Chapter 9
Marci clung to Ghost’s freezing back, looking nervously over her shoulder at the debris-scattered spiral of on-ramps that had once hidden their house, and now hid every dragon in the world. “Are you sure they’ll be okay? We’ve never tried anything like this before. What if your shield goes down because you got too far away?”
“It will be fine,” the Empty Wind said, sweeping them through the dark city on a gust of grave-cold wind. “The only reason I never did this before was because I didn’t have the power. With the magic I have now, maintaining a barrier is so simple, I don’t even have to think about it.”
“Please think about it a little,” Marci begged. “We’re playing fast and loose enough as it is. The last thing we need is for our entire army to get crushed because we weren’t paying attention.”
Her spirit harrumphed, but she felt his magic shift through their connection, pushing more power behind them. “Satisfied?”
She nodded, grabbing Ghost’s shoulders to pull herself up taller. She was riding on his back like a monkey with her feet planted on his hips and her hands gripping the freezing, ropey muscles on either side of his neck below his helmet. It was extremely undignified, but Marci far preferred it to being carried around in his arms like a fainting damsel. If nothing else, it was easier to see where they were going this way, not that she liked what she saw.
“Wow,” Marci breathed, eyes growing wide.
Other than the streets immediately surrounding their house, the city was in ruins. She’d known it would be bad—she’d been standing on one of the buildings the DFZ had thrown at Algonquin, so it wasn’t as if any of the destruction was new—but seeing the full extent of it lying still and dead under the dark of the Leviathan’s shadow was gut wrenching. The famous double-layered city of Skyways and underpasses looked more like a pile of rubble. Everything—the superscrapers and the megafactories, the elegant treed boulevards by the water and the giant apartment bricks that held up downtown—was destroyed. Even the famous neon streets of the Underground were dark and empty, their long-hidden roads exposed under the broken Skyways, most of which had been wiped out completely, leaving lines of skeletal support pillars sticking up from the ruined city like jagged bones.
It felt dead too. A few fires still sputtered in the wreckage, but otherwise there was no light at all. Aside from their house, all the power in the city was out, leaving the ruins a broken jumble of muted blacks and grays beneath the stain of the Leviathan’s shadow. Nothing moved in the dark, nothing made a sound. Even the seagulls were gone, leaving the banks of Lake St. Clair empty save for the corpses of thousands of dead fish. The stench was enough to make Marci retch even from this far away. She covered her nose with her arm, motioning for Ghost to take them west, toward the inland half of the city.
“I hope the spirit of the DFZ will be okay,” she said as Ghost flew them over the pile of rubble that had once been Marci’s favorite discount magical supplies warehouse. “I don’t know how the city is going to come back from this.”
“She’ll be fine,” the Empty Wind assured her. “She’s a Mortal Spirit. An idea, not a place. So long as people remember the DFZ, she will live on, and she will rebuild. The only reason she hasn’t started already is because she’s been busy with the Leviathan.”
“He certainly does dominate the conversation,” Marci grumbled, glowering at the black shape that filled the sky high above their heads.
The Nameless End looked even bigger now that they were out in the open. As fast as Ghost had to be flying, if Marci didn’t look at the ground, she wouldn’t have known they were moving at all. But implacable as the enemy above them looked, Ghost’s words gave her hope. When this was over, the DFZ would be the only place in the world ruled by a Mortal Spirit. A power that rose not of the land, but from the ideas and dreams of the humans that lived in it. Marci had already seen the DFZ move buildings like fingers and twist overpasses like vines during her fight with Algonquin. What could that power do when it came to rebuilding? Could she sprout new superscrapers from the ground? Lift the broken Skyways back into place like a surgeon setting a bone?
Marci didn’t know, but she desperately wanted to see it. Reason number eighty thousand to beat the Leviathan and stay alive.
