Merlin's Gift

A 15-part Modern Mythos story

By Devin McTaggart

Prologue - Heroes

February 14 ^th, 2021

"That doesn't make any sense, Gill," I said into the Zoom call, frustration plain in my voice, even though I knew it wasn't going to do any good. I'd known that it was odd when Gill told me we needed to have an emergency call on a Sunday night. "We were specifically promised that we were being brought on to get the India team to function as supplements, and not replacements. Remember that? Remember that promise? That no matter how useful the new team became, the old team didn't have to worry about losing their jobs. They promised us that, Gill. And now--"

"And now I'm telling you they lied to you, Ben," my former supervisor Gill said to me from his living room across the Bay. Gill was in his early fifties and lived over in Sunnyvale, across the Bay from my Fremont house. Like pretty much everyone else, he'd been locked in his house for about a year now. Just like me. "They lied to you and to me and to everyone else. And here we are, with me laying you off, knowing my own layoffs are probably coming in the next week or two. It sucks, man. Believe me, I know it sucks. I fucking hate it. Most of all, I fuckin hate that they can lie to us and there aren't any consequences, but you know as well as I do, Ben, they can, they will, they do, and they have. And they aren't gonna get punished for it."

"So, it's not just me getting laid off? It's the whole team?"

"Yep, although I've been guaranteed another month's worth of salary, to wrap everything up, and to get it all handed off cleanly to the team in Mumbai."

I sighed, rubbing my eyes. I was approaching fifty, and the idea of having to put together a resume and go shopping for a new gig wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing at this point in my life. I was an interface engineer, specifically focusing on maintaining and upgrading semi-outdated hardware/software interchanges, and it wasn't exactly a high demand field.

In plain English, that meant I was one of the people responsible for making sure the old computers that were still reliably doing their job weren't just being decommissioned because someone wanted something newer and shinier. In a lot of cases, the hardware we were maintaining was nearly twenty years old, and sure it could've been replaced with something newer, faster and cheaper, but all of the data those ancient machines had gathered would need to be converted into modern formats and retrofitted into the new machines if the client upgraded. Generally, companies decided it was cheaper just to maintain a small legacy team instead of transferring all the data to new machines and new structures every few years.

I once described it to an ex-girlfriend as like we were a bunch of technicians keeping the last remaining VCRs working, so the client didn't have to convert everything up to Blu-Ray, although that analogy's a bit dated now as well, I suspect. Do people still remember physical media?

"What's the severance package like?" I asked with deep resignation.

Over the next half an hour, Gill walked me through the terms of my termination, and parts of the package were good - health insurance would continue until the end of the year - but other parts, like the fact that I was only getting six weeks of salary in severance, weren't so good. They did have to pay out my accrued Paid Time Off, though, which was another month's worth of salary. And, of course, I could sign up for unemployment. I'd paid into it for long enough that I wasn't going to be in danger immediately, but it sucked, you know?

It was, overall, a shitty way to cap off a year spent in captivity, trapped alone, inside of my own house, a house that I was rapidly in danger of not being able to afford.

Top it all off, it was fucking Valentine's Day.

Ever since Covid had locked us all in, I'd been doing my best not to go out of my goddamn mind. I lived alone, and had a two story house to myself (well, me and the two cats, Lee and Kirby) and since the lockdown had been instituted almost a year ago, it had been a lot of time spent on Discord, on Zoom, talking across public parks, playing World of Warcraft, playing boardgames through Tabletop Simulator and generally watching enough TV that my eyeballs were just shy of bleeding.

Me and my usual boardgame group were scheduled to play Terraforming Mars that night via Steam, but I hopped into the Discord and told the guys that I'd just been laid off, and that I wasn't really in the mood to sit around and talk to folks tonight, so I was going to bail.

I'd been with McKittrick for nearly ten years, and I didn't really even remember how to look for a job. Add in the fact that I'd mostly been in isolation for about a year, with the quarantine having started early March, and I have to admit, I wasn't at my best. I'd been without a relationship for about ten years at that point, so yeah, the house felt empty. A couple of my friends had come by during the year, hung out at a distance, and it had been like being with friends, but the distance felt super odd.

So, I did what most people do the night they get laid off - I got shitfaced.

