“Merfolk exposed themselves to an Ordinary mage?” Arthur repeated, skepticism evident in his tone. Zani couldn’t blame him for doubting the tale. Merfolk were notoriously shy. Even amongst other magical folk. Interactions between non-magical folk and the Mer were almost unheard beyond the usual tales of shipwrecks.
“Specifically, it was an injured Merprince,” Zani continued, ignoring Arthur’s doubt. “The prince had been attacked—Cosimo believed it was by rebel Sirens who opposed the Mer royal family’s policies of isolation. The prince must have been quite desperate, because he was carrying something of immense value that his attackers wanted.”
“What was it?” Maida asked.
“One of the twelve sacred Celestial Sapphires,” Zani breathed. She waited a moment to let that sink in. “The prince begged Cosimo to safeguard it temporarily. Just until he could return with his royal guard. And Cosimo agreed. He couldn’t look away from the stone. He was hypnotized by its beauty and its mesmerizing luminescence.”
She knew she was telling the story far more dramatically than Cosimo himself had, but she could not resist the urge to embellish.
“Let me guess.” Will spoke in a monotone, breaking the spell with his snark. “The Mer prince never returned.”
She took a deep breath, trying not to let his attitude throw her. This story was not just a good one, it was important to her.
“Cosimo waited three days,” Zani continued. “Then a week. Eventually, he had to return to his tutors in Alexandria, and later to France. He had ambitions to join Catherine de Medici’s court as a seer.”
“Ambitions, you say?” Will snarked again.
“Seriously, Will?” Zani shot him an angry look and Maida tossed another pillow.
She went on to describe how Cosimo discovered the stone’s true power—how it granted him the ability to glimpse future events with remarkable clarity. And how it also seemed to attract favorable circumstances and abundance.
“Catherine was quite impressed with his scrying gifts,” Zani continued. “She elevated him to her inner circle, and consulted him on matters of state. But his visions troubled her.”
“Let me guess,” Arthur, always the logical one, interjected. “He foresaw something she didn’t like?”
“You’re correct,” Zani confirmed. “He foresaw her downfall. In excruciating detail. And she wasn’t about to accept that. Catherine wasn’t satisfied with merely knowing the future. She wanted to control it.”
Zani’s voice dropped lower as she described the night of the full eclipse, when the stars aligned in a once-a-millennium configuration, perfect for dark magic. She acted out the scene of Catherine coercing Cosimo into performing a forbidden ritual from his Egyptian spell book.
“Catherine demanded a blood ritual that night. But for Cosimo, sacrificing another human being was a step too far. He refused to do it. Instead, to assuage Catherine, he combined his own blood with the Celestial Sapphire. And that’s when everything changed,” she explained, pausing for drama.
“The vision stone was dramatically altered by his human blood. It amplified his human ambitions and distilled down his desire for power. Its hunger for more blood grew. It drained him dry, nearly killing him. When he awakened, he was transformed. His humanity was drained. The ritual turned him into a vampire.”
“And the stone?” Maida asked.
“Corrupted,” Zani replied sadly. “No longer a channel for abundance, but for scarcity. No longer bringing connection, but predation. It still granted power and wealth to its users, but that fortune always turned sour, leaving destruction in its wake.”
“So the bloodstone,” Arthur noted, “was literally born of blood magic.”
“Cosimo was devastated,” Zani shared. “He had just enough humanity left to feel remorse. First, he tried to destroy it, then he tried to hide it. But he was never successful. It kept coming back. Finally, he threw it back into the ocean. You can imagine how happy he was to learn from me, a time traveler from the future, that it would still cause chaos hundreds of years later.”
“He knew how toxic that stone was, and yet he still enlisted you to steal it back for him,” Will noted, a hint of bitterness in his voice. “Don’t you find that strange?”
Zani met his gaze. “Yes. But I think I understand the reason, Will. Burnside shared it in his lecture, didn’t he? The once-in-a millennium eclipse. It hasn’t been quite a thousand years since the last one, but it’s coming. Just next week. The ley lines will become partially untethered at totality.”
Will stared back at her, meeting her eyes with equal intensity and concern. Zani knew he was thinking what she was thinking. The words from Nostradamus’s prophecy haunted her.
“What was corrupted cannot be pure unless the porter and vagabond endure.”
At just this moment, Gemini the cat came tearing around the corner, a catnip mouse in her mouth. She startled them all so thoroughly that they all broke out in giggles and Maida spilled her port. They took a moment to mop up the mess. Will picked up with the next chapter of their tale.
“So, after Versailles, we popped forward to Baltimore in 1978,” Will said. “We had some truly excellent sandwiches there. And then we stopped by Johns Hopkins University.”
“Burnside Porter’s famous lecture?” Arthur whistled. “It’s not really my thing, but I have to admit, I’m jealous. I would have loved to have been there.”
Will made a shocked face. “Really, Arthur? I never took you for a fan of temporal mobility. It was all I could do to get you to port to Los Angeles with me.”
Arthur lowered his glasses and gave Will a withering glance. “I had no problem porting with you, Porter. What I took issue with was your leaving me stranded.”
