(Un)Charmed

It wasn’t until I splashed through the watery doorway into Merlin’s abode that I came to my damn senses...

I had been placed under a magickal compulsion called a Charm by Zulu that pretty much prevented me from overtly resisting any suggestion he made to me. Damn, but that man is powerful. I should have known not to trust a fucking politician, but really, I had no chance.

As mentioned in the last couple of posts, I was pretty much out it after I tried to take a stupid shortcut in the conflict with the splinter of Ma Grendel’s spirit that had stuck around for the ride. So I really didn’t have a chance to resist any Charm that Zulu wanted to implant in me, but boy did it chap my ass when I splashed through to the other side.

I was all wet in more than just the literal sense.

It all became crystal clear as soon as I landed on the floor of the cavern, catching my balance on one knee and two hands again. His words had all seemed so reasonable at the time, but then again, the Charm wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t used his words as skillfully as he did his magick!


Once I stopped my momemtum and realized that I just walked through a portal into an unknown location at the request of some asshole I’d only met once before and didn’t even half trust to begin with, I was more than a little pissed.

I got up quickly and looked back at the way I had come in. It was a shimmering, sheer wall that reflected the dim light in the cavern that I now found myself in rather well. I tried to put hand back through the ‘mirror’ the same way I had come in, and found it stopped by the solid, wet rock behind the cascading water. The portal had closed.

A few salty cuss words later, I tried to calm myself down and remember what it was that I felt as I had passed through the mirrors before, hoping that perhaps I could use the same method myself to get back to where I belonged.

Nothing. Shit.

But by focussing on the magick I had felt while travelling, I felt the now tattered bindings of the Charm that Zulu (or whoever the Hell he was) had used to keep me calm and to do his bidding. A flash of anger though, and those last tendrils of his influence were burned away.

“You bastard, you better hope I’m in a good mood the next time we meet!” I shouted at the gurgling wall before stepping back and surveying the rest of the place.

I found myself standing in a rather impressive cavern that reminded me more than a little of some of the more spectacular caverns in Mammoth Caves, in Kentucky. Dozens of sparkling stalactites hung from the roof of the cave while the floor was a veritable maze of smaller chambers created by tall stalacmites that stood in various patterns. The sounds of dripping and flowing water were abundant, from the drip drop of waterdrops falling from individual stalactites to the gurgling flow of sheets of water covering more than one wall. At my feet, at the base of the wall through which I had entered was a small pool of crystal clear water. A small outlet brook left that pool, flowing downhill along the base of the wall and disappearing through a small crevasse not ten feet away from where I stood.

From where I stood, I could see that the cavern was easily a hundred feet wide, another 50-60’ deep and at least 50’ high in the center of the room.

Cursing again, I began to make my way around some of the stalacmites to see about finding this ‘Merlin’, if he even existed.

The light that was in the cave seemed to be coming from somewhere on the far wall, so I started that way first.

After a few moments of picking my way around while trying not to damage any of the formations (don’t ask me why, it just seemed i should be careful), I came to the light source, it was a single glowing orb of light. I had seen Ravyn create similar orbs out of elemental fire while we were underground in New York, but this was more like an orb of pure light. It hung in the air near that far wall without any visible supports and without flickering or moving, about 9’ up. It looked to be about a foot in diameter.

Just below the orb, I could see that there was another water smooth surface that resembled the way I had entered this place. Hoping against hope, I reached out this ‘mirror’ but was again met with solid rock.

Looking around in the more illuminated part of the cavern, I noticed that there weren’t any exits from this place, except for the various small crevasses where the pools of water drained.

I was trapped.

I was alone.

I was pissed!

Fucking politician!

Dumb assed zombie.

Sigh...