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Thirty years on, Merlin went to the place of his own sacrilege and knelt. The Isle of the Blessed wrapped him up in its still mist, in a world no sound could reach, where each breath was wet and heavy. The magic here remembered him and prickled on his skin like lightning.
Please. He went to his knees before the altar and dug his hands into the cold mud. He could have waited eternity there, begging. His cracked and frozen fingers bled slow into the earth. What was the toll? What would be enough?
“Please.”
One hand on his bent head. Three voices singing in his ears.
You were never much for praying, Emrys.
“I didn’t know anyone was listening.”
We have always been listening.
A tear slid down Merlin’s cheek, the first hot thing for miles. “I know I failed. I know this is my punishment. But I beg—I’m begging—I’m begging you. I can’t. Camelot is gone. Everyone is gone.”
A poor beggar weeps but does not even tell us what he wants.
“I can’t face the rest, all alone, not knowing when it ends. Release me. Let it end, let me sleep.”
You would abandon your post?
You would abandon the world and wake in a time you will not understand?
You would abandon your king?
Merlin ripped his fists from the dirt so he could point a bloody, shaking finger. Gold in his eyes glaring through his tangled, graying fringe. Thunder in the world beneath them. “You don’t get to say that to me. Not you. I would have died for him. I would have died if you’d let me.”
Silence from the goddess.
Then
Three boons you ask
Two beyond our power
The last is yours, child.
The seasons will change, as will the years, as will the world. Stones fall to dust, and iron to rust, and Lake Avalon will wane to a little pool in a hidden glen but mostly an alright meadow for some sheep to graze in. Stories, which are mostly nonsense, get passed down and spread around where they can’t hurt anybody still aching and real. Albion will get a few new kings and queens. She’ll get a few new names.
And on the Isle of the Blessed, time will build a tower in a forest of briar, brick by brick and thorn by thorn, out of the same magic which might have kept on building bones, skin, and blood every time a deathless man misplaced his. In the heart of the mist, on an island untethered from its old shore, at certain times of day in certain lights, the right person might catch a glimpse of golden light, like sun glinting off a window, high in the distance. Behind that window, Merlin will sleep, under a spell he didn’t bother asking how to break.
In the village of Tintagel, a baby will be born to a woman no version of this story has figured out how to save.
***
Your name is Arthur Penn, and the dreams start as soon as you’re able to remember them. They make no more or less sense at first than anything else in your world; things are large and loud, but less loud than the world you know; the dark is very dark, but when you wake up scared there’s your nightlight that looks like a lighthouse, forever glowing away golden at its top.
Sometimes in your dreams there’s a smell you won’t know how to describe until later. Your father has someone to cook him dinner who’s too well-paid to burn the meat. It’s a year or so until the first night you dream about the pyre, and a man upon it, and the burning, and the screaming. You wake up screaming, too, horrible painful noises that won’t stop and wake your father, who always tells you that you have to stay in bed at night, because Father has to go to work in the morning and needs his sleep.
But it’s Father who runs to your bedroom and slams open the door, who, upon seeing you whole and unhurt throws himself onto your bed to hold you so tight and safe. It’s also Father who forces you through an endless parade of specialists and therapists for your night terrors, and it won’t be until much later that you understand this is his way of showing how desperately he loves you.
In your dreams, it’s never your father who holds you. He’s there, a lot, but always up high and out of reach. He goes to work before you leave for school and often isn’t home until your bedtime. History rarely repeats, but it often rhymes. No one in the early 1960’s was naming their kid Uther. This man is not that man. This world is not that world; your house has radiators for heating and an electric stove until the renovating and your torch runs on batteries. Open fire is only a thing in your dreams, and you’ll be afraid of it for the rest of your life.
You learn to say the dreams have stopped, even when they never do. When you’re twelve, your half-sister comes to live with you. She has dreams too. You remember the doctors and the questions so you tell her you only dream about football and girls, and she doesn’t speak to you for five months.
You take up fencing classes after school.
The summer Morgan comes to live with you, Father actually takes a whole week off work and takes you both to the seaside.
