A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  “Winging it,” Marci repeated bleakly. “That’s your plan?”

  The dragon shrugged. “It’s been my M.O. since I got here. Worked so far. Remember, no dragon has ever been to this side of the plane, and Bob can’t see what happens on this side.”

  “You mean you’ve been making it up this whole time?” she cried. “What’s the point of following a seer’s advice if you’re just going to fly blind?”

  “Plenty,” Amelia said, giving her stern look. “Bob picks horses, not races. He chose you not because of any specific event, but because your personality and choices gave you the best chance of success over the long term. The rest was up to us. This whole thing has been one giant long shot from your death all the way to here, but we pulled it off. Now we just have to keep that up. That said, this final part is the hairiest bit, which is why I’ve taken the precaution of enlisting some outside help.”

  Shiro’s head snapped up in alarm. “What kind of outside help?”

  “The very best,” Amelia said, glancing up at the twisted pine tree. “I’m actually surprised he hasn’t already outed himself. He normally can’t resist a dramatic entrance.”

  Marci didn’t see anything in the branches, but Shiro still looked utterly appalled.

  “Where do you think you are, dragon?” he cried, reaching down to snatch Amelia up. “You are a guest in the Heart of the World! The sacred fortress of the Merlins! You have no authority to bring in others. The fact that a snake like you was permitted entrance is itself a miracle. You can’t expect such a thing to—”

  He stopped, eyes going wide, though Marci had no idea why. Nothing on the mountaintop had changed that she could see. When she asked the shikigami what was wrong, though, all he said was, “There’s a bird here.”

  Confused, Marci looked up again to see he was right. There was a bird in the tree above their heads. An absolutely massive black raven with a very familiar gleam in his intelligent eyes. “My ears were burning,” he croaked, hopping down to perch on the edge of the cracked seal. “Did I miss anything?”

  “Hello, Raven,” Amelia said as she wormed out of Shiro’s slack fingers to join him. “Right on time.”

  “I should be. I’ve been checking this place every few minutes since I heard you’d died. Though I must say, Amelia love, you look worse every time I see you. And the company you keep…” He turned sideways to examine Myron with a black eye. “Dreadful.”

  Amelia lifted her lip in disgust. “I didn’t invite him. He’s a stowaway on Marci’s better nature. One of the bad habits she picked up from my baby brother.”

  “Really?” Raven said, turning gravely to Marci. “You must be more discerning, Madame Merlin. Betrayal is usually a repeated behavior.”

  “I don’t have to defend myself to you,” Myron said, lifting his chin. “I did what I felt was necessary to preserve the future of mankind.”

  “I know,” the spirit said tiredly. “It’s one of humanity’s worst traits. Good intentions justify all kinds of terrible behavior.”

  Myron was opening his mouth to argue when Shiro cut him off. “How are you here?” the shikigami demanded, his normally calm demeanor abandoned as he made a grab for Raven. “You’re an animal spirit! How did you get into this place?”

  “Well, firstly, you can’t keep ravens out of anything,” Raven said, dodging easily. “And second, I’m only partially an animal spirit these days. I started out that way, but I’ve been improving myself over the years.”

  “What do you mean, ‘improving yourself’?” Marci asked.

  “Nothing too drastic,” Raven assured her. “But as I’m sure you’ve picked up, humans have been my hobby for a very long time. I’ve been helping your kind since you first discovered language. With such a long run, it wasn’t hard to insert myself into your stories and mythologies, start building my legacy. Every culture in the world has tales of clever ravens and crows, which I might have also coopted.”

  Amelia snorted. “You stole Crow’s stories?”

  “Crow is a curmudgeon who wasn’t taking advantage of humanity’s incredible abilities,” Raven said, utterly unapologetic. “And most people can’t tell us apart anyway, so I helped myself to his share.”

  Marci stared at him in wonder. “You weren’t exaggerating the first time we met. You really are Raven from the stories. Not just the Spirit of Ravens, but Raven the Trickster God. You used our myths and legends about you to make yourself a Mortal Spirit!”

