Read Online The Demon's Revenge (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 4) by Katherine Sparrow - Free Book Online

After I had run away from the murderous rage the Holy Grail’s water had put me in. After I had left him for eleven hundred years.
    “It was my darkest time, and I was lost and looking for any meaning in the world. I was not sure I had any business still being alive at all.”
    Ah. So that’s what this was. Some last hour parable about redemption meant to pull me away from my final decision. As though I was some impressionable girl who did not know my own mind. Today was a death day. Nothing would change that. I stood and walked to the window. I stared out at the clouds turning pink and blue as the sun set for one last time in the west and I listened to Merlin’s words.
    I vowed not to let any of them in and change me.

 
     
     
     
     
    11
    The Realm of Shadows
    “It was a dark time for me, but also a dark time in the world, full of short and brutal lives.” He paused and shook his head. “Of course, it is still those times, all across the world. I dabbled here and there and every place in all kinds of magical realms that are best left unexplored. I searched for oblivion of one sort or another. Some escape from my own misery. Some quest for my existential center. I looked in all the easy and worst places, and when one goes looking for darkness, it is ever easy to find and willing to swallow you whole. There were long months lost to spelled drugs that once taken sought to transform me into someone else. They all worked, on a superficial level, but deep down I was always and still me. I took part in rituals to banish any of the gentler emotions within me, and they worked too. For a while I was evil, yet it bored me and once again I felt the echoes of my true self, calling me back. So if I could not change myself, then I decided to leave the world.”
    I nodded at him. I understood that. Not his chaotic quest, but the desire to leave.
    “You decided to die?” Adam said quietly.
    Merlin shook his head. “No. For even in my deepest despair, a curiosity and a desire to see what came next never left me. But I did decide to leave this realm behind and travel to a different reality. A different realm, or multiverse, as modern parlance might say. Perhaps that would be far enough to out run my…” he paused and glanced at me, “troubles.”
    Adam leaned forward. “No way? The multiverse is real? My Physics prof talked about the many worlds theory and the multiverse, but it’s just a theory. You’ve traveled into it with magic?”
    I found myself just as interested as Adam, despite myself. I knew little about the realms, except that when portals opened between them, what came through was rarely good. The knowledge of realms was one of the few magical things I knew almost nothing about.
    Merlin nodded. “It is not easy, moving between realms, and not done without a great cost of power. There are many strange lands, some of them so similar to this one with only a few minor variations that there is a great temptation there. To do things over. To make things right. Except, of course, in those similar places there would always be another Merlin. So I traveled widely, but stayed away from those places where I might find….” He sighed and shook his head.
    Where he might have found a slightly different Morgan who would not leave him without telling him why. I sighed too, and felt the pull of that halcyon thought: of going somewhere and getting to do it all over, even though I knew there was no such thing, not truly. “You saw the Hell door,” I reminded him.
    “Yeah, did you actually go to Hell?” Adam asked.
    “Hard to imagine you going dark,” Lila added.
    “Walking in the light has always been a chosen path for me, not a reflection on the depths within,” Merlin said.
    I smiled at that. It was a deep truth of both Merlin’s soul and my own. And I had loved him all the better for it, once I’d discovered, long ago, that deep down he was not some knight shining in the sunlight, but a more complex and measured