by HDA Roberts
I'd never had to repair eye damage before, much less replace one. The Spells that did the work functioned by repurposing stem cells and rebuilding the missing organ based on the body's living template. That template was based on DNA, meaning that the repair restored my eye to its natural state.
"How about that," I said with a chuckle.
"You look lopsided now," Cassandra said, bending over to retrieve any sandwich parts that might be salvageable.
"You said it was pretty."
"No I didn't. Shut up!"
"You're a confused little weirdo, aren't you?" I said sweetly.
"You've had a bad night, what with your girlfriend trying to kill you, which even with your romantic history is... ridiculous, so I'm going to let you have that one. The next one's going to cost you."
"Someone didn't get their nine hours last night."
"I do just fine with four, and I didn't even get that because someone, who will remain nameless, decided to assassinate a Vampire Elder."
"Assassinate implies planning."
"And we all know you're more or less incapable of that."
The door opened before I could reply, and Hopkins came in, yawning widely, "And how are you feeling today- wow!" she said, stopping as she saw my new eye.
She grinned. "That's a good look on you!"
I smiled back and hopped off the bed, sliding my feet back into the shoes I'd discarded last night. A small Spell drew the dried blood out of my clothes and the bedding, pulling it into a nasty brown ball that I ignited to avoid leaving a mess behind. The damage to the suit was repairable, but the Spells for fixing inanimate objects were quite complicated, and they weren't a specialty of mine, so I left those alone (I had a guy for that, anyway).
"We should head home. The Succubus is in a mood," Cassandra said before stuffing her reassembled sandwich into a mouth that was at least two sizes too small for it.
I nodded and turned to Hopkins, "Thanks for taking me in. And for listening."
“Any time,” she replied, pulling me into a hug.
Hopkins opened a Portal for us, and I said goodbye to her before leading Cassandra onto the front lawn of Blackhold Manor.
"Wow, that was a bad day," I said.
Cassandra smirked and patted my shoulder before walking up to the front doors, only to be nearly bowled over as my dog came bounding out of them, barking up a storm as he charged straight for me. Cassandra swore at him as he side-swiped her, but that didn't slow him down any.
Burglar was a behemoth of a dog, over a metre tall at the shoulder, big even for what was already a huge breed, weighing nearly ninety kilos. He looked vaguely ursine and would appear terrifying to anyone who didn't know that he was the biggest softie on the planet and frequently ran away from anything larger than a squirrel.
I braced myself for the leap, but it didn't help, and I was bowled over as usual, laughing all the while as he snuffled and barked at me.
"Every time, you great brute!" I said, scratching him behind the ears until he dropped to his belly, which he then presented for a rub.
I'd moved Burglar in with me about six months earlier. My parents were spending a lot of time abroad (still trying to make nice with the Mexican authorities after one of their lackeys knocked over a precious piece of history), so he’d been all alone except for the housekeeper and the groundskeeper. He was happier with me, and I was happier with him around (even if he did take a perverse delight in knocking me over).
I stood and the dog followed me back indoors where I found Tethys waiting for me, her foot tapping on the carpet.
Tethys was as lovely as always, a perfect figure under a beautiful face, her violet eyes tight with worry and her soft lips compressed into a frown. She wore a yellow sundress, leaving her arms and calves bare; the floral pattern brought out her eyes.
"Hi," I said, moving up to her.
She shook her head and pulled me into her arms before noticing my eye and smiling a little.
"Haven't seen that in a while," she said, tracing her fingers around the socket, "Come on, Miss Jenkins held lunch for you."
Hopkins’ house was about five hours behind GMT. So Cassandra was in heaven, lunch and breakfast all within the same hour. And speaking of which...
"That may have been her intention, but seeing as how Cassie had a ten second head start, I doubt that she succeeded."
Tethys snorted and led me to the breakfast room, where Cassandra had indeed made a running start on her second meal of the day.
