She had spent the entire journey thinking about the same thing. That white-haired boy with the determined look, planting his sword into the ground so he wouldn't collapse, screaming at her to run and never look back.
By the time she arrived, night had already fallen.
And what she saw froze her in place.
The meadow she had crossed just yesterday, still green and lush, was now nothing more than a miniature field of ruins. Shallow craters pitted the ground in places, still smoking. Long streaks of frost ran across the scorched grass, as if fire and ice had fought over the same patch of earth without either ever winning. Entire trees had been sliced clean through, their trunks stacked on top of one another in an almost artistic disarray.
Merlin walked forward slowly, almost reverently, through the scars of the battle.
This is where he fought.
She tried to picture the scene. Five mages against a single, exhausted boy who could barely stand. The kind of fight you shouldn't be able to win. The kind of fight you shouldn't even be able to survive.
So where is he?
She scanned every corner of the clearing, her heart pounding at a rhythm she had learned to recognize over the last few hours. She searched for what she dreaded finding and what she hoped, with everything in her, never to see.
Nothing.
No body. Not the faintest trace of dried blood on the charred grass. Not the slightest mark suggesting someone had been dragged or carried out of the clearing.
She stopped in the middle of the battlefield and began to think, refusing to let panic override her reason. After all, logic had always been her best ally. It was logic that had helped her escape the mages for months. This wasn't the moment to abandon it.
Alright. Let's go over this.
The five mages had caught up to her, several kilometers from here, empty-handed. No bag. No body slung over a shoulder. Not the slightest heaviness in their gait that would have betrayed the weight of an unconscious prisoner.
They're still only disciples. Their levitation magic isn't fast enough to catch up to me, so they must have used short-range teleportation. Except it's impossible to teleport while carrying someone else. So even using a miniaturization spell, he wouldn't have been able to.
If they had captured him, they would have brought him along. Or at least, they should have. A subject as fascinating as he had proven to be, a sword capable of nullifying magic, and the ability to teleport without any magical energy at all… The mages of Belialuin would never have let an opportunity like that slip through their fingers. Especially where teleportation was concerned.
So they didn't take him with them.
That left another possibility, a more unsettling one. What if, instead of physically dragging him along, they had used a spell to send him straight to Belialuin?
That thought chilled her blood for a moment, before a memory came to reassure her.
No. That's impossible.
She remembered the research halls of the capital, the years spent observing, sometimes against her will, the various magical development departments. She remembered, in particular, a grumpy old mage who spent entire days screaming at his assistants over a "long-distance teleportation" project that stubbornly refused to work.
Long-distance teleportation was still, as far as she knew, nothing more than a dream. A project barely more advanced than a theory scribbled on a chalkboard. No mage, however talented, could have teleported a human being all the way to Belialuin from somewhere this remote. Not yet. Maybe not for several more years.
So if they didn't take him with them, and they couldn't have teleported him…
A smile began to form on her lips, timid at first, before blooming fully.
Then he left under his own power.
He was alive. He had to be. It was the only conclusion that held up, the only one that didn't crumble under the weight of the most basic logic.
A weight she hadn't even noticed carrying until now suddenly seemed to lift from her shoulders.
She kept exploring the clearing, a little less apprehensive now, searching no longer for a body but for a clue, any clue, that might confirm her theory.
That's when she saw it.
Planted in the ground, almost at the edge of the clearing, half-hidden by a mound of overturned earth, a black blade gleamed faintly under the first rays of the sun.
The demon-dweller sword Drainda. As Merlin recalled.
Merlin approached, almost hesitant, as if she feared the sword might vanish at the slightest sudden movement. Up close, it was even more impressive than in her memory. The white clover above the guard. The six stars aligned three by three on either side of the groove. The edge, so perfect it seemed almost unreal.
He left it here.
That thought intrigued her more than it reassured her. A boy who could summon a weapon like this out of nowhere, a weapon this unique and fascinating, surely wouldn't have abandoned it willingly. Unless he no longer had the strength to carry it with him when he left.
That confirms he was in a catastrophic state when he fled.
Curious despite herself, and perhaps also wanting to feel a little closer to him through this object that had belonged to him, she reached her hand toward the hilt.
I'll just pick it up. Bring it with me. Maybe I could find him by casting a tracking spell through this sword.
Her fingers closed around the hilt and she pulled.
Nothing happened.
Surprised, she tightened her grip and pulled again, harder this time, putting the full weight of her body into it.
The sword didn't budge a millimeter.
What?
She frowned, convinced she was doing something wrong, and gripped the hilt with both hands this time, planting her feet firmly on the ground for leverage.
She pulled with all her strength.
Still nothing.
This makes no sense. It's just a sword. How can it possibly be this heavy?