You stand in the shallows where tiny fish bite your toes. It’s a sunny day in July, but in the distance is a spot the world blurs. An island, close enough to shore it ought to change the currents, surrounded by fog that should have been burned away at sunrise.
Above the mist shines a golden light.
You turn your back.
You know better than to say a thing.
***
Summer after his second year of university, Arthur comes home to the house on the lake. Things have gotten worse. There is a fog that goes on for miles to the space where hills are on the map, and roads, and shops, and other houses belonging to other rich men sitting empty most of the year. Arthur turned twenty, and he met no long-limbed, back-talking country boy while dicking around with his friends. Arthur turned twenty and there are islands in rainstorm gutters and flickering beads of gold when he runs the kitchen sink. A light on every water which never goes out.
Maybe Father was right all along, and there is something wrong with him. Arthur has read all the usual stories and should know better than to follow strange lights down stranger paths.
Last night, he dreamt of a flower. He hung from the tips of his fingers over a dark chasm knowing he held two lives in the balance. He dreamt of crouching over the pale form of a friend who would die for him.
He’s home and glad Father travels for work now that his children are out from under his obligation.
Morgan presses a smooth, flat stone into his hand like he doesn’t know better than to get into a skipping competition with her. Arthur puts it in his pocket with his handkerchief and some loose change. Shoulder to shoulder they stand, looking out across the water.
“You don’t even know how to swim,” she says.
***
He is a young man raised in an unlistening world, but I know he can hear me. When he dreams of me it will be a nightmare, a beast in the dark and blood on his hands, and we don’t have time for the memories that will come later, of the time we shared between one world and the next.
He must listen. He must.
***
“What did you dream about last night?” Arthur asks.
“Now you want to talk about dreams?”
“Morgana.”
Morgan hugs herself and sets her jaw the way she always has when arguing with their father. She says, “The same thing you dream about. Fire.”
“And what’s the best way to put out a fire?”
“I think they’ve invented a few new ones over the past couple centuries, dickhead.”
Arthur throws his head back and laughs and doesn’t change his mind. His sister will wait for him: it’s the most precious gift time could extend. The mist has begun to clear, great stripes of blue sky shimmering through, and if the island bears closer on some impossible current, Arthur is mad enough to believe it. With a final squeeze of Morgan’s arm, Arthur steps into the water which ripples soundlessly around his trainers, his ankles, his knees. He walks into the shadow of the great tower looming high above them.
Gentle hands reach up and pull him down into a world of gold.
***
Hello, old friend.
I’m so glad to finally meet you.
***
“You can’t give me the slightest hint,” Arthur says on the other shore.
Freya smiles in the way of ancient paintings. “I guess you’ll just have to follow your heart.”
He’s alone, sword in hand; and his heart says not to blunt the edge of an impossible relic on the woody stems of a thousand thorn-hedges. And as Arthur can’t ever get out of his own way, he disbelieves his heart and takes a swing at the briars in his path only to be blown back to the beach, to start again with tiny stones ground into the side of his face.
The hedges part at his gentle touch, like magic. Stomach cramping, he climbs the hill. There should be a dragon here somewhere, as the stories go, but that’s not what he’s scared of.
He lets himself in the front door.
Arthur has walked through many museums, but this is no curated collection: in the tower, rooms jumble together: the tops of skinny pines scrape vaulted ceilings and wooden furniture sprouts from leaflitter floors and Arthur climbs white stone staircases trying not to crush spars of crystal underfoot. Arthur stops for breath at a landing lined with creaking bookshelves, in the east corner of Camelot’s library, where old Sir Geoffrey was ever battling damp-rot and ever using it as an excuse to keep people from looking too hard at what he kept there.
Arthur walks the seams of a patchwork: every place Merlin ever saw, every place that ever marked him in return. He is looking for himself in the stitching. Here, the scarlet ribboning of his tourney tent. There, the favorite chair he passed his evenings in. Once, a painting, though Arthur hasn’t ever dreamed of sitting for one. He studies his own face and remembers letting Father think he was extra mad that year just to avoid getting braces, which Father expected would give his smile a winning edge when he followed his footsteps to a political career.