As expected of the aftermath from a fight between a city and a lake, the damage was largely concentrated along the water. Downtown and the other shore districts were an absolute mess, but the farther inland they flew, the less dire things looked. By the time they reached the tumbledown houses of the old University District at the border of Reclamation Land, the landscape below looked almost normal. Better than normal, actually, because the hazy, pea-soup magic leaking over the fence from Algonquin’s spirit paradise was gone. True, it had been replaced by the even thicker magic of the crash, but that was already starting to feel natural. From the shimmer of Ghost’s magic surrounding them, Marci knew the ambient magic must still be crazy high, but at least there was no more glowing snow rising from the ground.
“Looks like it’s finally fading,” she said as Ghost set them down. “How does it feel to you?”
“Thinner,” the spirit reported. “Ten, maybe twenty more minutes, and we won’t need a shield at all.”
“That’s good news,” Marci said, glancing again at the Leviathan, which still filled the sky in every direction for miles. “If our counterattack doesn’t get up in the air soon, there’ll be nothing left to defend.”
The Empty Wind nodded grimly before they both turned to walk up the broken driveway toward the slanting, ivy-covered, ranch-style brick house that had been Marci’s first home in Detroit.
The place looked even worse now than it had then. The basement windows were still shot out from the fight with Bixby’s goons, and the garden had been torn to pieces by the treads of Algonquin’s anti-dragon taskforce tanks. The roof had collapsed in places, probably due to all the shaking from the DFZ’s battle last night, but as battered and sad as it looked, the house was still standing, and in the broken, dusty, junk-piled windows, Marci could see the gleaming eyes of cats watching their every move.
“We always end up back here,” Ghost said quietly.
“Because it’s yours,” Marci replied, stepping off the driveway and onto the grassy path that led to the basement stairs. “Of all the death-filled places in this city, this is where you rose. It’s also where I was able to recharge you when your magic was almost gone. If there’s anywhere in the city that’s closest to your domain, this would be it.”
Ghost nodded and followed her through the shot-off door into the basement, his glowing eyes watching the cats as they fled deeper into the ceiling-high piles of trash that filled the damp brick room. “I wish I could tell you why,” he said as Marci pulled magic into the circle of her bracelet to give them some light. “But I don’t actually remember why I picked this place. I don’t remember much of anything from the beginning. All I know was that I was in darkness, and I was so angry. Angry, hungry, and alone, just like them.”
He knelt down on the stained cement floor, holding out his hand to the scrawny, bony cats watching nervously from the mounds of trash piled against the walls. “We were all forgotten. No one wanted us. No one remembered. No one cared if we lived or died.”
“Maybe that’s why you rose here,” Marci said. “They needed you.”
“They needed a champion,” Ghost agreed. “But I needed…” His voice fell off as he shook his head. “I don’t know. I knew I needed something, but I had no idea who I was or what I was meant to do back then. Helping them made me feel like I had a purpose, though. Even when I was killing that poor, sick old woman, I remember feeling righteous. She was the one who’d brought them all here and forgotten them, who’d left them to die buried under garbage without even a name. I thought killing her would make it right, but…”
“But it didn’t,” Marci said, squatting down beside him. “The old lady’s long gone, but this place is even worse off without her. Algonquin’s DFZ has no animal control, no shelters other than what volunteers provide from the kindness of their hearts. Once their owner was gone, no one even knew the cats were here except for you.” She smiled. “You remembered them.”
“I always remember,” the Empty Wind said, his eyes flashing blue as he rose to his feet. The wind rose with him, blowing away the pile of old advertisements and paper cups in front of them to reveal the corpse of a dead cat. From the look of it, the poor thing had been dead for at least a few days, but Ghost reached down to pet its rotting fur as if it were still alive and warm.
“I was made to remember,” he said, running his frozen fingers along the small body. “Every person, every creature, every soul who dies with no one left to mourn them, I am there. No one is ever truly forgotten so long as I exist. That is my purpose. That is why they call to me.”
“So answer them,” Marci said, nodding at the piles of trash. “I can tell from the smell that there are dozens more dead cats in here. They’re calling to you, right?”
“The dead always call,” he said as his hands began to shake. “So many voices. They need so much.”
“Then give it.”
His head whipped toward her. “Now?”
