by Daniel Diehl
Later, Jason realizes that in his final instant of life Merlin imparted some of his supernatural powers to his friend before disappearing from sight. Jason now has the ability to levitate objects at will. Excited and frightened by this occult power, he vows to increase and expand his magical powers by unraveling the information contained in the mountain of ancient scrolls and books which Merlin left behind in Jason’s apartment.
We rejoin our story some months before Jason discovers the strange gift he has inherited, at the very moment when Merlin tumbles through the vortex leading into the vast unknown place which is the dragons’ realm.
Chapter One
First there was the stomach churning unreality of falling - falling endlessly but without direction - no up, no down, no point of reference anywhere. His waist-length hair and beard floated in all directions, swirling around him, giving no indication that his fall was influenced by the pull of gravity. Merlin tried to find some object on which to focus his eyes, but there were no physical objects, nothing at all but the fathomless darkness. Somewhere there was a voice calling his name but there was no way to tell which direction it came from because the very concept of ‘direction’ had lost its meaning.
Desperate to reorient himself, Merlin’s mind flashed from place to place trying to recreate the past few moments that had brought him to this place of nothingness. He had been trying to close the gate – the hole in the world - through which Morgana was about to release the Dragon Lords and their armies. He had the stone - the key to the gate - in his hand. Instinctively, Merlin felt for the small leather pouch hanging from his belt. The other stone was still there; the one that could unlock the gate. The one that locked the gate was gone, wedged tight in the invisible vortex which was now sealed somewhere far, far away in the endless darkness. He remembered fighting off Morgana, and watching her fall through the gate into the yawning abyss. He remembered her making a grab for the sleeve of his coarse gray gown and he remembered his friend Jason making a lunge toward him, hands reaching out, grasping, in a desperate attempt to keep him from losing his balance. Now he remembered. The voice he had heard was Jason, screaming his name as the vortex drew in on itself and snapped out of existence.
Merlin’s attention was drawn back to his immediate situation. The darkness was changing now. His surroundings were still black and featureless but the air had become damp and cloying, clutching at his body and his lungs, forcing his mind toward a state of suffocating panic. Out of nowhere appeared a strange glowing banner bearing the words ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’. An instant later the letters broke up, their component parts skittering off in all directions on hideous insectoid legs.
Suddenly, from some indefinite point in his directionless surroundings came a crushing tsunami of noises, stenches and horrific sights that threatened to rip his mind and body to shreds. From above, around and below him the shrieking insanity closed in. Torrents of kaleidoscopic colors came in waves so intense it was like being in the center of a nuclear explosion. His nostrils were assailed by the violently nauseating reek of rotting flesh, feces and a thousand, thousand other nameless atrocities. Then came the scenes of madness, some identifiable, some without form, but all designed to unhinge the mind and send their victim into a state of slobbering madness. Shrieking wraiths, clanging bells, dancing mice, bloody entrails flying through the air and grappling claws that snatched at him from the hands of skeletal figures mounted on decomposing horses. A million, million nightmares simultaneously surged toward him and away from him, threatening to mow him down the instant before they vanished without a trace, only to be replaced by more and worse obscenities.
Merlin tried to block out the horror by closing his eyes, but there was no way to close his ears against the bombardment of sound. The shrieks and screams of the damned competed with gibbering voices speaking in a thousand unknown languages, and all around him the roar of rolling thunder louder than a million jet engines ripped at his ear drums and his mind. The raging symphony of madness was accompanied by rushing winds as fierce as a tropical typhoon and wet, sticky tearing sounds like flesh being ripped apart by meat hooks; all of these ate into his brain until he thought it would explode. Struggling to escape the onset of complete and total madness, Merlin threw up his hands, spreading his fingers to cover as much of his face as possible and began screaming so loud the vibrations in his throat threatened to destroy his vocal cords; “LIBERA NOS A MALO. LIBERA NOS A MALO” – Deliver us from evil. Deliver us from evil.
From out of the confusion arose the shrieking, belching roar of the dragons and the sound of a single human voice. Far, far away he could hear Morgana le Fay’s screaming; hurling a string of curses, vile oaths and imprecations into the endless sea of darkness. Against the fading, impotence of Morgana’s blind anger came the sound of a single deep, thunderous hissing voice.
“You disappoint me deeply Morcant le Fay. I was patient with you for endless eons, but I am Astaroth the eternal, lord of this realm; I am legion and my numbers are many and we will not be denied by the incompetence of human perversity.”
Then, diving through the bleak nothingness, came a V-shaped formation of half a dozen dragons, their huge, black, leathery wings extended out behind them like a squadron of living dive-bombers. Their hideous crocodile jaws were opened wide, exposing thousands of twisted, yellowing fangs and flickering forked tongues. Around the creatures’ gaping mouths clusters of twisting, probing tentacles, like those of some impossibly huge catfish, fired cascades of tiny electrical charges into the atmosphere. As the airborne nightmares shot past Merlin he caught fleeting glimpses of their massive horned skulls, sleek green-black scaled bodies, grasping claws like some gigantic bird of prey and long, whip-like leathery tails that thrashed left and right, twisting and turning, acting like rudders to guide their flight toward Morgana’s voice as it faded into the distance.