Healing always left me ravenous, but the events of last night had stolen some of my appetite. I couldn't help but remember the last look on Crystal's face before she'd said goodbye. She was just so... cold. Still, I ate, if somewhat mechanically, staring at the walls.
Tethys poked me in the side, startling me back to alertness.
"Hm?" I managed.
"Are you ready to tell me what happened?"
I nodded and retold the story (no more fun for the third time than it had been for the first two).
After I finished, Tethys... started laughing.
"It's not funny!" I protested.
"Come on, Matty, it's a little funny. Leaving aside the fact that your girlfriend tried to kill you, which is a new romantic low, even for you, there's the fact that you fought and beat one of the oldest, strongest Vampires in Europe, thwarting an extra-dimensional invasion into the bargain, all without taking so much as a paper cut... before nearly being slotted by a tiny little girl."
I glared, but it just made her laugh harder.
"That's just... mean!" I complained, "And she's not little, she's as tall as me and she's a bloody Vampire! They're dangerous!"
Cassandra was deliberately looking away, trying not to laugh.
I couldn't really blame either of them. They had both (separately and together, which should have been enough of an oddity to get me to pay attention) warned me that my relationship with Crystal was going to implode, which was a bit rich coming from Tethys, seeing as she’d got the thing going in the first place!
They'd told me that it wasn't going to last, that we were too different, that we had nothing in common... all that stuff, and I'd told them they were wrong. She was sweet, she was fun and she was gentle; that was more than enough for me.
And I'd ended up killing her father and nearly getting my throat ripped out by the girl herself.
It didn’t say anything good about my personality that I wasn’t nearly as annoyed by the attempted murder as I was about losing the argument. After all, people try to kill me all the time, but how often am I wrong?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, none of that was what really depressed me about the whole thing. What got to me was the simple fact that, even after all of that mess, this still wasn’t my worst breakup.
By this point I was seriously beginning to wonder if I was going to die alone... or worse, live forever alone.
Tethys' laughter eventually trailed off and she turned to smile at me, only find me banging my head on the table.
"There, there, Matty," she said, patting my arm, "It's not like we didn't see this coming."
"You," I said. "You saw this coming."
"We did warn you," Cassandra chimed in.
"Demise started a pool," Tethys said.
"Kandi won," Cassandra added.
I groaned.
"I had two months ago," Tethys said. "Lost a pile on that one."
"I hate you people."
Chapter 5
As if that wasn’t enough stress for one twenty-four hour period, my lunch wasn't even half over when the breakfast room’s door was nearly blown off its hinges by the arrival of Lady Time. She was always one to make an entrance and had very little patience, either for social niceties or the state of one's circulatory system. This would be the seventh time in the last three months that she'd appeared out of nowhere with what I assumed was the sole purpose of seeing if she could kill me on the spot from a shock-related heart attack.
"Every time?!" I said in a somewhat plaintive voice after the last of my bacon flew off my fork (to be gleefully intercepted by my opportunistic dog before it could hit the ground).
Her face cracked into the tiniest smile (which spoke of deliberate intent and far too much delight at the resultant state of me), but it soon resumed its normal, inscrutable expression.
Vanessa Kron looked to be in her mid twenties, but she was, by far, the oldest and most powerful Magician in the world. Some rumours had her at over two thousand years old, though I'd never had the courage to ask her to confirm that. She was tall and strong, steady as a rock and as immovable as a mountain when she'd made up her mind about something. She and I butted heads from time to time, but there were few people in the world I respected more and nobody I felt safer with.
It had taken quite a long time before she was comfortable playing pranks like that on me. Whether they were born from affection or sadism had yet to be adequately determined, but seeing as how she tended to turn up when startling me would cause a mess of some sort, I was leaning towards the latter.
