21st Century Merlin

By Bill Combs 

Part 1: The Locker Door to Nowhere

I’ve always suspected that my locker was trying to kill me.

Maybe it’s the way the door screeches like a dying banshee every time I open it. Or the fact that it smells faintly like wet socks and chalk dust, even though I’ve never stored either of those things inside. Or maybe it’s just because of days like today—days when it glows.

Not metaphorically. Not “Jack, you’re being dramatic again.” No.

Actually. Glows.

I stop in my tracks, my backpack sliding off my shoulder in slow motion as I stare into the steel mouth of Locker 319. At first, I think maybe someone stuck a glowstick inside. Or maybe I’m hallucinating. Maybe I finally snapped after too many lukewarm school lunches and standardized tests.

But no. It’s real. And it’s coming from something etched into the back of the locker.

A symbol.

Not graffiti. Not one of those dumb pentagram stickers the theater kids slap on everything. This is different.

The symbol is carved right where my physics notes should be taped—a weird circle-within-a-circle pattern, wrapped in spiraling geometry. There are three lines like claws branching out from the center, and tiny runes etched into the edges that look like they belong on a forgotten Stargate or the cover of a sketchy grimoire.

And it’s pulsing.

Softly. Like a heartbeat made of starlight.

I blink.

It doesn’t go away.

“Cool,” I mutter. “Locker runes. That’s new.”

The hallway is mostly empty—third period started five minutes ago, so everyone else is in class or hiding in the bathroom pretending to have cramps. I glance over my shoulder, half expecting a teacher, a janitor, or maybe a school exorcist to appear.

Nope.

Just me. My cursed locker. And an ancient cosmic scribble that’s definitely not OSHA compliant.

A wave of static rolls through my spine. The air gets... thicker. Like the hallway is holding its breath. The fluorescent lights above me hum too loud, like they’re feeding off something that wasn’t here before. Somewhere far off, I hear the bell ring again—but it sounds off. Slower. Distorted. Like someone hit pause and fast-forward at the same time.

I lean in.

The edges of the symbol start to shimmer.

And then it whispers.

Not out loud.

Inside my head.

“Emrys.”

One word.

It slams into my chest like a pressure wave, folding outward through my ribs, my bones, my brain. I don’t just hear it—I know it. Like the echo of something I forgot I knew. Something I’ve heard before in a dream I wasn’t supposed to remember.

“Emrys.”

I stagger back, knocking into the locker behind me. My heart is hammering. Not fast—loud. Like it’s echoing the rhythm of that symbol.

My hand is still tingling from where I touched the edge of the glyph.

I slam the locker shut so hard it bounces back open again.

The glow vanishes. The rune’s gone.

Just scratched-up metal now, cold and silent and completely ordinary—except for the lingering scent of something burned. Something old.

I open the door again. Slowly. Nothing.

I crouch down to double-check. Feel around the back wall. Just smooth steel. Like whatever I saw—and heard—was never there.

“Right,” I say to no one. “Definitely going insane.”

I grab my bag, throw it over one shoulder, and start walking down the hall with way too much awareness of every flickering light and distant echo. My legs are shaking. My hands feel like I stuck them in an electric socket, and my brain keeps looping the same name like a glitch in the Matrix.

Emrys.

I don’t know what it means.

But I know it means something.

And somewhere deep inside—under the sarcasm, the sleep deprivation, and the general teen-angst cloud I live in—I know that symbol didn’t show up by accident.

Something’s waking up.

And I think it’s me.

Part 2: Miri’s Rule #7: Weird Means You’re Doing Something Right

“I think my locker just tried to initiate me into a secret cult,” I say.

Miri looks up from her sketchbook, chewing the end of her pencil like she’s considering whether or not to call an exorcist.

We’re sitting on the concrete bench behind the school library, under a crooked maple tree that hasn’t figured out it’s supposed to shed its leaves in fall. There’s a low buzz from the HVAC vents above us, mixing with the soft whistle of wind and the occasional distant honk from the staff parking lot.

