A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  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 go
es 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.”