The only problem was I was doing it at home, alone. That meant I wasn't going to be driving anywhere, but it also meant that I didn't have anyone to cut me off, and I could drink until I'd drunk far too much. And then I also didn't have anyone to look after me while I was puking my guts out into the toilet a few hours later.

It was a little past 1 a.m. when I decided I needed to clear my head. Nobody was going to be out and about anyway, so I grabbed my leather jacket, my water bottle, and my headphones, and headed out to walk into Mission Peak Regional Preserve.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn't have been going into the preserve in the middle of the night. Their website said in sharp bold letters that 'hours are strictly enforced,' and that I could be subject to citation and/or arrest, and that citations cost a minimum of $300. Now, being that the park had officially been closed since the start of Covid, and that I'd done this sort of thing several dozen times since then without being caught, I wasn't too worried about it. It wasn't like I was going to be going that deep into the park where I could get lost or trapped on a mountainside. There was a section called the Mission Peak Paragliding and Hang-Gliding Zone, which was mostly just a handful of open fields on curved hills that overlooked the Bay. It was also an area that attracted a lot of amateur drone pilots when they were just getting started, because it had a lot of open space and very little to hit.

I liked going up there to think when I was having an especially rough day and the one time a park ranger had come across me, he'd just politely asked me to leave. It wasn't like I was trying to climb Mission Peak in the dead of night. Nobody's that stupid, at least, I think they aren't.

Mostly, I just want you to understand what sort of headspace I was in at that moment. Drunk. Lonely. Frustrated. Isolated. Despondent, sure, but not suicidal.

I tell you all that because when I saw a meteorite headed straight for me, I was basically frozen in place, out of shock, not out of any intention of doing something stupid. The speed it came hurtling at me, I wouldn't have had much time to do anything anyway. One moment, I was peering up at the dark starry night sky and the next moment, there was a fiery cannonball rushing almost straight towards me.

Almost.

The massive fireball felt bigger than it was when it came crashing into the grassy field area, kicking up dirt in a small crater. I almost wondered for half a second if I was about to find a small space capsule with a tiny infant from a planet far, far away in it.

What I found was actually much, much weirder.

In the center of the crater was an older man, dressed in a crimson suit nearly in tatters. I was surprised the framework of the fabric had held together, but through some miracle, there was enough of it to be recognizable as the remnants of a very fine, tailored suit. Through all the holes and rips in the suit, I could see tan skin almost completely covered in endless tattoos, deeply faded black ink, intricate and ornate patterns and shapes, a few like some kind of language I couldn't recognize. Everywhere except his right shoulder, which was completely devoid of ink, although I thought I could see flecks of ink streaking parts of the shredded suit. That exposed flesh was even a lighter tan, like it had been newly regenerated, or, as I'd think later, newly exposed. That would make sense to me later, but not then.

I was starting to take a better look at the guy when I noticed that the bottom of his suit pants had caught on fire. Some spark had spit flame onto the fabric, and I grabbed my water bottle, unscrewing the top to pour out the contents onto his pant leg, but it didn't seem to do enough to quell the growing fire so I pulled off my leather jacket and started using it as a fire blanket, kicking dirt on top of his feet to eventually get the fire shut down.

Once the guy was extinguished, I took a bit longer of a look at him. He looked to be in his sixties, with salt and pepper hair thinning on top pulled back into a long heavy braided tail that ran down his back and miraculously hadn't burned. He had a thick, bushy beard that reached down to his sternum, braided near the bottom as well, with a silver dragon figurine wrapped around the bottom to keep the braid in place. What parts of his skin weren't covered in tattoos were a deep shade of tan, giving a sort of Middle Eastern look. And despite his age being well into his fifties or sixties, he was ripped for his age, just the kind of musculature that would make younger men whimper in fear.

This, needless to say, was not what I expected Superman to look like.

And this certainly wasn't Kansas.

I started to pull the guy from the crater he'd made when I heard a whistling sound in the air above and behind me, and looked back to see a dozen more streaks of fiery red hurtling towards us. I grabbed the guy's ankles and gave him a sharp, hard tug and pulled him out of the crater. I got him maybe four or five feet away from the crater, just a bit down the hill, before I panicked and dropped to the earth, covering the guy's body up with my own as the area around us was peppered with hot shards of searing metal, embedding themselves into the ground, one large one the size of a man's thigh, finishing right where the man's body would have been if I hadn't moved him from the crater. I kid you not, it would've gone right through his unconscious body and killed him on the spot. I thought it would've, anyway. I still wasn't entirely sure how he'd lived through the whole 'flying like a meteorite' thing, or the 'cratering hole in the earth' bit, but one crisis at a time, I decided.

