21st Century Merlin Book 1
Chapter Previews
Prologue
My sixteenth birthday is a paradox in denim shorts and bug spray: everyone outside smiling, but everyone inside running the numbers on how long before the first awkward silence. The sun beats down in a contest of endurance, daring us to admit we’re hot and miserable, but none of us want to be first.
It’s June 21st, which apparently matters—Summer Solstice, longest day, all the thresholds and transitions, at least according to my mother’s ancient calendar and newer bottle of wine. Every year it’s the same: she brings out the trivia, tries to make it special, and I pretend not to roll my eyes so hard I sprain an optic nerve.
Today, though, the weather is a living thing, stalking us. Humidity clings to the back of my neck like the breath of some old world monster. I keep one hand on the condensation-slick glass of ginger ale, and the other crammed into my pocket, fingers worry-stoning a house key that’s already wearing a groove into my thigh. The yard is as prepared as it ever is: folding chairs, battered lawn games, a vinyl tablecloth with a repeating pattern of bluebirds that my mother claims is “vintage,” which I guess is true if you count Target 2004 as a bygone era.
Miri is the first to arrive, her hair a defiant violet this week, and somehow she makes “slightly wilted in the sun” look like a deliberate mood. I half expect her to melt into a puddle of sarcasm and eyeliner. She gives me a present in a crumpled brown bag—no wrapping, just a crude drawing of a goat on the side and the message “for Emrys” in block letters. I almost choke at the sight of the name, but she grins, like always, daring me to say something clever.
“Open it,” she stage-whispers. “It’s not cursed. Probably.”
Inside: a battered, first-edition paperback of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The back is signed: “Happy Birthday, Necromancer. Don’t forget the little people.”
“I see you went for subtle,” I say, dry as drought.
“Would you even recognize subtle if it knocked up your breakfast cereal?”
I’m about to answer when Mom calls everyone in for cake. She’s at the patio door, hips cocked in her business-casual stance, coffee mug in one hand, and her phone in the other, already counting down the seconds until she can escape back to emails and depositions.
It’s just the three of us and a handful of school acquaintances who came for the free food: Ben from soccer, who’ll eat anything and everything; Cara, who doesn’t talk to me except for desperate chemistry homework questions; and Tyler, who I’m convinced is only here because he lost a bet.
The cake is homemade, which means it’s three layers, slightly slumped, and covered in icing so bright it might violate the Geneva Conventions. Sixteen candles, already softening at the tips in the sun. Mom is doing that thing where she wants to be present and meaningful, but her smile is tight as an overtuned guitar string, and her eyes keep darting to her phone like she’s bracing for news she won’t like.
She says, “Make a wish, Jack,” and I almost laugh, because if there’s one thing my family has taught me, it’s that wishes are a liability.
I shut my eyes, breathe in sugar and ozone and the sour metallic tang of summer sweat. I wish—nothing. I blow out all sixteen candles anyway.
There’s applause. A single golf clap from Miri. The cake is served. Conversation limps along in bursts—something about college applications, summer jobs, the tragic existence of cats in Tyler’s neighborhood. No one mentions my meltdown at the end of sophomore year. Maybe that’s progress.
After the cake, I slip away under the pretense of putting dishes in the kitchen. I can see Mom through the sliding glass, out on the patio with her back to me, shoulders hunched like she’s bracing against an invisible wind.
My phone vibrates: “U ok?” Miri, of course.
I reply with a gif of a cartoon raccoon in a trash can, on fire.
Her response: “That’s my cryptid king. Don’t disappear on me.”
I look down at the cake knife, the sticky plastic fork, the bluebird napkin dotted with icing. The urge to run is sudden and electric, a muscle memory. But there’s nowhere to go, not really. I stare at my own reflection in the fridge for a beat: pale, angular, acne blooming along my jaw, eyes a blue so sharp they sometimes look fake. I’m not what anyone expects. Maybe not even what I expect.
Mom finds me, inevitably, when I’m hiding in the garage, examining the fossil record of our failed household projects: dead Christmas lights, a broken toaster, some kind of animal skeleton in a paint can.
She leans in the doorway, mug finally empty. “You want to talk?”
I shake my head.
“Not even about the thing last week?”
