but the Heart of the World does not make mistakes. If you are here now, it’s because something you did between our last meeting and this one was enough to earn the Heart’s trust, and that’s proof enough for me.”
Marci bit her lip. There was a lot to unpack in that statement. She was trying to decide where to start when Myron beat her to it.
“Where are we?” he demanded, looking up at the forested mountain. “All my research said that the Heart of the World was a spell, not a place.”
“It is a spell,” the shikigami said, “to make a place.”
“So it’s an illusion?” Marci said, tapping her foot on the paving stones, which certainly felt real.
“I think it’s more like a model,” Amelia said excitedly. “I’ve always wondered how the great mages overcame humanity’s inherent magical handicaps. I mean, you live in a dual-natured reality, but your perception is confined to the physical world while you’re alive, and stuck in your deaths after that. Even if you do claw your way out to the actual Sea of Magic, you still need a spirit to ferry you around and point stuff out since you can’t see squat. That’s a crippling limitation, especially when you’re talking about the really big scale magic Merlins were famous for. But if your secret base is actually a constructed reality—a place that takes all the stuff you can’t normally see and translates it into something you can interact with—that would explain a lot.”
“Of course,” Marci said, staring up at the mountain, which she could now see wasn’t craggy or rocky at all, but perfectly regular. A flawless cone, which was nothing but a bunch of circles stacked on top of each other.
She dropped to one knee, brushing her hands over the courtyard’s paving stones, which she now saw weren’t rough at all. They were carved, their stone faces engraved with so many tiny, interlocking lines of spellwork, they felt like sandpaper.
“It’s all a spell,” she said, awestruck. “This whole place was built by people.”
“Of course,” Myron said, dropping down beside her. “Humans can’t see or navigate the Sea of Magic, so they built an artificial physical space inside it. A safe haven.”
“Or a lens,” Marci said, looking up at the blue dome of the cloudless sky. “We’re still inside the Sea of Magic, it just makes sense now. That must be what this place does. It translates all that chaos into something we can interact with.”
“You are both correct,” Shiro said. “The Sea of Magic is as huge and unfathomable to mortals as the actual sea it was named for. Such confusion prevented magical advancement, so the mages who came before my master, the ancient Merlins, built this place to act as an interface. It is a tool that provides both shelter from the chaos of the Sea of Magic and light that renders that chaos of magic into a form humans can understand and use.”
“But that’s incredible!” Marci cried, shooting back to her feet. “You didn’t just draw a circle in the Sea of Magic, you made an entire world!” She looked up at the green mountain. “We’re standing in what has to be the biggest superstructure of magical logic ever built. One made without any of the modern tools like computer simulations or spell-checking software. That’s like discovering a new Great Pyramid built inside of Atlantis!”
“I don’t know what either of those are,” Shiro said apologetically. “But I’m happy you understand the importance and power of this place.”
“The power of this place was never in question,” Myron said, scowling. “What I want to know is what’s all this power for? Novalli’s right. This is the biggest spell I’ve ever seen by several orders of magnitude. But I’ve worked for the United Nations long enough to know that humans don’t build things on this scale unless it gives them a serious strategic advantage.”
Marci snorted. “How is that even a question? We’re talking about a tool that lets humans see and interact with magic like the spirits do. That’s a huge strategic advantage.”
“It is,” Myron agreed. “If that was all it did. But look.”
He marched over to the edge of the clearing and grabbed one of the thick bushes, pulling it down to show Marci the flat green leaf.
“Holy…” Marci grabbed the waxy leaf from his hands, staring down at the delicate veins that ran through it, but not in the usual branching pattern.
“This is spellwork,” she said, running her fingers over the looping ridges of the ancient symbols growing inside the leaf where its chloroplasts should have been. The other leaves were the same, as was the branch they grew from. “It’s all spellwork,” she whispered, reaching out to touch the spirals of symbols that formed the patterns in the bark. “Every inch of it.”
“And you know what that means,” Myron said, letting the tree go. “You never finished your PhD, but even undergrads should know that interlocked spellwork is exponentially co-functional. If all of this is inside the same circle, and I see no reason not to believe that the Heart of the World is one circle, then all of this—the stones in this courtyard and the leaves in the forest and anything else we find—are parts of the same whole. It’s like—”
“Programs running in the same operating system,” Marci finished, nodding.
“Don’t put your dated Comp Sci analogies in my mouth,” Myron said disdainfully. “I was going to say ‘organs functioning in a body.’ We’re doing magic, not writing point-of-sale software for minimum wage. I know you Thaumaturges have a hard time telling the two apart, but while Shamanistic magic has its drawbacks, at least they understand that magic is an organic force. We’re playing god with the stuff of life itself. Not writing logic chains for mindless computational systems.”
Marci rolled her eyes. “Says the man who wrote a book called The Logic of Magic.”
“Yes,” he said proudly. “And since you claim to have read all my work, you’ll remember I said that the logic of magic functions like the logic of every other natural system: a chaotic mess governed by a few universal rules, one of which is that all spellwork inside the same circle works together. That point made, take a moment and think about just how much spellwork we’re talking about.”
He stepped back to look up at the densely forested mountain rising above them. “Not counting anything else we might find, but if all of those trees are spellworked like this one, that right there is more magical notation than all the modern spellwork libraries combined. Considering the amount of logic we saw crammed onto one leaf, we might be looking at millions of spells, perhaps billions, all working together. If that’s true, then the next question has to be: working toward what end?”
Marci frowned. “Aren’t they making this?” She tapped her foot on the stone. “You know, supporting the Heart of the World?”
“As amazing as the Heart of the World unquestionably is, it’s not that complicated,” Myron said confidently. “I could probably create something similar given enough time and the space on the trees that immediately surround us. Even if you doubled those requirements, though, the spellwork required to make a separate reality, even one as complicated as this, still wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to fill all the trees and rocks and other presumably spellworked landscaping that blankets this island. And it’s not even confined to the ground. Look up.”
He pointed up at the sky, and Marci gasped. Now that he’d pointed it out, she could plainly see that what had initially looked like a clear blue sky wasn’t actually clear at all, or a sky. It was a dome, a blue shell covered with hundreds of thousands of millions of tiny symbols like pixels on an old-style LED screen.
From all the way down here, they blended together into a flat blue expanse, but if she squinted, Marci could see the symbols were arranged into spellwork, just like everything else. Not just single lines, either. The sky was a grid, a hatch of symbols arranged in a spellwork pattern that could be read not just from side to side, but up and down and maybe even diagonally as well. The complexity behind such a design was enough to make her head spin, but it was also one Marci had seen before.
“It’s like the inside of my Kosmolabe.”
Myron gaped at her. “You have a Kosmolabe?”
“Had,” she said. “But you’re right. As incredible as this place is, there’s way too much spellwork here just to keep the magic out and support a translation interface. It has to do something else.”
Probably a lot of something elses, including choosing to admit her as a Merlin. But even that kind of seemingly intelligent decision fit within the parameters of the logic that governed wards. Just as she could make a shield that blocked bullets or trapped spirits, the ancient Merlins could surely write a spell that kept out everyone except for the humans who met their requirements. It would take a ton of spellwork—abstract wards always did—but there was definitely enough here to do it. More than enough, which was the problem. Nothing took this much spellwork.