"Come with me, something's about to happen," she said, beckoning me out of my seat with quick swats of her hand. That got me moving, let me tell you. Kron didn't swat like that unless speed was of the essence. The last time I’d ignored her, I ended up getting covered in some very unpleasant materials. Materials that had once occupied the digestive system of a badly constipated Chimera, and that's the last I'm going to say on the subject. Suffice to say, I learned my lesson, and when Kron told me to move, I moved.
Cassandra stood to come with me, but I waved her back into her seat. Kron didn’t seem especially tense, and besides, if she couldn't keep me in one piece, then nobody could. My Warden smiled in gratitude and went back to her meal (the other reason I didn’t want her coming. Taking that woman away from her food would leave her crotchety all day).
Kron opened a Portal and all but dragged me through it, into some unfamiliar countryside.
Bartholomew Killian, Lord Death, was there with Lucille Palmyra, the Lifeweaver, and Hopkins. They nodded or smiled at me in greeting.
“Long time no see,” Hopkins said dryly.
I rolled my eyes.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Bredon Hill Nature Reserve," Killian replied.
I knew that area a little; my father had taken Desmond and I there on a day trip about seven years ago. Kron’s Portal had come out on the summit of a small hill; the River Avon flowed to the west, and there was a broad blue lake to the east, surrounded by farmland made gold by ripening wheat. Beyond the fields was the woodland of the actual reserve, dense and seemingly impenetrable, stretching in a broad arc from north to south.
"And why are we here?" I asked.
Kron pointed at the lake, "Not entirely sure, but brace yourself.”
I lifted an eyebrow and looked where she was pointing, raising a set of Shields just in case.
We stood there for a while, long enough that I was beginning to wonder if we were in the right place. But then something strange began to happen. It started as a tiny pulse of power, so subtle that I almost missed it. It was focussed on the centre of the lake, but it quickly expanded to encompass the whole thing in a colossal, intricate web of power. I’d barely begun to look at it before the whole thing started to flex and tear, coming apart at the edges like someone was pushing at it from within.
I can’t explain how, but the Magic almost seemed alive, like it was trying to keep itself together, the web’s ragged edges reaching for one another, as if trying to tie themselves back into shape. It was a losing battle though; the whole thing was falling apart in too many places.
A great tear appeared in the top, and there was a colossal flash of light, followed by an immense boom as the construct finally came undone.
And then things got really strange.
The air whined with contained power as another piece of Magic came into play. This one was different from the last; cruder, less technically impressive, but far more powerful. Above the lake, a black sphere appeared, packed with vast amounts of Space Magic, enough that I was worried about a dimensional rift forming.
I looked to Hopkins, who frowned, but didn’t act. I swallowed my fear. If the Archon of Space wasn’t worried, it was probably fine.
The dark sphere expanded, pushing down into the water, past the muddy bed of the lake and into the rock below. Then it popped, almost like a bubble, releasing a wave of energy that blinded even my Mage Sight for a moment, simply overloading it with too much information. We recoiled, most of us swearing in a variety of languages (four or five in Kron’s case).
I looked back as soon as I could... and just ended up standing there, open-mouthed, staring at an island that hadn't been there before.
It had to be a mile across and two long. There were no shores, only broad grey cliffs stretching up to a plateau on which was built a castle.
And what a castle it was! It was of an old English design, with three massive curtain walls containing various buildings in a beautiful gothic style, all surrounding a huge keep at the centre. It was made of gleaming white stone, a fortress to end all fortresses; bigger than Windsor Castle, more imposing than Edinburgh's, with roofs made of blue-grey slate and bright pennants in a hundred different styles and colours flapping in the sudden wind.
Even over the sounds of the diminishing Spellwork, I could hear Killian and Kron gasp in shock. The latter nearly shrieked.
"What the hell is that?" I asked, not unsurprised myself. The Magical mechanics involved in teleporting an entire island with a colossal castle on top of it were complex to say the least; I couldn't have done it.
"Camelot," Kron gasped, a sob in her voice. "He's returned. After all these years, he's come back to us!"
I honestly thought my brain had skipped a gear on that one.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Could you repeat that?"
