It was all one piece: a huge, circular disk of white stone three feet tall and ten feet across, laid on its side under the tree at the exact center of the circular mountain-top. Like everything else here, its surface was covered in spellwork, but unlike the leaf or the stones from the clearing below, which had merely been parts of a larger whole, this spellwork was contained within its own circle. The edge of the seal had been gouged to form a hard line, creating a clear border between the rest of the mountain top and the spellwork inside.
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 theliteralseal 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 trendedup, 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 isno way you knew this was here for certain until now.”
“I never said I was certain,” he snapped back. “I said Ibelieved. Itheorizedthe drought was caused by humans. Isuspectedthe 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 noproofof anything, but when the opportunity arose, I was confident enough in my theories to bet my life on getting in here. And I wasright.”
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 wasus.”
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 theirchoicedid 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 allgone. Everything we know about magic now, we’ve had to reinvent from scratch!”
“But you did it,” the shikigami said. “Becauseyouwere 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 werereal, 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 fromallof 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’tagree, but she understood the logic of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. What she didn’t understand washow.
“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 blockallthe 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 itin.”
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 itin. 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!”