Marci’s stomach began to sink. If she followed Myron’s logic and assumed the rest of the forest was jam packed like the tree and the stones under their feet, then there was enough spellwork here to hold all the world’s magic through twice over. And given why Myron and Algonquin had wanted to get in here, Marci had the awful feeling that was the entire point.
“You claimed this place was built to be a tool,” she said, turning back to Shiro, who’d never stopped watching her. “Something that wouldn’t just let humans see the magic here, but use and control it as well.”
“Correct,” the shikigami replied.
Marci nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “So what were they using it to do?”
The shikigami smiled wide. “To answer that question is my purpose,” he said, walking toward her. “But to do so, we must go higher.”
Before she could ask what that meant, Shiro reached the edge of the courtyard, where the trees met the stones. Then he lifted his hand, and the thick line of trees Marci and Myron had been examining peeled back like a curtain.
“Come, Merlin,” he said as he walked into the now-open forest. “I will take you to the Heart of the World.”
“I thought we were already there,” Marci muttered, hurrying after him into the tunnel of trees. Myron followed right behind her, then Ghost and finally Amelia, flapping her way after them out of the sunny courtyard and up the path turned cool green by the dark, leafy canopy of spellwork overhead.
Given the height of the mountain, Marci was braced for a long climb. Apparently, though, constructed magical islands didn’t follow normal rules of distance. After less than a minute of following a footpath uphill between the trees, Shiro pushed aside another wall of undergrowth to reveal a landscape of smooth stone and open sky. Blinking against the suddenly blinding light, Marci followed, stepping out of the forest into the bright, open, and strangely windless world of the perfectly flat plateau that was the mountain’s top.
After the blatant artificiality of everything else here, that really shouldn’t have surprised her, but it was just so odd. Beneath the blanket of forest, the mountain itself was perfectly conical, except for its peak. That was as flat and smooth as a factory floor, as though a passing giant had lopped the mountain’s point off with a razor. The only deviation from the flatness was at the peak’s center, where an elegantly gnarled pine tree grew from the stone beside what appeared to be a well. Aside from that, the only thing to see up here was the ocean.
“Wow,” Marci whispered, staring in wonder at the wild, strikingly blue water. “It really is a Sea of Magic.”
“It is,” Ghost agreed quietly, his glowing eyes round in the void of his face. “Though I’ve never seen it from this height before.” His voice softened. “It’s beautiful.”
It was more than that. The beautiful, clear, jewel-blue ocean stretching out around them was nothing like the nauseating black chaos Marci knew as the Sea of Magic, which was the entire point. This was the lens of the Heart of the World at work, transforming the confusing mess of the Sea of Magic into a form her brain could understand: a clear, shallow sea.
From the top of the mountain—which Marci could now see was indeed a perfect cone with no beach at all, just the vividly green jungle running right up to the waves like a wall—she could look straight down to the ocean floor. A long way down, too, because the base of the Heart of the World didn’t slope out gradually like a natural island. It went straight down like a peg, the stone column they’d seen from outside. And if that was there, then all the thousands of holes and cracks pitting what should have been the ocean’s sandy floor suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Look at all the spirit vessels,” she said, getting right to the edge of the mountain’s flat top.
The land beneath the vibrant blue water was so riddled with gouges, there was barely room for rock between the cracks. Some of the holes were so deep, the water was still pouring in, forming giant whirlpools as the sea was sucked down into the seemingly bottomless pits. From where she was standing, she could only look down into a handful, but the whirlpools were everywhere, dotting the choppy sea like freckles all the way to the horizon.
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
Marci jumped, whipping around to see Shiro standing right beside her. “I would have said beautiful,” she said when she’d recovered. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
“Part of it,” he said, staring solemnly at the endless sea. “This was what the Heart of the World was meant for. From up here, things are compressed, allowing us to safely and easily observe the Sea of Magic in its entirety.”
Compression would explain why the cracks looked so small. Or, at least, not the size of mountains and lakes.
“Those are the Mortal Spirits, aren’t they?” she said, pointing at the whirlpools. “The ones that haven’t filled up yet.”
“Correct,” Shiro said, his expression darkening. “Even more than observing, this place was created to protect. With so many spirits rising, we needed a watchtower, somewhere we could see the monsters coming, and prepare to strike back.”
“Monsters, huh?” Marci shook her head. “Have to say, though, I didn’t expect that from you guys. I thought forming partnerships with the Mortal Spirits was the Merlins’ whole shtick.”
“It was,” Shiro said. “Until we got overwhelmed.”
He turned away from the cliff, motioning for her to follow. Curious and frustrated, Marci did so, dogging his heels across the flat stone to the center, where Amelia, Ghost, and Myron were already waiting in the shade of the gnarled pine beside the stone well. Or, at least, she’d assumed it was a well. As they got closer, though, Marci realized that was wrong. The waist-high circle of stone wasn’t a well.
It was a seal.
It was all one piece: a huge, circular disk of white stone three feet tall and ten feet across, laid on its side under the tree at the exact center of the circular mountain-top. Like everything else here, its surface was covered in spellwork, but unlike the leaf or the stones from the clearing below, which had merely been parts of a larger whole, this spellwork was contained within its own circle. The edge of the seal had been gouged to form a hard line, creating a clear border between the rest of the mountain top and the spellwork inside.
As always, she couldn’t read a word of it, and not just because it was in a language she didn’t know. The spellwork on the leaves had been fairly normal looking, but the organization of the spell on the seal was something Marci had never encountered before.
Instead of spiraling around the circle as Thaumaturgical spells did, or even forming a grid pattern like the spellwork in the sky, these lines—each of which was smaller than the fine print on a legal document—wove in, out, and around each like threads. The result was a fractal knot that filled the surface of the circular seal without leaving so much as a centimeter of the white stone blank. It was absolutely magnificent, the sort of marvel that could spawn an entire new school of anthropological magic, which was why it was so tragic that the tightly woven spellwork was damaged.
At the top of the circle, the beautifully interwoven lines of spellwork were broken by a hairline crack. Along the break, beads of water welled up like blood from a paper cut, eventually joining together into a tiny rivulet that trickled down the side of the seal, across the mountain’s flat top, and eventually off the edge. It was such a tiny thing, a little leak from a little crack, but when Marci touched her finger to it, the water burned just as the magic outside had.
“Guess Algonquin wasn’t being metaphorical when she said the Merlins sealed the magic,” she said, flicking the burning water off her fingers. “This is it, isn’t it? This is the literal seal on magic. She was right.”
“Of course she was right,” Myron said angrily. “Do you think I’d have gone along with her if I believed otherwise?”
Marci glowered at him. “I think you would have gone along with anything that bought you a shot at being Merlin. But don’t try to pretend you knew all of this. I remember you saying back in the diner that you didn’t even know what Merlins did.”