Marci shrugged. “If not now, when? The world could end in half an hour. I promised when I gave you your name that I would help you, and that’s what I’m doing.” She smiled. “Do what you were made to do, Empty Wind. Help the forgotten. Remember the dead. Give them peace. Make this place your domain, somewhere the dead don’t have to be alone, and maybe we’ll both find what we’re looking for.”
The spirit’s glowing eyes widened as he finally realized what she was trying to do. “Very clever,” he rumbled. “But do you really believe this will work?”
“If not this, then nothing,” Marci said. “But I think it will. Every time I’ve helped you help the dead, we’ve gotten closer, become a better team. I don’t think that’s coincidence. The whole idea of a Merlin is someone who helps a Mortal Spirit be their best self. I didn’t technically become one until I passed through the Merlin Gate, but it was only through your steadfast friendship that I was able to reach the gate at all. We’re clearly meant to be a pair on all levels, so it only makes sense that the way back to my job in the Merlin realm would be through helping you do yours. If nothing else, we’ll do some good before the end, and that’s never a waste.”
“Helping the dead is never wasted,” Ghost agreed as the wind picked up. “Their gratitude is forever, the only warmth I feel.” The wind grew stronger as he spoke, whistling past the broken windows. This time, though, the gale did not disturb the trash. It blew through the piles, passing through the torn papers and broken bottles and piles of rotting clothes like water through soil, and everywhere it touched, the cats appeared.
They came in droves, packing the room just as they had when Ghost had been one of them. As Marci watched, he became one of them again, transforming into a giant white cat while his ghostly voice echoed through the howling magic.
Come with me.
All through the dark basement, lights appeared. They glittered like mist, coming together to form faint outlines of cats of all ages and sizes walking out of the trash toward Ghost. They dissolved again when they reached him, their ghostly shapes blown away by his wind, but they were not lost. They were still there, their faint magic becoming part of the vortex that swirled around the Empty Wind.
Marci couldn’t begin to count how many dead cats her spirit raised. The basement was full of them, and still they kept coming, filtering through the brick walls from the garden and down through the ceiling from the floors above. With each one that joined the Empty Wind, the grim aura that had hung over the house since she’d first come here lessened. It was still freezing, and the basement certainly didn’t smell any better, but a weight had most definitely been lifted. Even the living cats noticed it, their eyes growing less wary and fearful as the dead released their grip. Then, when the flow of ghostly shapes from the mountains of trash had slowed to a trickle, the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead turned to Marci.
He was hard to see through the hurricane of magic that was blowing around him, but Marci didn’t need her eyes to know that Ghost was smiling. She could feel his happiness in her bones. The tide of joy flowing down their connection now was even stronger than the happiness she’d felt when he was playing in the magic. That had been mere giddiness. This was the absolute satisfaction of finally doing what he’d always been meant to do.
Because of you.
The voice in her head was a multitude. A haunting gale of sounds, most of them not human, threaded together into joyful words. Thank you, Merlin.
“It was my pleasure,” Marci replied with a sincere smile, squinting at the outline of her giant white cat of a spirit through the whirling magic. “So what now?”
She felt Ghost’s invisible smile widen.
Jump.
Marci didn’t hesitate. The moment the word formed in her head, she jumped, leaving her body behind her as her soul leaped into the gale of spirits to blow with them back to the realm of the Forgotten Dead, and the Sea of Magic that howled above it.
***
Marci’s first impression when she entered the Sea of Magic as a living soul was panic. The magic here had always been chaotic, but what she’d seen before was nothing compared to this. Even safe inside Ghost’s protection, the currents were strong enough to knock her around like a bug in a jar. She wasn’t even sure which part of her body was her head and which were her feet anymore when a door suddenly appeared in front of her, the only fixed point in the moving, swirling, boiling madness.
She dove for it instinctively, nearly burning off her hand in her rush to get to the blessedly stable, normal-looking wood. The moment her fingers touched its surface, the Merlin Gate opened for her, and Marci tumbled inside, landing in a heap on the stone. She was still trying to stop the spinning in her head when a hand appeared under her nose.
“Bumpy entrance, huh?”