  Raven puffed out his chest. “Finally, someone’s figured it out. It’s about time I got credit for my brilliance.” He poked his beak at Amelia. “Where do you think she got the idea of taking over the dragon spirit? She cribbed it from me.”

  Marci was opening her mouth to ask him about that when Myron grabbed her shoulder and physically pushed past her. “You were a Mortal Spirit?” he yelled at Raven. “This whole time?”

  “Slow on the uptake, aren’t you?” Raven said coldly. “But before you achieve critical hypocrisy by calling me a traitor, I’m not a true Mortal Spirit. My original vessel has always been the one carved out for me by my ravens all over the world. All I did was craft myself an expansion using the human tales of my actions as the mythological Raven. The result was a sort of hybrid blend of the two, but though it’s a lot of work playing two roles, I’ve always enjoyed a challenge. And before you bring it up, there’s still not quite enough magic yet to bring my Mortal Spirit side up to snuff, so I couldn’t have solved our Merlin problem any faster than Marci here did. Not that you were any help in that regard. In fact, you are a big part of why I’m here.”

  Myron’s brow furrowed, but Raven had already turned back to Shiro. “You’re one of old Seimei’s shikigami, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Shiro said, his voice suspicious. “What of it?”

  “Nothing,” Raven said. “Just appreciating a master’s work. I make servants, too, though I stick to physical constructs, not intelligent magic like yourself. Still, I have a deep appreciation for the art. Tell me, are you bound directly into this place, or were you just locked up like a message in a bottle for the next person who happened to stumble through the door?”

  That struck Marci as a reasonable question, but Shiro looked terminally insulted. “My master would never be so irresponsible as to leave his shikigami with no anchor,” he said haughtily. “Of course I am properly bound to the structure that governs the Heart of the World.”

  “Excellent,” Raven said, turning back to Marci. “That means he has to do what you say. As the current and only Merlin, you are the undisputed master of the Heart of the World, which, as Shiro has just admitted, includes him. So, Madame Merlin, would you be so kind as to order your shikigami to bring up a scrying circle on the DFZ?”

  Blinking in surprise, Marci turned to Shiro. “You have to do what I say? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I did,” he said sourly. “I told you I was bound to the Heart of the World and I told you you were its master. I simply assumed you would put two and two together.”

  “Of course,” Marci said, rolling her eyes. “Do as Raven says.”

  Shiro set his jaw. “You should not listen to him. He’s an unbound spirit and a trickster god, and he is not supposed to be here.”

  “Well, I’m giving him permission to be here,” Marci snapped. “And a scrying circle is a good idea. If I’m going to be Merlin, I need to be informed, so fire it up.”

  With a final scowl, the shikigami turned and walked across the flat top of the mountain to a clear spot near the outer edge. When he reached it, he pulled the folding fan out of his sash and waved it in a circle in front of him. It wasn’t until a corresponding completely spellworked circle lit up on the stone below, though, that Marci realized what had just happened.

  “Holy—”

  She rushed over, dropping to her knees at the edge of the glowing circle to get a closer look, but she wasn’t mistaken. There were no markings on the ground, no carved circle or premade spellwork for him t
o activate. Shiro had just waved his fan, and the whole thing—the circle, the spellwork, the variables, all of it—had appeared out of thin air.

  “How did you do that?” she cried, jaw hanging open. “You just freecast a scrying circle!”

  That was a sentence she’d never thought she’d say. Freecasting, or casting spells without written spellwork, was one of the core elements of Shamanistic magic. It worked okay for small spells if you didn’t care about safety or quality standards, but doing anything complicated was out of the question, which definitely included scrying spells. Particularly a fancy one like this. The circle at Shiro’s feet was now a clear window looking straight down through the mountain into an aerial shot of the DFZ. There was no haze or distortion, and it moved, the picture swirling around as the shikigami steered with the top of his folded fan.

  “You have got to teach me how to do that.”

  “Of course,” he said, his voice resigned. “I was bound here to inform and protect. But I still do not understand why we are doing this.”

  Looking down, Marci didn’t either. “I don’t get it,” she said, staring at the city. “It’s just the DFZ.”

