Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There are silences which echo like cathedral bells—spreading outward, concentric and unceasing, shaking the air not by force but by absence—and the silence that filled the morning after Arthur Pendragon died was one of these. It did not merely hush the world; it hollowed it.

The lake did not stir.

Even the birds, those small custodians of continuity, seemed to have agreed—without argument and with no sense of occasion—that nothing ought to sing today. Not in this place. Not near this shoreline, where the moss lay wet and gleaming as if it too had wept in the night.

Merlin sat still, as though motion had become a stranger to his limbs. The stillness was not fatigue, nor paralysis, but something older—a kind of reverence that even he, with all his years of magic and grief and sorrow-etched love, could not quite name. He had not moved since the Lady of the Lake had vanished, bearing Arthur's body into the grey heart of the water. Nor had he spoken. Even thought had been slow to return, arriving in fragments like mist creeping in from the edge of a ruined field.

His hands rested limply upon his thighs, palms open to the morning as if to catch it, though there was nothing to receive. Not warmth. Not clarity. Not hope.

In his lap, balanced with a reverence he had never thought to afford a mere object, lay the empty scabbard. Black leather soft with wear, the gilded trim dulled to the colour of old harvest moonlight. It was longer than it ought to be now. Without Excalibur within it, it looked hollowed—unresolved—like a question no longer worth asking but still present in the room.

Merlin had known death before. He had watched men fall—brave and foolish and some both at once. He had buried dreams with his own hands, burnt pyres alone in the woods, held fading lives close to his heart until their last breath rattled out into the dawn. But Arthur's death was not a flame or a sword-thrust or even a storm. It was a door closing behind him with quiet finality, and the realisation that there would be no footsteps returning from the other side. Not for a long, long time.

And yet—not final.

That was the agony of it. That peculiar cruelty of prophecy: a promise, yes, but stretched like goldleaf over centuries. He shall rise again, Kilgharrah had said, with that maddening calm only dragons could maintain in the face of all mortal suffering. When Albion’s need is greatest, the Once and Future King shall return.

Merlin, who had spent so many years wondering if he would survive long enough to see it, now faced the unthinkable: he had. Or would. If he endured. And endurance had never before seemed so much like punishment.

The scabbard felt heavier than any sword.

He looked not at the lake, though he sat before it as a mourner sits before the grave of a lover, but at the thin curl of smoke that rose from the edge of the horizon, where distant hearths had already accepted the turning of the year. Samhain had passed with no fires lit in Camelot. No feast. No rites. The solstice would come soon. The world would shift and turn, and winter would lay its first breath on the earth—and Arthur would not feel it.

There was no wind. Only the slow, invisible hands of time smoothing the air.

Merlin exhaled, though he had not realised he’d been holding breath, and the sound it made was small. Not a sigh. Not grief. A release of something much older—like dust escaping from a book long unopened.

In that moment, the land felt like it belonged to someone else. Albion was not his anymore. It was a place on loan. A field he had tilled with magic and mourning, only to find the crop would not rise for centuries yet.

He turned his gaze downward.

The ground was soft with dew, but the moss beneath him bore the pattern of his boots and knees. An imprint. Proof that he had been here. That he had waited.

He thought of Gwen. Of her hand, trembling around the hilt of Arthur’s sword once, years ago, in the training yard when she had defied expectation. He thought of Leon, still upright no doubt, still loyal, still standing like the last tower in a fallen keep. He thought of Gaius, whose voice sometimes came to him in dreams—not as comfort, but as memory made sound.

He thought of Morgana. Not with hatred. That had long burned out. He thought of her like one thinks of winter: terrible, inevitable, and once—just once—beautiful before the frost came.

But most of all, he thought of the boy with the golden hair and terrible table manners who had grown, by increments too painful to notice until it was too late, into the king who had called him friend.

Arthur.

The name was a wound. It opened without blood, without heat. A slow unmaking.

And still—no tears.

What were tears, after all, but water given shape? And there was too much water here already.

He stood.

The movement was not elegant. His legs had numbed beneath him, and his back complained like an old door in a forgotten house. But the body obeyed, eventually. He gathered his cloak, drew it over his shoulders as if it were armour, and secured the scabbard to his belt.

It did not fit right. Nothing did anymore.

He took one last look—not at the lake, but at the trees beyond it. The path would lead east, through the stony woods and into the hills where the old road still lingered beneath root and bramble. Ealdor lay that way, though it was not the home it had once been.

There were no roads now that led to home.

He stepped forward, and the moss yielded beneath him with a soft sound like a whisper. The silence was not broken. Only shifted. The kind of silence that follows behind, walking at your back, pressing you forward even when you long to stay.

And somewhere, far beneath the lake, where neither time nor sun could reach, the king slept in the arms of water.

The wizard would wait.

Chapter Text

The map of the world had not changed, but the meaning of its roads had.

Merlin stood at the fork between east and west, watching the wind stir the last colour from the trees, and made the least courageous decision of his life: he turned north. Not to Ealdor, not to Camelot—just away.

He had not set out with a plan. He had not packed like someone with a destination. A half-loaf of bread, a knife, a spellbook too scorched to be useful, and a cloak that smelled faintly of smoke and memory. That was all.

The world did not try to stop him. There were no signs. No dragons in the sky. No celestial omens carved into the frost. Just long grass, the sharp breath of early winter, and the thick, woollen quiet of grief.

It was the kind of silence that bruised.

He waited a week before writing.

Not out of principle. Not out of pride. Simply because he did not know how to begin.

There was too much. There was nothing.

He lit a fire in the hollow of a sycamore grove and tried not to think about the scabbard beside him, its weight heavier for being empty. The sky overhead was milky and dull. He felt ancient. Like a ruin.

Eventually, without ceremony, he pulled out a scrap of parchment and began.

Gaius,

I’m alive. I am—well, I’m not dead, anyway. I’ve gone north. Nowhere in particular. I can’t—won’t—come back to Camelot yet. You’ll understand why. Or you won’t. Either way, I’m not ready.

The land is very quiet. Everything feels like it’s holding its breath. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve been walking. Fixing small things. Fences. Gates. A child’s doll. It’s not much, but it passes time.

I didn’t say goodbye. I know. I didn’t know how. I still don’t.

M.

He folded the parchment, pressed his palms together around it, whispered the spell under his breath, and felt the air shiver as it vanished.

It was a small, precise spell. One he’d invented centuries ago for wet winters and poor messengers. He had taught it to Gaius during one particularly tiresome plague season, mostly to avoid talking to people in person.

Now it served nobler purposes: silence, distance, guilt.

The reply arrived three days later.

It drifted gently into camp at dusk, settling beside his foot like a feather that had changed its mind. The seal was crooked. The parchment smelled faintly of rosemary and ink.

My dear boy,

I ought to scold you. But I won’t. You always do this—hide under the excuse of silence, as if not being seen makes the grief smaller. It doesn’t. It just leaves the rest of us squinting at shadows.

Gwen is holding steady. She meets with the court every morning, and rules with more patience than the entire line of Pendragons combined. Leon has taken on too much, as usual, but he refuses to rest. Percival’s left—north, I think. No one asked. No one needed to.

The castle is too quiet. And I am too old. But I am still here. For now.

You could write again. You could come home. I won’t ask. But I will be here, should you decide to.

