A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  “But what does that mean specifically?” Marci asked. “Like, are you you, or am I talking to a figment of my imagination?”

  “I think I’m me,” Aldo Novalli said with a shrug. “I remember your mother and my childhood and the day you were born. But I also remember things I couldn’t have known. Things you experienced after my death, including how you were living in sin with that dragon boy.”

  “I was not living in sin!” Marci cried. She wasn’t sure what was more embarrassing: that her father apparently had her memories, or that she was telling him the truth. She really hadn’t had a relationship like that with Julius, which was a freaking tragedy. She would have lived in a lot more sin if she’d known she was going to die.

  That thought made her want to cry all over again, so Marci shoved it aside. She’d wasted enough time on that already, and she couldn’t let herself forget she was here on a mission: to find Ghost and figure out how to do whatever it was she needed to do to become a Merlin. That was why she’d taken her spirit’s hand and let him pull her into death in the first place. Not so she could hang around weeping over lost opportunities like an actual ghost. But as she was telling herself to get it together, Marci noticed something was off.

  Okay, a lot of things were off, but this one struck her as particularly odd. So far in her experience with the afterlife—or whatever this was—things had looked mostly the same as they had when she was alive. The black void had been new, but once she’d managed to open her eyes, everything else she’d seen—the house, her car, the gravel on the ground, her dad—had all looked as good or better than she’d remembered. She was even wearing the same white T-shirt she’d had on when she’d died, though thankfully without the hole Emily Jackson had shot through it. But happy as Marci was that her chest was no longer a terrifying, bloody mess, it was glowing faintly, which struck her as important.

  “Do you see this?”

  Aldo frowned. “See what?”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Marci said, pressing her palm over the light. The faint glow was no brighter than a candle, nothing like the roar of power she remembered, but it was in the right place…

  Fighting hard not to get her hopes up, Marci gave her chest a push, bearing down not just with her palm, but with her magic, the mental hand she used to grab power for her spells. Sure enough, the faint light flickered when she poked it, so Marci closed her eyes and relaxed, but not with her muscles. The tension she was trying to undo was inside of her: the knot of internal magic she’d wound together on the balcony when Svena had forced the supernova that was Amelia’s magic into her own.

  At the time, the frantic origami folding had been an act of self-defense to keep Amelia’s fire from consuming her. Now, picking it apart again felt like trying to unravel a limp, knotted thread. It was such slow going, the folded magic so cold and lifeless, Marci worried she was wasting her time. Then, just when she was certain she was unraveling an empty cage, the tangle gave way, and something beautiful and burning slipped out of her chest to land in Marci’s palm.

  When Svena had first divided Amelia’s fire into her, it had felt like swallowing the sun. By contrast, the magic flickering in her hand now looked like a dying match, but it wasn’t Marci’s. The magic changed as she watched, the tiny flames dancing and shifting in her palm until she was no longer holding a fire. She was holding a dragon. A miniature feathered serpent no longer than her hand with scarlet feathers that glowed like banked coals.

  “Now do you see it?” she asked, holding the dragon out to her father.

  Aldo Novalli nodded, eyes wide. “What is it?”

  Before Marci could state the obvious, the little dragon stirred, shaking itself like a dog before looking up with beautiful, amber-colored eyes.

  “Did we make it?”

  The question made Marci jump. For all that it had come out of her chest, the tiny creature in her hand was so unlike the powerful, rollicking dragoness she’d known, she hadn’t actually made the connection in her head. Now, though, the familiar brash, confident voice snapped everything into place. “Amelia?”

  “In the flesh,” the little fire serpent said proudly, looking down at herself. “Or not, as the case may be. But either way, it’s me! And from the looks of things, I’ve successfully hitched a ride into the mortal afterlife.” She grinned, revealing a wall of sharp, white, tiny teeth. “Let’s see Svena do that.”

  If Marci had had any doubts left that this was, in fact, Amelia, that line would have cleared them. But while her identity was no longer in question, Marci had plenty of others. “What are you doing here?” she cried. “I’m dead!”

  “Actually, we’re both dead,” Amelia said authoritatively. “That was the plan. I put my fire in you, and when you die, I stow away inside your soul to the place that lies beyond death.”

  “The place beyond death?” Marci repeated, brows collapsing into a scowl. “Wait, so you knew I was going to die?”

  The little red dragon gave her a sideways look. “You are a mortal. No spoilers, but—”

  “I meant die soon,” Marci snapped.

  “Oh, well, that was less certain,” the dragon admitted. “But my brother is a seer, so I might have had an insider tip. But don’t be angry! I’m here to help you.”

  Marci didn’t buy that for a moment. “You died to help me?” she said skeptically, and then her face fell as she realized what that meant. “Wait, when you say you’re dead, too, do you mean dead dead?”

  “As a doornail,” Amelia assured her. “I’m ash on the other side.” She flapped her tiny fiery wings. “This is the last of me.”

  Marci gaped at her. “Why?”