I don’t answer. She lets it hang.
“I had dreams about you, you know. Before you were born.” She says this like she’s confessing a murder, not for the first time. “You came to me as three different kids. Each a little more… you than the last.”
“Okay,” I say, slow and careful, “that’s not even the weirdest thing you’ve told me.”
She almost smiles. “You were born at three thresholds. Solstice, astrological cusp, and a planetary alignment that only happens every seventeen thousand years. I wrote it all down. It’s probably in a box somewhere.”
I want to ask why this matters, why she’s bringing it up now, but I already know. Because after the thing in the locker, nothing is normal anymore. Because I started saying words I don’t remember learning, and she started seeing me as a stranger in her own kitchen.
I just say, “I’m not special, Mom. I’m just me.”
She hugs me, stiff and brief, then lets me go. “Go enjoy your party. Try not to break the world for one afternoon.”
The world’s already broken, I think. But sure, I’ll try.
~~~
It started with Locker 319.
The school year was two weeks from death, everyone in a state of advanced senioritis even if they weren’t seniors. I was opening my locker, thinking only about how much the rust on the door looked like blood spatters, when I saw it: a symbol drawn on the inside, fresh and angry, pulsing with a light not entirely explainable by science or psychosis.
I stared at it. The lines writhed, geometry folding and unfolding on itself like it was being animated by some hidden hand. Then a voice—not audible, not imagined, but intimate as a secret—said: “Emrys.” Not a sound, but a signature, written directly onto the surface of my thoughts.
I slammed the door closed. I think I stood there for a minute, maybe three. When I opened it again, the symbol was still there, but it was just black Sharpie now, nothing more.
I told Miri, because she was the only one who wouldn’t call the guidance office. She stared at the symbol like it was a long-lost relative, then took a photo, emailed it to herself, and spent the next three days texting me at all hours about “cymatics,” “sacred geometry,” and why the ancients were definitely more fun at parties.
But the dreams started after. The first was a blur: I was falling through a tower of glass and stone, stars crashing past me in reverse, and a name burning my tongue until I woke up biting the inside of my cheek. Every night, some variation, but always the tower, always the voice.
Then, that day in History, the substitute, Mr. Grey.
He walked in with a gait too smooth, hair like spun mercury, and eyes that changed color when the fluorescent lights flickered. He looked over the room and paused on me. Not in the way teachers do, but like he was verifying a long-standing hypothesis.
He started class with a story about the Tower of Babel, but he got it wrong, on purpose, and no one cared except me and maybe Miri, who spent the whole period looking at the sigil photo on her phone instead of listening. But halfway through the lecture, he drew something on the board—a variation of the symbol in my locker, only this one bent at the corners, reversed and amplified.
When he turned around, his eyes were silver. He said my name, but not “Jack.” He said “Emrys.” I blacked out for two seconds, maybe less, but when I came to, I was lying on the floor, everyone gathered around me, staring. Miri helped me up and got me the nurses office. Mr. Grey just nodded, smiled like a job well done.
I sit beneath the old maple tree behind the library—the same one Miri and I claimed earlier that afternoon—and let the last amber threads of October sunlight sift through the leaves and spill across the concrete at my feet. The campus is nearly empty now, the after-school noise drained away, lockers silent, doors shut, the world settling into that strange in-between hour where everything feels suspended. It should feel peaceful.
It doesn’t.
The quiet is too complete, too deliberate, as if someone lowered the volume on reality and forgot to turn it back up. It presses in around me, thick and staged, and I become aware of my own breathing in a way that makes me self-conscious, like I’m interrupting something sacred.
That’s when the sensation begins.
A prickling cold spreads across the back of my neck and shoulders, subtle at first, then sharper, like static sliding across skin before a storm breaks. My muscles tighten instinctively. My breath falters. The air feels different—not heavier, not colder exactly, but altered, as if a frequency just outside hearing has shifted.
I’m not alone.
And it isn’t the normal kind of being watched, the casual paranoia of high school hallways or whispered gossip. This is focused. Intentional. Clinical. The feeling of something studying me the way a scientist studies a specimen.
I don’t hear footsteps. I don’t hear leaves crunch.
But when I lift my eyes, he’s there.
