A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  “There was no time!” he cried. “Weren’t you listening? The gods had won! Faces of Death were riding through the sky! We had to seal the magic or die.”

  “I understand that,” Marci said. “But that’s not how things are now.”

  “Not yet,” Shiro said, pointing at the whirlpools dotting the sea around them. “The holes humanity dug have only gotten deeper as the population has grown. If you don’t repair the damage, if the seal breaks, the resulting flood of magic will fill those chasms, causing hundreds, perhaps thousands of Mortal Spirits to rise all at once. That’s a greater disaster than anything we faced, and the only way to prevent it is to act now, while we still can.”

  Marci looked away with a curse. Of all places, she’d never thought she’d hear Algonquin’s argument repeated here. This was supposed to be the place where Mortal Spirits were celebrated and accepted as part of humanity’s magic. The Heart of the World had opened its door to her only after she’d freed the DFZ, for pity’s sake. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand what Shiro was saying, but the world had changed a lot in the last thousand years, and as much as Marci revered Abe no Seimei as one of history’s best mages, he was dead. It was her turn now, and Marci wasn’t convinced things were bad enough yet to blindly repeat the nuclear options of the past.

  “What about a compromise?” she said, turning to Myron. “When she was trying to recruit me, Algonquin said she wanted to get a Merlin in here so they could cap the magic back down to the level it was immediately following the meteor. I disagreed at the time because I didn’t trust her and I didn’t want to rob Mortal Spirits like Ghost of their chance to be alive, but I don’t actually mind the idea of a limit. Could we do something like that? Modify the seal to only let out a certain amount of magic?”

  “Absolutely not,” Shiro said.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” Marci said, keeping her eyes on Myron. “I’m asking him. You’re always going on about how you’re the expert, Sir Myron, so go ahead. Advise me.”

  Myron scowled, but Marci had never met a know-it-all who could resist giving advice. Sure enough, after half a minute of pouting and sneering, he answered.

  “I suppose it’s possible. The seal’s already leaking, so we wouldn’t have to change the underlying spellwork. We’d just need to layer something on top of it that could relieve the pressure enough to let the magic out without pushing the crack wider.”

  “Like a spillway on a dam,” Marci said, nodding. “Gotcha.”

  “I don’t believe you do,” Myron said coldly. “Since you asked for my advice, you should know that I agree with the shikigami. Algonquin got me the spirit I needed to come here, but I didn’t become a Merlin because I wanted to follow her plan. I came here to save humanity from monsters like her by shutting the magic off for good.”

  Marci took a step back. “What? But you were the one who told me about Merlins in the first place! You said they were our weapons, our chance to meet the spirits on an equal field.”

  “That’s what I believed,” he said. “Until I met you.”

  Her eyes went wide, but Myron wasn’t done.

  “I know you think I sold out,” he said bitterly. “That I betrayed my team and all of humanity when I went to work for Algonquin, but what you don’t understand is that I was just doing what needed to be done. What I have always done. My entire life has been dedicated to doing what is best for humanity as a species. That’s why I joined the UN and stayed there for decades. Despite receiving countless offers for far better-paying positions, I chose to remain where I could do the most good, pushing our understanding of magic and advancing humanity’s ability to stand up to the monsters that were so much stronger than us. For years, I thought the Merlins were the key to that victory. They were the mages of legend, the weapons that would finally elevate us to the level of spirits and dragons. That was my hope, but then you came along.”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “You showed me the truth, Marci Novalli. Through you, I saw that Mortal Spirits weren’t our shining swords. They were our monsters. Our deaths. Even bound, your Empty Wind was always greater than you, always stronger.”

  “But that’s a good thing,” Marci argued. “Ghost is my partner. His strength is my strength.”

  “Is it?” Myron asked. “Do you really think your Empty Wind couldn’t kill you in an instant if you angered him? Or the dragons? Do you think you’ve ever been anything to them but a tool?”