  “Exactly,” Raven said, hopping over to perch on Ghost’s shoulder, which the bigger spirit didn’t seem to mind at all. “It’s just the DFZ. No cars. No people. Nothing.”

  He was right. The longer Marci looked, the creepier the picture became. There were no automated taxis, no delivery drones, not even people on the sidewalks. In a city that had barely paused when the Three Sisters had been shot out of the sky above it, the emptiness was just plain wrong, but when Marci glanced at Raven to ask why, the answer found her.

  “GET OUT!”

  The words came from the ground itself. They echoed through the city in a roar of rage, breaking windows and cracking the supports of the abandoned Skyways. That would have been terrifying enough, but what made it a thousand times worse was the fact that Marci recognized the voice.

  “Is that—”

  “Yes,” Raven said. “It’s the spirit of the DFZ. The one boy genius there used my spellwork to bind and fill because he couldn’t stand the idea of someone else becoming Merlin.”

  “No,” Myron said, jerking his head at Marci. “I couldn’t stand the idea of her becoming Merlin. An opinion I still maintain since her plan to deal with the upcoming magical apocalypse is to hurry it up.”

  “Congratulations, then. You beat her to it,” Raven croaked, bobbing his head down at the city. “Thanks to you, we’ve got a fully formed and fully enraged Mortal Spirit on the loose. The only reason she’s not burning a swath right now is because Algonquin is holding her down, but that won’t last much longer, which is why I’m here.”

  Amelia’s head whipped toward him. “I thought you were here because I asked.”

  “I’m always here for you, my darling snake,” Raven said. “But this is slightly more pressing than old favors.” He turned back to Marci after that. Then, to her surprise, he lowered his head, bowing down before her until his beak touched the stone.

  “I’ve come on behalf of all spirits to beg the Merlin’s help,” he said quietly. “In her fear, Algonquin used the spirits of the land who were afraid of change to fill the DFZ to the brim. This has left a newborn Mortal Spirit filled with the land’s old anger. Needless to say, it’s a volatile and dangerous situation that’s only been made worse by Algonquin’s order to evacuate the DFZ.”

  “How does evacuating make things worse?” Marci asked. “I’m amazed Algonquin cared enough to get people out.”

  “She didn’t do it to save the humans,” Raven said. “The DFZ is the spirit of the city. As such, her instinct is to protect her population, because people are the soul of a city. Without them, though, the DFZ is empty in more ways than the obvious. She has no anchor, nothing but the rage and fear of the spirits Algonquin stuffed her full of, and with no Merlin to help her calm down, she’s rapidly spiraling out of control. Algonquin’s managed to keep her in check thanks to Myron’s plagiarism of the spellwork I created for Emily, but the DFZ is a Mortal Spirit. She’s orders of magnitude bigger than the Lady of the Lakes. Even my brilliance can’t handle that sort of power difference. If we don’t do something soon, she’s going to break free, and when she does, she’ll destroy Algonquin, and probably her own city as well.”

  “Saving the DFZ is obvious,” Marci agreed. “But why do you care if she destroys Algonquin? I thought the two of you hated each other.”

  “That doesn’t matter right now,” Raven said. “Whatever happens, we cannot allow Algonquin to believe she’s lost.” He turned to Shiro again. “Show us the lake.”

  The shikigami didn’t move a muscle. Only after Marci motioned for him to go ahead did he finally flick his fan, turning the scrying circle’s magical window to show the lake below Algonquin’s white tower, and the shadow floating above it.

  “Wow,” Marci whispered, eyes wide.

  She knew what she was looking at, of course. Algonquin’s Leviathan was almost as famous as the Lady of the Lakes herself, and Marci had gotten her own up-close-and-personal introduction to him when she’d been Algonquin’s prisoner. But the monster floating in the air above Lake St. Clair was multiple times bigger than the one they’d fought in Reclamation Land. Even with his tentacles stuck down in the lake water, which was lower than Marci had ever seen it, the crest of his rounded, beetle-like back was taller than the Skyway’s superscrapers.

  “Wow, he got an upgrade.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Raven said, his normally joking voice grim. “He’s just not bothering to hide his true nature anymore, which is our sign that this situation’s gone critical.”