  “Because I saw a chance to do what no one else could,” the dragon said proudly. “Even Bob can’t see what happens here, so the details were a bit fuzzy, but all our best guesses said that you still had a good chance of becoming the first Merlin even after you died. You’ve actually already done the hardest part, which was getting here. All that’s left now is to clinch the deal, and if there’s anyone who can clinch a deal, it’s you.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Marci said. “But how does my becoming Merlin help you? You’re still dead.”

  “Ah, but I’m also still burning.” Amelia turned to point at her glowing ember plumage. “Remember when I told you that so long as even a bit of her fire was still going, a dragon could live on? Well, you’re seeing theory in action. I might be only a fraction of what I was before, but so long as I burn, the core of Amelia the Planeswalker, Greatest Dragon Mage of All Time, lives on. More importantly, I’m living here, on the other side, where no dragon has gone before. And speaking of...” She swiveled her head to look over the house, the car, and the silent shell of on-ramps that caged them in. “Swanky digs. Are all mortal deaths this enormous?”

  “No,” Aldo Novalli said quietly. “No, they are not.”

  Amelia jolted at his voice, almost falling out of Marci’s fingers. “Who’s that?” she cried, scrambling up Marci’s arm.

  “He’s my father,” Marci said, unsure why the dragon was only noticing him now. “Dad, Amelia the Planeswalker. Amelia, this is my dad, Aldo Novalli.”

  Aldo gave her his famously charming smile, but Amelia was still staring at him as though he were an impossibility. “How did your dad end up inside your death?”

  “It’s a long story,” Aldo said. “But the short version is that I died, was forgotten, and was then restored to my daughter to help her find her way.”

  That sounded unnecessarily cryptic to Marci, but Amelia looked like he’d just explained the secrets of the universe. “I get it now,” she said, nodding appreciatively. “That clever cat.”

  “Well, I wish you’d explain it to me,” Marci said, exasperated. “Because I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “It’s very simple,” Amelia said quickly. “We’re in your death, right? Right. And do you know where your death is?”

  Marci shook her head. “My dad said it was the impress
ion left by life, but he didn’t have a location.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Amelia said. “Modern mortals don’t have a clue when it comes to death, though he was right about the impression thing. This place”—she waved her claw at the house, the gravel driveway, and the dirt lot beyond—“is a crater formed by the impact of your life. It’s literally your mark on the world, sort of like the giant grooves dug by humanity’s collective fears and hopes that become Mortal Spirits, but on a one-person scale. Following so far?”

  Marci nodded, looking around at the wall of on-ramps, which she now saw that, unlike the real version in the DFZ, had no tunnel leading out. “I get that this is the mark made by my life,” she said, turning back to Amelia. “But what did I make a mark in?”

  “The magical landscape, of course.”

  “Wait,” Marci said, leaning into her. “You mean there’s a literal magical landscape? As in the place where spirits have their vessels?”

  “The very same,” Amelia said, nodding. “To understand what that really means, though, you first have to understand how magic enters the world.”

  This was what she’d been waiting for her whole life. “Tell me.”

  Amelia smiled and rose up on her hind legs, pressing her forefeet flat together. “Like most other magically awakened planes, this realm is really two halves sandwiched together: a physical world, and a magical one. The classic example is two sides of a coin, but I find it easier to imagine a plane as a sheet of paper: two distinct faces, but still one whole. A wrinkle on one side—say a mountain—causes an equal but opposite formation on the other—a Spirit of the Land. Following?”

  Marci nodded rapidly. What Amelia was explaining was similar to several already popular theories, but none of those could explain…

  “How are humans magical?” she asked. “If there are two sides, then we definitely live in the physical one. So where does our magic come from?”

  “The same place all magic does,” the dragon explained. “Here. Just because you think of yourself as living on one side doesn’t mean you don’t touch the other. Remember, they’re not actually separate places. We’re talking about two halves of a whole. As a native species of this plane, humans, just like every other magical creature, exist in both halves simultaneously, meaning you have a physical self, your body, and a magical self—”

  “The soul,” Marci finished excitedly.

  Amelia frowned. “I’ve never liked that terminology because it implies one lives inside the other. A more accurate description would be that you have two bodies—physical and magical—that overlap, inhabiting the same space in different dimensions. But sure, you can call it a soul if it makes you feel better.”

  “Of course I’m going to call it that,” Marci said, eyes gleaming. “You’re talking about proving the existence of life beyond our physical bodies! Do you know how big that’s going to be?”

  “Huge,” Amelia agreed, giving her a skeptical look. “But I don’t understand why you’re so excited. You’re bonded to a spirit of the dead who summons armies of ghosts. How much more proof of the soul did you need?”

  “Those could still have been echoes,” Marci said. “Every paper I’ve read claims that ‘ghosts’ are nothing but the aftershocks people leave in the ambient magic when they die. Even with the Empty Wind, I had nothing to actually disprove that since the dead he brought back weren’t exactly chatty. They had goals but no personalities or proof of independent thought, so it was still plausible that he was reacting to the echoes of the emotions those people left in the magic when they died rather than the actual individual souls. But this is different.”

  She put her hand on her stomach where Emily’s shot had gone through. “I know I died, but I’m still me. I’m here and thinking and talking to you. If I can just figure out how to get proof of this back to the physical side, this could change everything we know about death and our own mortality!” Which would get her a Nobel Prize for sure.