She squints. “Do I want to know, or is this one of those ‘Jack being dramatic to avoid math homework’ things?”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s what worries me.”

I lean back against the wall, arms folded. “There was a symbol. Inside the door. Glowing. Like—seriously glowing. Pulsing. Like it was alive.”

She raises an eyebrow, fully giving me her attention now. “Alive how?”

“Like it was breathing,” I say, and immediately feel stupid for how that sounds.

Miri doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t smirk. Instead, she flips her sketchbook open and starts thumbing through pages—each filled with messy scrawls, diagrams, doodles, and a surprisingly good rendering of a three-eyed cat in a wizard hat.

She lands on a page covered in overlapping circles and spirals. At the center is a symbol.

My mouth goes dry.

It’s not exactly what I saw, but close enough that my skin prickles. The shape is right. The strange balance of geometry and chaos. The way it feels like it means something.

“You’ve seen this?” I ask.

“I dreamed it,” she says, tapping the page. “Last week. And the week before. Then again last night. It shows up right before I wake up. Always floating in front of something—like a gate, or a mirror.”

“A symbol for what?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know yet. But it’s tied to you.”

I blink. “Wait, how do you know that?”

She gives me a flat look. “Jack. You’ve been weird for months.”

“Define weird.”

“Spontaneously speaking Latin in your sleep.”

“Could’ve been gibberish.”

“Boiling a beaker in chemistry with your eyes.”

“There was a hot plate—”

“There wasn’t,” she says, deadpan. “You’ve started writing in your notebook and forgetting you wrote anything. Half the time, the pages don’t even look like your handwriting.”

“Okay, that’s new.”

She flips to another page. A rough sketch of me, sitting under this very tree, holding a small disc in my hand. It’s not a perfect likeness—my hair’s too tidy—but the vibe? Nailed.

I stare. “When did you draw this?”

“Two days ago.”

“Two—Miri, come on. This is freaky.”

“You think I’m freaked out?” she says, eyes sharp. “Try dreaming a guy you’ve known since fifth grade is actually some reincarnated cosmic librarian from before Atlantis and then waking up with sigils burned into your pillowcase.”

I blink. “That... happened?”

She holds up her phone and shows me a picture. The pillowcase has a faint, charcoal-like stain in the shape of that same spiral pattern.

I stare for a long time.

Miri leans forward, voice low now. “Jack. Something’s happening to you.”

I laugh, but it comes out dry. “You don’t say.”

She watches me, like she’s measuring how far I’ll let this go.

“So what now?” I ask. “I start floating objects? Grow a beard overnight? Join the local Druid circle and start worshiping rocks?”

She smirks. “Too late. I already signed you up. Potluck is on Thursday. Bring hummus.”

I groan, dropping my head into my hands. “I’m losing my mind.”

“No,” she says gently. “You’re waking up.”

That stops me. I glance sideways at her. “Waking up?”

Miri nods slowly. “Look, I don’t know all the rules. But I’ve read enough—ancient texts, channelers, even that old Quanticism blog that got deleted off the net last year. This feels like an activation. Like you’re coming online.”

I stare at her.

“You mean like... a spiritual awakening?”

She hesitates. “Maybe. But different. Like... consciousness remembering itself through you. Like you’re a node that just reconnected to something ancient.”

I snort. “You’re one tarot card away from sounding like my aunt Debra.”

“Your aunt Debra thinks microwaves are spying on her. I think you might be the reincarnation of someone who used to do real magic.”

“Yeah? And who exactly?”

She hesitates again. Her voice is almost a whisper. “Emrys.”

My stomach drops.

The name. The one the sigil whispered.

“You said that like it’s a thing.”

“It is,” she says. “Old name. Welsh, I think. Shows up in a ton of texts. Sometimes it's a prophet. Sometimes a madman. Usually... a wizard.”

“Merlin?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Kind of. Emrys is the name behind the myth. The one the stories forgot.”

