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The one who speaks must answer to his soul, the
woman in him that is his part of Optima, and so he says, sadly but firmly, "No, bright being. I have lived as a demon and mocked meaning—and I have lived as a man and
been mocked by the absurd. Now that I am entrusted to make meaning for a people, I feel its necessary beauty.
This beauty needs me or it will not exist at all. What hopeful meaning I can shape for the ages needs me.
Heaven does not."
The unicorn snorts, bewildered.
"Such is life in the abyss." Merlinus shrugs. "This is where She has led me—and I will not leave without Her."
The wizard steps back and raises his arm in farewell.
The unicorn's green eyes brighten as they search
deeply into the odd figure that stands before it. And though it believes the demon-wizard foolish to forsake this one chance to ride out of the abyss and through the black sun into heaven, it backs away.
You are no longer a demon, it acknowledges, finally understanding.
The unicorn swings about and, with a last, mute look
backward, bounds into the streaming sky. Like a watery reflection, the astral steed wavers and breaks apart, becoming pure light, streaks of wet, brilliant colors that strobe among the clouds and linger like a renegade
sunrise.
Thunder collapses over the wizard. He sits down
heavily in the feathered grass and watches heaven run off among windblown seeds.
Regret squats in him only briefly before he
recognizes that the powerfully amplified presence of the unicorn has opened his strong eye. A commercial jetliner crawls down the sky, and highways follow the contours of the landscape in concrete ribbons.
He remembers trying to account for himself to this
season of steel. Sitting masterless and orphaned from heaven, he feels foolish now for all those times he strove to see the future and change it.
That was before the sixth gate of his body opened,
and the strong eye siphoned the energy from his throat into his skull, leaving behind a wake of laughter. No laughter blows through him now, because the strong eye closes as his life-force rises past it toward the seventh gate.
Merlinus sits taller in the grass, remembering the
unicorn's promise to help him open all seven stations of his body. He closes his eyes and settles to the dark
watchfulness of his center. With the strong eye firmly closed, he pulses softly in the dark of his skull. He directs his consciousness and strength upward.
Whiteness and cold—a walloping blizzard of storm-
crying wind and white glare. He opens his eyes and
watches radiation slide from him like cool shadows. He has become as the unicorn, transfigured to light!
Life-force smokes off him in viscid sheets of fiery
plasma that the wind rips away. And as he burns, he
shivers smaller.
All around him, a pale world watches him shrink.
Massive cedars shine translucent as amber and jade, and in their depths he can already see the raftered halls and groined vaults made from their lumber in Camelot. He can see Camelot, too: a river gorge for a defensive ditch and mountains for walls—and, upon a high ridge with a wide western prospect, a city of white stone towers whose blue tile roofs are so tall they rub their color right off the sky.
The abrupt realism of the vision frightens him, and
he looks away. Juttering with cold, he swings his gaze about and finds Ethiops far off. The demon crouches in darkness at the edge of the wizard's cast light, cringing.
Rays jet from the crown of Merlinus' skull, a furnace shaft open to the harrowing cold. The intensity keeps the demon at a distance, yet the wizard can read the awe and anger in his bald face—and the barbed grin, hoping that Lailoken has undone himself.
Merlinus watches himself shriveling. He gets colder
as the whipping wind sweeps his life's heat out of his body and into the broadening reaches of space. The peevish
thought occurs to him that maybe this, too, is a chemical delusion, the poisons of his gutsack. He suspects that maybe Ethiops has already torn him apart and his dying brain spews a dream.
Merlinus turns his crown-light upon himself and
observes that he is whole, only smaller, shrinking and getting weaker. If he remains in this heightened state much longer, he will evaporate. Anxiously, he searches for the gateway back down, into his physical body. He must push against the gushing energy of his own life spilling into the void.
Skittering against that strong current, he crawls
around the floor of the world and finds a narrow crevice.
Reduced to a boiling trickle of mercury, he slinks into that fracture and leaks back into himself. Each drop of his being gleams with global reflections of the cedar forest,
Camelot's empty ridge, and his own gawky figure sitting in the grass, white-haired, bush-bearded, and with startled eyes staring from dark bone-pits.
Iridescent swirlings oil the surface of each drop. And inside those paisleys, the wizard sees a strange truth: The eruption that cast angels and demons into the void was not a singular event—not one Big Bang but many. Creation
explodes into being at each instant and many universes exist in the vacuum. Each universe rips the cold, dark fabric of the void—and from these rifts the power of infinity flows into many worlds.
