A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  From the outside, the wooden door had looked deceptively simple. As simple as anything leading into a giant stone pillar rising from the floor of the Sea of Magic could be, anyway. But the moment she stepped over the threshold, everything changed. There was no more dark, no more swirls of nauseating magic. Even the grave-like cold of Ghost’s wind vanished, giving way to a warm, tropical breeze blowing down from what could only be described as paradise.

  She was standing in a circular courtyard paved with rough-hewn interlocking white stones at the foot of a verdant mountain. At the paving’s edge, tropical plants grew in wild abundance, creating undergrowth so thick, a cat couldn’t have squeezed through. But while the jungle surrounding it was a wall, the courtyard itself was clear and open to the blue sky, and standing at the center was Shiro, the conjured servant of the ancient Merlins who’d turned her away before.

  Seeing how she’d let herself in, Marci fully expected him to tell her to get right back out, but the shikigami made no move to oust her. He didn’t even say anything when Ghost, Amelia, and finally Myron came through the door—which looked like a massive iron gate on this side—after her. Only when the iron slab swung closed again did the shikigami finally make his move, stepping forward and bending at the waist in front of Marci in a deep, formal bow.

  “Welcome, Merlin,” he said respectfully. “To the Heart of the World.”

  “Merlin?” Marci took a step back. “You mean I did it? I’m finally a real Merlin? Like officially?”

  “You can be nothing else,” Shiro said as he straightened up. “The Heart of the World was created by and for the Merlin Circle. Its door opens only to those deemed worthy, and it opened for you. That makes you a Merlin by every possible measure. As I am a servant bound to the Heart of the World by order of the Last Merlin, Abe no Seimei, it is now my duty to welcome you and your guests.”

  “If it’s your job to welcome us,” Ghost said skeptically, crossing his arms over his transparent, shadowy chest, “why did you turn us away before?”

  “That was my duty as well,” Shiro said. “I only welcome the worthy, which is a title your mistress had not yet earned when she first knocked.”

  “But has now,” Amelia said, tapping her claws thoughtfully. “I wonder what did it.” She looked at Marci. “Did you pass a test or something?”

  Marci shrugged and looked at Shiro, who shook his head. “I’m not privy to its logic, so I can’t say what exactly you did that caused the door to open, but the Heart of the World does not make mistakes. If you are here now, it’s because something you did between our last meeting and this one was enough to earn the Heart’s trust, and that’s proof enough for me.”

  Marci bit her lip. There was a lot to unpack in that statement. She was trying to decide where to start when Myron beat her to it.

  “Where are we?” he demanded, looking up at the forested mountain. “All my research said that the Heart of the World was a spell, not a place.”

  “It is a spell,” the shikigami said, “to make a place.”

  “So it’s an illusion?” Marci said, tapping her foot on the paving stones, which certainly felt real.

  “I think it’s more like a model,” Amelia said excitedly. “I’ve always wondered how the great mages overcame humanity’s inherent magical handicaps. I mean, you live in a dual-natured reality, but your perception is confined to the physical world while you’re alive, and stuck in your deaths after that. Even if you do claw your way out to the actual Sea of Magic, you still need a spirit to ferry you around and point stuff out since you can’t see squat. That’s a crippling limitation, especially when you’re talking about the really big scale magic Merlins were famous for. But if your secret base is actually a constructed reality—a place that takes all the stuff you can’t normally see and translates it into something you can interact with—that would explain a lot.”

  “Of course,” Marci said, staring up at the mountain, which she could now see wasn’t craggy or rocky at all, but perfectly regular. A flawless cone, which was nothing but a bunch of circles stacked on top of each other.

  She dropped to one knee, brushing her hands over the courtyard’s paving stones, which she now saw weren’t rough at all. They were carved, their stone faces engraved with so many tiny, interlocking lines of spellwork, they felt like sandpaper.

  “It’s all a spell,” she said, awestruck. “This whole place was built by people.”

  “Of course,” Myron said, dropping down beside her. “Humans can’t see or navigate the Sea of Magic, so they built an artificial physical space inside it. A safe haven.”

  “Or a lens,” Marci said, looking up at the blue dome of the cloudless sky. “We’re still inside the Sea of Magic, it just makes sense now. That must be what this place does. It translates all that chaos into something we can interact with.”

  “You are both correct,” Shiro said. “The Sea of Magic is as huge and unfathomable to mortals as the actual sea it was named for. Such confusion prevented magical advancement, so the mages who came before my master, the ancient Merlins, built this place to act as an interface. It is a tool that provides both shelter from the chaos of the Sea of Magic and light that renders that chaos of magic into a form humans can understand and use.”

  “But that’s incredible!” Marci cried, shooting back to her feet. “You didn’t just draw a circle in the Sea of Magic, you made an entire world!” She looked up at the green mountain. “We’re standing in what has to be the biggest superstructure of magical logic ever built. One made without any of the modern tools like computer simulations or spell-checking software. That’s like discovering a new Great Pyramid built inside of Atlantis!”

