There was a small meadow here, surrounded by trees, with clover and soft grasses and wildflowers. It’s long gone. The workers have already marked out the lots for the new homes, and the ground is all mud and weeds. The pines and birch have been clear-cut, their bulldozed stumps with roots like skeletal fingers emerging from the dirt. The spring that once bubbled up in the heart of the glade has been capped.

The workers must take their breaks here; there’s a pile of trash, old cigarette butts, water bottles, and a Porta-John.

This was his place of power. His connection to the world beneath the world, the intersection of ley lines and an older, purer time. After the wind began talking to him at ten years old, after the therapists, after he was the first kid in his class to be put on Prozac, after the divorce his mother said came because he was crazy, he made his way here, desperate. He still heard a call that was not drowned out by the pills, or the doctor visits, or the razor he put to his wrists that one time. He came here, and stood in the silence, and understood for the first time.

This was where he found his way, where he learned how to move the scenery of reality, where he learned he was this generation’s Merlin.

And they’re literally shitting on it.

He still finds the center of the glade by feel, as if it fits around him. He listens to the silence, and finds the still place within him. He imagines the door, and makes the sign of the glyph in the air to unlock it, the old, familiar gesture coming back like muscle memory.

The world spins beneath him. The door opens. He doesn’t step through. Instead, he opens his eyes.

Darkness. A cave, the walls thick with roots and rot. The bones of some small animal by his feet. The smell is worse than he remembers.

Just ahead of him, something at the back of the cavern moves. He finally sees the eyes, blood-red and burning in the dark, glaring at him.

A shape lurches forward, and a voice roars out.

“And where the fuck have you been?”

Merlin — also known as Ambrosius Merlinus, Mryddin Wilit, and Emrys; prophet, seer, royal adviser; the wizard of Camelot; (alleged) son of a demon; and the greatest (mostly) human magician in history — does not look good.

He is trapped in the cavern, as he has been for centuries, by the complicated root network of an ancient tree. It weaves around and through his body, knitting him to the dirt and stone of the cave’s far wall. His beard is wiry and long, his skin like wax, and his eyes are bloodshot and wild. Eric wonders, not for the first time, how anyone could ever have described him as a kindly old man with a Papa Smurf beard.