—Gaius

Merlin didn’t reply for another five days.

He had taken to sleeping in the shell of an old Roman tower. It overlooked a creek and the beginnings of a forgotten orchard. Trees leaned against it like gossiping old women. A fox had made a home near the base and occasionally left him small offerings—half-chewed fruit, a feather, a mouse that looked mildly offended.

He cooked what he could, mostly badly. He fixed things when the locals weren’t looking. He spoke to trees out of habit. He kept the scabbard wrapped in cloth, tucked beneath his bedroll, like a secret he couldn’t forget and couldn’t explain.

And he wrote again.

Gaius,

Thank you. For answering. And for not asking the wrong questions.

I saw Ealdor from the ridge. Could’ve walked down. Didn’t. Couldn’t. Not sure which. It’s been too long, and I’ve changed, and the thought of seeing something familiar through the eyes of strangers—

Well. You know.

The forest here doesn’t remember me. I think I like it for that. There’s a kindness in being anonymous.

Tell Gwen I’m—no, don’t tell her anything. Just tell her I’m not dead. Yet.

M.

The next letter arrived in the middle of the night, when the wind was making too many promises.

Merlin,

You are not forgotten. Not by me. Not by Gwen. Though she won’t say it aloud. She rules as if Arthur might walk through the door at any moment. I think that’s how she keeps from falling apart. She believes he will return. Do you?

I have started sleeping in your old chair. The back still tilts annoyingly to the left. I keep meaning to mend it. I never do.

The candle shop down the road has closed. The new one sells something called “amber spice.” I miss lavender.

Write back. Even if you have nothing to say.

—Gaius

Merlin lit a small fire.

Sat.

Folded his knees beneath him.

Looked at the sky and whispered, “You left me with the hard part, you royal bastard.”

A fox trotted past. Didn’t stop.

Merlin rubbed his face with both hands. Then reached for his pen.

Gaius,

I fixed a windmill today. No one saw. Felt smug anyway.

The stars look different up here. Like someone rearranged them out of spite. Orion’s missing an arm. Not metaphorically. Just—gone. I suppose it’s possible the sky moves on, too.

I keep dreaming about Arthur. Sometimes he’s shouting. Sometimes he’s smiling. Sometimes he’s silent. I think that’s worse.

Is it foolish to keep hoping for something prophecy-shaped?

Anyway. Still breathing. Still here.

—M.

And so the weeks passed.

The notches Merlin carved in the beams of the ruined tower grew deeper. He stopped counting, but kept carving anyway. Some habits were steadier than calendars. He kept to the edges of villages. Helped where he could. Disappeared before anyone asked for a name.

And every few days, like the turning of a clock that no longer cared for time, a letter would drift into his campfire’s glow. And another would vanish from his palm.

Words, weightless and slow, passing between two men who had seen too much and said too little. A ritual. A tether. A long, thin thread across the silence.

Neither of them said it, but they both knew:

The waiting had only just begun.

Chapter Text

The frost came early that year, and it came with teeth.

Not the delicate frost that clings to autumn windows in lace-like webs, but the kind that bites through wool and lingers inside boots, the kind that kills the last crops standing and makes men build coffins before snow has fallen. By mid-October the ground had hardened. By November, rivers froze halfway through the bend. And by the turn of the year, the wind no longer sounded like wind—it sounded like something pulled too tightly across the mouth of the world, humming with tension.

Merlin did not name it. He didn’t need to.

He knew when a winter meant something.

The hut was sturdier than it looked. He’d built it up from the bones of a Roman waystation, tucked into a cliffside, the stones still marked faintly with old chiselled numbers, smooth as bone. There had once been a sign here—he could see the outline in the wall—but whatever Latin had stood there had long since eroded into memory. The walls were thick. The door was narrow. And the roof, which he’d sealed with pitch and charm and a great deal of irritation, no longer let in the snow.

He stayed inside for most of that winter. Days passed without incident. Without sound. He boiled roots. Burned pine and oak and sometimes the crumbled remains of scrolls that had been unreadable since Vortigern’s war. In the worst of the freeze, he spoke only to the fire.

Time passed more slowly when measured by thaw.

The days were pale and short. The light barely touched the floor by noon, and by early evening the wind had already begun clawing at the eaves. The world shrank in winter. Roads disappeared. Villages folded inward. Even the sky seemed to crouch lower. Once, in January, Merlin went outside to relieve himself and found that the snow had drifted to his chest. He stood in it for several minutes, breath steaming, staring at the horizon.

There was no sound.

He felt, for a brief moment, as if the world had stopped turning.

Then he went back inside and lit another fire.

He sent his first letter of the year just after Candlemas.

Gaius,

Still alive. Nothing worth reporting. Snow came early. Lost a boot in it. Found it again two days later frozen to a hare. The hare was alive. We negotiated. It left with the boot.

Had to dig out the south wall. Roof held. The hut’s too cold to stay dry, but it hasn’t collapsed, so I’m calling that a victory. I’ve sealed the cracks with moss and a bit of spellwork. Not elegant. Functional.

Some villagers passed by in early winter. Didn’t speak to them. Just watched. One of them was singing. Badly. It was strange to hear a human voice again.

Still not coming back. Not yet.

—M.

The letter vanished in a flick of ash. It didn’t hum with power. It didn’t glow. It just went—faded between two blinks. Simple magic. Domestic. The kind of spell he’d taught Gaius once because ravens kept eating their correspondence.

The reply came back seven days later, fluttering down onto the floor near the fire like a dead leaf that had changed its mind mid-fall.

Merlin,

Your sense of humour hasn’t improved, though I’ll take signs of life however they arrive.

Camelot has survived the worst of the cold, but just barely. The roads are impassable west of the valley. Leon’s horse broke its leg in the snow last week—he walked it home and hasn’t spoken since. Gwen has had to ration flour. She does it without complaint, but she looks like she hasn’t slept in months.

We’ve lost two healers. The sickness that came through the kitchens in December took them both. I’m managing. Slowly. I sit more. Write more. I think that means I’m getting old, which is an alarming discovery. Still, I wake up every morning. That counts for something.

We are still here. But the kingdom feels quieter than it should. As if something’s waiting, and hasn’t told us what for.

—G.

The hut creaked at night.

Not the charming kind of creaking, like an old chair beneath a familiar weight, but the long, slow groaning of a structure trying to decide if it still believed in itself. Merlin lay in bed some nights staring up at the rafters, the scabbard laid beside him like a relic no one worships anymore. He did not touch it. It did not speak. But it never aged. Never dulled. The leather was still soft. The fittings still gleamed in the firelight.

It was the only thing in the room that hadn’t been touched by time.

Even Merlin could not say that anymore.

Spring came reluctantly.

The thaw began in March. Streams cracked open like wounds, gushing with dark water that stank of rot and roots. Fields lay bare. The frost had killed most of the early shoots. Villagers emerged blinking and thin, like half-formed things. And somewhere, far to the south, a Roman road collapsed into a riverbed, and no one rebuilt it.

A boy would pass through the ruins two centuries later, calling it King Arthur’s Fall.

He spent most of spring repairing the hut and walking. Not far. Just enough. Sometimes he’d come across remnants of stone—milestones with faded numerals, pieces of villas crumbling beneath ivy, forgotten boundary walls sunk half into mud. Once, he found a mosaic of a lion and a sword in the floor of a burned villa. The face had worn away.