Marci looked up with a start to see Amelia standing over her, her face grim. “What are you doing here?” she asked, grabbing the dragon’s hand. “You’re supposed to be with Julius.”
“I was,” Amelia replied, hauling her up. “And I will be again, but this was kind of a crisis, so I bopped over. Shiro was going to kick me out on account of my whole ‘not having a Merlin’ thing, but now that you’re here, you can vouch for me.”
Marci nodded absently, too distracted by her surroundings to pay Amelia’s explanation proper attention. She was certain she’d come in through the Merlin Gate, but this was not the stone courtyard at the foot of the green mountain where she’d entered last time. Everything looked so different, it took Marci several seconds to realize she was standing on top of the flat peak of the mountain… which was no longer a mountain at all, but a tiny island in the middle of a vast and terrifying black sea.
“What happened?” she cried, turning in a circle. The mountain, the forest, the stairs, even the gate was gone. The place where she’d come in was just a line scratched into the stone. Beyond that, there was nothing but sea. Not the beautiful blue expanse from before, but a huge, rough, terrifying, tar-black ocean full of giant waves that would have been washing them all under if not for Myron and the DFZ, who were frantically holding the water back with a shimmering barrier.
“Novalli!” Myron yelled over the crashing water. “Help us!”
Marci rushed to obey, grabbing a fistful of magic and slamming it into Myron’s spellwork to help keep the ward in place. She was frantically trying to make sense of Myron’s maze-like patterns so she would be more effective when the other mage ran over. “Not like that!” he yelled in her ear, grabbing her fingers and moving them to press against the faint green lines rather than the blue ones. “Green is always ground!”
Marci shifted her magic accordingly. “Like this?”
He nodded and ran back toward the center of the island. “Hold that in place while I link it into the rest of the circle.”
“What circle?” Marci cried as a giant wave crashed into the magic she was struggling to hold up. “Everything’s gone!”
“Not gone!” yelled another voice. “Just underwater.”
She jumped at the sound, looking over her shoulder to see Shiro climbing out of the sea where the waves were sloshing under the edge of Myron’s dome. The shikigami caretaker was absolutely drenched, his black-and-white robes hanging like soggy bedsheets from his slender body. Despite his bedraggled appearance, though, he looked extremely pleased with himself.
“I found this!” he said excitedly, running over to hand a small, battered-looking leaf to Myron. “It should be enough to serve as an anchor.”
Myron snatched the leaf out of his hand with the barest nod of thanks. After staring at it for a moment, the mage turned the small piece of greenery upside down, placed it carefully on the ground, and stomped on it with all his might, grinding the green leaf into paste under the heel of his shoe. Marci was about to yell at him for being so rough with something Shiro had clearly gone to great lengths to obtain when the stone lit up with the glowing lines of Myron’s labyrinth. As he finished grinding the leaf—and the spellwork baked into it by the ancient Merlins—into the pattern, the whole maze shifted and locked, shutting out the roar of the storm-tossed sea as though someone had just inverted a thick glass bowl over their heads.
“There,” Myron said, his breathless voice painfully loud in the new silence. “That should keep us afloat for now.”
“What is going on?” Marci demanded, letting go of the now-stable ward so she could face him properly. “Why is the Heart of the World underwater?”
“Why do you think?” Myron snapped. “You broke the seal and unleashed a thousand years of magic back into the world all at once! Where did you think it was going to go?”
Marci blinked in alarm. She’d been so busy dealing with the magical fallout in the real world, she hadn’t even considered that the same thing might be happening on this side. Even so. “How was I supposed to know the mountain would sink?” she cried. “There’s the same amount of magic now as there was a thousand years ago when this place was built. It’s not my fault the Merlins made themselves a tiny island!”
“They didn’t!” Shiro said angrily, pushing his dripping black hair away from his face. “It’s never looked like this before!”
“How did it end up like this, then?” Myron demanded. “You told us the last time we were here that new magic accumulation over the drought was minimal!”