It seemed like the wave of shrapnel was the only thing that was going to come raining down, with no signs there was a second wave incoming. I took another moment to check the guy for injuries or wounds, because he hadn't stirred to consciousness in all the commotion. His fingers were covered in rings, and he had a dozen or so necklaces hanging around his neck. He also had about as many earrings in each ear. He looked vaguely Persian, although there was also some definite Western European in his heritage as well. He also had the most heavily calloused hands I'd ever seen in my entire life, as if he was always working with them.

I wanted to pull the guy down the hill and get him to my house, but I'm not in great shape, and even though the guy looked like he could weigh more than a buck fifty, that was more than I could easily handle hauling six or seven blocks.

I considered calling an ambulance, but even with the evidence right in front of us, were they really going to believe the guy just fell from the sky, or would they think it was some kind of hoax? Beyond that, the guy didn't seem to be injured. Like, at all.

In the end, I did the only thing I could think of to do - I sat down next to him, and I waited for him to eventually wake up.

I'm not entirely sure how long it was I waited. I don't think it could've been much more than five or ten minutes, but that much time fretting over an unconscious body can feel like an eternity, especially when you're still semi-drunk.

After however long it was I kept watch, the man suddenly sat bolt upright, gasping in a deep breath of air as he glanced around frantically, latching onto me, grabbing my shoulders. His eyes, now open, were swirls of fire and ice, a deeply unnatural glow to them before they faded into a swirling mix of gold and silver. "You! Where the hell am I?"

"Fremont?" I told him.

He narrowed his dark eyes at me and considered his next word carefully. "California?" He glanced up at the sky in confusion then turned to look at the field around him, seeing the crater he'd landed in earlier, gasping as his gaze fixated on the giant shard of metal in the center of it, impaled through the imprint of his body's chest that had been left in the dirt. Then he looked down to his own shoulder, touching the bare skin, the only patch without a tattoo on it. "Bollocks. Bollocks, damnation, hellfire and one more round of extra fucking bollocks, just for fucking good measure," he grumbled, before looking back at me. "You. You pulled me out of the crater?"

"I saw streaks of fire shooting towards our location, so I pulled you as far as I could from the crater and then laid over you to make sure nothing hit you, since I couldn't get you far enough from the crash zone," I said to him, offering him my hand. "I'm Ben Bauer."

He looked at my hand for a second then shook it. "Merlin."

I tilted my head a little bit. I was drunk, but not that drunk, surely. "As in the Merlin? King Arthur? All th--"

"Yes yes, all that bloody nonsense from thousands of years ago, which has evolved into something far beyond what I'd ever intended it to be," Merlin sighed as he moved to examine the crater, seeing how deeply wedged the shard of metal was in the earth. "You actually did save my life. Just some random yokel out for a midnight stroll."

"There's more to it than th--"

"Hush up, lad," Merlin said with a wave of his hand and I felt myself grew silent, even though I hadn't intended to stop talking. "You'll only be doing yourself a disservice. Let me have a look and see how deep in your debt I am."

Before I could respond, he reached up and touched two fingers to my temple, and the most recent day of my life began flying through my memories, like a replay on incredibly fast speed, although it seemed like Merlin could follow everything that was happening, tutting a little when it got to the point of me being laid off, before skimming through my drinking, on to my walking, and then his doing his best Kal-El impersonation while I watched and tried not to get killed. But the moment when I was pulling his body out of the crater and the massive shard of searing molten metal impaled where he'd been, it was almost as if the memory slowed down to a crawl, everything taking much longer than it actually did when it happened, as Merlin examined the moment in my head.