He didn’t know it, but these stones would become the bones of myth.

The lion would be mistaken for Arthur.

The sword, for Excalibur.

The villa, for Camelot.

People would carve new stories into the ruins, because it was easier than remembering the truth.

He wrote again before Beltane.

Gaius,

The river broke. I nearly lost the scabbard trying to fish a deer carcass out of the current. Slipped, went in up to my ribs. Got it back. Deer floated off. No loss.

I saw lights in the hills two nights ago. Not fire. Something higher up. Cold. Didn’t go investigate. I’m too old to be running into fairy nonsense unprepared.

Found the ruins of a bathhouse. The floor was mosaic. It’s cracked now. I sat there for a while. Don’t know why. Maybe because it was quiet.

Do you think we’ll be remembered? Or just misremembered? I keep thinking of Arthur, and I can’t tell anymore if I remember him or just the shape of him.

Still here. Still walking.

—M.

The reply was slow. Over a fortnight. The longest delay yet.

When it came, the script was thinner.

Merlin,

Sorry for the delay. My hands are slower these days. I drop things more. But the mind is still sharp enough.

Gwen has begun writing edicts in both Latin and Brythonic. She says it keeps the court honest. I think it’s because she fears the language is fading, and she refuses to let it go quietly.

We are being remembered, Merlin. Just not how we wanted. That’s how memory works. It smooths the corners, changes the names. Arthur is already becoming a story. I hear things. Songs. Not all of them are true. But all of them carry something of him.

We’ll speak again soon. I hope.

—Gaius

Merlin folded the letter slowly.

Set it beside the fire.

He looked out the window at the hills, still green, still rising into the wind like old shoulders beneath a blanket.

Somewhere out there, stories were taking root. Already sprouting false flowers.

He did not feel bitter.

But he did feel tired.

And for the first time since Camlann, he wondered—not if Arthur would return—but what would be left of the world when he did.

Chapter Text

The road south no longer knew where it was going.

What remained of it—once cut from Roman stone—had fractured into mud veins and goat tracks, winding blindly through flood-streaked valleys and old forests whose names no one remembered. Travellers kept to hills now, where trees did not press so close, and the ground did not weep under every step. Merlin followed the pathless ridgelines, passing outcroppings of flint and broken shale, where ravens nested in silence and the air tasted of rust and woodsmoke.

He moved without ceremony, unnoticed and unspoken. A figure clad in rough cloth, with a walking stick too finely carved for a beggar, too plain for a priest. He passed ruins often—shattered villas swallowed by ivy, burial mounds split open by frost, forgotten Roman milestones tilting in damp earth. He did not linger. He had long since stopped collecting names for places that no longer answered to them.

The letter that had reached him came folded into bark, sealed with a pressed thistle flower. The writing was shaky but unmistakable.

Merlin,
I forget small things more often now. Where I’ve left the kettle. Why I’ve walked into a room. My hands are not as steady as they once were, and the stairs seem taller.
Still—I’ve seen worse. You know that better than most.
If you’re nearby, come. If not, never mind this foolishness.
I remain, for the moment, stubborn.
—Gaius

Merlin reread it twice before folding it into his satchel, tucking it beside the scabbard. That night, he rebuilt his wards with fresh circles. In the frost-hardened soil behind a crumbled waystone, he whispered a protection across the old trade route that wound, half-used, toward Camelot. Just one more barrier between the world and a place he no longer lived in—but couldn’t leave alone.

It took him over six weeks to make the crossing. The detours alone added days: washed-out fords, flooded lowlands, bridges fallen to rot. He avoided towns where possible, trading only when necessary. A loaf here. A needle there. Quiet transactions, always with the hood drawn low.

By the time he reached the outer hills, Camelot had changed its scent.

Once it had smelled of metal and horses, baking bread and wet wool. Now it carried the breath of stone left out too long in the rain. Woodsmoke. Quiet rot. A city in decline, but one that refused to crumble outright.

He entered at dusk beneath the north postern gate. No one stopped him. The guards were lean-faced and inattentive, their armour dulled by long use. Inside, the square was empty but for a few clustered stalls—herbs, salt, old tools. The light from the windows flickered low and uncertain, as if the candles were saving their strength.

He didn’t go straight to Gaius’s chambers.

Instead, he walked the perimeter of the inner wall, where moss grew between the stones and old watch-holes had been filled with mortar. He paused at the base of the library tower. A child sat on the step there, humming to herself, the tune unfamiliar but haunting in its cadence. She looked at him, blinked, then looked away. Nothing remarkable in him, nothing to be afraid of.

That was the point.

When he reached the physician’s house, the shutters were closed. An oil lamp glowed faintly behind the sill. He knocked once and waited.

The door creaked open. The figure behind it was older than Merlin remembered, not in years, but in angle. Gaius stood stooped, his shoulders drawn inward as if the very air weighed more than it should. His beard had thinned to something like a memory, and his hands rested too long on the door frame before he moved.

For a heartbeat, neither of them said anything.

Then Gaius stepped back and gestured him in.

The room was warm, sparsely so. The hearth was burning but low. Bundles of dried herbs hung above the shelf, smaller than they had been years ago. A kettle sat half-full beside a dwindling stack of parchment. The bed in the corner had a second blanket folded over it.

“You’ve come far,” Gaius said, voice rougher than it had been. He didn’t ask from where.

Merlin nodded once. “Not far enough.”

“Still walking in straight lines, then.”

Merlin looked at him carefully. “You’re not well.”

Gaius didn’t argue. He moved back to the chair by the fire, lowering himself with quiet effort. He reached for the kettle, poured water into a clay cup, then gestured at the bench across from him.

“I have two kinds of tea now. Bitter, and slightly less bitter. Take your pick.”

Merlin sat. He accepted the cup. The tea tasted like boiled grass and something slightly singed.

“Less bitter,” he said flatly.

“Mm.” Gaius nodded. “It’s the singeing. Adds character.”

They sat a long while like that, the only sound the crackle of the fire and the faintest whisper of a draught pushing under the sill. Gaius’s hands shook slightly when he reached for the ladle, but he didn’t spill anything. His face bore the set lines of a man who’d long stopped being surprised by what his body could no longer do.

“You should’ve come sooner,” he said, not unkindly.

“I know.”

“But then,” he added, setting the ladle down, “you never were very good at timing.”

Merlin’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t reply.

Gaius raised his famous eyebrow, and Merlin was struck by a sudden wave of nostalgia, when both him and that eyebrow were considerably healthier, more well kempt. That eyebrow, which had scorned him so many times, had lightened to a wisp.

"It wasn't an insult Merlin, as much as a compliment." Gaius smiled mildly. "I meant to say, in better phrasing, you have extraordinary luck despite your slightly erratic timing."

“Is it bad?” Merlin asked finally.

Gaius gave a long breath. Not quite a sigh.

“I have days. And I have other days.”

“And which are these?”

“Somewhere in between.”

The fire popped. Merlin watched the flame fold around the log. It reminded him of something—but it passed before he could name it.

Gaius’s eyes drifted toward him, steady beneath the sag of his brow.

“You’re thinner,” he said.

“You’re older.”