I want to laugh again, to brush it off. But I can’t. Not when her dream sketches match the locker sigil. Not when I felt the truth of that name echo in my bones.

“So what?” I ask. “I’m some ancient wizard reborn into a skinny 16-year-old with acne and daddy issues?”

Miri gives me a crooked smile. “Well, maybe not a wizard. More like a... consciousness on a mission. Reincarnated potential. Just stuck in a teenage meat-suit for now.”

“Great. I always wanted to be a cosmic larva.”

She snorts. “You’re the weirdest chosen one ever.”

“Chosen by what, though?”

Miri shrugs. “Maybe you chose yourself.”

That silences us both.

For a moment, the wind dies down. A leaf spins slowly past her shoulder and catches the sunlight just right—turning gold. I watch it fall, feeling like it’s trying to tell me something.

I don’t know if I believe in fate.

But something’s changing. And Miri?

She might be the only person who sees it too.

Part 3: The New Sub

Third period English is usually just another hour of low-grade psychological torture.

Mr. Kaplan, our regular teacher, is obsessed with sentence structure like it’s a holy relic. The man once assigned a five-page essay on comma splices and then deducted points for “tone inconsistencies” when I added a joke about Oxford commas starting wars.

But today, Kaplan is mysteriously absent. A rare event.

And in his place stands a man I’ve never seen before.

Tall. Thin. Hair the color of antique silver, combed neatly back. He's wearing a brown suit—old-fashioned, like something out of a dusty boarding school brochure. His shoes shine like they’ve never touched actual pavement.

But it’s his eyes that stop me cold.

They shimmer.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Like liquid mercury mixed with thunderclouds. Like they shift color depending on what angle you look at him from. Steel. Ash. Faint flashes of violet.

Something about him makes the hairs on my arms stand up. And not in the fun way.

He doesn’t introduce himself.

Doesn’t take attendance.

He just walks to the whiteboard, picks up a dry erase marker, and—without a word—draws the symbol.

My symbol.

My stomach flips.

It’s the same as the one from my locker—but reversed. Inverted. Twisted like a mirror image, the spirals curling the wrong way, the center distorted like someone cracked it and glued it back together with lies.

My heart kicks against my ribs.

Around me, everyone else just... watches. Bored. Staring. Not one person reacts. Not like they should.

The marker squeaks as he finishes the last glyph.

The air in the room changes. I feel it in my teeth—like static right before a lightning strike. I’m suddenly hyper-aware of everything: the tick of the second hand on the wall clock, the rustle of paper in a girl’s backpack two rows over, the deep mechanical hum of the building.

And then—I’m not in the classroom anymore.

Not exactly.

Something shifts in my vision, like a filter sliding out of place. The fluorescent lights above me vanish, replaced by flickering candlelight.

The walls are stone.

There are books—hundreds, maybe thousands—stacked high in wooden shelves that reach beyond the ceiling. The windows stretch impossibly tall, looking out over a sky I can’t describe. It’s night—but not Earth night. Stars shimmer in colors I don’t have names for. Some pulse slowly, like they’re alive. Others move like fish in a slow tide of space.

I’m standing. I’m older.

I feel it in my bones—stronger, heavier, wiser. There’s a weight on my shoulders that I’ve never felt before, not in this life. A kind of gravity that doesn’t come from mass, but from meaning.

There’s a staff in my hand. Gnarled wood. Symbols carved along the grain. Its weight is familiar.

I take a breath. And the world breathes with me.

Behind me, a voice speaks—my voice—but deeper, older, richer: “Not yet. Not again.”

The words ripple across the stone floor. They carry power. Not magic. Something older than magic.

Then—Pain.

My chair screeches against the linoleum. My head spins. A wave of nausea hits me like a truck.

My body snaps back to the present. Lights flicker. I hear someone shout. A distant “Hey—Jack!” but it’s muffled like I’m underwater.

I feel blood. Warmth dripping from my nose.

Then everything tilts sideways. The floor rushes up to meet me.