“It was minimal,” Shiro said, pointing at the fifty-foot-tall waves that were crashing over the top of Myron’s barrier. “This isn’t new magic. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve never seen the Sea of Magic this high before.”
“Neither have I,” Raven said, finally coming out of his hiding place in the squat little tree at the mountain’s center. “And I’ve been here a long time.”
“Okay, so what’s going on?” Marci asked.
“Not what,” Raven said, hopping over to perch on her shoulder opposite Ghost, who was still a cat. “Who.”
He pointed a wing tip at the waves. Curious, Marci walked to the barrier and pressed her face against the magic, squinting through the glowing maze of Myron’s labyrinth spellwork. No matter how hard she looked, though, she couldn’t see a thing, which didn’t make sense at all. The entire point of the Heart of the World was to translate the Sea of Magic into something humans could understand. It was a lens designed to let humans see the unseeable, but Marci couldn’t see anything at all. The crystal-clear water she’d looked through last time was gone, replaced by murky tides every bit as dark and confusing as the mess outside.
“I don’t get it,” she said at last. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Neither can we,” Amelia said, crossing her arms. “That’s the problem. Remember what Raven said earlier about the Leviathan being in Algonquin’s vessel? Well, turns out he didn’t stop there. The entire Sea of Magic has been infiltrated.”
Eyes wide, Marci turned to look again, and this time, she saw it. It wasn’t the water that was dark—it was the things inside it. The once-bright ocean was filled with thick, black tangles. They stretched as far as Marci could see, bobbing with the waves and carpeting the sea floor in all directions. A few tendrils had actually crawled up to the edge of the Heart of the World’s peak. They were tiny, no thicker than fine black hairs, but the deeper ones were as thick as buildings, and there were tons of them. Possibly millions, which explained how the sea had been pushed so high. It was full.
“What are they?” she asked, voice shaking. “Tentacles?”
“More like roots,” Raven said grimly. “They started in Algonquin’s vessel, but they’ve been spreading since she gave in.”
“Is that why it’s so stormy?” Marci asked. Then her face grew pale. “He’s not attacking spirits, is he?”
“No,” Amelia said. “If he were, we’d already be screwed. Bad as this looks, though, I’ve seen no evidence that he’s eaten anything yet except Algonquin. The waves you’re seeing were actually here before Leviathan started spreading.” She grinned. “Turns out, you get a lot of sloshing when you dump a thousand years of magic in all at once.”
“That is not ‘sloshing,’” Myron snarled, stabbing his finger at the giant waves washing over his protective bubble. “That is the work of spirits, and it’s all her fault.”
He snapped his finger back to Marci, who sighed. “What are you blaming me for now?”
“If you didn’t do so many irresponsible things, that wouldn’t even be a question,” Myron snapped, marching over to the giant stone seal at the center of the mountain-turned-island, or what was left of it. The circular slab that had been the seal on a thousand years of magic was cracked right down the middle, the stone blown away as though it had been blasted apart from the inside. But even broken, it was still a huge chunk of rock, and there was more than enough left for Myron to climb on top of.
“Come,” he said, snapping his fingers at Marci. “You can’t see them from the ground due to the waves, but come up here, and you’ll see that I was always right.”
Marci had never heard a less compelling reason to do anything, but Myron was clearly not going anywhere until she complied, so she sucked it up and climbed onto the cracked seal beside him. “There,” she said, tilting her head so she wouldn’t bump it on the zenith of the protective bubble over their heads. “I’m up. Now, what am I looking for?”
Myron pointed toward the horizon. Marci followed the motion with a sigh, squinting as she tried to see what he was so worked up about. But while it was much easier to see over the waves from up here, the Heart of the World’s interpretation of the over-full Sea of Magic’s chaos was still so rough, it took far longer than it should before Marci realized that the giant breakers peaking in the distance weren’t actually waves. They were creatures. Huge, alien-looking monsters, and they were attacking each other.
Every direction Marci looked, giant things were breaching the stormy sea like killer whales, flinging themselves at each other in bloody confrontations. There were so many fights, the ocean looked like it was boiling, and those were just the battles that broke the surface. Now that she knew what to look for, Marci could see the creatures clashing below the water as well. Thousands of dark shapes silhouetted against the Leviathan’s deeper blackness, trying their best to rip each other to shreds.
