Prologue
One thousand years ago.
The immortals were dying.
Algonquin lay at the very bottom of her lakes, tendrils of water frantically probing the silt for the source of the terrible emptiness creeping through her. It was a desperate search, and a futile one, because Algonquin knew the problem couldn’t be here. This was the realm of the physical. Problems on this side were simple, mechanical, but the death growing inside her wasn’t linked to her fish or her water or the land that had been her shore for millennia. It came from the other side, from the swells of power that rolled through the world only spirits knew like waves through the sea. So much magic, it had no end. And yet, somehow, it was ending.
With a frustrated cry, Algonquin left her shores and sank, flowing down the chasm that was her vessel in the deep magic, the place where spirits were born. It was not a journey she made often, or happily. As a Spirit of the Land, she belonged to the land, to the physical forces of sun and wind and rain. This dark hole below the magic was nothing but her shadow, the vessel that shaped the magic that rose to become the Spirit of the Great Lakes. But she’d loved this place too, once, before the Mortal Spirits had come. Before they’d grown so strong. But the magical side of the world was theirs now. Even Algonquin, who fought them every chance she got, never came here without fear. Whatever was happening now, though, it couldn’t be solved from the sunlit side, so she steeled herself and went deep, plunging through the dark recess of the vessel that gave her shape and life into the realm beyond it. The terrifying chaos mortals called the Sea of Magic.
Or what was left of it.
For the first time ever, Algonquin rose from the gouge her lakes had dug into the magical landscape eons ago to find nothing. No pounding magic, no swells, no waves. Even the Mortal Spirits were gone without a trace, leaving the floor of the Sea of Magic empty as a desert.
Considering how long she’d fought them, that might have been a blessing, but as much as she hated the human monsters, nothing could still the terror of finding a barren plane where a sea should have been. She was pulling herself out of her vessel to try and discover what had happened, where all the magic had gone, when she saw it.
Across the empty plane that had been the Sea of Magic, a mountain now rose from the ground where no mountain had been before. It was straight and round like a post, but unlike every spirit vessel Algonquin had ever seen, it went up, not down, soaring so high, she couldn’t see its peak. She could feel it, though. Somewhere up there, beyond her reach from the floor of the now bone-dry desert, mortals were working magic. Not normal mortals, and not normal magic. These were the most dangerous of their kind, the traitors who called themselves Merlins. Together with their horrible gods, they were working what little magic remained, gathering and bending it into something it should never be. Something hard and dry.
Something she couldn’t touch.
“No!” she yelled. “Stop!”
But her voice made no sound. There was no magic left here to carry it. No life, no power. Just the horrible emptiness beating down on her like the summer sun in a drought, and as it scorched her, Algonquin’s own magic began to evaporate.
“No,” she said again, grabbing at her water as it vanished. “No! I don’t want to die!”
But there was no stopping it. Somehow, the humans had stopped the flow of magic. Stopped the sea itself. With no more power flowing in, what was left was rapidly shrinking, leaving her floundering in a smaller and smaller puddle.
Leaving her to die.
“No,” she sobbed, but her voice was tiny now. Time passed differently on this side. In the real world, the growing emptiness had been alarming but measured, a problem to be dealt with. On this side, it was panic. Her magic vanished out from under her, leaving her tiny and weak at the bottom of her vessel. By the time she realized just how things were, she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t yell, couldn’t stand. Couldn’t do anything except watch herself vanish.
Watch herself die.
No! She was the land, part of the Earth itself. She could not die! If she vanished, who would protect her fish? Who would push back the dragons and hold the human tide at bay? She couldn’t die. Wouldn’t. She’d do anything to stop this, anything.
“Please!” the last of her cried in the dark. “Someone, anyone, help me!”
I don’t want to vanish!
Her last plea was nothing but a thought. The disappearing magic had taken everything else with it, even her voice. She was an empty cavern now. A ghost, and even that was fading fast. Desperate, she prayed for help. Prayed to the dark, promised it anything if it would only keep her from vanishing. Keep the deathless from death. Then, just as the last of her was collapsing into dreamless sleep, something whispered back.
Anything?
The voice was one she’d never heard before. It wasn’t even properly a voice. It was more like a shift in the dark, and it came from far, far away. But it was an answer, the only one she had, and so Algonquin reached out to it with the last of her magic, promising it anything if only it would save them. Save her.
Her cry was a single drop of water. A plea so weak, even she barely heard it. The answer, though, was crystal clear.
I come.
The promise slipped like smoke through the emptiness, but Algonquin was no longer there to hear it. She was gone, an empty vessel forced into a deathlike nothingness that mortals ten centuries later would arrogantly call sleep. But though she couldn’t answer, the promise was made, and far away, beyond the walls of the planes, something turned in the emptiness between worlds and began to move.