"Hellfire," Merlin grumbled. "Bollocks, bastard, blasted buggery!" His fingertips pulled from my skull for a second as he shook his head in intense frustration with himself, his hand grasping his forehead. "You've only gone and saved my bloody life, you have. Can't fucking believe this horseshit. Well, the precedent's been set, and never let it be said I wouldn't pay my debts when clearly my erstwhile companion pays hers. At least I have her template to use, although gods know, she'll probably mess around with mine the way I toyed with hers." He smirked a bit, as if that idea amused him, before he carried on talking. "But I can at least establish enough proofing levels so that she can't exactly go and muck around with it all willy nilly. Now, let's see what you're looking for in terms of missing fulfillment in your life, you lucky and wonderful bastard."

I was still speechless as his hand touched my temple again, and my life ran through his head from start to present, slowing down briefly to consider things like my first love, my first job and buying my first home. Nearly fifty years of life, flying by in an instant, leaving me both somewhat proud and a little sad, as my accomplishments felt much smaller than my failures. Too many missteps along the way, too many times I didn't gamble when I should've or gambled when I shouldn't have. I'd like to say it was bad luck, but it's also possible it was full of bad judgment, things I didn't know what to do with at the time, or even now.

Overall, I'd lived a mess, but it was mine, I guess.

He paused and did a second pass, focusing on the six major relationships I'd been in, from my high school sweetheart to my ex-wife, whom I'd divorced about a dozen years' prior. Since then, maybe that lack of trust in women had held me back. I'd done some dating, sure, but I'd also been cheated on, and that sort of dagger in the back leaves some deeply festering scars. So, while I'd sort of half-heartedly tried to get back onto the dating scene, the wounds kept me from being too enthusiastic about it, and for the last ten years, I'd been without a significant other.

That wasn't what seemed to annoy him the most though. What frustrated Merlin most as he reviewed my love life was a lack of a pattern - I definitively didn't have 'a type.' There were common elements across all the women, things that were true across all my partners, but none of them were physical characteristics - they were personality traits. I'd been involved with people of all shades, shapes and sizes.

"Magics below, Benjamin Odysseus Bauer; you truly are going to be a challenge to tend to, a problem I'm going to need to cook up some serious spellcraft for, in order to make sure the gift you are given is worthy of the act of selfless sacrifice you were willing to undertake to save my life," he said, lowering his hands to his sides once more. "We'll have to make you a zen hotdog - one with everything."

"What does--"

"Still, anything she can do," Merlin said, almost talking to himself more than he was me, gesturing in the air, maybe writing notes to himself or trying to commit something to memory, "I'm certain I can do better, faster and more entertainingly."

"Who are--"

"Never you mind, Mister Bauer. She took six months before her gift began. I'll have mine ready in six weeks," he said. He glanced down at his shredded suit with a frown and snapped his fingers with a loud pop, as a golden disc of light wrapped around his neck and slowly moved down his body, repairing the suit as it went, the shreds of fabric weaving themselves back into exquisite tailoring, almost as if the outfit had never been damaged in the first place. I could even see the little black filigree woven into it before the gold ring disappeared, leaving him in a dapper state once more. He placed a hand upon my shoulder and grinned at me, toothy and wild, giving me a little wink. "Don't worry, it'll all work out in the best possible way for you. In the very end, anyway. There may be a few bumps and stumbles along the way, but as I've always said, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few chickens."

"Don't you mean 'eggs?'" I asked him cautiously.

"Eggs, chickens, not much of a difference in the long run, really," he said, bending down to poke at the crater, as if he was making sure he hadn't dropped anything there when he was unconscious.

"Tell that to the chickens you broke along the way," I mumbled, but apparently it was loud enough for him to hear, because he laughed.

"You're funny, Ben. That's good, that's clever," Merlin said with a smile, seemingly having the measure of who I was as a person now and found it someone he could work with. "Hold onto that. Having your sense of humor about you will make all of this much easier to take. Now, I saw in your mind that you live just a few blocks away from here, yes?"

"Yeah, down on Vineyard Avenue, in the smallest house on the street."

"The one thing I ask of you is that you don't move out from that house over the next six weeks," Merlin said to me. "I know you're worried about having money on hand now that you've been laid off, but I'll have groceries delivered to your doorstep once a week for the next six weeks, and in about six weeks' time, give or take, I'll have your gift ready for you. The start of it, anyway. My way of saying thank you for saving my life in my moment of stupidity."

"Can... can I ask what happened? To, uh, cause you to go all shooting star and whatnot?"