Restored to his body, Merlinus sits alertly in the
resonant afternoon. His nerves sparkling, he listens to the chimes of birds. The seventh gate is the way out! He smiles at this realization: The very body he once thought trapped him actually provides a portal to the energy realms where once he lived as a demon. Now he will have the
chance to learn how to live there as an angel.
If there are many Big Bangs, many universes, then
creation is the spilled light not of one fall but of an endless falling, a majestic pouring forth of creation's fire.
Stunned by this revelation, he stares at his hands,
not thinking, just looking at the blue bones under taut knuckleskin. His destiny is in his grasp again. Maybe, after all, he can make his own individual dream true. Maybe he can find Her here, as once he did inside Optima. He does not know. The same mystery that has pulled him into the womb draws him on into the future, younger each day and full of magic.
He decides then that he will, in fact and in name,
make his own destiny. He will no longer live as Merlinus a Briton or Myrddin a Celt but Merlin, wizard for all the people of the kingdom.
His naked pride embarrasses the sorcerer. He stretches his tired muscles and reminds himself that
everything is possible but actions alone are real in this cold corner of the universe. Dreams and hope are not enough.
He stands in the cedar grove, firmly in his physical
body. No demons or angels are anywhere in sight. From the skein of afternoon shadows, the cedars knit scarves of mist that they will wear at dusk. A breeze of resin clears his head, and he gathers up the sword Lightning and his staff and resumes his journey.
*
Merlin descends among sharp rock tumulus
overgrown with shawl moss. Moving swiftly over slick, lichenous boulders, he feels stronger and more nimble than ever in his mortal life. He grows younger. He runs along slippery paths beneath waterfalls and rainbows on the cliffs above the brown, roiling Amnis.
The steep trace twists down and down into
mountain shadows. Oak forest and rhododendron give way to willow and ivy and dragonish old trees hoarding sun shafts in fine gold mist.
Through this gorge forest, Merlin follows the brook
that leads to the star stone. It trickles among lotus pads, hastening away over rocky inclines of blue moss, past fallen firs, and luminous islands of birch. The sorcerer moves more slowly, memorizing the landscape in this
primal scene of destiny. He
re, Uther and Ygrane's barbed fate touches Arthor's future.
The brook elbows around a steep bluff, called Mons
Caliburnus when the Romans had a watchtower here
centuries ago. Larks soar into the blue seam of the sky. At the star stone, Merlin shoves the lower rock into place, activating the magnetic strength between the two lobes.
He gathers smooth ingots of water-rubbed rock and
jams them against the magnet stone so that it cannot be moved. Vines curtain the tall bank. In a summer or two, the lower lobe of the star stone will disappear from sight.
Atop the bluff, the sword Lightning in hand, the
wizard stands before the black rock. In his strong eye, in his memory of the future, the image of the Nine Queens arrayed around the dead king on the barge to Avalon
gathers spark by spark into view of his inner eye.
Seen this vividly, he recognizes each of the
queens—Rna, the departing falconess, and the nameless eight in every sun-struck hue of autumn, who will remain with Arthor. They have proud yet patient faces. The sky burns behind them like ceremonial fire. A few brittle stars
herald the night to come.
Merlin cannot tell if his strategy and magic will
preserve Arthor—or, as any demon would argue, sacrifice him in blood ransom to the Fire Lords and their mysteries.
The vision passes, and he is again in a flaked gold
afternoon on Mons Caliburnus. Butterflies climb ladders to heaven.
Arthor himself will have to decide whom he serves.
But to even earn him that choice, the wizard must act.
Looking up at tall branches chaffing sunlight, he asks of himself diligence for the work yet to be done and of all else luck, the slanderous name of God.
Bees touch the gold tassels of grass nesting the
meteorite. A thrush warbles from the trees' drooping hair, and a turtle splashes in the brook. These noises mell to a kind of music, the peacefulness of the soul at her most human.
Merlin remembers a future of steel and glass
towers, an age without prophecy and with no higher law than human justice—and he gives the sword to the stone.
* * *
Table of Contents
Prelude: The Mortal Gods
Book One: Dragon Lord
Book Two: Mistress of the Unicorn
Epilog: Merlin— a Memory of the Future
Book One