“I didn’t, specifically,” he said with a dirty look. “But we’ve always known that humans are the only species with the ability to alter the magical landscape. Nothing else can do that, and considering that the total magic of the world has historically trended up, not down, it only made sense that its unprecedented total disappearance had to be caused by man.”
“Don’t feed me that,” Marci snapped, pointing at the seal. “There is no way you knew this was here for certain until now.”
“I never said I was certain,” he snapped back. “I said I believed. I theorized the drought was caused by humans. I suspected the ancient Merlins had some kind of control over the tectonic magical flows. A hypothesis that was further correlated by Algonquin’s desperation to get her own Merlin inside before one could rise naturally. I had no proof of anything, but when the opportunity arose, I was confident enough in my theories to bet my life on getting in here. And I was right.”
He placed his hand on the cracked seal. “This is the smoking gun. The magical drought, the long sleep of the spirits, the loss of our knowledge—it all started here. Magic didn’t vanish because of some natural disaster or dip. It was us.”
Marci stared at him in horrified disbelief. “Why?”
“Because they had no other choice.”
The reply came from Shiro, and Marci turned on him in disgust. Because if there was any line her recent life had taught her to hate, it was that one.
“‘They had no other choice,’” she repeated through clenched teeth. “Do you know the damage their choice did to us? The scope of what we lost? Before it reappeared sixty years ago, people didn’t even think magic was real. Everything we’d built, the knowledge of how to do stuff like this.” She waved her hand at the beautiful spellwork of the seal’s surface. “It was all gone. Everything we know about magic now, we’ve had to reinvent from scratch!”
“But you did it,” the shikigami said. “Because you were not gone. Humanity survived the death of magic, but did you ever stop to wonder how? Why it was that, in a world of dragons and spirits and monsters, humanity rose to become masters of the Earth? It’s not because you are so great or so special. It’s because the Last Merlins sacrificed to give you a safe haven.”
“By eliminating everything else!” Marci cried. “You put every spirit in the world to sleep!”
Shiro sneered at her. “Why do you think we did it? You have no idea what things were like back then. How it felt to see Death riding through the sky, or to look out on a battlefield and witness War laughing as he collected heads from both sides. These were not metaphors to us, not stories. They were real, and they were terrifying. The Mortal Spirits of our time were gods in truth. They did whatever they pleased, and the more they did, the more people believed in them, and the more powerful they became. It was a vicious cycle, and the only way to keep it from grinding the whole world to dust was to stop the wheel entirely.”
“So the Merlins sealed off the magic,” Myron said, nodding. “No magic, no spirits. Makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Marci said angrily. “They took magic from all of us! Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
“You think my master and his fellow Merlins made this choice lightly?” Shiro said angrily. “They were mages, too. Just like you, they’d dedicated their lives to magic, but it wasn’t enough. No matter how many times we slew the Mortal Spirits, they would always rise again. For all our efforts, we could never gain ground, because our enemy was fear itself, and fear is an intrinsic part of humanity. Finally, desperate and overwhelmed, Abe no Seimei did the only thing left that he could: he sealed away that which he loved most for the good of all.”
Just hearing that made Marci want to cry. “You can’t possibly call that a victory.”
“No one did,” Shiro said, shaking his head. “Humanity was defeated that day, and yet, thanks to my master, you survived. Survived and thrived, because, unlike spirits, humans are more than magic. In the thousand years since the seal was created, I have watched you grow to the world’s greatest power. Even dragons tremble before your weapons now, and it is all thanks to the Merlins’ sacrifice.”
He smiled at her. “That is what I was left here to say. Before he was forced out by the failing magic, my master, Abe no Seimei, the Last Merlin, bound me to the Heart of the World so that I would be able to tell future generations the truth of what happened. Part of it was that he hoped to be forgiven. Mostly, though, he wanted you to understand why the seal he sacrificed so much to create must never be undone.”
Marci understood that much. She didn’t agree, but she understood the logic of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. What she didn’t understand was how.
“Okay,” she said slowly, rubbing her temples. “I get why he wouldn’t want his work undone, but how did he do it? Even if it’s not actually a sea in the literal sense, we’re still talking about building a wall big enough to block all the world’s magic. How is that even possible?”
“It isn’t,” Shiro admitted. “Magic is a natural system. We could no more stop it than we could stop the rain from falling or the wind from blowing. But my master’s genius was in realizing we didn’t need to keep it out. We just needed to keep it in.”
Marci’s eyes went wide. “Of course,” she said, looking down at the mountain under her feet. The perfectly circular mountain topped with a perfectly circular seal.
Now that he’d pointed it out, Marci could have kicked herself for not realizing what was going on earlier. The whole point of circles was to hold magic. The bigger the circle, the more you could hold. Add in efficient spellwork, and you expanded that capacity by a power of ten, and if there was anything this place had in abundance, it was spellwork.
“This whole place is a circle,” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t stop the magic. You sucked it up and sealed it in. That’s why the Heart of the World stayed up when every other spell stopped working. You were sitting on all the magic.” She looked down at the stone under her feet. “This whole mountain is a holding tank!”
“This mountain is only the tip,” Shiro said. “There’s also the column below it, which goes down quite a ways. It was originally built to lift the Heart of the World above the Sea of Magic so we could see, but when he realized what he needed to do, my master redesigned this entire place to act as a funnel.”
He pointed at the spellworked sky. “Like the water it resembles, magic is constantly cycling. It flows from the sea into the physical world, where it is used up and dispersed into small pieces that eventually drift back to this side, where they fall into the sea again like rain. To break this cycle, we built a net to catch the incoming magic before it could reenter the system, funneling it into the mountain instead. Once stored, it was removed from the cycle, and without rain—”
“The sea dried up,” Marci finished, staring out at the blue water. “Just like a real drought.”
“And it’s all in here?” Myron said, kneeling to rap his knuckles on the mountain’s smooth top. “All the magic of the old world?”
The shikigami nodded. “All the magic that was in the sea of our time plus all the new magic that’s fallen since.”
Myron’s head shot up. “Wait, new magic? You’re sure it’s new?”
“It has to be new,” Shiro said. “My master and his circle used the seal to suck the Sea of Magic dry before they were forced out. The net in the sky was only there to catch the magic left on the physical side as it filtered back in. My master, Seimei, estimated it would take a couple of years for all the ambient magic to filter back through, but the seal has continued collecting small amounts of magic all the time I’ve been here. Since all known magic was already accounted for, I can only assume it is new.”
Myron and Marci exchanged an excited look. “Do you know what that means?” he asked.
Marci grinned. “That the Murthy Theory of Magical Genesis is true? Oh yeah. But we knew it had to be since total magical levels trend up over time, and how can that happen unless new magic is entering the system? The only thing we didn’t know was where it came from.”
“But we still don’t know,” Myron said, brows furrowed. “Where does the new magic come from?”
“Other planes, most likely,” Amelia popped in. “Planes aren’t closed systems. There are lots of ways magic can enter, though I couldn’t say for sure which one is happening here without doing a few centuries of observation. Right now, though, I’m way more concerned about the fact that we’re sitting on top of a thousand years’ worth of compressed magic.” She turned to Shiro. “Just how long was Abe no Seimei planning to let this go on?”