Merlin's grin turned a bit dark but refused to leave his face. "I was working on a project out at sea, simply I was working with some very volatile magics. Not the sort of thing I work with all the time, but raw, primal stuff. Anyway, it backfired on me in truly spectacular fashion, and the explosion hurtled me several hundred miles to the east, to here," he said, gesturing around him. "I had a protective spell in place to make sure I survived the accident, but it dissolved after it did its job on impact, keeping me alive. It wouldn't have stopped the shrapnel from the boat from killing me a few moments later, if you hadn't stepped in to save my life."

"Holy shit. Really?"

"I really shouldn't leave the park a mess like this," he said, as his right hand raised and started swaying through the air, and the entire field began to repair itself, the pieces of shrapnel uprooting themselves from the ground and plopping into the dirt, as the earth beneath them folded back into its original state. Within mere moments, other than the cooled scraps of metal strewn around the field, there was no sign there had even been a crash. Then the bits of metal slowly started floating up a few feet off the ground, and began popping out of existence, one at a time, a soft whooshing of air to fill the space where they once were. And then, maybe a minute or so after he started, Merlin and I stood in that field with no evidence of any disturbance left behind.

I was starting to wonder if all this was just me hitting my head on something stumbling around in the dark, but Merlin snapped his fingers again, and a small yellow ball of glowing light floated next to us, providing us with better illumination.

"You're going to have loads of questions, I know, but this is a complicated spell we're talking about, and it's going to take some serious time for me to get it right," he said to me, his right hand on my shoulder, like he was confiding in me, his left resting against my hip. "Not the six months it took Morgana to set things right with that fellow in L.A., but still, time enough. Like I said, six weeks, give or take a few days, then you'll get answers to any of your questions that I feel like answering, and you'll be on the path towards claiming the entirety of your reward, my gift, my way of saying thanks for making sure an errant accident didn't provide an indignant end for old Merlin."

"I think anyone would've done what I did," I said to him, which made him laugh even harder.

"Most people, Ben, they see fire, chaos, carnage, and their first instinct is to run away from it. You saw a man fall from the sky and keep breathing, and your first instinct wasn't 'kill it with fire before it destroys us all,' it was 'better make sure that person's okay.' You don't seem to realize quite how rare that is. It's incredibly uncommon for me to be injured to the degree that I'm vulnerable, but it happened here, and the shrapnel afterwards? It would've been the perfect storm of things to kill me, if you hadn't come along and thought to yourself, 'that man needs help.' It's something truly megalithic, what you did, and needs to be rewarded in a fashion according to how monumental the deed was. So, in honor of you saving my life, I'm going to help you salvage yours. Don't worry; you'll be extremely happy when all is said and done. It may feel rather chaotic when it's all unfolding, but it's the end results we care about, not the process, yes yes?"

"Uh, sure?"

"That's the spirit, lad! You're about to have the adventure of a lifetime! You just don't know it yet! Anyway, got to be going. Need to jet back out onto the Pacific and make sure I didn't accidentally leave an open rift in time and space to an eldritch dimension on and running like some interdimensional oven from Hell. I know, it's just the worst, am I right? Demons. Can't take them anywhere. Anyway, six weeks! Give or take! Keep your calendar relatively clear, although I guess nobody's really leaving their house much these days anyway, yeah? Cheers!"

He began rolling his fingers, as technicolor streaks of prismatic flame swirled around them, forming a vortex that coalesced on his hand, a giant whirlpool of color and chaos before he tossed it up in the air and the area around him blossomed into psychedelic showers of sparks and jets which streaked around the area and then disappeared almost as quickly as they'd arrived, leaving me back in the darkness of the park's open area, lit up only by the moonlight and my own confusion.

I remember during the walk home wondering if maybe I'd just imagined the whole thing, but when I got home, I took everything out of my pockets and found there was something new in one of them. When he'd put his hand on my shoulder, the old wizard had apparently put a ring into my jeans pocket without me noticing. It was a simple golden band with some faded words engraved into it, but nothing I could recognize.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I was sober, and I'd done almost an hour's worth of research, when I found it was Scottish Gaelic, and the words, loosely, meant 'A promise to be repaid.'

Two days later, a massive number of groceries were delivered to my house.

All paid for.

I went to the paper calendar that I had hanging on the wall and circled March 28^th on it.

That would be six weeks.

What the hell was going to happen then?