When I come to, I’m lying on something soft, and someone’s pressing a cold pack to my head.

The school nurse is mumbling something about dehydration.

But I barely hear her. Because I’m still somewhere else.

Not entirely—but enough that I can feel the stone tower pressed into the edge of my memory. The scent of old parchment. The echo of the staff in my palm. The weight of that name hanging in the silence of my chest.

“Emrys.”

It’s not just a name anymore. It’s a reminder.

Part 4 — The Veil Slips

I wake up staring at a ceiling tile that looks like it’s been soaked in existential dread and expired printer toner.

The nurse’s office. That’s where I am.

Someone’s draped a scratchy beige blanket over me, and there’s an ice pack pressed against the side of my head, slowly leaking through whatever paper towel they’ve used as a barrier.

A faint antiseptic smell fills the air—mixed with cheap hand sanitizer and whatever trauma-soaked history lives in old school vinyl cushions.

My brain feels like it’s full of bees.

“Jack?” a voice says softly.

I tilt my head and immediately regret it. The world wobbles like a drunken carousel. But then she comes into view.

Miri. Sitting on a stool beside the cot, arms folded, wearing a familiar look of exasperated concern.

“You look like someone drop-kicked you through a wormhole,” she says.

“Accurate,” I mutter. My voice is hoarse. “Do I still have a face?”

“Most of it. The important parts.”

I sit up slowly. A sharp throb stabs behind my eyes, but I ride it out.

“Everyone else still alive?” I ask.

“Apparently. I checked. Though the girl who sits behind you was crying. Probably thinks you’re cursed.”

“Maybe I am.”

Miri tilts her head. “Do you remember what happened?”

Bits. Flashes. The stone tower. The stars. That staff in my hand. The voice—the voice that was mine but not mine—echoing through my bones like a memory I hadn’t earned yet.

And that name. “Emrys.”

I don’t answer right away.

Miri pulls something from her coat pocket and places it gently in my lap.

A dark, polished stone.

“Obsidian,” she says, like a nurse offering medicine. “Grounding. Helps with energetic fragmentation.”

“You brought me a rock,” I say.

“A psychic rock.”

“Still a rock.”

She just smiles.

I turn it over in my hand. It's warm. Or maybe my skin is just that cold. Either way, it feels... anchored. Like something that doesn’t lie.

“Thanks,” I say.

“So,” she starts carefully, “are we still pretending this is all stress-related? Or are you ready to consider that something real is happening?”

I sigh.

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Well,” she says, “start by telling me everything you remember. Start at the beginning.”

I do.

Not just about the sigil in the locker or the substitute teacher—but the dream-fragments. The flashes of other places, other selves. The staff. The tower. The moment in class when reality folded like a page in a book and I was somewhere else entirely.

I even tell her about the name. Emrys.

She listens without interrupting, nodding occasionally, only scribbling one note in her sketchpad: a star inside a spiral, with lines radiating outward like nerves.

When I finally stop talking, she looks at me like I’ve confirmed something she already knew.

“You’re remembering out of order,” she says.

“What?”

“Reincarnation doesn’t always give you the past like a movie. It leaks through symbols. Emotions. Fragments. Sometimes you don’t remember who you were. Sometimes you just feel the weight of it.”

I frown. “What if I don’t want to be someone else?”

She hesitates. “What if you’re not?”

“...Explain.”

“What if you’re not becoming someone else? What if you’re becoming you, but... more?”

The idea settles on me like dust in the light—too light to grasp, but too heavy to ignore.

“I keep thinking about that word,” I say after a pause. “Emrys.”

Miri’s gaze sharpens. “And?”

“It didn’t feel like a name,” I say. “It felt like... a key. Like it opened something.”

She closes her sketchbook.

“I’ve been reading up on name sigils,” she says. “Some schools believe that your true name isn’t what you’re given—it's what you remember. And when you speak it—or even hear it—it starts to unlock your higher self. Old soul blueprints. Dormant strands of memory. All that.”