The shikigami began to fidget. “As I said before, it was an emergency decision. Gods of death and fear were threatening every living thing. There simply wasn’t time to—”
“So there was no plan.”
“Just because he acted quickly didn’t mean he didn’t plan!” Shiro said angrily. “My master built the seal to catch and compress magic safely for thousands of years. That should have been more than enough time for humanity to grow and learn. His plan was to buy safety for future generations in the hope that one day they would have the wisdom to solve the problems he could not, and it would all still be working just fine if that rock hadn’t cracked it!”
“Rock?” Myron repeated. “What rock?”
“I think he means the meteor,” Marci said. “You know, the one that brought magic back.”
“A meteor did not bring back magic,” Myron said authoritatively. “It was just a bit of space debris hitting the ground in Canada, nothing magical about it. It was just a coincidence the panicked media jumped on as an explanation for what was inexplicable at the time.”
As ever, Myron said this as though it were the one and only truth, which struck Marci as crazy. While it was true the meteor theory had never been proven, it was still a widely accepted explanation for what had happened that night. Before she could start arguing with Myron, though, Shiro beat her to it.
“But it was the meteor.”
“Impossible,” Myron said. “I hold the Chair for Tectonic Magic at Cambridge University. I’ve spent my entire life studying the deep magic, and I can tell you definitively that physical disasters such as earthquakes and meteor strikes have negligible impact. We weren’t monitoring the deep flows back then, obviously, but I can guarantee there is no way a chunk of iron pyrite falling from space caused enough impact on this side to break anything, much less an ancient seal inside the fortress of the Merlins.”
“That would be true,” Shiro said, “if it was a normal meteor.”
Marci blinked. “It wasn’t?”
“No,” he said. “It had its own magic—”
“It did not,” Myron snapped. “That meteorite has been tested thousands of times. I’ve handled it myself, and I can tell you firsthand that it’s no more magical than any rock.”
“Maybe not by the time you got it,” Shiro said gruffly. “But I was here when it happened. I felt that meteor hit the seal just as I felt the jolt of alien magic inside it that caused the shift in pressure that made the crack.”
Myron’s eyes were wide by the time he finished. Marci’s weren’t any better. It sounded like the plot of a bad movie, but hearing someone as in the know as Shiro talk seriously about alien magic was absolutely terrifying. Especially if that magic was no longer contained inside the meteor it had arrived in. That was like getting to the alien queen’s egg-laying chamber only to see that all the eggs had already hatched, and Marci had watched enough movies to know how that scenario ended.
“So where did it go?”
“I don’t know,” Shiro said, shoulders slumping. “I lost it in the chaos after the seal cracked. Since you haven’t had any problems, I presume it integrated safely with the rest of the world’s magic. The important thing, though, is that whatever fell from the sky that night did in fact crack the seal, and magic’s been leaking out ever since.”
“Wait,” Marci said, looking down at the tiny crack oozing magic like a paper cut. “You’re telling me this little trickle caused all of that?”
She pointed at the wild blue sea surrounding them on all sides, and Shiro nodded. “I told you, this place is compressed. It’s meant to convey the idea of the sea, not the accurate scale.”
“Seems like a pretty important difference,” Marci said, leaning down to get a better look at the tiny leak that was the apparent source of the rebirth of magic. “That said, though, I think this was a blessing in disguise. The crack let magic into the world gradually, giving us time to learn and adapt. I mean, can you imagine if the whole thing had gone at once? It would have been terrible.”
“I have imagined,” Shiro said angrily. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This isn’t a stable situation. The crack you see there is twice the size it was at the beginning. It’s been getting bigger every year, letting out more and more magic.”
Marci didn’t like where this was going. “So you’re saying it’s going to, what? Keep widening? Break all the way?”
“Have you seen a seal break under pressure?” Shiro asked grimly. “It’s not going to slowly open. It’s going to burst, and soon. A few months if we’re lucky, weeks if we’re not, though even that might be a stretch if the magic keeps jerking around like this.”
Marci frowned. “Jerking around?”
“The Sea of Magic is unsettled,” Ghost explained, glancing over his shoulder at the choppy blue waves. “I told you it was rougher than usual. Probably because a Spirit of the Land sacrificed her fellows to artificially inflate the spirit of a city.”
That last part was accompanied by a murderous glare at Myron, who sighed. “In my defense, it seemed necessary at the time,” he said, rubbing his hands over his face. “And I didn’t know we were dealing with a crack.”
“Well, that’s just peachy,” Marci growled. “Algonquin gets to screw us all over again.” She turned back to Shiro. “So what can we do?”
“There’s only one thing to do,” the shikigami said. “You have to repair the damage.”
“Me?” she squeaked, looking down at the masterpiece of ancient spellwork in front of her. “Fix that? Did you miss the part where I can’t even read it?”
“But it can only be you,” Shiro said firmly. “The seal is Merlin magic, and you’re the Merlin. You are the only one who can change the spellwork of this place. Even I’m just a talking part of the scenery.”
“But I don’t even know how it’s structured,” Marci protested. “And there’s the part where modifying a spell while it’s still in action is horrifically dangerous. If I make one mistake, I could blow this whole place. And even if I do miraculously get everything right the first try, won’t repairing the seal make magic go away again?”
“It will,” Shiro said, looking relieved. “That’s why I was so determined not to allow anyone who might be compromised to enter the Heart of the World. A human under the control of dragons or spirits might be tempted to shift the balance of power back toward their masters, but a true Merlin serves humanity alone, and humanity is best served when there is no magic at all.”
He smiled at her as he finished, holding out his hands in invitation, but Marci just stared back in horror. “No.”
The smile fell off the shikigami’s calm face. “I do not understand.”
“What’s there not to understand? N-O. No. I’m not taking magic from the entire world again.”
“But you are the Merlin,” he said. “It’s your job to do what serves humanity best.”
“And I’m telling you that plunging us back into the magical drought isn’t the way to do that,” Marci said firmly. “You don’t make humanity stronger by making everyone else weak. That’s not power. That’s just shooting everyone in the foot because you happen to be better at limping than the other guys. Also, we just got our magic back. I didn’t even know this place existed until today. There’s a lifetime of learning just in the spellwork in front of me. I’m not giving that up.”
“But you must,” Shiro said angrily. “It’s the duty of the Merlin to abandon selfish desires and do what is good for all.”
“Who are you to say sealing the magic does that? It’s not like you guys took a vote.”
“There was no time!” he cried. “Weren’t you listening? The gods had won! Faces of Death were riding through the sky! We had to seal the magic or die.”
“I understand that,” Marci said. “But that’s not how things are now.”
“Not yet,” Shiro said, pointing at the whirlpools dotting the sea around them. “The holes humanity dug have only gotten deeper as the population has grown. If you don’t repair the damage, if the seal breaks, the resulting flood of magic will fill those chasms, causing hundreds, perhaps thousands of Mortal Spirits to rise all at once. That’s a greater disaster than anything we faced, and the only way to prevent it is to act now, while we still can.”
