“This mountain is only the tip,” Shiro said. “There’s also the column below it, which goes 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’sallin 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,newmagic? 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?Ohyeah. 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. “Wheredoesthe 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 ofcompressed 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 thatrockhadn’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 didnotbring 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 itwasthe 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 canguaranteethere 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 aboutalien magicwas 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 howthatscenario 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 ofthat?”
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.”