For a moment, they both allowed a thin flicker of a smile to cross their faces, brief and untroubled.

Outside, wind stirred the eaves. The city shifted slightly in its bones. There was nothing to announce Merlin’s return—no bells, no lightning. Just a man sitting in a room he once knew well, across from the only person left who still knew him.

“You’ll stay?” Gaius asked, quiet now.

Merlin looked down at the tea.

“Yes,” he said. “For now.”

He would not say how long that meant.

Neither of them asked.

Chapter Text

By late winter, Gaius could no longer write without smudging the ink. He refused to dictate, of course—he still insisted that Merlin’s script was illegible at best, heretical at worst—and so correspondence dwindled into vague notes in margins and slow-moving gestures toward herb jars. His hands, though clever still in their movements, had become too uncertain for the fine motions they once commanded. The grind of pestle and mortar was an effort now. The tea strainer had become his adversary. And the fire, once maintained with ritual fuss, burned low more often than not, because bending to stoke it came with a cough that lingered longer than either of them liked to admit.

Still, Gaius did not complain. He greeted the stiff mornings with the same dry sense of order as he always had, making small noises of disapproval at the state of the floorboards or the temperature of the broth, muttering vague curses at whatever apprentice—real or imagined—had last cleaned the copper pot and, evidently, left it cursed. Once, he called Merlin a “leaf-footed menace” for startling him by returning early from market. He said it without looking up from the scroll he had been too tired to finish reading.

They settled into a kind of rhythm—familiar, steady, and quietly brittle. In the colder afternoons, Gaius would sit in the armchair by the window with a blanket folded carefully over his knees, squinting at whatever dried specimen Merlin laid before him. Sometimes he spoke. Sometimes he simply reached for Merlin’s hand and repositioned the sprig or seedpod, correcting an error without remarking on it. It was in those small, precise movements that the old teacher still lived, keen-eyed and particular.

The days passed with the soft-footed weight of inevitability. The shutters creaked. The mortar flaked. And still Merlin waited.

He did not know, until he did, that it would be the last morning.

The dawn was pale and cold, the kind that made stones sweat under their moss. Merlin rose before the light touched the sill and crossed the room to stir the fire. The air in the cottage had turned thin. There was no warmth yet in the season. He knelt, struck flint, and fed the embers until they answered him.

Only then did he notice the stillness.

Not absence—something else. A kind of completion. As though a breath had been taken and never needed returning.

He crossed to the cot.

Gaius lay composed, as though he had only just closed his eyes. His fingers were tucked gently into the linen folds. His expression was soft with something close to amusement, the faint lift of the mouth giving him a look of having solved a long-standing riddle and found the answer perfectly acceptable.

Merlin sat. For a long time he said nothing.

Then, slowly, he reached out and laid a hand on Gaius’s chest, where once the rise and fall had been steady and strong and certain. There was only stillness now. And beneath his palm, the heat was fading.

He bowed his head. Tears came without resistance, as sudden and natural as rain through a broken roof. No wrenching cry, no keening—but his shoulders folded forward, hands clenched in the blankets, the weight of grief sliding down his spine and into the hollow of his chest. He wept with the silence of someone who had waited too long to grieve.

When it passed, or when he had simply emptied enough of himself to move again, he dressed the body. He used lavender water to wash the hands. He smoothed the hair. He changed the cot linen and folded the blanket once at the foot of the bed. The shutters he opened just slightly, letting the morning in—not harsh, but clean. Pale gold across the stone floor.

Three days later, Gaius was laid to rest.

The chapel had not changed. Its ceiling rose in calm vaults overhead, and the iron candelabras, though warped by rust and smoke, still caught the light as they always had. Gwen stood at the front of the gathering—composed, black-gloved, her veil drawn back. She read the rites herself, voice firm, though once, just once, it caught at the edge of a name. Leon and Percival stood behind her, dressed in the muted greys of formal mourning, each with a hand clasped to the other’s shoulder. They had aged, not unkindly, but with the quiet gravity of men who had fought and lost and still chosen to stand.

Merlin kept to the back of the room, hidden beneath the hood of a travelling cloak that smelled faintly of pine and wet earth. No one turned. Or if they did, they said nothing. It was not cowardice that held him back—at least not in the way it once had been. It was simply that the language he spoke now was silence, and grief, and long walks in the dark. To explain himself would be to betray what he had become.

The service was brief. The coffin was lowered beneath the old yew tree that marked the rear of the chapel garden, where the grass grew in thick whorls and the moss wrapped around stone like a blanket. The grave had been dug deep, the headstone carved with care. Gaius of Camelot: Healer, Guide, and Keeper of Fire.

Before the final prayers were spoken, Merlin slipped away.

He did not wait to be seen.

He walked the length of the city that night.

Not the market or the citadel, but the unseen corners—under the arches near the old grain store, through the broken archway where the weavers once hung their winter cloth, down to the dry well where, years ago, he had tossed a ring into the dark and listened for the splash that never came.

He carried no torch. He didn’t need one. The streets, even in shadow, remembered his feet.

When he reached the outer gate, he paused. Set one palm to the stones and let the magic settle—not rushed, not in defiance, but in quiet affirmation. He whispered names he had not used in years. Drew the sigils slowly. Renewed the wards that had grown brittle with time. A circle of iron. A thread of salt. A single carved symbol pressed beneath the lintel of the gatekeeper’s door.

Then, he turned his back on the city.

The path west led him through thinning woods. The branches above reached long across the sky, grey with the lingering cloud of late winter. Frost rimmed the leaves. The ground was soft beneath his boots, wet with thaw and moss.

The lake waited, silent as ever.

A mirror of slate, ringed in reeds and shadows, with the sky caught like breath above it. The trees leaned over its banks, their limbs black with damp, their roots exposed in crooked tangles. No breeze stirred. The surface held no reflection—only depth.

He stood at the edge, the hem of his cloak brushing the waterline. He did not speak. No names. No calls. No questions.

His eyes, red still, held to the centre of the lake, where once the Lady had risen.

But there was nothing now. No voice. No promise. No sword.

Just water.

He knelt.

Pressed his hand to the earth.

Not to conjure.

Just to remember.

Then he stood.

And left the lake behind, with considerable finality.

Chapter Text

It began, as many important things do, with a cart, a pig, and an ill-advised shortcut.

Merlin—though here known, uncreatively, as "Merle"—had not set out to be helpful. He was carrying nothing more than an old cloak, three potatoes, and the sort of persistent weariness. He had reached the age where one no longer expected surprises, let alone opportunities. He certainly did not expect employment.

But the farmer’s cart had been overturned in a patch of ankle-deep mud, one wheel spinning uselessly in the air like a stricken beetle. The pig—who appeared to be the more intelligent of the pair—had made a calculated escape attempt. Merlin caught it by the hind leg, returned it without ceremony, and lifted the cart with a grunt that felt far too familiar.

“You’ve got arms,” said the farmer, who had no concept of introductions but an excellent grasp of free labour. “Need work?”

Merlin blinked. “I—suppose.”

And that was that.

He was given a fork, a stable wall to sleep against, and a week’s trial period. By week’s end, he had a proper bed—straw-filled, flea-resistant, roughly horizontal—and pay in the form of silver coin. Real coin. Weighty, jingly coin. He looked at it the first time like it might vanish. Arthur had never paid him, unless one counted sarcasm as currency. Gaius had offered board and the occasional crust, and once a second-hand cloak that had fleas and history in equal measure.