What else is missing because stupid Arthur didn’t think it worth looking back on later? Heart pounding and not from exertion, at the next landing Arthur has to step through a waterfall, which he welcomes to wash away the fear-sweat. The water cools the hall beyond almost to ice. On shivery legs, Arthur trips over the block in the center of the room. He stumbles back from it, gagging; there are no stains, but from the arrangement of the candles it’s clear this was once a ritual space.
He doesn’t want to know what was sacrificed here.
“I don’t know this one,” he echoes in an empty room. Who is he talking to? The water at the door is rushing and white with no gold in it at all.
“I’m glad,” says a woman behind him. “Perhaps, this time, you’ll know enough of the truth to make sense of the lie when it comes.”
This is the first other soul Arthur has met here. His soul would know hers mewling, blind. She’s wearing a knit jumper and a denim skirt, a pearl net in her cornsilk hair. When he folds up into her arms, she smells like the rock-rose perfume her handmaidens brought from home.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur warbles into her neck.
“It’s not your doing.”
“It’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t.”
But at least this time, her words are her own, what few fate allows her to speak.
“Follow your heart,” she tells him, “As I followed mine to you.”
He tires of the wandering. He tries to do as he’s been told and fix his compass on the one sure thing that waits him, and the rooms fall into a sort of order when he thinks about the road to Ealdor, the narrow stairs to Gaius’s tower, the wide corridor between his room and Morgana’s.
In the throne room, someone waits for him on the far side of a gleaming table. Arthur has to walk half its whole perimeter before she greets him, wondering all the while what kind of wood it was cut from and what kind of arrogance it takes to demand something this size be built.
The arrogance of kings, he supposes. It doesn’t make him feel better.
“Are you going to sit?” asks Queen Guinevere.
“Am I allowed?” Arthur blurts. “I haven’t taken any vows, or…”
To his surprise, the queen laughs, sweet and rich. “Oh, you are him. Of course that’s what would bother you. Arthur.”
She stands, smoothing down the front of her azure gown. Behind her crests sunlight through the stained-glass windows and shimmers a halo in her coiled silver hair. Arthur has dreamed her in the first flush of love and kneels before her now, a child, a supplicant.
Guinevere touches Excalibur to his shoulders.
“Do you, Arthur, swear to always wield what power you possess for the sake of what you know is right?”
“I do.”
“Then rise, Sir Arthur.”
“Wait. That’s it?”
“There used to be more to it. I only kept the parts that really mattered.”
So Arthur rises, legs curiously numb for how little time he knelt there. With a bow, Gwen passes the sword back to him, but Arthur passes it to the table so he can take her hands. Hers are storied from work and age; his are even softer now than they might have been at court an age ago. Time made a prince of him more than blood ever did.
“Why me?” he asks.
“Why any of us?” She shrugs. “I doubted myself for a long time. All I can say is that I got where I was by following my heart.”
And with her storied hands she pulls him down to kiss his brow. When he opens his eyes again, he is alone.
Atop the dais, past the old thrones, there is a door in the wall for servants to pass inconspicuous to those whose convenience it is not to notice them.
Behind that door, there is one final staircase.
***
Arthur crosses the threshold and a wave of light cuts through him like winter wind. But instead of chilling bone, it sweeps away the ache in his feet from all the stairs and leaves the taste of strawberries on the back of his tongue. It sweeps the room, then flies back to him, curling around his wrists, mixing with his breath, fingercombing his hair, slipping over his feet like little fish do at the seashore.
A nudge at his back—the wind pushes him forward and shuts the door behind.
The tower room has known so much magic the bricks themselves burnish gold. For all its grandeur, the den-like room is a disaster. Arthur shuffles through a detritus of coins and glittery broken glass and chainmail rings. Gemstones spill from ransacked drawers, silk ribbons and dried flowers and haphazard runs of fabric. Furniture moulders under sheets of scarlet, here and there embroidered with a golden seal.
Looks like he’s found the dragon.