“That’s way too poetic for 11 a.m.,” I say.

She grins. “You passed out in English. You missed poetry entirely.”

I try to laugh, but it comes out as a cough.

There’s a long moment of silence. Not awkward. More like... shared reverence for the fact that something has cracked open between us.

Between me and the world.

Between me and... me.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I whisper.

“You don’t have to,” Miri says. “Not yet.”

She reaches out and gently places her hand over mine, the obsidian still between us.

“But whatever it is,” she says softly, “you’re not doing it alone.”

Part 5 — The Watcher Returns

It’s just past sunset when I leave the nurse’s office, the rest of the school already bleeding into shadows and leftover announcements echoing faintly from inside.

I should go home.

But something tells me to wait.

I sit under the maple tree behind the library—the same place Miri and I talked earlier—and let the last of the October sun filter through the leaves. It’s quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that feels staged. Like the world is holding its breath.

Then I feel it.

That prickling sensation, like cold static crawling across my shoulders. My skin tightens. My breath catches.

I’m being watched.

And not in the “jealous sophomore spying from a hallway window” way.

In the “dimensional predator studying your soul print” way.

He steps into view from behind the trees.

The substitute.

Same antique suit. Same silver hair. Same shifting eyes—clouded metal one second, black glass the next. The air around him warps slightly, like he’s wrapped in a veil of heat waves.

“You’re accelerating,” he says, his voice calm. Measured. Like he’s talking about a stock report, not my existential breakdown.

“Who are you?” I ask. My voice is steady. I don’t feel steady.

“Names are... insufficient,” he replies. “But you would have known me once. In another coil of time.”

He steps closer. Not threatening. Not quite. But there’s something off about the way he moves—too smooth. Like his body is mimicking human motion without fully understanding how it works.

“I remember what you were, Emrys.”

That name again.

It hits harder this time. Like the syllables are hammers, striking chords in my chest that still haven’t fully healed.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I say, backing up a step.

His smile is almost gentle. “No. You’ve mistaken yourself for someone less.”

I try to think. Try to piece together something Miri said. About names being keys. About old soul patterns.

But he’s still walking.

“You were the Architect,” he continues, “of a great movement. The last teacher of the First Era. You were the mapmaker of memory.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I snap.

“No,” he says. “But you will. And soon.”

He stops a few feet away.

His presence is wrong. It doesn’t feel like a person. It feels like a shadow that forgot how to be attached to anything.

He raises one hand. Palm outward.

A circle of blue fire spins into the air between us—the same symbol from the locker and the whiteboard, now fully formed and pulsing with light. The runes around the edges churn like gears. In the center, a spiral opens, revealing something like a black sun.

“I came to end this before it begins,” he says.

“You’re threatening me?”

“I’m giving you an exit.”

“From what?”

“From yourself.”

That does it.

I take a step forward, fists clenched. My pulse is racing, my legs screaming at me to run—but something else inside me stands still. Ancient. Rooted.

“No,” I say. “No more riddles. No more games. You don’t get to walk into my life, warp reality, and act like I’m some kind of broken USB drive full of magical data.”

“You don’t understand what’s at stake.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But I’m starting to understand who I am. And you’re not here to help. You’re here because you’re afraid of me.”

That breaks his mask. Just a flicker—a tension in the jaw, a twitch of the eye.

He knows I’m right.

And in that moment, something shifts inside me.

A word rises to my tongue. Not English. Not anything I’ve heard in this life. But it burns, electric and molten, clawing its way up from my gut.

I don’t even know how I say it—only that it comes out like thunder cracking a mirror.

“Is’n’Tol’Kar’el”

The symbol between us explodes in light.

The ground beneath us scorches with a glowing ring. Wind screams in from nowhere, ripping through the leaves and throwing his coat into spirals.

The substitute stumbles backward, face contorted—not in fear, but in recognition.

“You’ve begun,” he says, voice distorted like it’s coming through layers of time.

And then he vanishes.