This, by contrast, was civilized.

The farm, "Little Dun," was an untidy sprawl of damp fields and animals of varying ambition. The house was leaning at a meaningful angle, the geese were in open rebellion, and the landlord, Master Corwin, suffered from gout, pessimism, and a longstanding feud with his own boots.

None of this discouraged Merlin. He had lived in worse places. Several had tried to kill him.

He set to work without complaint, ate without much appetite, and kept to himself. When pressed, he offered only the name Merle, and when further pressed, pretended not to hear. He made himself useful, dependable, and entirely unremarkable. The locals decided he was dull but capable—a useful combination. By all appearances, he was on track to be just another wanderer come to mend fences, dig potatoes, and vanish before spring.

Then came the girl.

She arrived in the way cats and lightning storms tend to—unexpected, unwelcome, and absolutely unbothered by the inconvenience of her presence.

It was a bright morning in the first month of the season falling leaves. Merlin was halfway through stacking hay, humming a tune that might once have been a spell or a lament or possibly both, when she emerged from behind the goat shed and announced, “You’re Emrys.”

He turned.

She was small—no taller than his shoulder—with brilliant red hair tied back in a braid that looked like it had been done at a run, freckles scattered across her nose like a map of forgotten islands, and eyes the colour of pine needles after rain: green, sharp, and tilted slightly upward, giving her the expression of someone perpetually unimpressed by the world’s efforts. She wore trousers and a tunic several sizes too large, patched at the knees and elbows with scraps of fabric in suspiciously neat stitches.

He narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” she said, and he realised her mouth was not moving, she was speaking in his head. She took a step closer. Her boots were caked in dried river mud. “You’re Emrys. The Druidbane. The Changeless One. The Slow-Walker. They call you lots of things. I’ve decided I’ll call you ‘Master.’”

Merlin stared at her.

She stared back.

“Do you always announce your intentions like that?” he asked, mildly.

“No,” she said, “but I thought you might be dense. It seems I was correct. You’ve been hiding for years.”

“I’ve just started farming,” he corrected.

“Badly,” she added, surveying the haystack, which had collapsed slightly to the left. “Also, the goats hate you.”

“They hate everyone.”

“Ehh. I think they hate you more"

She folded her arms. The expression on her face could only be described as smugly prepared.

“I’ve got magic,” she added. “And I’m not here to burn anything. I’m here to learn.”

Merlin considered several options at once: denial, laughter, retreat. He settled on resignation.

“You’ve got the wrong man.”

“I really don’t,” she said. “You mutter in Old Speech when you milk the cow. Also, I saw you charm a hoe to till three rows without touching it.”

He winced. He had done that. Once. It had been raining and he’d been tired and, frankly, the hoe had been behaving stubbornly.

“And you are?” he asked, reaching for the fork again.

“Linnet,” she said, without blinking. “I was raised by Druids. They wanted me to train in the North Circle, but they’re all rules and riddles and metaphors. You were once the most dangerous man alive. I thought you’d be more fun.”

“You thought wrong.”

“Maybe,” she said, inspecting her nails, “but I’m here now.”

That night, Merlin found her sleeping in the loft over the grain store.

He did not ask why. He suspected she would have a monologue prepared.

Instead, he tossed her a blanket.

She caught it mid-snore.

In the weeks that followed, she refused to leave.

She worked, in her own crooked way: she fetched water, kept the barn swept, and bullied the chickens into something resembling discipline. She asked endless questions—on magic, on stars, on history, on whether warts could be used as currency (he assured her they could not). She read quickly, picked up languages by eavesdropping, and could identify half a dozen kinds of sigil by shape alone.

She also had a tendency to mutter in her sleep in what sounded like hexes. The cow stopped producing milk for three days after she had a nightmare.

Merlin pretended not to notice. And when she burned her hand trying to scry without instruction, he sat her down, handed her balm, and explained—slowly, precisely—exactly what she had done wrong.

She did not cry.

She did not thank him.

She asked three more questions and tried again.

He didn’t call her his student. She never called him her master again. But each morning she followed him into the fields, each evening she listened. Unfortunately, she was still devastatingly arrogant and devastatingly curious.

She was trouble, undoubtedly. Sharp as broken glass.

But for the first time since Gaius had gone, and he had abandoned Camelot once more, Merlin did not feel entirely alone.

And though he would never say it aloud—not to her, not to the wind, and certainly not to himself—he had begun, reluctantly, to watch the horizon again.

And Merlin, for all his grumbling and caution and mud-caked boots, had always been an optimist.

Chapter Text

A quarter of a century.

It sounded grand in the way certain milestones did, like a weighty stone dropped into a still pond, as though ripples of meaning should naturally follow. In truth, it meant little. Twenty-five years since Arthur’s death had passed with the unremarkable regularity of weather: winters lean or fat with snow, summers that baked the ground to clay or sulked in cloud. If the world marked the span at all, it was in the way certain faces had vanished from it.

Gwen was gone, leaving a Camelot ruled by men who had been children when Arthur wore the crown. Leon and Percival had lived long enough for their hair to grey, though Merlin had not seen them in decades—save for once, briefly, in the aftermath of Gaius’s funeral. Lancelot had never lasted long enough for the years to claim him. Elyan had gone before that. Hunith, his mother, remained mostly as an ache he chose not to prod too often.

His life as a farmhand had ended without drama; the fields changed hands, the animals were sold, and Merlin—now well-practised at slipping out of situations without notice—walked away. Linnet, the sharp-eyed, sharper-tongued redhead who had once decided she was his pupil, had already gone. Three years of relentless questions, half of them designed to catch him out, and then she’d vanished with a bag over her shoulder and the lofty declaration that she was “going to test the edges of the map.” He hadn’t stopped her. She would not have let him.

It was on the coast that he found the monastery—or rather, that the monastery found him. He had been standing at the edge of a windblown market, eyeing the price of smoked fish with the suspicion of a man who had once eaten far too much of it, when two monks began loudly despairing over a collapsed section of their roof. Without thinking, Merlin remarked that it could be repaired in three days if they had proper tools. He hadn’t meant it as an offer. They took it as one.

The monastery itself clung to a headland like a stubborn barnacle. Salt had chewed the stone pale, and the wind had sanded it smooth. When Merlin arrived at dawn with the monks, the smell of the sea hit him like a wet rag. The gulls were already screaming their war-cries, and a bell was tolling from somewhere within—a slow, hollow sound, like the heartbeat of a patient on the edge of death.

They gave him no grand welcome. Brother Cedd, the taller of the two monks from the market, simply thrust a bundle of tools into his arms and led him through a small, square gate into the main courtyard. The paving stones there were slick with moss, and the air was damp enough to curl parchment. The other monks moved with the air of men who had been awake for hours; Merlin was acutely aware that, if his disguise slipped even a little, they would notice.

His morning was spent on the roof, the lead sheets groaning under his weight, the wind pushing at him like an irritable sheepdog. It was not difficult work—he had mended worse in Camelot—but the materials were stubborn, and the monks had an unhelpful habit of appearing at the base of the ladder to ask whether “God might lend a hand.” Merlin restrained himself from suggesting that God could fetch his own nails.