  Marci looked sideways at him. “The Mortal Spirit of a city has gone psycho, and the Leviathan’s your line for critical?”

  “Yes,” he said, his talons tightening on the Empty Wind’s shoulder. “Do you remember what we discussed on the jet before you died? When you asked me about the Nameless Ends?”

  “You mean what we didn’t discuss?” Marci said, crossing her arms. “Because I distinctly remember you saying it was too dangerous for mortals to know.”

  “I said it was too dangerous for normal mortals,” Raven corrected. “But I did promise to tell you if you became a Merlin, which you have.”

  Marci smiled. Finally, a perk to being the Merlin. “So what are they?”

  “Whoa,” Amelia said, pointing at Myron, who’d gone suspiciously silent. “Should you really be outing this in front of the freeloader? He’s not exactly trustworthy.”

  “He’s a traitor,” Raven agreed. “But that might actually work in our favor. If this plays out how I think it’s going to, Myron’s position as Algonquin’s inside man might be our only chance of getting out of this alive.”

  Myron looked visibly relieved by that, but Marci was starting to get frustrated. “So what’s going on?” she demanded. “Why’s the Leviathan getting so big? What’s Algonquin doing?”

  Raven sighed. “What she feels she has to.”

  He hopped off Ghost’s shoulder, flapping down to land on the cracked seal. “Algonquin didn’t always hate humans,” he said, tapping his talons on the spellworked stone. “This changed that. When the Merlins cut off all magic and plunged the world into drought, Mortal Spirits weren’t the only ones who vanished. We all did.”

  This was not new information, but the way he said it was. Marci had never heard one of the really old spirits sound anything other than demanding or cocky or angry, but this was different. This time, Raven sounded afraid.

  “Do you know what that was like for us?” he whispered. “We are the immortal spirits, as old and immutable as the land itself. Our changes happen on geologic timelines: mountains eroding into plains, or tiny proto-birds evolving into ravens. That was our reality, the world we’d always known. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Magic, the very stuff of our existence, dried up like a river in summer, and without it, we—the deathless—died.”

  “That’s
a little dramatic,” Marci said. “I mean, you came back.”

  “We didn’t know that then,” Raven said bitterly. “The Merlins made their decision without consulting us. They knew what would happen to us, but they decided we were an acceptable sacrifice for humanity’s safety. There’s not a spirit in the world who took that well, but Algonquin took it personally.”

  “But I’m not going to take the magic away again,” Marci said quickly. “The Last Merlins made a tough call with a lot of negative externalities, but the situation now is different. I’m not going to repeat—”

  “I know,” Raven said. “Why do you think I’m so delighted you beat Myron to the punch? But while we know you’re not like your predecessors, Algonquin doesn’t. I got in here because I’m clever and adaptable, but Algonquin’s a true spirit of the land, stubborn as a rock. She has no access to the Heart of the World and no idea what’s happening on our end. All she sees is what’s in front of her, which right now consists of Myron’s comatose body and an unbound Mortal Spirit running amok. She thinks her bid to get a Merlin failed, and now Myron’s stuck on this side while his spirit goes haywire, which means it’s up to her to put the DFZ down again before it destroys her lakes.”

  Marci bit her lip. “I see why you came. Algonquin and the Leviathan are bad enough on their own, but if they start beating the spirit of the DFZ into submission, the whole city could be destroyed. It’ll be the night of the flood all over again.”

  “Actually, that’s the good part,” Raven said. “We want her to fight the DFZ, because fighting means she hasn’t given up hope yet that she can salvage the situation. The real danger comes when she gets desperate.”

  “How much more desperate can she get?”

  “Plenty,” he said. “Remember what I just said about the night the magic vanished? We thought it was the end of the world. We’d never even contemplated death, and then suddenly everyone we knew was dropping like flies. We had no idea how to stop what was happening or if the magic that sustained us would ever come back. That sort of fear drives even the wisest spirits to do desperate, stupid things, and Algonquin was no exception. She thought the end of the world was upon her, so she did the only thing she could. She cried out for help, offered everything she had if this would only stop, and unfortunately for us, something answered.”