  “Hey!” Amelia said. “Don’t bring us into this.”

  “Why not? You’re part of the problem.” He turned back to Marci. “You stand there and criticize Abe no Seimei for taking away magic, but now that I understand what he was up against, I think he was a hero. The thousand years of peace he bought us with his drought were the greatest in our race’s history. We were the unquestioned masters of the world. Even dragons were forced to pretend to be human to survive. When magic returned, though, we went right back down to the bottom, and that’s where we’ve stayed. Emily and I were trying to change that when we sought you out, but now I know we were doomed from the start. No matter what we invent or how clever we get, humanity just can’t win so long as magic is in play. Even if we learn to deal with the dragons and Algonquin, we would still be doomed, because of things like him.”

  He pointed at Ghost, and Marci clenched her jaw. “I get it. You’ve never liked my spirit, but—”

  “This isn’t about your spirit,” he snapped. “It’s about all spirits, Mortal ones in particular. You heard Shiro’s story about how the ancient Merlins were overrun, but I don’t think even he understands just how bad these new ones will be.”

  “But—”

  “The world’s population when magic vanished was roughly three hundred million people,” he said over her. “Today, there are nine billion. That’s a thirty-fold increase, and that’s not even taking into account the global spread of ideas caused by mass communication. You saw how huge the DFZ was, and she’s not even naturally occurring. Algonquin created her specifically so that she’d have a Mortal Spirit small enough to fill before the others did. The real Mortal Spirits, the ones who’re a natural result of humanity’s collected fears, are bigger than we can comprehend.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” she said, jerking her head at the Empty Wind. “I’m bound to one. I know how big he is, but just because something can kill us doesn’t mean it will. Ghost helped you, if you’ll recall.”

  “But will the next one?” Myron said. “We’re talking about a plague of gods unleashed on an unsuspecting world. You’re asking me to believe that all of them can be controlled like your Empty Wind, but you didn’t have full control over him at the beginning, did you? You told me yourself that you had to bind him multiple times, and that was with the handicap of him barely being awake. We won’t get that break with the rest of them, and I’m not willing to gamble humanity’s future on the hope that all these spirits of death and anger will miraculously turn out to be reasonable.”

  Marci rolled her eyes. “That’s not—”

  “I don’t care,” he snapped, placing his hand on the broken seal. “You want my advice? This crack should be repaired as quickly as possible, not enshrined. Even without Mortal Spirits, the return of magic has already caused irreparable harm and loss of life to people all over the world, particularly in Detroit. Sealing it away again is the only responsible course of action. To do otherwise is to doom us all.”

  Shiro nodded as he finished, looking wistfully at Myron as if he were seriously regretting not letting him attempt to enter the Heart of the World first. The rejection stung, but Marci couldn’t blame the shikigami for it. She couldn’t make herself be mad at Myron, either, because pompous as he was, he wasn’t wrong. Mortal Spirits were a threat. What Myron was saying now was the same thing Amelia had said before the fight with Vann Jeger: that if Marci didn’t control her spirit, he’d end up controlling her.

  It had almost happened, too. If she’d been less bold in the moments after he’d
first remembered his name as the Empty Wind, he would have taken over. Their entire relationship had been a delicate exercise in trust building, and as happy as she was with the end result, Marci had no illusions that it was the sort of process that could be easily reproduced. Even if she could come up with a process, every Mortal Spirit was different, as was every mage. Every pair had to forge its own unique connection, build their own bridge of trust. That was hard enough between two normal people, but when the price of failure was a god rampaging out of control, Myron’s argument made a lot of sense.

  And yet…

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Marci said slowly. “There’s no question that sealing off the magic again would save lives, but you’re missing the part where human lives aren’t the only things at stake here. This isn’t just our planet, Myron. It’s home to spirits and magical creatures of all kinds, many of whom were living here long before we came down from the trees. If we bring back the drought, we might save humanity, but we’ll hurt everything else.”