  “No doubt,” Amelia said. “If you can get back, this will blow the lid off everything, but you’re still thinking too small.”

  Marci gaped at her. “How is changing the concept of human mortality small?”

  “Because you’ve always known it,” the dragon said with a shrug. “There’s a reason the soul is a concept in every culture. The idea of physical-life-only is a modern fallacy caused by the magical drought. Now that the magic’s back, it was only a matter of time before someone rediscovered what was common knowledge for the vast majority of humanity’s existence. Personally, I’m way more interested in your death specifically.” She looked back up at the cavern of on-ramps. “I mean, this place is huge.”

  “Is it?” Marci asked, because next to the stories of endless fields and the other mythical landscapes that were supposed to exist in the afterlife, she’d thought her little house was pretty modest.

  “Totally,” the dragon said. “Not that I’ve ever been to this side before, of course, but I was under the impression that unless you were the sort of person whose life left a huge impact—heroes, great rulers, beloved artists, feared dictators, that kind of thing—mortal deaths were pretty cramped. No offense, but I was expecting something much smaller. I mean, you’re not famous, and you died relatively young, so where did all this space come from?”

  Marci had no idea. Her father, however, was smiling. “It’s because she is well remembered.”

  “Obviously,” Amelia said. “But remembered by whom?”

  Again, Marci had no clue. She’d cut off contact with all her old friends when she’d fled Nevada to protect them from Bixby. Even after he’d died, she’d been too busy to reach out. Most of them didn’t even know that she was in the DFZ, much less dead. The UN team knew, but they were only two people and a raven spirit. That left the dragons, but other than Amelia, the only dragon who knew her as anything other than “that mortal” was…

  “Julius.”

  Amelia grinned. “And now you know why your death is so interesting to me. It goes without saying that Julius took your loss very badly, but what’s remarkable here isn’t that he loved you enough to carve you out a good death—’cause let’s be honest: if any Heartstriker was going to fall hard for his too-competent mortal, it’d be him—it’s the fact that he’s a dragon. And as we all know, dragons aren’t part of this world. We’re refugees. Non-natives, as Algonquin would say. We can inhabit the physical half of this plane because physicality is common across almost all worlds, but magically, we’re incompatible. That’s why we kept functioning during the drought that shut down the spirits and every other magical creature. We worked on an entirely different system, one where we created our own magic. That’s also why I had to hitch a ride here inside of you. As a non-native species, I didn’t share this part of your plane, so I needed an inside mage.”

  “You mean to be inside a mage,” Marci said. “But if all that’s true, then how would Julius’s remembering me shape my death? If dragons can’t touch this side, how did this happen?”

  “I have no idea!” Amelia said excitedly, flapping her little wings. “Everything I know says that Julius’s memories shouldn’t do squat for you here, and yet they clearly matter. There’s just no other explanation for why your death is so huge since no one else remembers you. This place has to be his doing, and that raises powerful possibilities.”

  Amelia said this as though it were the best possible thing that could ever be, and from a magical-theory standpoint, Marci supposed that was true. If Julius was the one behind this, then they were standing inside the smoking gun that proved dragons were capable of manipulating the native magic of this world in at least one way. But while finding evidence of the impossible was one of the most thrilling events in any discipline, Marci was having a hard time matching Amelia’s excitement about the metaphysical manifestation of Julius’s sadness over her death. It was one thing to hope the guy you loved liked you back, but to find out the truth like this, when everything they could have had was already lost, was to
o tragic to contemplate.

  “I have to get back.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Amelia agreed, scrambling back down Marci’s arm. “As delighted as I am to finally find proof for the theory I’ve been working on for centuries, we didn’t come here to sit around enjoying the view. You’re going to be Merlin, and I’m coming with you, so tap your cat’s envoy, and let’s go!”

  “Amelia!” Marci hissed. “Don’t talk about my dad that way!”

  “Why not?” she said, glancing at Aldo, who’d sat through all the theory talk in uncharacteristic silence. “That’s what you’re here for, right? Ghost is the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead, and since we’ve just established Marci is most definitely not forgotten, that puts her outside his normal reach. But all the spirit/Merlin pairs I’ve heard of started with some kind of sacrifice, and—forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions here—a dead father fits the Empty Wind’s bill pretty solidly. My guess is the memory of dear old Dad was the price of admission for your initial bond. Now that death’s forced you apart, the Empty Wind’s coughed him up again to act as a guide. That means guiding us is his job, and there’s no insult in asking a man to do his job.”

  “The insult is that you’re treating my dad like he’s a single-use item!” Marci snapped, glaring at the little dragon before turning back to her father. “Sorry, Daddy.”

  “It’s all right,” Aldo said. “She’s not wrong. I was sent here by the Empty Wind specifically so I could guide you back to him. I should be doing exactly what the little dragon says. But for all his power, the Forgotten Dead can’t see us here, and before I go back into his service, I wanted to do my job as your father and make sure you knew you had a choice.”

  “Choice?” Marci stared at him. “What choice? Stay dead?”