  “I don’t know what either of those are,” Shiro said apologetically. “But I’m happy you understand the importance and power of this place.”

  “The power of this place was never in question,” Myron said, scowling. “What I want to know is what’s all this power for? Novalli’s right. This is the biggest spell I’ve ever seen by several orders of magnitude. But I’ve worked for the United Nations long enough to know that humans don’t build things on this scale unless it gives them a serious strategic advantage.”

  Marci snorted. “How is that even a question? We’re talking about a tool that lets humans see and interact with magic like the spirits do. That’s a huge strategic advantage.”

  “It is,” Myron agreed. “If that was all it did. But look.”

  He marched over to the edge of the clearing and grabbed one of the thick bushes, pulling it down to show Marci the flat green leaf.

  “Holy…” Marci grabbed the waxy leaf from his hands, staring down at the delicate veins that ran through it, but not in the usual branching pattern.

  “This is spellwork,” she said, running her fingers over the looping ridges of the ancient symbols growing inside the leaf where its chloroplasts should have been. The other leaves were the same, as was the branch they grew from. “It’s all spellwork,” she whispered, reaching out to touch the spirals of symbols that formed the patterns in the bark. “Every inch of it.”

  “And you know what that means,” Myron said, letting the tree go. “You never finished your PhD, but even undergrads should know that interlocked spellwork is exponentially co-functional. If all of this is inside the same circle, and I see no reason not to believe that the Heart of the World is one circle, then all of this—the stones in this courtyard and the leaves in the forest and anything else we find—are parts of the same whole. It’s like—”

  “Programs running in the same operating system,” Marci finished, nodding.

  “Don’t put your dated Comp Sci analogies in my mouth,” Myron said disdainfully. “I was going to say ‘organs functioning in a body.’ We’re doing magic, not writing point-of-sale software for minimum wage. I know you Thaumaturges have a hard time telling the two apart, but while Shamanistic magic has its drawbacks, at least they understand that magic is an organic force. We’re playing god with the stuff of
life itself. Not writing logic chains for mindless computational systems.”

  Marci rolled her eyes. “Says the man who wrote a book called The Logic of Magic.”

  “Yes,” he said proudly. “And since you claim to have read all my work, you’ll remember I said that the logic of magic functions like the logic of every other natural system: a chaotic mess governed by a few universal rules, one of which is that all spellwork inside the same circle works together. That point made, take a moment and think about just how much spellwork we’re talking about.”

  He stepped back to look up at the densely forested mountain rising above them. “Not counting anything else we might find, but if all of those trees are spellworked like this one, that right there is more magical notation than all the modern spellwork libraries combined. Considering the amount of logic we saw crammed onto one leaf, we might be looking at millions of spells, perhaps billions, all working together. If that’s true, then the next question has to be: working toward what end?”

  Marci frowned. “Aren’t they making this?” She tapped her foot on the stone. “You know, supporting the Heart of the World?”

  “As amazing as the Heart of the World unquestionably is, it’s not that complicated,” Myron said confidently. “I could probably create something similar given enough time and the space on the trees that immediately surround us. Even if you doubled those requirements, though, the spellwork required to make a separate reality, even one as complicated as this, still wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to fill all the trees and rocks and other presumably spellworked landscaping that blankets this island. And it’s not even confined to the ground. Look up.”

  He pointed up at the sky, and Marci gasped. Now that he’d pointed it out, she could plainly see that what had initially looked like a clear blue sky wasn’t actually clear at all, or a sky. It was a dome, a blue shell covered with hundreds of thousands of millions of tiny symbols like pixels on an old-style LED screen.

  From all the way down here, they blended together into a flat blue expanse, but if she squinted, Marci could see the symbols were arranged into spellwork, just like everything else. Not just single lines, either. The sky was a grid, a hatch of symbols arranged in a spellwork pattern that could be read not just from side to side, but up and down and maybe even diagonally as well. The complexity behind such a design was enough to make her head spin, but it was also one Marci had seen before.

  “It’s like the inside of my Kosmolabe.”

  Myron gaped at her. “You have a Kosmolabe?”

  “Had,” she said. “But you’re right. As incredible as this place is, there’s way too much spellwork here just to keep the magic out and support a translation interface. It has to do something else.”

  Probably a lot of something elses, including choosing to admit her as a Merlin. But even that kind of seemingly intelligent decision fit within the parameters of the logic that governed wards. Just as she could make a shield that blocked bullets or trapped spirits, the ancient Merlins could surely write a spell that kept out everyone except for the humans who met their requirements. It would take a ton of spellwork—abstract wards always did—but there was definitely enough here to do it. More than enough, which was the problem. Nothing took this much spellwork.