“Now I see why we had such a rough entrance,” Ghost said, abandoning his fluffy white cat form to appear at her side as the faceless warrior he always turned into when things got serious. “They’re at each other’s throats.”
“They who?” Marci asked desperately.
Her spirit looked at her, his glowing eyes terrified. “Everything.”
“Everything, pah!” Myron scoffed, pointing at one particularly enormous shape on the horizon. “Those aren’t normal spirits. Those are Mortal Spirits! The magic filled them, and now they’re rising and going crazy just like everyone warned you they would!” His face turned scarlet. “We told you this would happen. I told you! But did you listen? No! You just dumped the magic out, and now everything’s going to pieces!”
“You can’t blame this on me!” Marci cried. “I wanted to let the magic out slowly, remember? Algonquin’s the one who broke the seal and dumped it, and even she only did so by accident. If anyone’s to blame, it’s the Leviathan! He’s the one who cracked the seal in the first place, and I bet all those roots he’s put down are what’s driving everything into a frenzy.” She crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest. “I’m no spirit, but having a Nameless End shove his tentacles into your face sounds pretty panic-worthy.”
“Actually, I believe Sir Myron is right,” Shiro said, wringing the water from his robes. “This is more extreme than usual, but Mortal Spirits have always been dreadful. That’s why we were willing to sacrifice all magic to stop them, but now they’re back and bigger than ever.” He looked out at the chaos. “Perhaps this is simply the new way of things.”
“I don’t think you can lay all the blame on the Spirits of Man this time,” Raven cawed. “Humans have a flair for the dramatic that’s truly terrifying when distilled into its purest form, but even Mortal Spirits can’t cause this much chaos by themselves. Look again, and you’ll see there are plenty of Spirits of the Land and Animals in the mix as well.” He fluffed his feathers. “Today’s madness is equal opportunity, it seems.”
“Because the Leviathan is driving them to it,” Marci said.
Raven shrugged. “Leviathan, Algonquin’s betrayal, bumping elbows with crazed, newly raised Mortal Spirits. We’re spoiled for choice on reasons to panic, which is why everyone seems to be doing it. This mess is a team effort.”
“That’s fitting,” Marci said, hopping down off the broken seal. “Because it’s going to take a team effort to get us out.”
Myron gaped at her. “You can’t be serious. You still want to go ahead with the banishment plan?”
“What other choice do we have?” she asked, pointing at the black roots that filled the water. “The world is ending, Myron. That’s not hyperbole. Our reality will literally cease to exist if we don’t do something.”
“I know, but…” He dragged his hands through his graying hair. “I can’t work miracles. When I told you earlier that I could fix the seal, I was counting on having access to all the spellwork covering the rest of the mountain, but I’ve got nothing to work now! Shiro had to risk his life swimming down to get me a leaf just so we wouldn’t all be washed away.” He pointed at the broken seal under his feet. “What am I supposed to patch this thing with? My hopes and dreams?”
“If that’s what it takes,” Marci said, smiling at him. “You’re one of the greatest modern mages, Myron. You built a barrier against the raging Sea of Magic using nothing but labyrinths and a leaf. If anyone can make this work, you can.”
Myron rolled his eyes. “I appreciate the pep talk, but I’m not just being melodramatic. I really can’t do this without the rest of the Heart of the World. If we have to wait for Shiro to dive for every material I need, we’ll be here all year.”
“Then ask your spirit for help,” Marci said, turning to the DFZ, who’d been oddly quiet this whole time. “Can you get him what he needs?”
“I don’t know,” the city spirit replied, her orange eyes glowing in the dark of her hood as she considered it. “I’ve never tried swimming before, but I should be able to handle the currents. Even when it’s rough, the Sea of Magic is my world, and I’m pretty strong.”
Myron whirled on her. “You mean you could have been helping me this whole time?” he cried. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because you never asked me!” the DFZ yelled back, sounding so offended, Marci couldn’t help but laugh.