Midday came with the ringing of bells and a painful headache. He was shepherded into the refectory, where the smell of boiled barley hung so heavily in the air it could have been ladled. The tables were long and plain, the benches older than most of the men sitting on them. Merlin found himself next to a young monk whose enthusiasm for the day’s bread roll was matched only by his ability to talk about it for the entire meal. Across from him, an elderly brother was silently retying the same section of his robe cord over and over.

After the meal came the scriptorium. The air inside was thick with dust and the faintly sour smell of vellum. Merlin was handed a quill, a pot of ink, and a sheet on which he was to copy a sermon on humility. He found the irony almost pleasing. Brother Cedd supervised with the expression of a man resigned to disappointment. By the second paragraph, Merlin had to stop himself from using magic to dry the ink faster.

Evening brought Vespers, the chanting echoing through the chapel like the tide filling a cave. Merlin stood at the back, blending into the shadows, while the brothers sang words that had been repeated so many times they no longer meant anything. The sound was beautiful in the way storms could be beautiful—impersonal, vast, and utterly indifferent to the people caught in them.

When the day ended, they gave him a narrow bed in a room barely wide enough to turn around in. The mattress was stuffed with something that crunched faintly when he lay down; probably hay, but he didn’t want to think too deeply about it. Outside, the sea gnawed at the cliffs. Inside, the walls hummed with the faint vibration of the wind.

He slept without dreaming.

He had not intended to stay. The roof was repaired in three days, exactly as promised. But the monastery was in need of a pair of hands for work that none of the brothers seemed inclined to do: repairing nets, scraping mildew from books, fetching timber from the village. They offered him food and a bed and the unspoken promise that no one would ask too many questions. Merlin took it.

Seasons passed in their slow procession. Winter was for mending boots and fighting draughts that slipped through the shutters like thieves. Spring was for tending the hives, whose occupants viewed every intrusion as a personal insult. Summer demanded repairs to the sea wall and the hauling of stones that left his shoulders aching. Autumn meant gathering rushes from the marsh, an activity notable mainly for the smell.

The bells divided his days with metronomic certainty: Matins, Lauds, Primese, Terce, Nonne, Vespers, Compline. He learned which could be ignored and which could not. He learned the peculiarities of the brothers: who hoarded honey-cakes, who polished the chapel candlesticks with more fervour than their prayers, who could be relied upon to look the other way if Merlin vanished for an afternoon.

The village below provided entertainment of a sort. Disputes over fishing rights were frequent; the arrival of the tax collector was treated with the enthusiasm of a plague. Stories reached him there—about Emrys. None matched the truth, but all were flattering in their own absurd way: giant-slayer, wind-talker, ghost of the coast. Merlin found them preferable to the truth, which was that Emrys had been mending roofs and copying sermons for twenty-five years while waiting for a king who did not come.

So the years folded, one into another. His hands remained busy; his mind drifted elsewhere. The monastery kept him fed, sheltered, and, perhaps most importantly, ignored. It was not happiness, but it was a kind of peace—blunt-edged, sea-worn, and tinged always with the faint taste of salt.

And some mornings, before the first bell, he would stand at the narrow window of his cell, looking east, back to Camelot.

Not waiting, he assured himself.

Merely looking.

Chapter Text

Fifty years is a curious span of time. It is long enough for the stones of a hall to blacken and crumble, for the names of kings to turn brittle on the tongue, for songs to wear so smooth with retelling that no one can quite say where truth began and embellishment took its place. It is not, however, long enough for memory to fade in a man cursed with too much of it.

Merlin walked into the village square with the steady tread of one who has nowhere to hurry, staff knocking against the uneven cobbles in rhythm with his own muttered thoughts. The air was thick with market smells: wool damp from last night’s rain, turnips pulled fresh and muddy from the earth, fish laid open with glassy eyes that stared at nothing. Voices rose and fell in a disordered choir — barter, gossip, an argument over the price of salt.

He might have passed through unnoticed, had not age made him conspicuous. Children are merciless in this regard; they see wrinkles as proof of ancient secrets, or at the very least, as an excuse for sport.

“Old man!” a boy shouted, breaking from a cluster of them by the well. “They say you could’ve known King Arthur, with hands as wrinkly as river-stones.”

Another chimed in, bold with mischief: “Or maybe you were his cook! Did you stir his porridge?”

A third, snickering: “Or polish his boots till you fell asleep in them?”

Merlin paused, considering them from beneath the hood of his cloak, eyes glinting with the sharpness they mistook for frailty. “Boots, porridge… yes, that sounds about right. Though I seem to recall he tripped often enough that no boots of mine could save him. As for porridge, well — he burnt that himself.”

The children laughed, half-delighted, half-baffled. They had not expected agreement, still less such a casual dismantling of their hero. The oldest girl, standing slightly apart, tilted her head as though weighing him. There was suspicion there, though whether of truth or of madness, Merlin could not tell.

They pressed him for more. “They say he fought fifty men in a day!”

“Fifty?” Merlin said, lowering himself onto the lip of the well, more for the chance to sit than from any wish to indulge them. “It was seventy before breakfast, if you believe the singers. By supper he’d slain the entire world and still had room for pie. In truth—” he paused, letting their eager faces lean forward— “Arthur was lucky to manage one man at a time, especially if that man happened to be quick-footed.”

They giggled, though one boy muttered that it wasn’t very kingly. Merlin shrugged. “Kings are not half so kingly when you’ve shared a tent with them. They snore, they sulk, they lose at dice, they stub their toes in the dark. Arthur was no different.”

This earned a ripple of laughter, though again, the older girl’s eyes narrowed. It was not the story she had been told.

“Tell us of his queen!” cried a voice from the back. “They say she was the fairest woman alive!”

Merlin’s mouth twitched. “Fair, yes. But fairness is not what kept men wary of her. Guinevere could halt an argument with a silence as quick and sharp as a knife. She saw through bluster quicker than any man could summon it. Beauty fades, but wit and justice, I assure you, is much more dangerous.”

The children glanced at one another. This was not the Guinevere of song, crowned in roses and light.

They clamoured for knights next. Merlin gave them little. Percival, who could lift an ox but preferred a pie. Leon, whose armour gleamed though his boots were always muddy. Lancelot, who never stumbled, never faltered, never gave anyone the satisfaction of seeing him look a fool. Each name spoken lightly, as if tossed into the air to see how it would fall.

By now, the market had gone quieter. The elders, who had first feigned indifference, were leaning in while pretending to rearrange baskets or haggle over onions. Their mouths tightened at his words, as though unwilling to hear their heroes treated so unceremoniously.

“This is not what the singers say,” one muttered, not quite loud enough to challenge.

“No,” Merlin replied, loud enough for all to hear. “Singers tidy things. They polish. They make crowns shine and swords sharper than they ever were. I tell you what I remember. If you prefer songs, go find a bard.”

A silence followed, heavy as the clouds before rain. Then a child laughed nervously, and the tension broke. More questions, more teasing, more noise. Merlin endured it for a while longer, letting his answers wander, circle, collapse into fragments. He found even his own stories growing dull in his mouth, worn down by overuse until he could not quite tell if he was remembering or inventing.

At last he rose, staff knocking against the stone. “That is enough,” he said, though not harshly. “I came for bread, not to be a bard.”