As Merlin watched the ghastly things rocket past, he pondered the words of the first dragon. “I am Astaroth…” Astaroth. His mind was hardly working at maximum efficiency but he knew he had heard that name somewhere before. Where? He twisted around in a vain attempt to find the flight of monsters but their massive forms had vanished into the blackness. Finally it came to him. Astaroth was the name used by one of the chief warlords of hell - commander of sixty legions of demons and patron of all corrupt and powerful humans. Finally, after more than sixteen centuries of guessing, fearing and wondering, Merlin finally knew beyond all doubt what the dragons were and where they came from. This is the place his Welsh ancestors knew as anwyn. This was hell. And he was trapped in it.
Still floating aimlessly, falling but not falling, the great wizard contemplated what it might mean to be in hell. Would this be how his unnaturally long life ended? Had he somehow displeased God so much that this was how he would spend all eternity? He pondered these unsettling thoughts for an indeterminate period of time – possibly minutes, possibly decades - how do you judge time in the pits of eternity? As he tumbled slowly through the void his attention was diverted by the sound of huge, flapping wings. When he twisted around in an attempt to find the source of the sound he was terrified to see one of the creatures flying directly toward him, its fifty-foot-long wings hammering the air with a steady whump, whump, whump, its slimy black tail lashing the air behind it. As the thing came closer it grinned obscenely, opened its hideous mouth, belched out a wave of nauseating stench and spoke.
“How came you here, sorcerer? This place is not for you.”
Stunned almost beyond words, it took Merlin a moment to gather his thought and answer the creature.
“I fell…that is, I was pulled through the gate by Morgana le Fay.”
As it spoke the creature’s tongue flicked in and out of its gigantic mouth as though it was searching for the scent of something it could not quite identify, and Merlin realized with a shudder that it was sensing his essence the way humans stare into each other’s eyes when gauging the speaker’s veracity. Finally, apparently con
tent with what it sensed, the thing spoke again.
“She is ours but you are not. The righteous do not belong here. There is no place for your kind in our realm. Be gone. Take your stench from our world.”
It glared at Merlin with huge yellow eyes slashed by gigantic, vertical red pupils that laid bare its undisguised loathing of the tiny man it was talking to. No, Merlin realized, it was not just him the thing despised, but all humans and everything that they were and stood for. This creature lived to wreak vengeance on the entire human race, to tear mankind’s collective soul from its body and torture it slowly, endlessly, for the sheer joy of the experience. But apparently there were rules governing who it could, and could not, molest.
“Am I dead?”
“No. And that is but one of the many problems which you have caused. You have been a botherment for an eternity of eternities and you must go back to where you came from.”
“Is Morgana dead?”
Before it answered the creature pulled its gelatinous lips up over its teeth as though it were trying to form an obscene parody of a smile.
“The physical body of that one no longer exists but her pain and suffering shall endure for all eternity. My Lord Astaroth reserves a spectacularly creative array of torments for those foolish enough to displease him.” The thing’s fetid breath came in a series of short explosions that Merlin thought sounded frighteningly like a chuckle. “He shall provide eons of excruciating misery during which she can contemplate her shortcomings.”
“I see.”
“You do not see but it does not matter. We do not want you here. Now go away.”
“I don’t know how to leave.”
“My Lord Astaroth feared as much. I have been sent to be your guide. It is but one small part of my many agonies.”
“I’m sorry.”
The thing threw its massive horned skull back and roared. “NO PITY! It is not permitted. Is not my torture enough without the sanctimonious stench of your pity?”
Merlin turned his head away from the bellowing monstrosity when suddenly, impossibly, while the massive, looming shape of the dragon continued to tower above Merlin, it was simultaneously on the same level he was. Stunned and confused, Merlin stopped walking and stared at the beast. Walking? Merlin looked down, and although there was certainly no ground beneath his feet, there was also no doubt that he was standing on some kind of solid surface. When he looked back up the dragon was gone. In another fantasia-like shift it had been replaced by a grizzled, middle aged man dressed in a suit of ring mail and wearing an ugly looking short sword at his side. With a violent start Merlin recognized the man – it was the traitorous warlord Vortigern who had murdered Merlin’s friend and teacher, Brother Jerome, almost seventeen centuries ago, when Merlin was only nine years old. He had also ordered Merlin’s throat to be cut. Recoiling in disgust, Merlin knew the instant he looked into Vortigern’s eyes that this was not the long-dead warrior. The irises of its eyes looked like broken yellow glass and the pupils were ugly, hate-filled vertical slits as red as burning coals. Vortigern smiled and when he spoke his voice had the same escaping-steam hiss as the dragon that had stood in its place a moment before.
“Is this shape easier for you to relate to, wizard?”
“Not particularly.”
The image of Vortigern winked out of sight to be replaced with that of Morgana le Fay and the dragon’s voice chuckled in a series of short wheezing bursts.
“Is this more to your liking?”