None of this detail matters to Arthur, who sees only the man asleep at the center, in a four-poster bed carved of dark oak, hung with velvet curtains. His hands are folded on his chest, and his face is aged with grief more than time, which Arthur knows to be true from having grown up with grief as his very first playmate. It’s real all at once. This is not the rude, playful boy from his dreams; this is a man whose pain is Arthur’s future, played out night by night until Arthur has no more memories to give.
Lacking other options, afraid to disturb a single treasure, Arthur sits on the floor, Excalibur beside him, leaning back against the crimson bed. It’s easier down here where he can’t see.
“The thing is,” he says loudly, “I don’t actually want to be a king. It seems a bit shit, except for the money, and I’ve already got quite a bit of money. At least until Father learns I’m for environmental law, not anything serious. If I wake you up and turn out to be a massive disappointment, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. Understood?”
No answer. Heart in his throat, Arthur goes up on his knees to make sure Merlin is actually breathing, only for his own breath to catch. They’re so close. And while Gwen was much changed by the life Arthur missed, Merlin is weathered so beyond what Arthur knows of him that he is, briefly, stilled by his fear. He doesn’t know what to do for a man with battle-scars he can feel. He barely knows what to do with himself.
“Alright,” he whispers. “Onward, then.”
His mind says the stories can’t possibly have it right, but to his heart, the task is profoundly simple. He first pined for this kiss on a different lakeshore, when he was the one too weak to lift his head—but there will be time, later, for memories of dying.
Arthur touches their lips together, and lives.
***
The magic breaks in the usual way of a man who’s overslept.
Groaning, dizzy and disoriented, Merlin curls up and crushes his palm against his eyes. A migraine pierces behind his left one, ears ringing faintly, agony he’s only ever felt with his magic drained to empty. He went to sleep in the mud and woke in bed and he hasn’t dreamed in all this time, so it must be real. What time is it? What has the goddess done?
A weight shifts the side of the bed, pulls on Merlin like gravity.
He opens his eyes.
A boy leans over him with a furrowed brow between blue eyes. Merlin rockets upright fast enough he almost slams their foreheads together, and before the boy can finish sputtering Merlin bears him backwards, pins him against the bedpost. Merlin fists his hands in wheat-gold hair and drags his head back—a closer look—kneeling above him, Merlin devours every inch of—familiar, here, flushed with life. His ears ring louder, louder, discordant with the frantic whistle of air in his throat—
“Merlin! Calm down before you hurt yourself!”
Merlin obeys. Collapses atop the old coverlet, cleaner now after—time—than it ever was. Before. Merlin spreads out his hand and runs it down the fabric.
This bed burned with the rest when Camelot fell. He makes another keening, wordless sound.
“It’d be stupid to ask if you’re alright,” Arthur says, shaky. Clumsy fingers brush Merlin’s hair from his eyes. “You’re probably thirsty. I haven’t felt a thing, but you’ve been here for...longer. I’d fetch you some water, but we’re, ah, locked in. You wouldn’t be able to do anything about that, would you?”
No. Merlin prods his magic; it’s right where it should be. A million tiny golden scales encase his sanctuary, parting only once to admit Arthur and Excalibur. Now they’re safe. Here, Arthur will always be safe.
“Merlin.”
There it is—that edge, the lip of a nag, that old demanding whine. Polish my boots, Merlin. Where’s my breakfast, Merlin.
Merlin shakes. “I don’t know how.”
Arthur scoffs. That stroking hand turns on him and knuckles Merlin’s temple. “All-powerful warlock. Right? Don’t be lazy now; you’ve only just woken.”
“You know me, sire.”
Arthur clicks his tongue. Did he say something wrong?
“Forget the door, then.” The sound of fabric, then Arthur’s uncalloused hand touches his, something heavy in it. Arthur’s fingers wrap warm around Merlin’s around a lump of plain rock.
“Just a bit of what you’re missing. Come on, Merlin. I’ve quite a lot to show you.”
In the coming days, bemoaning the sword he left on the floor in a tower long-gone, Arthur will stress he could have fenced for England if he’d wanted. Then he stops, apologizes instead for all the treasures he claims he forced Merlin to leave behind.
And for all Merlin’s magic, he has no battles left to fight but this:
He takes the hand Arthur gives him and brings them both into the dawn.