Page 45 of The Mirror of Beasts

He gave an awful, wheezing laugh.

“What knot can … the great Viviane … not unravel … that she must now … seek the help … of one … such as me?” Merlin grated out. “Perhaps the darkness … that seeps through the isle … ? The poisons drunk deep by the roots … ?”

Viviane was a tall woman and she held herself like a queen. But the question made her shrink back in alarm. “It has already reached the Mother tree?”

Merlin said nothing.

“Do not be a fool,” Viviane said. “If it reaches the heart of the isle, you yourself will be consumed by it.”

“It … will be … an end,” he said.

Viviane’s expression hardened with anger. “Is it him, then? Your former master?”

“Not master … guide …”

“I haven’t the time to debate your doomed choice to worship at the altar of a false god,” Viviane said. “I am asking you, as High Priestess and the last protector of Avalon, if you—shepherd of kings, keeper of stories, and prophet of dreams—have seen visions of what is to come.”

Merlin let out a harrumph that expelled several beetles between his crumbling teeth. But the flattery and deference coaxed him into speaking again.

“I have seen much … when the paths turn to ice … when the world shakes and weeps blood … when the sun is devoured by darkness,” he said, closing his terrible eyes.

“More of your infernal riddles,” she fumed.

“The worlds will sing of the coming, chains of death broken … new power born in blood,” he finished. “You know … of what I speak. The end … has come. He will have … what was once promised … to him.”

Viviane drew in a sharp breath. “It will not come to that. Not if you tell me how to stop him. Did you not hear something whispered on the wind? Did the answer not come to you in a dream? You are too clever not to have divined a way to escape him.”

Merlin’s eyes remained closed. His lips unmoving.

“You have had centuries to ruminate on the way you betrayed this isle,” Viviane said, “the very one that welcomed you, when the mortal world would just as soon have cut the heart from your chest. Do you not have any desire for atonement?”

Still the druid remained silent. Viviane wore her disgust plainly, all but trembling with barely suppressed fury. She pulled a knife from her belt, drawing closer to him. “Then I’ll carve you out and burn you to cinders, the way I should have done an age ago—”

With a flick of the blade, a gnarled chunk of bark stripped from his cheek and fell to the floor. An oozing pocket of pus and sap opened on his face.

“Is that … all?” The druid’s laugh was low, pitying. “You never possessed … the stomach to do … what must be done. That is why you lost … Lady Morgan … and why you … shall now lose everything else … you hold dear …”

Viviane drew back at Morgan’s name, her nostrils flaring with anger. With pain.

“I will find the answer another way,” she vowed. “And you—you will continue to be nothing more than a husk of what you once were.”

Her cloak whirled over the floor as she turned to go, taking long strides down the corridor.

“Look … upon me with despair …,” Merlin continued in his harsh, labored voice. “For I am … the Mirror of Beasts … my silver sings of eternity. … as I capture all … in my glare.”

Viviane’s steps slowed, but only for a moment.

“The mirror lies … beyond your reach … forevermore,” he roared after her, malice and spittle dripping with each word. “And you … you shall die screaming … with all the rest!”

My eyes snapped open as I surfaced from the memory.

I braced a hand against the table as a spell of dizziness passed over me. My mind needed more than a moment to accept the sight of the sun-streaked pub after lingering in the darkness of the underpaths of Viviane’s memories.

Olwen wiped the tears streaming down her face, turning for a moment to compose herself. Caitriona looked more rattled than I’d ever seen her.

“Was that the only memory?” Neve asked as the pedestal rattled and slowed to a stop. The vessel stared back at us with its hollow eyes, the manifestation of Merlin’s final promise.

“I think the better question is,” I began with a calmness I didn’t quite feel, “what, in all the many hells, is the Mirror of Beasts?”

---