  Myron sneered. “If you’re asking me to feel sorry for the dragons who have to stay in their human forms—”

  “I’m not just talking about dragons,” Marci said. “I’m talking about magical animals, the chimeras and tank badgers and unicorns and all the other magical species that have reemerged since magic returned. If I seal magic away again, I’ll send them back into hibernation, possibly forever. And what about the spirits? They’re not all like Algonquin. There are millions of land and animal spirits all over the world that live peacefully with their human neighbors. Many of them even help us. Are they monsters? Do they deserve to die?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “But we do what we must to survive.”

  “Do we?” she asked. “Are we really surviving?”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  Marci lifted her chin. “Am I?”

  He sighed. “Bad example. But your death was—”

  “My death is why I can talk about this!” Marci cried. “Magic isn’t just power, Myron. It’s our soul, and I’m not speaking poetically. When my body died, this is what was left.”

  She held up her hands, which were still transparent in the Heart of the World’s brilliant sunlight. “We’re magic, too. Maybe not as much as spirits, but it’s still a part of us. Obviously, humanity physically survived the drought, but just because our race kept multiplying doesn’t mean the loss of magic didn’t hurt us terribly. When I died, my magic was what lived on inside my death. I would have been stuck in there until it collapsed if Ghost hadn’t come to save me.”

  Marci put her hand on the Empty Wind’s shoulder. “You’re always going on about how ‘he is death,’ but what you’re forgetting is that’s not a bad thing. All humans die, and it’s spirits like Ghost—the Mortal Spirits of death—who care for our souls afterward. If you take that away, if you put those spirits to sleep, what happens to us? Where do we go?” She turned back to Shiro. “What happened to the people who died during the drought?”

  “What do you think?” he said stoically. “They died.”

  “But what happened after?” Marci pressed. “If there’s no magic, then what happens to the magical part of us? To the soul? Does it just die?”

  “All things die.”

  “Answer the question,” she growled, stepping closer. “What happened to their souls?”

  Shiro dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said at last. “They didn’t go anywhere, because they weren’t there to begin with.”

  “Stop,” Myron said, putting a hand to his forehead. “Just stop. This is insanity. Are you really telling me that humans born during the drought didn’t have souls?”

  “They had something,” the shikigami said quickly. “Humans need a certain amount of magic to live, and my master was very careful to leave a small buffer. He couldn’t leave much since it takes very little for the smallest spirits to rise, but the entire outer ring of spellwork you see there on the seal is dedicated to making sure the seal never sucks in that final percent of magic necessary to let humans keep their magical half while they are alive.”

  “What about after?” Marci asked.

  Shiro winced. “There, I’m afraid things had to change. It takes only a tiny bit of magic to let humanity live, but death is far more demanding. Keeping souls together on this side requires more magic than we could allow, so we were forced to let them disperse.”

  “Disperse?” she repeated, her voice shaking. “As in poof? No more? You’re just gone?”

  “It was very peaceful,” Shiro said quickly. “Much more so than the torments some Mortal Spirits would—”

  “That’s beside the point!” Marci cried. “You took away the afterlife from hundreds of generations! Your master stole that from them!”

  “Yes!” he yelled back at her. “To save the living! I keep telling you, this isn’t a solution we came to lightly. My master had to make a hard choice, and he chose to do whatever he could to keep humanity going.”

  “I understand that,” Marci said. “My problem isn’t that Abe no Seimei had to make a tough call in a bad situation. It’s that you’re asking me to do it again, and I won’t. Not if there’s even the slightest chance of a better way.”

  Shiro dropped his eyes after that. When Marci turned back to Myron, though, the older mage was just standing there staring at the seal.

