Chapter Text
Prologue
Merlin cried from the moment of his birth.
A crying newborn is nothing unusual, and his mother applied all the typical remedies which had effectively comforted babies since time immemorial. When these failed to produce the expected result, the midwife declared him colicky and said he would grow out of it.
But days, then weeks, then months, then years passed, and Merlin wept still.
When he was old enough to articulate himself, he tearfully explained that he wasn’t meant to be here yet, that he was early, that he was displaced, that he was wrongly in the world.
The unprecedented magic he displayed made his neighbors nervous, but his unending tears made them wary. It was a strange time to have magic in the land that would one day be Albion. Magic that used to serve healers and teachers had grown unstable; magic that used to answer to wicked and cruel whims grew weak. His control, more than his power, made people leery. Beasts and monsters both magical and mundane were wandering more freely and attacking more savagely, and the fear seemed worse after Merlin, weeping, drove them away. There was a sense of endings in the air, of loss and of something beautiful slipping away that none could articulate but all could feel.
People whispered and wondered and frowned more and more deeply, and when Merlin walked into the forest one day in his tenth year and never came back, there was more than one quiet sigh of relief, though his mother mourned bitterly for her strange, inconsolable child.
He didn’t simply vanish, of course. He walked until he found a group of druids, who knew him for what he was and taught him all they knew of the world’s fading magic and ancient legend and vague prophecy, and kept their pity and discomfort for his tears to themselves.
In his twentieth year, Merlin walked out of the druid camp, going deeper still into the forest, guided by some instinct that had always lived at the bottom of his heart, that came from the same place as the weeping. He came, at last, to a clearing where the sunlight filtered through the foliage to shine down on a stone, and, secure in that stone, a sword. Merlin was not very good at smiling, but he did it, because the feeling of this place was of patience, and waiting, and hope.
He stepped closer, and the wrenching despair that had dogged him all his life sloughed away. He went to his knees by the stone and wrapped his arms around its warm, mossy bulk and laid his head down on it. And as he slipped into sleep, a sleep of patience and of happy anticipation and of relief, the tears finally ebbed and stopped.
He dreamed of a golden man in a golden crown, who would lead the land into a golden age.