They ignored me.
The remains of the Spell quickly petered out, leaving the castle, shimmering with the reflected sunlight from the lake below. I saw a few men come onto the ramparts, dressed in suits of highly polished armour with blue and white tabards on their chests and ancient weapons in their hands.
The air crackled with energy again, and a new Spell descended on the lake, causing the castle to vanish, though Mage Sight showed me that it was still there, just hidden from normal vision.
Killian and Kron were practically bouncing up and down, clearly impatient.
"Do you suppose it's really him, Van?" Killian asked, his tone nearly desperate.
Kron nodded, staring at the castle in awe, “Who else could it be?!”
"Who’s this?" I asked. "Would someone tell me what's going on? And if you could please clarify the ‘Camelot’ bit before I go insane?!"
Kron rolled her eyes.
"We really need to get you a reading list. Fourteen hundred years ago, Camelot and all her forces vanished. We thought they'd been destroyed, or sent to some hell dimension to be consumed.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t Arthur’s time long before that? Just after the fall of the Roman Empire?”
“Yes, but Camelot didn’t belong to Arthur. Contrary to popular opinion, Arthur was not a king. He was actually the Warden Master of Ambrosias Myrddin, the High Primal. He died defending his master at Camlan Field."
My mouth dropped open.
"Arthur wasn't a king?" I asked after a moment. That was quite a shock (and more than a little disillusioning, to be honest).
"He was a great man," Kron replied. "A talented leader, a skilled Magician, a brilliant general; the best man of his age and a true hero. He was the first knight, long before the rest of the world even had a word for that, and there have been few men to match him since. But no, he wasn't a king."
I sagged.
"And the Primal?" I asked.
Primal Magic was just another term for Low Magic (Earth, Air, Water, etc), but she sounded like she talking about a person.
Kron started walking towards the lake and we all followed.
"The Primals were to the Lower Elements what we are to the Higher. Each of the seven had their own Primal, until they started dying out. We still don't know what happened or how, but their powers were never reborn, simply being transferred to one of the other Primals instead, until only Ambrose- Ambrosias- was left."
"Myrddin... that wouldn't be Merlin, by any chance, would it?" I asked, my hopes reviving just a tiny, little bit.
And incidentally, where had I heard the name Myrddin lately? That sounded very familiar, and not in a good way...
"Not exactly," Kron answered with a smile. "He was the basis of those legends, but the historians got all the details mixed up and misplaced, and they regularly confused him with his father. I forget his name...
“Anyway, the elder Myrddin was closer to the Merlin of legend, interfering with the politics of the day and uplifting people for his own ends. Ambrose was more like us; he helped, but did so quietly, subtly. Losing him was like losing a brother."
So... Arthur, not really Arthur, and no Merlin, either?
What's next? Lancelot wasn't an over-sexed, wife-stealing dog? The Lady of the Lake was just a particularly damp sword-collector? They were ruining my favourite stories!
Next they were going to tell me that there was no highly-educated owl...
Kron stopped and we followed suit. She started casting something that involved sound waves (probably her equivalent of a doorbell), but didn't even get half way before the air in front of us flexed and disgorged a man.
He didn’t look more than thirty, tall and rake-thin, dressed in bright green robes, with long, brown hair tied into a neat tail, a goatee and slim beard framing his mouth and chin. His face was good-natured and handsome, split by a huge, warm smile.
I had a moment of panic, though, because, as far as I could tell, he was the most powerful Magician I'd ever seen, and that included Kron (who had about twice as much power as me!). The other Magician (who I was just assuming was Myrddin) had all that power, and more besides; not a huge amount more, but still a noticeable chunk.
He also seemed to have all the Low Magic affinities, Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Flesh, Mind and Spirit (the main reason I thought it was Myrddin). That should have been impossible. I didn’t know how a single Well could contain all of those disparate Affinities and not overload, or at least fracture, but there he was, and without a trace of instability.