  Marci’s stomach began to sink. If she followed Myron’s logic and assumed the rest of the forest was jam packed like the tree and the stones under their feet, then there was enough spellwork here to hold all the world’s magic through twice over. And given why Myron and Algonquin had wanted to get in here, Marci had the awful feeling that was the entire point.

  “You claimed this place was built to be a tool,” she said, turning back to Shiro, who’d never stopped watching her. “Something that wouldn’t just let humans see the magic here, but use and control it as well.”

  “Correct,” the shikigami replied.

  Marci nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “So what were they using it to do?”

  The shikigami smiled wide. “To answer that question is my purpose,” he said, walking toward her. “But to do so, we must go higher.”

  Before she could ask what that meant, Shiro reached the edge of the courtyard, where the trees met the stones. Then he lifted his hand, and the thick line of trees Marci and Myron had been examining peeled back like a curtain.

  “Come, Merlin,” he said as he walked into the now-open forest. “I will take you to the Heart of the World.”

  “I thought we were already there,” Marci muttered, hurrying after him into the tunnel of trees. Myron followed right behind her, then Ghost and finally Amelia, flapping her way after them out of the sunny courtyard and up the path turned cool green by the dark, leafy canopy of spellwork overhead.

  Given the height of the mountain, Marci was braced for a long climb. Apparently, though, constructed magical islands didn’t follow normal rules of distance. After less than a minute of following a footpath uphill between the trees, Shiro pushed aside another wall of undergrowth to reveal a landscape of smooth stone and open sky. Blinking against the suddenly blinding light, Marci followed, stepping out of the forest into the bright, open, and strangely windless world of the perfectly flat plateau that was the mountain’s top.

  After the blatant artificiality of everything else here, that really shouldn’t have surprised her, but it was just so odd. Beneath the blanket of forest, the mountain itself was perfectly conical, except for its peak. That was as flat and smooth as a factory floor, as though a passing giant had lopped the mountain’s point off with a razor. The only deviation from the flatness was at the peak’s center, where an elegantly gnarled pine tree grew from the stone beside what appeared to be a well. Aside from that, the only thing to see up here was the ocean.

  “Wow,” Marci whispered, staring in wonder at the wild, strikingly blue water. “It really is a Sea of Magic.”

  “It is,” Ghost agreed quietly, his glowing eyes round in the void of his face. “Though I’ve never seen it from this height before.” His voice softened. “It’s beautiful.”

  It was more than that. The beautiful, clear, jewel-blue ocean stretching out around them was nothing like the nauseating black chaos Marci knew as the Sea of Magic, which was the entire point. This was the lens of the Heart of the World at work, transforming the confusing mess of the Sea of Magic into a form her brain could understand: a clear, shallow sea.

  From the top of the mountain—which Marci could now see was indeed a perfect cone with no beach at all, just the vividly green jungle running right up to the waves like a wall—she could look straight down to the ocean floor. A long way down, too, because the base of the Heart of the World didn’t slope out gradually like a natural island. It went straight down like a peg, the stone column they’d seen from outside. And if that was there, then all the thousands of holes and cracks pitting what should have been the ocean’s sandy floor suddenly made a lot more sense.

  “Look at all the spirit vessels,” she said, getting right to the edge of the mountain’s flat top.

  The land beneath the vibrant blue water was so riddled with gouges, there was barely room for rock between the cracks. Some of the holes were so deep, the water was still pouring in, forming giant whirlpools as the sea was sucked down into the seemingly bottomless pits. From where she was standing, she could only look down into a handful, but the whirlpools were everywhere, dotting the choppy sea like freckles all the way to the horizon.

  “Terrifying, isn’t it?”

  Marci jumped, whipping around to see Shiro standing right beside her. “I would have said beautiful,” she said when she’d recovered. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “Part of it,” he said, staring solemnly at the endless sea. “This was what the Heart of the World was meant for. From up here, things are compressed, allowing us to safely and easily observe the Sea of Magic in its entirety.”

  Compression would explain why the cracks looked so small. Or, at least, not the size of mountains and lakes.


  “Those are the Mortal Spirits, aren’t they?” she said, pointing at the whirlpools. “The ones that haven’t filled up yet.”

  “Correct,” Shiro said, his expression darkening. “Even more than observing, this place was created to protect. With so many spirits rising, we needed a watchtower, somewhere we could see the monsters coming, and prepare to strike back.”

  “Monsters, huh?” Marci shook her head. “Have to say, though, I didn’t expect that from you guys. I thought forming partnerships with the Mortal Spirits was the Merlins’ whole shtick.”

  “It was,” Shiro said. “Until we got overwhelmed.”

  He turned away from the cliff, motioning for her to follow. Curious and frustrated, Marci did so, dogging his heels across the flat stone to the center, where Amelia, Ghost, and Myron were already waiting in the shade of the gnarled pine beside the stone well. Or, at least, she’d assumed it was a well. As they got closer, though, Marci realized that was wrong. The waist-high circle of stone wasn’t a well.

  It was a seal.

  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.