Marci looked away with a curse. Of all places, she’d never thought she’d hear Algonquin’s argument repeated here. This was supposed to be the place where Mortal Spirits were celebrated and accepted as part of humanity’s magic. The Heart of the World had opened its door to her only after she’d freed the DFZ, for pity’s sake. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand what Shiro was saying, but the world had changed a lot in the last thousand years, and as much as Marci revered Abe no Seimei as one of history’s best mages, he was dead. It was her turn now, and Marci wasn’t convinced things were bad enough yet to blindly repeat the nuclear options of the past.
“What about a compromise?” she said, turning to Myron. “When she was trying to recruit me, Algonquin said she wanted to get a Merlin in here so they could cap the magic back down to the level it was immediately following the meteor. I disagreed at the time because I didn’t trust her and I didn’t want to rob Mortal Spirits like Ghost of their chance to be alive, but I don’t actually mind the idea of a limit. Could we do something like that? Modify the seal to only let out a certain amount of magic?”
“Absolutely not,” Shiro said.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Marci said, keeping her eyes on Myron. “I’m asking him. You’re always going on about how you’re the expert, Sir Myron, so go ahead. Advise me.”
Myron scowled, but Marci had never met a know-it-all who could resist giving advice. Sure enough, after half a minute of pouting and sneering, he answered.
“I suppose it’s possible. The seal’s already leaking, so we wouldn’t have to change the underlying spellwork. We’d just need to layer something on top of it that could relieve the pressure enough to let the magic out without pushing the crack wider.”
“Like a spillway on a dam,” Marci said, nodding. “Gotcha.”
“I don’t believe you do,” Myron said coldly. “Since you asked for my advice, you should know that I agree with the shikigami. Algonquin got me the spirit I needed to come here, but I didn’t become a Merlin because I wanted to follow her plan. I came here to save humanity from monsters like her by shutting the magic off for good.”
Marci took a step back. “What? But you were the one who told me about Merlins in the first place! You said they were our weapons, our chance to meet the spirits on an equal field.”
“That’s what I believed,” he said. “Until I met you.”
Her eyes went wide, but Myron wasn’t done.
“I know you think I sold out,” he said bitterly. “That I betrayed my team and all of humanity when I went to work for Algonquin, but what you don’t understand is that I was just doing what needed to be done. What I have always done. My entire life has been dedicated to doing what is best for humanity as a species. That’s why I joined the UN and stayed there for decades. Despite receiving countless offers for far better-paying positions, I chose to remain where I could do the most good, pushing our understanding of magic and advancing humanity’s ability to stand up to the monsters that were so much stronger than us. For years, I thought the Merlins were the key to that victory. They were the mages of legend, the weapons that would finally elevate us to the level of spirits and dragons. That was my hope, but then you came along.”
His dark eyes narrowed. “You showed me the truth, Marci Novalli. Through you, I saw that Mortal Spirits weren’t our shining swords. They were our monsters. Our deaths. Even bound, your Empty Wind was always greater than you, always stronger.”
“But that’s a good thing,” Marci argued. “Ghost is my partner. His strength is my strength.”
“Is it?” Myron asked. “Do you really think your Empty Wind couldn’t kill you in an instant if you angered him? Or the dragons? Do you think you’ve ever been anything to them but a tool?”
“Hey!” Amelia said. “Don’t bring us into this.”
“Why not? You’re part of the problem.” He turned back to Marci. “You stand there and criticize Abe no Seimei for taking away magic, but now that I understand what he was up against, I think he was a hero. The thousand years of peace he bought us with his drought were the greatest in our race’s history. We were the unquestioned masters of the world. Even dragons were forced to pretend to be human to survive. When magic returned, though, we went right back down to the bottom, and that’s where we’ve stayed. Emily and I were trying to change that when we sought you out, but now I know we were doomed from the start. No matter what we invent or how clever we get, humanity just can’t win so long as magic is in play. Even if we learn to deal with the dragons and Algonquin, we would still be doomed, because of things like him.”
He pointed at Ghost, and Marci clenched her jaw. “I get it. You’ve never liked my spirit, but—”
“This isn’t about your spirit,” he snapped. “It’s about all spirits, Mortal ones in particular. You heard Shiro’s story about how the ancient Merlins were overrun, but I don’t think even he understands just how bad these new ones will be.”
“But—”
“The world’s population when magic vanished was roughly three hundred million people,” he said over her. “Today, there are nine billion. That’s a thirty-fold increase, and that’s not even taking into account the global spread of ideas caused by mass communication. You saw how huge the DFZ was, and she’s not even naturally occurring. Algonquin created her specifically so that she’d have a Mortal Spirit small enough to fill before the others did. The real Mortal Spirits, the ones who’re a natural result of humanity’s collected fears, are bigger than we can comprehend.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she said, jerking her head at the Empty Wind. “I’m bound to one. I know how big he is, but just because something can kill us doesn’t mean it will. Ghost helped you, if you’ll recall.”
“But will the next one?” Myron said. “We’re talking about a plague of gods unleashed on an unsuspecting world. You’re asking me to believe that all of them can be controlled like your Empty Wind, but you didn’t have full control over him at the beginning, did you? You told me yourself that you had to bind him multiple times, and that was with the handicap of him barely being awake. We won’t get that break with the rest of them, and I’m not willing to gamble humanity’s future on the hope that all these spirits of death and anger will miraculously turn out to be reasonable.”
Marci rolled her eyes. “That’s not—”
“I don’t care,” he snapped, placing his hand on the broken seal. “You want my advice? This crack should be repaired as quickly as possible, not enshrined. Even without Mortal Spirits, the return of magic has already caused irreparable harm and loss of life to people all over the world, particularly in Detroit. Sealing it away again is the only responsible course of action. To do otherwise is to doom us all.”
Shiro nodded as he finished, looking wistfully at Myron as if he were seriously regretting not letting him attempt to enter the Heart of the World first. The rejection stung, but Marci couldn’t blame the shikigami for it. She couldn’t make herself be mad at Myron, either, because pompous as he was, he wasn’t wrong. Mortal Spirits were a threat. What Myron was saying now was the same thing Amelia had said before the fight with Vann Jeger: that if Marci didn’t control her spirit, he’d end up controlling her.
It had almost happened, too. If she’d been less bold in the moments after he’d first remembered his name as the Empty Wind, he would have taken over. Their entire relationship had been a delicate exercise in trust building, and as happy as she was with the end result, Marci had no illusions that it was the sort of process that could be easily reproduced. Even if she could come up with a process, every Mortal Spirit was different, as was every mage. Every pair had to forge its own unique connection, build their own bridge of trust. That was hard enough between two normal people, but when the price of failure was a god rampaging out of control, Myron’s argument made a lot of sense.
And yet…
“I understand what you’re saying,” Marci said slowly. “There’s no question that sealing off the magic again would save lives, but you’re missing the part where human lives aren’t the only things at stake here. This isn’t just our planet, Myron. It’s home to spirits and magical creatures of all kinds, many of whom were living here long before we came down from the trees. If we bring back the drought, we might save humanity, but we’ll hurt everything else.”