Standing between the trees as if he had always been part of them.
The substitute.
He looks exactly as he did in class—antique charcoal suit, sharply tailored, tie knotted with unnecessary precision, silver hair swept back from a face that is almost too symmetrical to trust. But it’s his eyes that unsettle me most. In the shifting light they refuse to hold a single color, sliding from storm-cloud gray to a slick, reflective black, like oil coating glass. The air around him bends faintly, as if heat is rising from pavement on a summer day, though the temperature has dropped enough that I can see my breath.
“You’re accelerating,” he says, his tone calm and measured, as if we’re discussing test scores or market trends rather than whatever existential fault line has cracked open beneath my life.
My heart slams hard enough that I feel it in my throat, but I force myself to remain seated for one more second before pushing slowly to my feet. My hands curl into fists, not in aggression but to stop them from shaking.
“Who are you?” I manage, surprised that my voice doesn’t betray how unsteady I feel.
He takes a step forward, and something about the motion is subtly wrong—not robotic, not stiff, but too smooth, like someone performing the concept of walking rather than inhabiting it.
“Names,” he says, almost gently, “are insufficient.”
The words hang in the air between us, deliberate and heavy.
“But you knew me once,” he continues. “In another coil of time.”
The phrase sinks into me in a way that logic can’t process but my body reacts to instantly. A low hum vibrates in my chest, faint but unmistakable.
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I say, though even as the words leave my mouth they feel thin.
His mouth curves—not quite a smile, more like an adjustment of expression.
“No,” he replies softly. “You have mistaken yourself for someone smaller.”
He steps closer, and the temperature drops further. The world feels compressed, as though the space between us is shrinking faster than it should.
“I remember what you were, Emrys.”
The name strikes like a tuning fork inside my ribs. Everything inside me reverberates. My ears ring. My vision tightens at the edges, and for a moment I’m aware of something deep beneath my thoughts—something ancient shifting in its sleep.
“I don’t know that name,” I say, but it comes out more like a denial than a statement.
“That,” he says, “is precisely the problem.”
He lifts his hand slowly, palm outward, not in threat but in invocation.
The air between us folds inward.
A circle of blue fire blossoms into existence, intricate and rotating, runes sliding along its circumference in precise geometric arcs. They grind against one another like the teeth of invisible gears. At the center, a spiral opens, not empty but impossibly dense, darker than shadow, as if it absorbs light rather than reflects it.
It’s the symbol.
The one from the locker.
From the whiteboard.
From the edges of my sleep.
The ground beneath my shoes vibrates faintly, and I become aware of my pulse syncing with the slow rotation of the runes.
“I came to end this before it begins,” he says.
“You’re threatening me?” I ask, my throat dry.
“I am offering you mercy.”
“Mercy from what?”
“From yourself.”
Something inside me tightens at that—not fear, not quite anger, but recognition. The kind that arrives without explanation.
“You were the Architect,” he continues, voice steady. “The mapmaker of memory. You fractured the world once. You will fracture it again.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I snap, my composure cracking.
“You will,” he says. “And soon.”
The spiral in the center of the sigil deepens, and for a moment I feel as though it is pulling at something inside me, not physically but conceptually, tugging at a thread I didn’t know I carried.
He isn’t here to understand me.
He’s here to contain me.
The realization settles into my spine like iron.
“You’re afraid,” I say quietly, surprising myself. “You’re not offering mercy. You’re trying to stop me before I remember.”
For the first time, his expression shifts—just barely. A tightening at the jaw. A flicker in the eyes.
The pressure in the air spikes.
The sigil surges brighter.
My heart races, but beneath the fear there is something else rising—something still and rooted and impossibly old. My thoughts narrow into focus. Emotion aligns with intent in a way I don’t consciously orchestrate.
The word comes before I understand it.
It rises from somewhere deeper than language, dragging heat up my throat like molten metal.
I don’t choose it.
It chooses me.
“Is’n’Tol’Kar’el.”
The sound tears through the air.
Light erupts outward—not chaotic flame, not lightning, but something structured and precise. The blue circle shatters mid-rotation, its runes splintering into fragments of brilliance that dissolve like sparks in a gale. Wind roars into the courtyard from no visible source, ripping leaves from branches and spiraling them upward in a violent vortex.