“What did you expect?” she asked, trying her best not to let either of them see just how amused she was. “You tied yourself to the spirit of the Detroit Free Zone, Myron. That’s not a place known for volunteering. If you want something in the city, you have to do it yourself or pay someone else to.”
The city spirit’s orange eyes flashed. “I like being paid.”
Myron looked horrified. “You expect me to pay my own spirit? That’s ridiculous!”
“Hey, I got here through a swirling vortex of dead cats,” Marci said with a shrug. “Mortal Spirits are as ridiculous as the human desires that create them. Sometimes you’ve just gotta roll with it. That said, if you two are going to work together, you might want to try understanding how the DFZ does things instead of just giving her orders.”
Myron scoffed. “Are you a relationship counselor now?”
“Nope,” Marci said. “Just someone who’s already had to learn this lesson and wants to spare you the trouble. Not that I don’t enjoy watching you suffer, but repetition is inefficient, and we’re crunched enough for time as it is.” She grinned at the city spirit. “I don’t care what it takes. Promise her ownership of the entire DFZ if you have to, but I want that circle up and ready to receive on time. The dragons and General Jackson’s troops are probably in the air by now, and I don’t want them in danger one second longer than necessary because you’re bad at communicating.”
“I’m not bad at communicating!” Myron cried. “I’m a professor! I’ve written fourteen books! I—” He cut off with a clench of his jaw. “You know, never mind. I’ve made a career out of doing the impossible. I’ll do it again now. You’d do better to focus on holding up your end of this bargain, and speaking of.” He folded his arms over his chest. “How do you intend to get enough magic to drop a hammer banish? I let you brush me off before because I didn’t want a bunch of dragons asking questions, but now that it’s just us, I need to know. You said you had a plan. What is it?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Marci said. “I’m going to ask the spirits.”
Everyone turned to stare at her.
“What?” Amelia said at last.
“I’m going to ask the spirits for help,” Marci clarified. “They’re sentient magic, and magic is what we need. I know they can give up their magic freely because they did it for Algonquin while she was trying to fill up the DFZ, and since they’re all going to die too if this Leviathan thing goes south, I thought I’d ask them to pitch in.”
“Let me get this straight,” Myron said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to ask a bunch of ancient spirits—many of whom see you, a Merlin, as the bringer of a different sort of apocalypse—to commit suicide in order to help you defeat Algonquin’s weapon?”
“It’s not suicide,” Marci said irritably. “They’ll just re-form in their domains once the banishment is complete. Most of them will be down for a week at the worst, and when they wake up, they’ll still have a world to call home. That sounds like a good deal to me.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Raven said. “Algonquin’s spent the last six decades teaching them that this was the only way. They’ve already made up their minds. You’re not going to change that.”
“Yes, I can,” she said. “Because this goes beyond normal spirit politics. We’re talking about an end even you immortals can’t survive. I know Algonquin’s poisoned the well, but ‘work with me or we’re all dead’ is a pretty powerful argument.”
“But you won’t just be dealing with Spirits of the Land,” Myron said, reaching into his pocket to pull out a small slip of paper, or the representation of his memory of a slip of paper since nothing was actually physical on this side. “I suspected you wouldn’t have a proper grasp on this subject, so I did the math for just how much power it will take to hammer banish Algonquin’s magic off the Leviathan before I left. Assuming the standard formula, the answer seems to be just shy of…” He trailed off, checking his equation one last time. “All of it.”
Marci blinked. “All of what?”
“All the magic that currently exists on this plane,” Myron clarified. “Give or take a few percent.”
His Cambridge professor accent rendered every word perfectly, but Marci still couldn’t understand what Myron was saying. “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, putting up her hands. “You’re seriously telling me that banishing the Leviathan is going to take all the magic there is?” When he nodded, she gaped at him. “How is that even possible? Algonquin’s five lakes. She’s not the Pacific Ocean!”
