4.18: The Merlin Stone

It takes pTravis a little while to subdue Pebble - and only after a combination of punishing blows using a handy large lump of wood to the feisty varmint’s eyes and teeth, on which it is probably better we do not dwell (pre-watershed) - and catch up with Lottie. 

He finds her some way up the quarry rock face perched below a mysterious slab-like standing stone, presumable revealed by a rock fall. There has clearly been some sort of communion between them.

Reacting to his unspoken, implicit question, Lottie says, slowly and thoughtfully: 

“I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a person. It was there before Merlin. It’s a force, a power. Merlin woke it and was strong enough. He held the balance. It slept until ‘Mr Furbelow’ woke it. It’s not a person, pTravis. It isn’t even a creature. It doesn’t think. It knows, it feels. It’s like a whirlpool or a black star in space; it drags things towards it. It’s not like anything I can explain. I don’t even know if it’s alive. But it is there in nature, deep in the roots of everything, where it all begins. It has its own tides, its own energies, its own needs, its hungers, its order. But it needs the nature of our world and we’ve been changing that nature too fast. Our machines, our pollution. We’ve put it out of balance. It felt, it knew. It was ready to wake. It tried to rebalance the world. So it lurched the other way and the world became more unbalanced than ever.”

Stifling the thought that the sign was therefore quite incorrect... it should have said ‘Ego Merlini’ or ‘Inventus sum a Merlinu’ or ‘Fui ante Merlinum’... he asks instead: 

“What on earth are we going to do then?” 

“Oh no probs! I’ve sorted all that already while you were wrestling with that tiny pebble!’