A ring of white-blue heat scorches the ground around my feet.
Pain detonates behind my eyes, blinding and electric, as if every nerve in my body has been plugged directly into the grid of something far larger than myself. I taste copper. My knees threaten to give out.
The substitute staggers backward, his coat whipping violently around him. For a fraction of a second his outline fractures, and I glimpse something tall and angular behind the human form—something that doesn’t belong to bones or flesh.
“You’ve begun,” he says, his voice distorted now, layered as though spoken from multiple distances at once. “The pattern resumes.”
The light collapses inward just as violently as it expanded.
He disappears. No smoke. No dramatic fade.
Simply absence, as if reality corrected an error.
Silence crashes down. The wind dies. Leaves drift slowly back to the ground, settling across the scorched circle at my feet.
My ears ring so loudly I can barely hear my own breath.
For three terrifying seconds, I cannot remember my middle name.
Then it returns in a rush.
I sway, catching myself against the trunk of the maple, my hands shaking uncontrollably now that whatever held them steady has receded.
The sigil burned into the pavement fades from white to gray to nothing, leaving only darkened concrete behind.
Whatever that word was, it wasn’t anger.
It wasn’t instinct. It was alignment. And it cost me.
I lift my eyes to the place where he stood, the quiet no longer staged but hollow, and for the first time since this started, I realize something that sends a different kind of tremor through me.
He didn’t come because I’m weak.
He came because I’m waking up.
The next day, he wasn’t back. When I asked the office, they said there was never a sub assigned to our class.
That night, I dreamed of the tower again, only this time I wasn’t falling—I was climbing, dragging myself hand over hand up a staircase made of glass, each step cutting my palms. At the top was a mirror, and in the mirror was me, only older, eyes like embers, mouth stained black from whatever I’d been eating.
I woke up with a name in my mouth: Emrys. I spat it into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain.
~~~
After the party winds down, Ben and Tyler gone, Cara texting from the curb, Miri helps me carry folding chairs back to the garage.
“So. Sixteen. Do you feel different?” she asks, tossing a chair onto the heap.
I consider lying, but my brain is too tired for it. “I keep waiting for it to matter. Maybe it’s defective.”
“Or maybe it’s the world that’s defective.”
I can’t argue. I’m still thinking about the symbol, the way it burns behind my eyelids when I blink too long.
She puts a hand on my shoulder, steady. “You’re not crazy, Jack. You’re just—remembering.”
The word sticks. Remembering. As if my life is a rerun I’m only now watching for the second time.
I tell her, “Sometimes I feel like I’m not real. Like I’m just a placeholder, until the real thing shows up.”
She squeezes my shoulder, then lets go. “You’re real enough for me. And if you ever want to talk about weird dreams, you know where to find me.”
We stand in the garage, surrounded by the fossil evidence of past mistakes. I want to tell her about how I am feeling, about the way the world feels like it’s rotating on a different axis now, but I don’t have the words. Instead, I fish the house key from my pocket and let it click against my palm, a private semaphore.
She leaves. The house is quiet, except for the low hum of the fridge and the clock in the hallway that’s always five minutes fast. I stand at the window, staring into the backyard, where the candles are melted stubs and the bluebird napkins are scattered like feathers.
I wonder what would happen if I drew the symbol again, on purpose. If I called the name out loud, instead of swallowing it.
I don’t, of course. Not yet.
I watch the darkness settle over the yard, the world holding its breath for whatever comes next.
~~~
The first week of July, the air sticks to itself like an old grudge. Mornings begin with the low, conspiratorial whine of cicadas and end with everything—skin, hair, thoughts—stained by humidity. I count the days by the wilted parade of Amazon boxes on our stoop. Mom’s retail therapy; my only evidence of a world outside this weather.
Today’s package isn’t from Amazon, at least not officially. No smile logo, no tracking sticker, no sign of its origin. Just an anonymous rectangle, brown and utterly unremarkable, except for the absence of fingerprints or dust, as if it was materialized there by some cosmic delivery drone. I poke it with the toe of my Converse, half-expecting it to detonate in a cloud of sentient wasps.