  “I didn’t know,” he said at last. “I had no idea there was an afterlife until…”

  His voice wavered at the end, and Marci sighed. She’d grown up reading his books, but she’d despised the real-life Sir Myron Rollins almost from the moment she’d met him. He was a bombastic, pompous, cocky jerk who made terrible choices, but despite all that, he really did seem to care deeply about saving lives. That wasn’t actually surprising for someone who’d spent his entire life working for the United Nations, but it was a new discovery for Marci, and for the first time since her rosy image of Sir Myron Rollins had been crushed by the real thing, she felt a flash of her old admiration.

  “We’re not going to let that happen again,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “The Mortal Spirits, the gods of death, they were created by us so our souls would have someone to help them. The Empty Wind is full of people who’ve found peace, and those are just the forgotten. There are other faces of death, other ends. They might not all be pleasant, but any afterlife has to be better than just dissipating into nothing.”

  “Does it?” Myron asked, dropping his hands with a sigh. “That’s what I always thought would happen to me. I thought I would die and that would be it. I’m not sure how to feel knowing there’s more to it.”

  “It’s kind of a shock,” she agreed. “But however we feel about it, we don’t have the right to take eternity from the people who do care.”

  “Perhaps,” he said tiredly. “But I’m not just mourning a thousand years of lost souls. I’m also grieving for the death of our last acceptable solution. I thought if I stopped the magic, everything would go back to how it was before. Now you’re telling me there’s an afterlife, and if we stop the magic, we’re taking that away, too. If we don’t halt the magic, though, we still face Armageddon. The Mortal Spirit problem doesn’t go away just because a few of them have side jobs shepherding our souls. We’re going to be facing even bigger versions of the terrors the ancient Merlins couldn’t handle. Are we supposed to just accept that as the price for not killing our own afterlife?”

  “I don’t know,” Marci said honestly. “Every choice has consequences. The trick is to pick the one with the fallout you can live with. Or die with, as the case may be.”

  “There’ll be a lot of that if you let the Mortal Spirits rise.”

  Marci gave him a scathing look. “You know, for someone who’s dedicated his life to defending humanity, you sure have a low opinion of us.”

  “It’s not an opinion,” Myron said angrily. “It’s fact. My work for the UN took me to countless disaster sites, everything from spirit tantrums to dra
gon attacks to magical terrorism. It was all horrible, but do you know which disasters were invariably the worst? The most cruel?” He leaned in closer. “The human ones. Genocide, child soldiers, school bombings, human trafficking—I’ve seen it all. Magic was the weapon of choice in the situations I was called to work on, but it didn’t really make a difference. Cruelty is cruelty, and humans excel at it. That’s why I wanted the Mortal Spirits so badly. I thought they were our better angels, and if I could just get my hands on one, I could solve so many problems. Right so many wrongs.”

  He heaved a long sigh. “Imagine my disappointment when I realized they were an accurate reflection. That’s when I decided to end it, even if it meant teaming up with Algonquin. I’d finally realized you were right, Novalli. Mortal Spirits are us, and that’s what terrifies me.”

  “But it shouldn’t,” she said. “Yes, people can be terrible, but so many more are decent. That matters for Mortal Spirits especially, because they’re not the work of a single person. Those huge chasms are dug by our collective feelings, and if at least some of the diggers are good people, then every spirit has a positive side, even the terrifying ones. Look at the Empty Wind. He’s always been terrifying, but he’s still one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That might sound like a contradiction, but so is everything else about being human, which is all they are. Human, just like us. So when the bad ones come, and they will, we’ll handle them just like we handle bad people. We’ll oppose them with good ones.”

  Myron stared at her like she was crazy. “What are you talking about?”

  “Merlins,” Marci said with a grin. “I’m talking about Merlins. An army of them. Abe no Seimei sealed the magic because he got overwhelmed by the worst parts of us, the murder and war spirits and so forth. But the world has come a long way in the last thousand years. Modern humanity is more educated, more enlightened, kinder, more civil, and less violent than it’s ever been. When our Mortal Spirits rise, I have no doubt there will still be monsters of fear and violence, but we’ve never been more prepared to combat them as a society than we are right now.”