The children groaned, the elders frowned, but no one stopped him. An old man may wander off whenever he pleases. That was the one dignity age still afforded.

He bought his loaf at last — barley, heavy, sour — and left the square behind. Beyond the palisade the road stretched toward the fields, rutted by carts, weeds pressing up between the stones the Romans had laid with their endless, arrogant straightness. Ruins broke the horizon here and there, walls fallen, villas abandoned, skeletons of buildings once meant to last forever. Nothing lasts forever.

Merlin walked until the voices of the market were gone, until the crows marked his passing instead. He thought of Arthur, as he always did when forced to speak his name aloud, and the thought was less a comfort than a weight.

Fifty years. The children would repeat his words, twist them, forget them. Soon they would be nothing more than another story, half-believed. And perhaps that was as it should be.

That night, on his straw bed, chewing bread that fought his teeth with every bite, he considered Arthur’s temper, his pretty, crooked smile, those mirthful eyes, the way he hated being ordinary in anyone’s telling. Merlin smiled, thin as a crack in stone. All the more reason, he thought, to tell it so.

Chapter Text

It had been a hundred years since Arthur’s body slid beneath the waters, though the lake gave no sign of remembering. Time lay upon it as lightly as mist, without count or care, while Merlin alone carried the number in his chest like a stone he could neither swallow nor set down. A hundred years sounded a great heap in a tale, but lived through, it was only days strung one upon another until the thread grew too long to hold.

The lake was much the same as it had always been. The reeds whispered in the same manner, the surface stretched still and grey as hammered pewter, the same faint odour of wet earth and slow decay rising from the shallows. He planted his staff in the mud, bent more than he needed to be — Emrys (not Merlin) was expected, after all, and old men must keep to their parts.

“You’re very late,” he told the water, the words sticking in his throat from disuse. “A hundred years, by my count. Though I’ll grant, I’ve not always been a careful keeper of days. Still, it seems a long while to leave a man sitting on his promise.”

The heron, perched solemn on one leg, flapped up and off without reply. A ripple spread where it had been, the only motion in the place.

Merlin stayed longer than he meant, as if by sheer looking he might prise something loose — a hand breaking the water’s skin, a voice, the faintest stirring from that otherworld he half-hoped, half-feared. But there was only silence, heavy and stubborn, pressing until even his own muttering sounded foolish.

When at last he turned away, the mud sucked his boots with a noise like a laugh. The path south curved between hedges bare of leaf, their thorny skeletons scratching at the air. Birds clattered up from the ditch at his passing. The day wore long, and the second dawn found him still plodding, hunger in his belly and damp on his cloak.

It was then he heard voices ahead — strange voices, sharper than the thick country speech of the villages, quicker too, running over their own words as if unused to stopping. He slowed, easing off the path into the shelter of a stand of hawthorns.

A little band of strangers came trudging along the road. They carried themselves oddly: robes rather than tunics, sandals ill-suited to mud, a great wooden cross swung from one man’s neck, and another hugged a heavy book as though it might shield him from the rain. They chattered in their slippery tongue, gestures cutting the air, brows knit in displeasure at the countryside around them.

The sound tugged at something in Merlin’s memory. He had heard scraps like it once, in Gaius’s chambers, when the old physician muttered the names of herbs under his breath: pulmonaria, verbena, belladonna. The shape of the syllables was the same, though these men spat them quicker, sharper, and with more scorn.

One of them caught sight of him, and that was that. No use trying to be invisible once they had fixed their hungry eyes upon you. They approached with the air of men who expected answers whether you had them or not. Their words poured out, foreign and fluid, with only the occasional familiar stone among the current: rex, princeps, dux.

Merlin leaned on his staff and raised a brow. “Yes, very impressive. I understood perhaps one in ten of those, which is better than nothing. You’re looking for… someone?” They gestured again, one making a spiky motion above his head. "Erm...your head is itchy but you can't touch it?" They put their hands either sides of thier forehead. "Oh you have a headache? I'm pretty sure I have something for that -" he rummaged in his pocket, but then they clasped their hands together, palms still stuck at the forehead. "OH! Someone with a hat!"

They did not understand him, though his tone of finality gave them pause.

“Oh, I see,” Merlin said gravely. “You want the grandest man of the lot. A leader. With an itchy hat.” He considered for a moment, then pointed with his staff toward the smoke rising from the nearest village. “This way, then.”

And, to his surprise, they followed.

The strangers kept to his heels like hounds who had scented meat, their sandals slapping uncomfortably against the rutted track. Merlin did not hurry for them. If anything, he slowed, testing their patience, finding a quiet satisfaction in the way their muttered conversation grew sharper the longer they trudged behind.

The village lay not far — a scatter of low huts, smoke seeping lazily from their roofs, a few hens scratching at the mud as if determined to find treasure where none had ever been buried. The missionaries, if that was what they were, looked around with open distaste, pinching their robes up from the muck and whispering their liquid words more loudly now, as though volume might turn poverty into marble.

Merlin led them to the elder’s hut, a crooked thing with a roof more moss than thatch. The man himself was perched outside on a stool, wrapped in a heavy cloak despite the season, his stick-thin fingers plucking at a cup of ale. His nose was long, hooked like a hawk’s beak, and his eyes shrewd under drooping lids. He did indeed have an awful looking woollen thing on his head.

The strangers spilled forward in a flurry of Latin. Rex. Princeps. Magnificus. Domine. The elder squinted, his brows knitting as he sifted through the flood.

To Merlin’s astonishment, the old man replied in the same tongue, though bent and broken like a wheel with missing spokes. The words came slowly, as though pulled from deep storage, but they were recognisably the same: Ego… sum… senex… non rex… His accent, however, would have made Gaius wince.

The strangers blinked, then laughed outright. One soldier elbowed another and muttered a phrase Merlin could not catch but knew well enough in tone: mockery. Another clapped his hands together as though to applaud the elder’s attempt, his grin thin and mean.

Merlin’s eyes flared gold — just a blink, no longer than the glint of sun on water. A moment later the grinning soldier stumbled violently over nothing at all and pitched face-first into the muck. His companions smothered their laughter, swallowing it so hard their throats bobbed.

“Clumsy ground,” Merlin said mildly, adjusting his grip on the staff. “Very treacherous.”

The elder carried on as though nothing had happened, drawing himself up with as much dignity as his joints allowed. He gestured toward the castle northward saying the word "Camelot" very slowly, then toward Merlin, and said something that sounded like dux viarum in his stuttering Latin. The strangers followed his finger, then turned their eyes upon Merlin with a new vicious interest.

He did not need the words translated. He knew that look.

“Oh, no,” Merlin said flatly. “Absolutely not. I’ve already led you this far, which was a kindness I’ll regret until midsummer. Find your own way to your—”

The elder cut him off with a few brisk words in their shared tongue, too quiet for the strangers to understand. “They’ll have it from you one way or another, Emrys. You may as well keep your dignity and walk upright beside them.”

Merlin grunted, the name like a stone in his ear. He did not use it anymore, and he did not care to be reminded. But he said nothing, only adjusted the weight of his cloak and stared down the road with a look that suggested there was nothing in the world he would less like to do than guide this gaggle of crowing priests.

Yet when they set off, there he was, staff tapping, trudging at their head.

