Merlyn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 19

Merlyn ran his thumb across the last shard of bone and felt the crack. He was blind, but his hands read stone and bone better than any eye. This piece would carve like the others: it would split under the sacrifice-rune and misfire. A misfired sacrifice-rune killed the one who cut it. He needed his sight back, and the only way to earn it was this rune, the same rune his old master left unfinished before death took him. Every medium Merlyn owned was flawed. He stood in the workshop where the seer once studied. Dried herbs hung above him. His fingers found bottles, dice, and a heavy stone-bound book on the shelf. He knew that book by its carved covers. His master had marked pages in it for three hundred years of readers. Merlyn opened it and traced the raised lines with his fingertips. The pages spoke of the deep ash tree and the doorway inside its trunk. Beyond that doorway grew bone-white bark, pure enough to hold any rune. Merlyn had read of it as a boy. He had thought it a story. The door opened behind him. He knew the weight of the step. "You look like a dead man reading," Kjell said. The dwarf set something on the table. Coins rang against wood. Merlyn had taught Kjell to read runes years ago, and the man had never once softened a hard truth. "Every bone I own is cracked," Merlyn said. "I cut the rune, I die." "Then don't cut it." "Then I stay blind." Merlyn closed the book. "There is a wood past the ash-tree door. The bark there takes a rune clean." Kjell was quiet. "That door burns fools." "I am not a fool. I am tired of my father's hands." Merlyn's own hands began to glow, the knots on his forearms brightening as he pulled at the earth. "He worked that stone with no fingers left. He died before he saw. I will not." Kjell pushed the coins closer. "Payment for the wild folk, if the door leads to them. Take it." Merlyn gathered the coins into his apron. He found the ash tree by the hum in the ground, the way roots pull at buried magic. His hand met bark, then open air where the trunk should have been solid. The doorway breathed cold at his face. He reached through and touched a young tree on the far side. The bark peeled away smooth and whole. No crack. No flaw. He pressed his thumbnail into it and felt it hold. Merlyn drew his hammer and set the fresh bark against a flat stone. He cut the first line of the sacrifice-rune. The bark took it clean, no split, no misfire. His hands would live to finish it. But cutting the full rune meant giving something in return. The book had named the price. He had the medium now. He did not yet have what the rune would demand.