“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.”
“Ihaveimagined,” 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 eventhatmight 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 thingtodo,” the shikigami said. “You have to repair the damage.”
“Me?” she squeaked, looking down at the masterpiece of ancient spellwork in front of her. “Fixthat? 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 magicback. 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 forall.”
“Who are you to say sealing the magic does that? It’s not like you guys took a vote.”
“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 arenow.”
“Notyet,” 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, perhapsthousandsof 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 actnow, 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.”