She remembered then that she wasn't without other resources. She let her magic flow, channeling some of her energy into her arms to strengthen her grip, just as she had done the day before to cover kilometers in record time.
This time, the sword moved. Barely. A centimeter, maybe two, before falling heavily back into the ground as if it categorically refused to leave its spot.
Merlin was already panting, her arms trembling, a strange sensation of emptiness gradually settling deep within her. As if something were draining her energy the longer she kept contact with the hilt.
She hastily let go of the sword and stumbled back several steps, out of breath.
She looked at her hands, almost in disbelief.
What was that…
She cast a wary glance at the black blade, planted in the ground, as still and silent as a monument.
It's like it was drinking my magic.
She stood there in silence for a long moment, staring at the sword, searching for a rational explanation for what she had just experienced. A weapon as heavy as a mountain, one that seemed to literally feed on the magical energy of anyone who tried to lift it…
And yet, he had wielded it as if it weighed nothing at all.
She remembered the way he had spun it before bringing it down on the light cage. The apparent lightness with which he had raised it to cut through Galileo's petrifying ray. Nothing in his movements had hinted at such a weight.
How… how does he do that?
She had no answer. Only a new certainty, even more troubling than the first: this sword was nothing ordinary, and neither was the boy who had summoned it.
In the end, she found a solution as simple as it had been hard to think of. She tore off a piece of her skirt and wrapped it around Drainda's handle.
And against all odds, it worked.
So it needs direct contact to drain you.
Just what you'd expect from the greatest genius of Belialuin.
But the sword is still terribly heavy, even reinforced I can't lift it.
Merlin had no choice left; only one option remained.
Scratch! Scratch!
She had to drag the sword along the ground.
How undignified.
Which was a real shame for her, because if Merlin had only bothered to wait for the night to pass, she could have seen him again directly.
The next day, in the very same spot where he had fought, Emrys reappeared.
The first thing he felt was the pain. A diffuse, all-encompassing pain that seemed to have taken up residence in every fiber of his body. His wounds hadn't miraculously healed. He still bore countless injuries and muscle damage from performing techniques that were, under normal circumstances, far beyond his reach.
He stayed lying there for a long moment, motionless, simply breathing, letting his mind slowly catch up with reality.
The pain eased, giving him a chance to think clearly.
He vaguely remembered dematerializing at the last possible instant, that ability he had still never truly mastered, one that always seemed to trigger right at the edge of the abyss, more like a last-ditch survival reflex than a conscious choice. He had no idea where it had taken him. He didn't even know how long he had been unconscious.
He tried to sit up and the pain came rushing back immediately, dragging him back down.
Damn it.
He stayed lying there a few seconds longer, waiting for the pain to settle down once more. And this time he decided not to move.
Is this really how it ends up for me?
He thought back to the fight. To Drainda, knocked out of his reach. To Gae Dearg, crumbling into shards of light the moment he lost consciousness. He had neither of them with him now. Nothing but his own exhausted body, and a consciousness that had only just barely emerged from the void.
A chilling thought slowly settled over his mind, more painful still than any of his wounds.
I managed to survive. But did I actually gain anything from this?
For one brief moment, he had believed he had become stronger. The awakening of his magical power, the materialization of Gae Dearg, that heady feeling of finally having something to stand against the world with… All of it had only been enough to delay the inevitable by a few minutes.
Five mages. It had only taken one of them to strike him down with a casual flick of the wrist, literally, with a single spell.
He clenched his jaw, refusing to let the tears he felt welling up actually fall.
Awakening my magical power made me arrogant. I don't even understand how I could have become arrogant. He was superior to me in every way.
He thought back to the moment he had materialized Gae Dearg. To the moment he had felt like he'd become Diarmuid Ua Duibhne. Like he'd become the strongest knight of the Fianna.
But the truth is…
I'm nothing.
He stayed like that for a long while, alone against his tree, dwelling on that bitter truth.
Then, slowly, something else began to surface, hidden beneath the humiliation and exhaustion.
Anger.
Not at the mages. Not really. At himself. At that version of himself who had believed he was ready, who had thought a freshly awakened power would be enough to make up for years of lost ground.
No. Never again.
I never want to feel this powerless again.
He thought of the girl he had protected. He still didn't know whether she had survived, whether she had truly managed to escape, but he refused to consider the alternative. He thought, too, of his mother, somewhere out there in this world, whom he still hadn't found.
If I want to protect anything, if I ever want to find her, I can't stay what I am right now.
He clenched his fist, feeling, despite the pain, a new determination take root deep within him, deeper than anything he had felt before.
I'm going to become stronger. No matter how long it takes. No matter how many times I have to fall before I get there.
He opened his eyes, for the first time since reappearing, his gaze suddenly harder, more determined, despite the exhaustion still weighing on every one of his limbs.
But he quickly realized something was wrong.
"Why can't I see anything?"