No smoke. No teleport animation. Just gone—like a file deleted from reality.

Silence rushes back like a wave sucked from the shore.

The leaves settle.

The streetlights flicker back on.

And I’m standing alone on a scorched patch of concrete, the sigil burned into the ground beneath my feet, fading with every second until it’s just shadow again.

I stand there for a long time, until my legs remember how to move. When I finally step away, I feel something in my jacket pocket. A small, circular object. Smooth. Cold.

I pull it out.

It’s a coin-sized disc—etched with the sigil. Not drawn. Stamped into metal that hums softly when I touch it.

I don’t remember picking it up.

But it feels like it remembers me.

Part 6: The First Truth

That night, my room feels smaller than usual.

Maybe it’s me.

Maybe I’ve gotten... bigger, somehow. Not physically. Not even mentally. Just... wider. Like part of me no longer fits in the usual lines of my life.

The lights are off. The curtains drawn. I sit cross-legged on my bed, holding the object I found in my coat pocket after the confrontation.

The disc.

Smooth metal. Cold. Etched with that now-familiar sigil—my sigil.

It looks ancient, like it was forged in a forge that forgot how to age.

It hums when I hold it. Not audibly. Just... inside. In that same place where the name “Emrys” rang like a bell earlier.

I turn it over and over between my fingers. This isn’t a prank.

It’s not a dream. Something is happening to me. Or maybe through me.

And that might be the most terrifying part.

My phone buzzes.

MIRI:You alive?

I smile a little. Type back.

JACK:Define alive.

She responds instantly.

MIRI:Still sarcastic = not possessed. Probably fine.

MIRI:Come outside. I brought the weird tea.

She’s waiting for me on the curb, dressed in a black hoodie, pajama pants with little crescent moons on them, and a thermos that smells like ginger, licorice, and something vaguely medicinal.

We sit side by side in silence for a while. The street is empty. Just the glow of the lamppost buzzing above us and the flickering pulse of distant porch lights.

After a few minutes, she says, “You look... different.”

“Do I?”

“Not your face. Your field.”

“My what?”

She taps the space just in front of my chest. “Energy. Vibe. Aura. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Cool. So I’m giving off wizard static now?”

She nods, completely serious. “Like metaphysical puberty.”

I groan. “I don’t need another puberty, thanks.”

She sips her tea. “Too late. You’ve cracked open.”

I stare at the disc in my hand.

“It felt like I said something real,” I murmur. “Back there. The word I yelled. Is’n’Tol’Kar’el.”

“Do you know what it means?” she asked.

“No. But I meant it.”

She nods, thoughtful. “Some words don’t need translation. Just recognition.”

There’s a long pause.

Then I ask the question I’ve been avoiding all day.

“Miri... what if I’m not ready for any of this?”

She takes a long breath. “Then the universe probably has really bad timing.”

She glances sideways at me. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong for it.”

I think about the dream again.

The tower. The stars.

The voice that was mine. Not just from another time, but another depth.

“You will forget. But you will return.”

“You were born not to cast spells... but to wake them up.”

I don’t know what that means yet.

But I know it’s true.

I press the disc to my palm. It warms slightly, like it's responding.

“I’m scared,” I admit.

“Good,” Miri says, with a small smile. “That means you’re not a villain.”

We sit a little longer.

A leaf falls between us, landing in the empty space on the sidewalk. It twitches once, then settles.

She leans her shoulder against mine.

“You don’t have to figure it all out tonight,” she says.

“I don’t?”

“Nope. Just... don’t stop asking the real questions.”

“What if I don’t know what the real questions are yet?”

She shrugs. “Then start with this one: ‘What if I’m more than they told me?’”

I look at the stars. They're the same stars from the dream. I feel it. Like I’m staring at old friends through a dusty window.

“I think,” I say slowly, “something inside me is remembering. Like there’s a story underneath this one... and I’m only just starting to read it.”

Miri nods.

“You’ve turned the first page.”

If Jack's story interests you, let me know. I would love some feedback!