“If she were an ocean of any sort, we couldn’t banish her at all,” Myron said. “You said it yourself: hammer banishes work by using a blast of overwhelming power to completely disperse a spirit’s magic. But the amount of power required to qualify as ‘overwhelming’ increases exponentially with the spirit’s size. Algonquin’s one of the largest spirits of the land. No one’s ever used the hammer method on something her size before, let alone a spirit that’s currently inside a separate extraplanar being.” He held the paper out so Marci could see. “Frankly, some of these numbers are just guesses on my part. There’s a chance we could swing everything we have, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
She snatched the paper from his hand, but when she looked the figures over, she saw Myron was right. When she’d come up with this idea, she’d assumed the standard ten-to-one ratio for a hammer banish, which meant that if she could get just ten or twenty big spirits on board, it would be enough. But she’d forgotten about the exponential curve. Under that math, she needed to multiply every number by a power of ten. Once you did that, all the magic in the world started to look terrifyingly short.
“We can still do it,” she said, hands shaking as she handed the paper back to Myron. “We’re just going to need everyone now. But that’s fine. So far as I know, everyone wants to live, so my argument still stands.”
“And there are Mortal Spirits now as well,” Ghost added. “Our kind is much more powerful than the land and untainted by Algonquin’s hate.”
“You are also mad and unpredictable,” Shiro said angrily, pointing at the battles that thrashed the sea. “All the gods humanity learned to fear have risen. I sided with you before because you said you would do it slowly, and that you would find them all Merlins, but there’s been no time for that. Those are all newborn powers, maddened spirits who don’t yet know the destruction they are capable of. They don’t even know their names yet! Forces like that cannot be reasoned with.”
“Nothing can be reasoned with if you don’t try,” Marci snapped, marching back to the line on the ground that marked the temporary, un-submerged Merlin Gate. “I’m going.”
Shiro stepped in front of her. “With respect, Merlin, that is suicide. The Sea of Magic is more treacherous than I have ever seen it. The chaos will rip you to shreds.”
“It will not touch her,” Ghost growled, moving closer to Marci’s side. “You forget, construct. I am a face of death. Nothing shall touch my Merlin so long as she is in my shadow.”
“But you’re no longer the only god out there,” Shiro pleaded, his face growing desperate. “No one has ever brought the Mortal Spirits to heel, and they are panicked now. They will not be reasonable.”
“It’s because they’re panicked that this will work,” Marci argued. “And I’m not trying to bring anyone to heel. I’m offering them a chance to save themselves, and no one fears death more than immortals.”
“That may be true,” Shiro admitted, his voice quivering. “But… we just got you back! This world—I have been without a proper Merlin for so long! Sir Myron is unquestionably skilled, but he doesn’t have your understanding or vision for how the future can be better. I want to see the world you promised the last time you were here, and that can’t happen if you’re dead for real!”
“It won’t happen if I don’t go, either,” Marci said, surprisingly touched. “Your support means a lot to me, Shiro, but I have to do this. Not because I’m the Merlin, but because I’m the only one who can do the job right now. I want to see that world too. I want to live, and I can’t do that if Tentacle Face out there eats my plane. I’m ready to do whatever I have to to beat him, and I’m betting there’s a lot of spirits who feel the same. We’ve never been able to unite before, but we’ve also never faced a truly universal threat. This is an existential crisis that threatens every sentient being in our reality. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come together and fight to survive, especially when the stakes are this high.”
“You are right,” Shiro said, lowering his eyes. “I was being selfish.” He bowed deeply. “Forgive my disobedience, Merlin.”
“Thank you for caring enough to try to stop me,” Marci said, grabbing his shoulders to gently pull him back up. “But I’ve got this. Just hold down the fort, and make sure Myron doesn’t get so caught up haggling with his spirit that he forgets to mend the seal, because when I come back, I’ll probably be coming in hot. Also, Amelia and Raven are allowed to come and go as they please.”
“I believe the Spirit of Dragons has already gone,” Shiro said. “But I will not try to kick her out again.” He lowered his head one more time. “Good luck, Merlin.”
Marci smiled and turned away, sliding her hand into Ghost’s freezing one as they stepped through the door into chaos once again.