3MA

3MA | Chapter 14

14
KAH DOLGIN

Sprawled out in my boxer shorts across the monstrous mattress, staring at the celestial engravings on Merlin's ceiling, I realize that there's no possible way I can sleep.

Not yet.

Not until I do what any sane human being would do if they'd been given a guest room in a mythological castle.

I have some major snooping around to do.

I slide my feet into a pair of padded slippers Lorna left by my bedside. I'm not really a big slipper guy, but I figure the flexible soles will make my footsteps less noisy. Then I slip across the room to a wardrobe. The ancient cabinet hulks beside a bookcase displaying a large collection of rocks, each stone pulsing softly with a different color light. I grab a medium-sized stone that flickers with faint, dusty pink. That should do for a flashlight.

I open the wardrobe and can't help but laugh out loud. The closet is empty--save for one single garment.

A purple silk cloak splattered with golden stars.

I've seen that hooded robe before, painted across the walls of my imagination, sketched into the pages of a thousand children's books.

It's Merlin's robe.

I run the tips of my fingers over the shimmering garment's silky sleeve. It feels like tracing a finger through a cool stream. Or is it more like prodding a finger into an open flame? It seems like both sensations at the same time.

On the backside of the wardrobe door, a yellowed photograph dangles from a rusty nail. It's a portrait of a little boy, around Mag's age, with severe black hair swept to the side. A cursive handwritten notation at the bottom of the picture reads: Carven, age 11.

It's a picture of Merlin's son. The one who ate a dragon heart for a snack.

I shut the wardrobe. Something about snooping through another man's private things seems innately wrong. Even if that man is a fairy tale wizard who's been dead for fifty centuries. Plus, the picture of Carven kind of gives me the creeps.

I decide to slip on a simple cotton jersey and drawstring pants from the pile Lorna left bedside. Not the manliest of outfits, but anything is better than my sweat-stained hoodie and jeans that still reek from working at the Drunken Sailor earlier tonight.

Had I really just been working at that dive only mere hours ago? It feels like I haven't been on the Surface for weeks.

I clutch the glowing hunk of stone and slip out the bedroom door. Then I tiptoe down the spiral staircase, a faint arc of grapefruit-pink light illuminating a few steps in front of me, the rest swallowed by absolute darkness.

It only takes an hour of snooping through long oil painting-lined corridors, wide, eerily empty banquet halls, and rooms unceremoniously jammed with rolls of rugs and dented armor, before I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea where I am.

I turn into a hall where a harp plays softly on its own accord, the same three dissonant notes: Wim-wam-wog-wim-wam-wog.

I walk up a half flight of steps and enter a tight windowless chamber filled with piles of human bones. One skeleton is frozen in a silent laughing fit, as if mocking death itself.

Another room appears to be some kind of cylindrical armory, its towering walls decorated with a vast collection of daggers, maces, spears, whips, cross-bows, and a variety of other death-inducing tools.

Finally, I find myself walking through a large square space surrounded by thin columns, all connected by elegant archways. The room is illuminated by boulder-sized versions of my glowing grapefruit rock; massive lime green and sunset orange and lavender pools of pulsing light spill across the room.