Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(61)
She dove for it instinctively, nearly burning off her hand in her rush to get to the blessedly stable, normal-looking wood. The moment her fingers touched its surface, the Merlin Gate opened for her, and Marci tumbled inside, landing in a heap on the stone. She was still trying to stop the spinning in her head when a hand appeared under her nose.
“Bumpy entrance, huh?”
Marci looked up with a start to see Amelia standing over her, her face grim. “What are you doing here?” she asked, grabbing the dragon’s hand. “You’re supposed to be with Julius.”
“I was,” Amelia replied, hauling her up. “And I will be again, but this was kind of a crisis, so I bopped over. Shiro was going to kick me out on account of my whole ‘not having a Merlin’ thing, but now that you’re here, you can vouch for me.”
Marci nodded absently, too distracted by her surroundings to pay Amelia’s explanation proper attention. She was certain she’d come in through the Merlin Gate, but this was not the stone courtyard at the foot of the green mountain where she’d entered last time. Everything looked so different, it took Marci several seconds to realize she was standing on top of the flat peak of the mountain… which was no longer a mountain at all, but a tiny island in the middle of a vast and terrifying black sea.
“What happened?” she cried, turning in a circle. The mountain, the forest, the stairs, even the gate was gone. The place where she’d come in was just a line scratched into the stone. Beyond that, there was nothing but sea. Not the beautiful blue expanse from before, but a huge, rough, terrifying, tar-black ocean full of giant waves that would have been washing them all under if not for Myron and the DFZ, who were frantically holding the water back with a shimmering barrier.
“Novalli!” Myron yelled over the crashing water. “Help us!”
Marci rushed to obey, grabbing a fistful of magic and slamming it into Myron’s spellwork to help keep the ward in place. She was frantically trying to make sense of Myron’s maze-like patterns so she would be more effective when the other mage ran over. “Not like that!” he yelled in her ear, grabbing her fingers and moving them to press against the faint green lines rather than the blue ones. “Green is always ground!”
Marci shifted her magic accordingly. “Like this?”
He nodded and ran back toward the center of the island. “Hold that in place while I link it into the rest of the circle.”
“What circle?” Marci cried as a giant wave crashed into the magic she was struggling to hold up. “Everything’s gone!”
“Not gone!” yelled another voice. “Just underwater.”
She jumped at the sound, looking over her shoulder to see Shiro climbing out of the sea where the waves were sloshing under the edge of Myron’s dome. The shikigami caretaker was absolutely drenched, his black-and-white robes hanging like soggy bedsheets from his slender body. Despite his bedraggled appearance, though, he looked extremely pleased with himself.
“I found this!” he said excitedly, running over to hand a small, battered-looking leaf to Myron. “It should be enough to serve as an anchor.”
Myron snatched the leaf out of his hand with the barest nod of thanks. After staring at it for a moment, the mage turned the small piece of greenery upside down, placed it carefully on the ground, and stomped on it with all his might, grinding the green leaf into paste under the heel of his shoe. Marci was about to yell at him for being so rough with something Shiro had clearly gone to great lengths to obtain when the stone lit up with the glowing lines of Myron’s labyrinth. As he finished grinding the leaf—and the spellwork baked into it by the ancient Merlins—into the pattern, the whole maze shifted and locked, shutting out the roar of the storm-tossed sea as though someone had just inverted a thick glass bowl over their heads.
“There,” Myron said, his breathless voice painfully loud in the new silence. “That should keep us afloat for now.”
“What is going on?” Marci demanded, letting go of the now-stable ward so she could face him properly. “Why is the Heart of the World underwater?”
“Why do you think?” Myron snapped. “You broke the seal and unleashed a thousand years of magic back into the world all at once! Where did you think it was going to go?”
Marci blinked in alarm. She’d been so busy dealing with the magical fallout in the real world, she hadn’t even considered that the same thing might be happening on this side. Even so. “How was I supposed to know the mountain would sink?” she cried. “There’s the same amount of magic now as there was a thousand years ago when this place was built. It’s not my fault the Merlins made themselves a tiny island!”
“They didn’t!” Shiro said angrily, pushing his dripping black hair away from his face. “It’s never looked like this before!”
“How did it end up like this, then?” Myron demanded. “You told us the last time we were here that new magic accumulation over the drought was minimal!”
“It was minimal,” Shiro said, pointing at the fifty-foot-tall waves that were crashing over the top of Myron’s barrier. “This isn’t new magic. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve never seen the Sea of Magic this high before.”
“Neither have I,” Raven said, finally coming out of his hiding place in the squat little tree at the mountain’s center. “And I’ve been here a long time.”