It doesn’t. So I pick it up, its weight more psychological than physical, and carry it inside.
Mom is at work already. She left a sticky note: “Please for the love of god take the chicken out of the freezer. Also don’t burn the house down.” The pen is running out of ink. The subtext is running out of patience.
I put the box on the kitchen table. Look at it. Walk around it. It’s sealed with old-fashioned brown tape, the kind you’d find in a detective’s office or a Cold War dead drop. There’s no return address, no “To Jack” or “Occupant” or even a bad joke in sharpie. Just my name, written in letters that are careful and slightly too perfect.
I consider not opening it, but that feels like a defeat. So I grab a butter knife and slit the tape down the middle. Inside: a book, swaddled in tissue paper and more secrecy.
The cover is glossy and sky blue, titled in raised silver: “Uplifting Humanity: The Path Toward Conscious Evolution.” Author: Ethan Cross, PhD. The blurb on the back promises secrets of consciousness, self-mastery, and the hidden engine of history itself. It’s every cult-adjacent self-help book ever, but with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I check the rest of the box—no note, no threatening letter, not even a bookmark. I flip through the pages. Half of it is diagrams: fractal shapes, energy fields, strange mathematics that makes my skin crawl just to look at. Every so often, a symbol flickers on the page, gone when I blink. I swear I see the sigil from my locker, twice.
I close the book, fast, and run my thumb along the edge of the cover. “Ethan Cross” sounds like a name made up for TV, the kind that’s always one step away from “John Doe.” But the dust jacket has a photo: mid-fifties, hair trimmed like an astronaut, a suit that looks like it was tailored by someone who used to work for the CIA.
I put the book back in the box. My chest is tight, like the air pressure dropped without warning.
I text Miri: “You free? There’s something you need to see.”
~~~
We meet at the playground behind the abandoned Rite Aid, because she likes the view and the swings have the least graffiti. She’s wearing black cutoffs and a tank top that says “Existential Dread is My Cardio.” She clocks the package the moment I sit down.
“Don’t tell me,” she says, “the Illuminati finally sent your membership card.”
I hand her the box. She pulls the book out, holds it up to the light, and gives a low whistle.
“Fancy. This has major cult energy. Did you order it?”
“I don’t even have a debit card.”
“Who’s Ethan Cross?”
I shrug. “Your guess is better than mine.”
She opens to a random page and reads aloud: “‘All consciousness is a resonance field. Once you attune to the right frequency, you can manipulate the fabric of reality itself.’” She grins. “Bet this guy microdosed on the regular.”
I watch the way her hands hover over the diagrams. She’s drawn to the weird the way flies are drawn to lightbulbs. I want to tell her to just take the book, keep it, but I’m not sure that’s allowed.
She looks up, suddenly serious. “Is this about your locker? The symbol?”
I hesitate. “I think it’s all the same thing. Or, I don’t know. It feels like it is.”
She closes the book, cradling it like something alive. “You’re scared.”
“No shit.”
She tilts her head. “You want me to read it for you?”
A part of me does, badly. Another part wants to dig a hole and bury the book and everything else under a metric ton of denial.
I shake my head. “I just want one normal summer. One. No symbols, no weird dreams, no secret societies trying to hack my consciousness.”
She traces her finger along the edge of the cover, then hands it back. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”
“Humor me,” I say. “Just this once.”
She rolls her eyes, but she relents. “Fine. But if you turn into a brainwashed zombie, I get dibs on your vinyl collection.”
“It’s all digital. And you hate my taste in music.”
“All the more reason to torch it.”
The banter feels good, like a muscle I forgot I had. We sit in silence for a while, just swinging, watching the clouds stall out against the sky. The package is tucked under my arm, the book pressing against my ribs like a secret I’m supposed to keep.
Eventually she stands, wipes her hands on her shorts. “You know where to find me when you’re ready to stop pretending.”
I watch her walk away, hair catching the sun for a split second, then gone.
Back home, I shelve the book between a used copy of Slaughterhouse-Five and the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft, as if putting it next to other kinds of madness will somehow dilute its effect. I stare at the spine until my eyes go watery.
For the rest of the summer, I don’t touch it.
But I know it’s there, humming with a frequency only I can hear.