Of the six brands of magic present on the Starblaster, Merle’s is most prone to fluctuation. It isn’t his own fault, of course: it’s just that his god is different in each planar system. Sometimes they go by a different name, or their power is weak on the material plane. Sometimes his Zone of Truth is startlingly strong, burning the soles of liars’ feet through their shoes. But no matter what form it takes, there’s always someone who responds to Merle’s holy symbol, at least up till the final weeks of each year.
It’s forty-something cycles in (Merle doesn’t keep count) when he discovers the worst iteration of his powers yet. Taako comes yelling towards the Starblaster hauling an unconscious Lup with a levitation spell. Merle calms him down and has him lay Lup on the couch, because god damn it he can’t work with a target floating three feet above his head.
He puts one hand on his bible and the other on Lup’s forehead. Feels the energy of the earth below and calls to the heavens above. Bids their power collide on the elf with holy might. He’s so used to a quick response time that it’s not until Lup doesn’t wake up immediately that he realizes the whole casting felt off.
Taako, noticing that the symbol engraved on the book’s cover hasn’t lit up, disguises fear with nonchalance. “What’s the holdup, my man?” Merle looks over and recognizes the way his hands gesture more dramatically to make their shaking seem like part of the natural movement. “She’s, y’know, obviously in need of your healing expertise, I dunno why you even need to check-”
“Taako,” Merle puts a hand on his leg, “She’s gonna be fine. Even if I don’t use any magic, she’ll just need rest for a week at worst.”
The elf straightens up, even though Merle could swear he was already standing as tall (and stiff) as could be. “Well, clearly,” Taako says in that voice he uses when he’s pretending he hasn’t learned something entirely new. “But she could still use a heal, don’cha think?”
“Oh, sure. If my magic was working.”
“Oofa doofa. What, havin’ another weak year?”
“Worse,” Merle says. “Hang on.” He steps away from the couch and kneels on the carpet, putting both hands on his holy book. It reaches towards the heavens with a question. Is anyone there?
Merle knows what his magic feels like when the Hunger descends. It gets cut off halfway to the source, and a sputtering signal or nothing comes back. This is different. He can feel it this time, quiet and too weak to power any spells, but there. He can’t even make out the words, but he feels the affirmation. There is a celestial plane here, and the beings there would help him if they could. But they’re barely wisps in this universe.
Lucretia goes with Merle to investigate the cause, hoping to document it. The plants themselves have no answer for him– they can’t tell him anything without godly magic to create a connection. So they head for the nearest city and ask around. Merle tries first to find any congregation, but there are none to be found, no matter how he describes the concept to passers-by.
More direct questions confirm his worry: people don’t believe in gods. Even those who think they might exist don’t have faith in their power. Why would they? The gods haven’t done anything to prove themselves in what might as well be an eternity.
Now, the Starblaster’s cleric has proven himself very good at instilling faith in people. He headed the first church of Fungston. Perhaps he can reawaken the gods here, too.
Turns out, it’s very hard to convince people that gods exist when you have no miracles to show for it. Even if he did, it would be indecipherable from sorcery or some very subtle vocal bard magic. And besides that, Merle realizes, the people here have found their own enlightenment in the peace they’ve created. He can’t disrespect that by trying to tear it down and build his own version of it. That would be… wrong.
He decides to leave it be, but his crew members still insist they need a healer for this year. Barry tries learning how to heal from local magicians, but they don’t do healing here. Nobody gets hurt. The people here are unbelievably hardy (though they consider the Starblaster crew unnaturally fragile) and the only way anyone dies is old age.
“Means there’s no disease here, at least,” Barry sighs. “Any virus would die off since, well, any that existed had to be too weak to affect anyone.”
Barry asks Merle to teach him healing, which goes about as well as expected: like a sorcerer trying to tell a bard to draw magic from his blood, Merle has no techniques beyond connecting to the heavens. Wizards and clerics have very few spells in common, and even the few they do are drastically different in the way they’re cast. Barry learns very little of use, but he makes a diligent effort to translate Merle’s teachings into writings in his spellbook.
There’s a fairly upbeat feeling among all of them that nothing’s going to go wrong anyway, so he won’t have to worry. This, of course, leads to casualty.
It’s Magnus (of course it’s Magnus) who limps back to the ship and collapses in the grass in relief the moment he makes eye contact with Merle. The wound across his chest is potentially fatal, but for once he’s back in time to be healed, because there was no righteous reason to stay and die in this fight. It was just someone’s pet, used to playing with people who were impossible to injure.
Merle starts doing what he can (with bandages, not magic) while Barry prepares to cast a pseudo-spell he made based on what he was taught.
Barry’s shaking. Magnus grabs his arm– a weaker grip than usual, but still impressively firm– and says, “I trust you, buddy. You’ve got this.” And Barry calms down enough to start reciting the incantation that he wrote months ago and really should have taken more time to improve– no, concentrate. For Magnus.
At first, with Merle’s reassuring eyes on him, Barry does the best he can to follow the spell. It asks the grass and trees to share their energy, because that was one of few things Merle described that didn’t directly involve holy powers.
The grass is stubborn, though, and Barry doesn’t have Merle’s gentleness or a god’s skill with persuading flora. So he finds himself veering the incantation towards something he knows how to do better. He yanks energy from the grass instead, sucking the life out of it. It’s inefficient, he knows, because he has to pull from each individual blade. But this is all he can do, and he has to do it, for Magnus. He can do it if he just keeps drawing these tiny sparks of life and giving them to his friend, he just has to keep going, he just,
Barry only realizes he’s been shouting the spell when Merle shakes his shoulder to snap him out of it. “He’s gone, pal.”
“Oh my god,” Barry says, and he snaps his spellbook shut and shoves it hard across the grass. “Oh my god.”
“Barry, it’s alright. He’ll be back. There was nothing we could do this time.” That’s not it. Barry should have known, but that’s not what has him scared. The end of that incantation had gone beyond healing and reached the point of straight up necromancy. He’d been trying to raise a zombie. He’d been about to make his friend Magnus a soulless undead thing.
Barry does not cast any magic until the reset.
Merle wears flowers in his beard the day Magnus dies, but they wilt by sunset.