Myron sneered. “If you’re asking me to feel sorry for the dragons who have to stay in their human forms—”
“I’m not just talking about dragons,” Marci said. “I’m talking about magical animals, the chimeras and tank badgers and unicorns and all the other magical species that have reemerged since magic returned. If I seal magic away again, I’ll send them back into hibernation, possibly forever. And what about the spirits? They’re not all like Algonquin. There are millions of land and animal spirits all over the world that live peacefully with their human neighbors. Many of them even help us. Are they monsters? Do they deserve to die?”
“Of course not,” he said. “But we do what we must to survive.”
“Do we?” she asked. “Are we really surviving?”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
Marci lifted her chin. “Am I?”
He sighed. “Bad example. But your death was—”
“My death is why I can talk about this!” Marci cried. “Magic isn’t just power, Myron. It’s our soul, and I’m not speaking poetically. When my body died, this is what was left.”
She held up her hands, which were still transparent in the Heart of the World’s brilliant sunlight. “We’re magic, too. Maybe not as much as spirits, but it’s still a part of us. Obviously, humanity physically survived the drought, but just because our race kept multiplying doesn’t mean the loss of magic didn’t hurt us terribly. When I died, my magic was what lived on inside my death. I would have been stuck in there until it collapsed if Ghost hadn’t come to save me.”
Marci put her hand on the Empty Wind’s shoulder. “You’re always going on about how ‘he is death,’ but what you’re forgetting is that’s not a bad thing. All humans die, and it’s spirits like Ghost—the Mortal Spirits of death—who care for our souls afterward. If you take that away, if you put those spirits to sleep, what happens to us? Where do we go?” She turned back to Shiro. “What happened to the people who died during the drought?”
“What do you think?” he said stoically. “They died.”
“But what happened after?” Marci pressed. “If there’s no magic, then what happens to the magical part of us? To the soul? Does it just die?”
“All things die.”
“Answer the question,” she growled, stepping closer. “What happened to their souls?”
Shiro dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said at last. “They didn’t go anywhere, because they weren’t there to begin with.”
“Stop,” Myron said, putting a hand to his forehead. “Just stop. This is insanity. Are you really telling me that humans born during the drought didn’t have souls?”
“They had something,” the shikigami said quickly. “Humans need a certain amount of magic to live, and my master was very careful to leave a small buffer. He couldn’t leave much since it takes very little for the smallest spirits to rise, but the entire outer ring of spellwork you see there on the seal is dedicated to making sure the seal never sucks in that final percent of magic necessary to let humans keep their magical half while they are alive.”
“What about after?” Marci asked.
Shiro winced. “There, I’m afraid things had to change. It takes only a tiny bit of magic to let humanity live, but death is far more demanding. Keeping souls together on this side requires more magic than we could allow, so we were forced to let them disperse.”
“Disperse?” she repeated, her voice shaking. “As in poof? No more? You’re just gone?”
“It was very peaceful,” Shiro said quickly. “Much more so than the torments some Mortal Spirits would—”
“That’s beside the point!” Marci cried. “You took away the afterlife from hundreds of generations! Your master stole that from them!”
“Yes!” he yelled back at her. “To save the living! I keep telling you, this isn’t a solution we came to lightly. My master had to make a hard choice, and he chose to do whatever he could to keep humanity going.”
“I understand that,” Marci said. “My problem isn’t that Abe no Seimei had to make a tough call in a bad situation. It’s that you’re asking me to do it again, and I won’t. Not if there’s even the slightest chance of a better way.”
Shiro dropped his eyes after that. When Marci turned back to Myron, though, the older mage was just standing there staring at the seal.
“I didn’t know,” he said at last. “I had no idea there was an afterlife until…”
His voice wavered at the end, and Marci sighed. She’d grown up reading his books, but she’d despised the real-life Sir Myron Rollins almost from the moment she’d met him. He was a bombastic, pompous, cocky jerk who made terrible choices, but despite all that, he really did seem to care deeply about saving lives. That wasn’t actually surprising for someone who’d spent his entire life working for the United Nations, but it was a new discovery for Marci, and for the first time since her rosy image of Sir Myron Rollins had been crushed by the real thing, she felt a flash of her old admiration.
“We’re not going to let that happen again,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “The Mortal Spirits, the gods of death, they were created by us so our souls would have someone to help them. The Empty Wind is full of people who’ve found peace, and those are just the forgotten. There are other faces of death, other ends. They might not all be pleasant, but any afterlife has to be better than just dissipating into nothing.”
“Does it?” Myron asked, dropping his hands with a sigh. “That’s what I always thought would happen to me. I thought I would die and that would be it. I’m not sure how to feel knowing there’s more to it.”
“It’s kind of a shock,” she agreed. “But however we feel about it, we don’t have the right to take eternity from the people who do care.”
“Perhaps,” he said tiredly. “But I’m not just mourning a thousand years of lost souls. I’m also grieving for the death of our last acceptable solution. I thought if I stopped the magic, everything would go back to how it was before. Now you’re telling me there’s an afterlife, and if we stop the magic, we’re taking that away, too. If we don’t halt the magic, though, we still face Armageddon. The Mortal Spirit problem doesn’t go away just because a few of them have side jobs shepherding our souls. We’re going to be facing even bigger versions of the terrors the ancient Merlins couldn’t handle. Are we supposed to just accept that as the price for not killing our own afterlife?”
“I don’t know,” Marci said honestly. “Every choice has consequences. The trick is to pick the one with the fallout you can live with. Or die with, as the case may be.”
“There’ll be a lot of that if you let the Mortal Spirits rise.”
Marci gave him a scathing look. “You know, for someone who’s dedicated his life to defending humanity, you sure have a low opinion of us.”
“It’s not an opinion,” Myron said angrily. “It’s fact. My work for the UN took me to countless disaster sites, everything from spirit tantrums to dragon attacks to magical terrorism. It was all horrible, but do you know which disasters were invariably the worst? The most cruel?” He leaned in closer. “The human ones. Genocide, child soldiers, school bombings, human trafficking—I’ve seen it all. Magic was the weapon of choice in the situations I was called to work on, but it didn’t really make a difference. Cruelty is cruelty, and humans excel at it. That’s why I wanted the Mortal Spirits so badly. I thought they were our better angels, and if I could just get my hands on one, I could solve so many problems. Right so many wrongs.”
He heaved a long sigh. “Imagine my disappointment when I realized they were an accurate reflection. That’s when I decided to end it, even if it meant teaming up with Algonquin. I’d finally realized you were right, Novalli. Mortal Spirits are us, and that’s what terrifies me.”
“But it shouldn’t,” she said. “Yes, people can be terrible, but so many more are decent. That matters for Mortal Spirits especially, because they’re not the work of a single person. Those huge chasms are dug by our collective feelings, and if at least some of the diggers are good people, then every spirit has a positive side, even the terrifying ones. Look at the Empty Wind. He’s always been terrifying, but he’s still one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That might sound like a contradiction, but so is everything else about being human, which is all they are. Human, just like us. So when the bad ones come, and they will, we’ll handle them just like we handle bad people. We’ll oppose them with good ones.”