Merlin had already come to the conclusion that if the creature had the power to harm him it would have done so before now. Obviously it was just trying to make their time together as unpleasant as possible. Apparently it was manifesting itself in the forms of people who had caused Merlin pain and distress in the hope of terrifying him. Evidently its hatred of mankind was not just one aspect of its makeup but lay at the very core of its being. It was clear that causing humans to experience pain and terror excited the thing, or brought it some perverse kind of pleasure, and Merlin had no intention of feeding its twisted emotional needs.
“It doesn’t matter to me what you make yourself look like. I just want to know how to get out of this place.”
Having failed to elicit the desired reaction, the thing’s snake-like eyes stared at Merlin with a corrosive hatred.
“I would give me great pleasure to tear your soul from your body and torture your still living spirit for all time to come, but you do not belong to us and you have disrupted the law of linear continuity. This must be corrected before you do even more damage to the way of things.”
Merlin’s forehead creased into a confused scowl. “I don’t understand. What is this ‘linear continuity’ and how have I disrupted it?”
The thing morphed again, returning to its own shape, floating next to Merlin, while somehow remaining at eye level and yet towering more than fifty feet over his head.
“There are laws which even those who pray to your God must obey; no matter how great a wizard they imagine themselves to be.”
Frustrated by the dragon’s evasive, circular answers Merlin stared hard into the fiery eyes and flailed his arms in the air. “Great. Explain to me what law I’ve broken.”
The thing squinted its hate-filled eyes and flicked its tongue at Merlin before answering. “By encasing yourself in the orb to hide from your enemy le Fay you simultaneously remained timeless and un-ageing and yet continued to move through time. This is not allowed. That which you did must be undone.”
“You mean that I somehow changed time?”
“You come from what you would refer to as the past and yet you have precipitated events that changed the course of the future long after you should have been dead.”
“You’re just pissed off because I locked the gate, aren’t you?”
The thing bared its teeth and shook its massive, bony head. “You give yourself far too much credit, human. True, you locked the gate, but it is only one gate to one small place at a single point in time in a very, very large universe.”
Stunned by the possible implications in what the dragon said, Merlin’s jaw worked silently for a minute before he found his voice. “You mean there are more gates?”
The thing grinned hideously but refused to address the question. Instead, it motioned with one gnarled talon. “We are here.”
Merlin looked around but could only see more of the endless nothingness. “We are where?”
“The point to which you must return to repair the damage you have done to the great linear continuity.”
“Where? I don’t see…”
And before he could get the next word out of his mouth, the realm of darkness, the dragons and the directionless void were gone. Now Merlin was standing in a sunlit meadow with the tall golden grass of late summer whispering around his knees, propelled gently back and forth by a freshening breeze scented with the sharp tang of the ocean. Most startlingly, only inches in front of him stood the figure of a pale young woman who appeared to be hardly out of her teens. Her angular, waif-like face looked like it had been plucked from a pre-Raphaelite painting. From her delicate shoulders hung a nearly translucent blue-green gown and her white-blond hair flowed down across her shoulders and back, nearly reaching her hips. On her head was a delicate silvery diadem decorated with what appeared to be the forms of hundreds of tiny fish, each one catching and reflecting the light so they almost looked like they were alive and swimming around her head. She looked up at Merlin, a tiny, delicate scowl of confusion creasing her flawless forehead. As Merlin spoke she cocked her head to one side like a curious little bird.
“My dearest child, what are you doing here?” Then, looking around at the meadow and toward the cliff edge a few dozen yards away, he added “And where are we?”
Vivian looked up across the length of Merlin’s snowy beard, staring deep into his hypnotic blue eyes and finally raised one hand to her temple. “I came because you called me. You asked me to help hide you from that woman.” Raising
one hand she pointed to the grapefruit sized blue crystal ball which Merlin was holding tight against his chest. “In that.” Merlin looked down at the sphere in amazement, staring blankly at it as the Lady of the Lake continued rambling in her perpetually vague voice. “But I thought we had already buried you…it.” Then, shifting her gaze back to Merlin, she added “Or are we just about to do that? I can’t seem to remember. Would you like me to bury it now? The lines of power in the earth are at their strongest here, and you will be safe from Morgana’s spying until you do whatever it is you feel you need to do.”
Suddenly Merlin felt uncontrollably nauseous. Reaching out, he laid one trembling hand on the girl’s shoulder to steady himself, afraid for a moment that he might faint. Had it all been a dream – some kind of a strange vision? Had he really lived in the sphere for sixteen centuries and been thrust abruptly into the unimaginable confusion of the far distant twenty-first century, or had it all been some fleeting hallucination? Shaking his head to regain clarity, he raised a hand to caress Vivian’s cheek, demanding her undivided attention.
“Unless I’m going quite mad, you already buried my sphere, but it happened a very long time ago.”
“I don’t understand.’
“Neither do I.” He began slowly, marshalling his thoughts as he went. It was so very hard getting definite information out of a creature like Vivian, who lived simultaneously at all points in time, remembering the future and past with equal clarity but always vague and unsure about where in the time stream she was at any particular moment. “Do you remember my friends?”