Myron stared at her like she was crazy. “What are you talking about?”
“Merlins,” Marci said with a grin. “I’m talking about Merlins. An army of them. Abe no Seimei sealed the magic because he got overwhelmed by the worst parts of us, the murder and war spirits and so forth. But the world has come a long way in the last thousand years. Modern humanity is more educated, more enlightened, kinder, more civil, and less violent than it’s ever been. When our Mortal Spirits rise, I have no doubt there will still be monsters of fear and violence, but we’ve never been more prepared to combat them as a society than we are right now.”
Myron sighed. “I keep forgetting how young and optimistic you are.”
“So what?” she said. “Those are good things.”
He sneered. “Optimism won’t beat a god.”
“But the Spirit of Optimism might,” Shiro said thoughtfully. “Has humanity really advanced that much?”
“I think it has,” Marci said. “Universal literacy, modern medicine and agriculture, the spread of democracy, equality for women—these things bring a lot to the table. We’ve still got our problems, as Myron pointed out, but we’re trying to fight them. That’s why organizations like the UN exist: to foster peace and improve people’s lives. Even when we fail at that, I’d still rather be alive right now than at any other time in history. That has to count for something.”
“It does,” the shikigami said, tapping his chin. “How would you build an army of Merlins?”
“Why are you asking?” Marci asked coyly. “Have you decided to come over to my side?”
“There are no sides,” he said primly. “I care only for what is effective. In my master’s time, that was the seal, and even he admitted that was a defeat. If the situation has changed such that we no longer need such heavy-handed measures, I am delighted to switch course. If it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true,” Myron said. “I just don’t know if it’s enough.” He glared at Marci. “Our enemies are gods. Even if we can stabilize the crack to prevent a full breakdown, they’ll still be here sooner than we like. How do you propose we handle that? It’s not like we can just recruit Merlins and have them ready.”
“Why not?” Marci asked, glancing at Shiro. “What would you say the chances are for your average mage to become a Merlin?”
The shikigami looked offended. “Such things cannot be measured in chance.”
“On a large enough scale, anything can be measured in chance,” she said. “Just give me your best guess.”
He sighed. “To be clear, I don’t believe Merlins can be accounted in this way, but if I had to give a number, I’d say that perhaps one in a million mages is skilled, disciplined, and lucky enough to find an appropriate Mortal Spirit, forge a bond, and make it all the way through the gate.”
“Fantastic,” Marci said, doing the math. “So if the current world population is nine billion people, and the chances of being born a mage are roughly one in ten, that gives us approximately nine hundred million mages alive right now. If we apply your one-in-a-million guess to that number, we get nine hundred potential Merlins.”
That actually didn’t sound like much for a global organization, but Shiro’s eyes went wide. “Nine hundred?”
“How many did you have before?”
“Never more than a few dozen,” he said, his voice awed. “Nine hundred Merlins would be incredible.”
Marci grinned. “What did I tell you? It’s a brand-new ballgame. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but we are absolutely not out of this fight. I know we can make it, because no matter what Myron says, humanity’s not all fear and death and war, and neither are our spirits.”
Myron shook his head at that, but Shiro was staring at her with new eyes. “Now I understand why the Heart of the World let you in,” he said. “You are a champion of humanity indeed, Marci Novalli.”
“She’s going to get humanity killed,” Myron said angrily, glaring at her. “You’ve won over the shikigami, but I still say we should repair the seal.”
“Are you crazy?” Marci cried. “Even if you don’t care about the spirits or the magical animals or everything else we’ll be ruining, did you miss the part where blocking off the magic will destroy our afterlife?”
“Better than destroying our living life!” he shouted back. “At least fading into nothing would be peaceful. You’re talking about raising armies of Merlins so we can recruit gods to fight against other gods. Even if you can pull that off, which, for the record, I don’t think you can, the results will be catastrophic. Even if you win every conflict, can you conceive of the damage a fight between spirits of that size could do? How many innocent lives would be lost? It’s unthinkable. It’s irresponsible.”
“It’s still better than screwing over every magical entity on the planet,” she said, glaring at him. “Trading our eternity for a little more safety right now is not a good bargain.”
“It is if you like being alive,” Myron growled. “Safety and security are not to be scoffed at. Not everyone has your cozy relationship with death.”
“Why are you so convinced we can’t make this work? Of all mages, I didn’t expect defeatism from the great Sir Myron Rollins.”
“Because you haven’t had to deal with as many disasters as I have!” he yelled.
“Well, maybe that’s the problem,” Marci said. “You’ve had your face shoved into the gutter of humanity for so long, you’ve forgotten the great things we’re capable of.”
Myron looked away in disgust. “Why are you even trying to convince me, anyway?” he said bitterly. “You’re the Merlin. I’m only here on your charity. Pretending you care about my opinion is an insult to us both.”
“That’s not true,” she said, walking around the seal so that he had to face her. “This is a decision that affects everyone, especially you. You’re one of the greatest living mages who also happens to be tied to the only other Mortal Spirit in existence right now. She might not be chained to you anymore, but the link between mage and Mortal Spirit is forever. Until one of you dies, that makes you the closest thing to the next Merlin we’ve got.”
Myron’s lip curled in a sneer. “Don’t act like that makes you happy.”
“It doesn’t,” Marci snapped. “You’re a cynical jerk who wants to wipe out all magic because he’s afraid. But you’re also a mage who wants to save humanity, just like I do. That’s not a lot of common ground to work with, but we have to use it, because no matter what we decide to do in the end, something has to be done about this seal before it snaps, and I can’t do it on my own.”
That was the bald truth. Marci was rightfully proud of her spellwork, but even in her greatest moments of hubris, she’d never claim to be as good as Sir Myron Rollins. He’d literally written the books on ancient casting languages and complex spellwork system modification, both of which were vital if they were going to have a prayer of transforming the cracked seal into something stable.
“I’m not asking you to agree with everything I say,” she said gently. “I just want you to take a chance. You came here ready to give up your magic in order to save mankind. That’s not something a mage would do if he weren’t serious about his convictions. We disagree a lot, but in this at least, you and I are the same. We both want to fix things, so let’s do it, but let’s do it together.”
She held out her hand to him as she finished, and Myron gave her frankly skeptical look.
“Really?”
“Really,” she said sincerely. “We’ve got too many enemies to keep fighting each other. Now are you with me or what?”
She flashed him her best smile, the one she used to close deals, but Myron just smacked her offered hand away.
“Come on!” she cried. “I saved you!”
“Which entitles you to nothing,” he said, crossing his arms tight over his chest. “A shikigami of the Last Merlin flat-out told you that the Mortal Spirits are going to overrun us, and you’re planning to ignore him. Not because of facts, but because you feel different. Because you believe in the power of human goodness. That might make a nice inspirational poster, but it is lunacy to bet the lives of every man, woman, and child on such shoddy logic, and I refuse to ride at your side while you tilt at windmills.” He kicked the broken seal with the toe of his fancy shoe. “You want to destroy the world? Do it yourself.”
Marci was imagining dropping that stone seal on his head. “Why are you so stubborn? It’s like you want to give up your magic!”
“What I want is to ensure the survival of the human race,” he snarled. “You’re the one who cares about magic more than people.”
“But people are magic!” she yelled. “This isn’t humans versus spirits. It’s all of us finding a way to live together without killing each other!”
“Tell that to Algonquin,” Myron said. “She’s certainly made up her mind. And since you were right about me still being bound to the DFZ, I might as well tell you that she’s already back in her city, and it is not a happy homecoming. She and Algonquin are determined to tear each other apart, which means the chaos I warned you about is already happening. You could stop it if you cared to. I’d gladly help you repair the seal and shut all this down for good, but that’s not what you want. You want to fight. You want to have it all, even if it means people die. I can’t allow that, so unless you change your mind, we have nothing further to discuss.”
He turned away after that. Marci turned her back on him as well, grinding her teeth as she fought the urge to throw him off the mountain. Julius made this turning-enemies-into-allies stuff look so easy when he did it, but Myron must have been more stubborn than a dragon, because she was getting nowhere. She just didn’t understand how such a smart man could be so cynical and shortsighted. If he weren’t the only other mage here, Marci would have written him off completely. She didn’t need this nonsense.
Unfortunately, she did need his help. Even if Amelia could translate the words, the crazy spellwork on the seal was way outside Marci’s area of expertise. If nothing else, she needed another pair of hands to maintain the circle that would hold the magic steady while she made changes. Myron might not be able to change the spellwork here, but he could still move magic, and unlike her, he could actually read what the spell did. That was kind of important when you were trying to modify a spell where a single mistake could send a thousand years of magic cascading down on an unsuspecting world.
There was nothing for it. She needed him, and since appealing to Sir Myron’s reason and better nature was clearly a waste of time, Marci decided to try a different approach. “How about we make a deal?”
Myron glanced suspiciously over his shoulder.
“I get that you don’t want anything to do with this,” she went on. “But the seal still has to be stabilized. I can’t do that on my own, so how about you help me figure out a way to jury-rig this thing into letting out magic at a safe, sustainable rate, and in return, I will build you an emergency shut-off.”
“You mean like a kill switch?” he said, turning back around.
“Exactly like a kill switch,” she said. “I’ll even let you design it so you can be certain it works. This way, I can do my thing, and if you’re right about it destroying humanity, you’ve got something you can hit to shut things down anytime you want.”
For a moment, Myron looked as if he was actually giving the idea serious consideration, and then he scowled.
“I see your trick,” he said bitterly. “You’re letting me build a kill switch because you know I won’t be able to use it. Even if you made me a big red button right on top, I wouldn’t be able to push it, because only Merlins can manipulate spellwork in the Heart of the World, and I’m not a Merlin.”
“Of course there’s a trick,” Marci said with a smile. “I’m offering you a deal, not a surrender. Why would I let you build a kill switch if I knew you were just going to mash it the first moment you could? No, no.” She wagged her finger. “Here’s my part of the deal. I will let you make a kill switch, but you’re going to have to become a Merlin yourself if you want to push it.”
Myron stared at her, uncomprehending. “A Merlin?”
Marci, Ghost growled in her mind. What are you doing? You can’t make him a Merlin. He wants to destroy us.
“But that’s just it,” she whispered back, keeping her eyes on Myron. “I can’t ‘make’ him a Merlin. The Heart of the World decides that, not me, and that’s why this is going to work. Think about when the gate let me in. It didn’t open because I was a hotshot mage with a Mortal Spirit. I was only let in after I freed the DFZ, because that was when I’d proved I understood that Merlins are champions for all of humanity. Spirits and ghosts included, not just the physical people alive right now. That’s why I can build Myron a kill switch, because if he can understand that truth to the point where the Heart of the World opens to him, then he’ll no longer be the sort of man who wants to push it.”
That didn’t stop the other Merlins, the Empty Wind argued. They were the ones who made the seal in the first place.
“And considered it their greatest defeat,” she said, raising her voice so that Myron could hear too. “I know it’s a gamble, but it’s a safe one, because I’m right. If Myron can become a Merlin on his own merit, then I won’t have to say a word. He’ll understand for himself just how foolish and cowardly he’s being, or he won’t be a Merlin at all.”
The older mage sneered. “And if I refuse?”
“You won’t,” Marci said confidently. “Refusing would mean you’ve given up on becoming a Merlin entirely, and I don’t believe that for a second. You might have lost your shot at being the first, but this is still something you’ve wanted all your life. There’s no way you’re giving it up now. Not when you’re so close.”
That, at last, seemed to get through. “I’ll never give up,” he said firmly. “I deserve to be a Merlin.”
“Great,” Marci said. “If you can dump that sense of entitlement, you might just make it. In the meanwhile, how about translating this seal? Because I have no idea where to start.”
Myron heaved a long-suffering sigh. Then, slowly, he leaned down over the seal. “For the record,” he said. “I’m only doing this because I’m terrified of what you’d do in ignorance without me. The moment the crack is stabilized, though, you’re taking me back to the physical world. I need to get my body back so I can find another spirit and come back here as a Merlin to do what you could not.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “But before you get your hopes up too high, you’re not getting another spirit. First, the DFZ is the only Mortal Spirit in the world aside from Ghost right now, and second, did you miss the part where you two were bound for life?”
Myron shook his head. “I can’t use her. She hates me.”
“Tough,” Marci said. “She’s your responsibility. You raised her. You pissed her off. Now you have to clean up your mess. Or do you not believe a Merlin should be responsible for his mistakes?”
When Myron flinched, Marci knew she had him. “Just give it a chance. The DFZ is famous for being a place where people start over. Talk to her. Apologize for being a jerk. Treat her like a city instead of a monster, and I bet you’ll be surprised.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “If she sees me again, she’s going to kill me.”
“Then you’d better make sure she has a good reason not to,” Marci said, joining him by the seal. “Either way, you’ve already said yes, so let’s get to work. I want to get this thing stable pronto so I can get back to the real world, too. I left a lot of irons in the fire when I died. The faster I get back to deal with those, the happier I’ll be. And speaking of…”
She glanced at Shiro. “How do I travel back and forth from here to the real world? Do I click my heels together or spin widdershins or what?”
“What are you talking about?” the shikigami asked, genuinely confused. “This is the real world.”
“I meant I want to go back to being alive,” Marci clarified. “Since I was bound to a death spirit, I had to die to get over here. Now that I’m officially a Merlin, though, I’d like to remedy that. You know, get a new body, return to the physical world, all that good stuff. History’s full of famous Merlins, so I know it has to be possible. How do I do it?”
“That depends,” Shiro said. “Does your spirit have an aspect of rebirth?”
Marci looked at Ghost, who shook his head.
The shikigami shrugged. “Then I’m afraid there is no way back.”
She froze. For a long heartbeat, Marci just stood there like a statue. Then she exploded into motion, grabbing the shikigami’s shoulders with both hands as she shrieked, “What?”