The road south was little more than a scar across the land, worn by carts and feet, muddied by the week’s rain. The strangers did not take to it kindly. Their sandals sucked and squelched in the mire, their hems grew dark and heavy, and more than once one of them lifted a pale ankle and hissed through his teeth as though the mud itself had bitten him.

Merlin went on ahead at his usual shuffle, Emrys’ stoop exaggerated now that his back ached in earnest. He leaned upon the staff, though truth be told it held more dignity than weight. From time to time he slowed enough to let the missionaries stumble up beside him, then quickened just enough to leave them floundering again. It amused him. A little.

They talked constantly, their voices a stream of Latin that wrapped round Merlin’s ears without soaking in. Every so often, a word bobbed to the surface like driftwood: rex… fides… templum… He picked at them in his mind, fitting them against scraps of memory from Gaius’s herb lore. Fides… fiducia? Faith, perhaps. Rex, of course, king. Templum… He glanced sidelong at the heavy wooden cross swinging on one man’s chest. Ah. That.

The countryside spread wide around them, hedgerows ragged and fields patched with frost where the sun had not yet coaxed it away. Smoke rose in threads from farmsteads sunk deep in the folds of the land. Once, a herd of swine came squealing across the track, scattering the company until the soldiers swore and the priests lifted their robes high. Merlin only chuckled and tapped his staff until the last piglet scuttled off.

At a brook they stopped, the strangers wrinkling their noses at the water as though it were poison. Merlin drank deeply, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and let the gold spark in his eyes just long enough to clear the silt from the stream. They never noticed — too busy muttering their prayers and crossing themselves in sharp, practiced motions. He wondered if they would thank him if they knew. He suspected not.

Night drew in before the castle’s lands rose on the horizon. The company settled beneath an oak, the missionaries huddling together in their cloaks, their book clutched close as though it might sprout teeth in the dark. Merlin sat apart, poking the fire with his staff, feigning the drowse of old age while listening to every syllable.

They spoke of their journey — or so he guessed by their tone, the weariness in their cadence, the way one gestured eastward as though pointing across a sea. He caught again Britannia and Romani. The names rang like bells from old tales, though they meant little beyond that. Rome. A place of order and scorn, if their faces were anything to measure by.

Merlin let the fire crackle between them and thought of Arthur’s court — the tents raised in campaign, the knights passing a flask from hand to hand, the careless laughter of men who trusted one another’s swords and shields. There had been faith there too, but of a different sort: not in books and crosses, but in the strength of bonds. He closed his eyes, not from sentiment but to shut the noise away, and in that darkness he heard again the echo of a laugh that had not sounded in a hundred years.

By dawn the company were grumbling and stiff, eager for stone walls and a crown to bow to. Merlin rose with deliberate slowness, letting them curse their stiff legs, then set off again, the staff’s tap-tap keeping time with their sighs. The land shifted subtly now, more cultivated, hedges trimmed, fields sown in straighter lines. A broad meadow opened, and beyond it the towers of Camelot pierced the sky like the bones of some old giant refusing to lie quiet in the earth.

Merlin stopped at the meadow’s edge. His staff bit into the mud. The missionaries babbled their questions at him, pointing with their sharp gestures, their cross flashing in the pale light.

“Yes, yes,” he muttered. “There’s your king, or near enough. Go on then. March in to get your itchy hats. He’ll love you, I’m sure.”

He gestured them onward with a weary sweep of his staff. They did not thank him — of course they didn’t. They hurried across the meadow, their robes flapping, their sandals flinging mud, leaving Merlin standing alone.

He waited until they were nearly at the gate before he moved again, slipping round the hedgerow’s edge, stooping deeper into his Emrys disguise, following with the patience of shadow.

The closer he crept to Camelot, the more it felt like a wound that had scabbed over badly. The outer fields still bore the marks of ditches and half-filled earthworks, relics of old wars no farmer had yet flattened. The meadow grass quivered in the wind, silvered with frost, and Merlin felt the weight of every step pressing back into memory: here, where Arthur once had ridden out to meet his men; there, where banners had snapped red and gold against a summer sky. All gone. He tugged his cloak closer, as though to keep the ghosts from brushing his skin.

The missionaries clattered on towards the gate, loud as geese. Merlin, by contrast, had no wish to be noticed. The Emrys guise offered age as a shield — people seldom looked twice at an old man, except to pity him — but pity was still too much. He melted left, into the crease where hedge and wall met, his staff perfect for a creeping gait.

The walls had been patched, not rebuilt. Stone darker than stone, lime fresh against weathered ashlar. A mason’s work that spoke of fewer hands and less coin. The south postern door — how many times had he slipped through it as a servant, late for Gaius’s bidding? — still lay half-hidden by an alder’s spreading boughs. The iron hinge had rusted but not vanished. A flicker of gold passed through his eyes; the bolt eased with a sigh, like a memory too tired to resist.

Inside, the air grew colder, more stone than sun. The corridors smelt of smoke, damp rushes, old meat. He knew their twists better than the lines on his palm, though years had rubbed them bare. His boots made no sound; a muttered charm softened each footfall. He kept to the narrow ways: the servants’ stairs, the half-lit cloisters, the passages that bent around kitchens and stables. Men looked through him when they glanced at all — another old drudge, bent on some errand.

At the hall he paused. Voices carried. Deep, booming, the cadence of command; another thinner, pitched high with urgency; and beneath them the slick slide of Latin. He edged into the gallery, high above, where carved screens let him peer through.

The Romans fanned out below like a murder of crows that had discovered robes. Their sandals squeaked faintly on the flagstones, their book gleamed with enough gold leaf to feed three villages, and their cross caught the light like a blade. They spoke in long, rolling stretches of Latin, all teeth and tongue, with the easy arrogance of men who believed themselves to be the first to discover words.

Merlin leaned closer to the screen. He had no Latin beyond Gaius’s herbs, but even those scraps gave him a footing. Rex. Fides. Templum. Idolum. Enough to smell the shape of things, if not the colour.

The poor translator sweated beside them, mopping his brow with a kerchief that had already surrendered to damp. His Latin limped where theirs galloped, but he made up for it with enthusiasm, if not accuracy.

“My lord,” the fellow stammered, “they say… they say you are… oh dear. No, that is not it… they say you ought to be a shining jewel, yes, in the crown of—no, that isn’t—well, a very important empire, you see.”

Merlin’s mouth twitched. Arthur would have cut through that in a heartbeat: Say it plain, man.

The Romans went on, hands cutting the air in sharp angles. The translator bobbed like a cork on rough seas, seizing half their phrases, mangling the rest.

“They say the gods you worship—pardon, the gods, as in plural—they are… how to put this… unsuitable. Out of date. Superstitious nonsense, especially the magic. No, no, forgive me, my lord, those were their words, not mine.”

A ripple of unease stirred through the gathered courtiers. Merlin could almost hear Uther’s ghost stamping in delight that finally, after after around a century, someone was finally going to take steps against magic.

King Mark sat stiffly on the throne. From Merlin’s vantage he could see the tight line of the man’s mouth, the restless shifting of his hands. That nose again — Arthur’s nose, bent from some long-forgotten ancestor — but none of the warmth, none of the brightness. He was a pale, pallid sketch where the old painting had been.

The translator dabbed his brow, squinting at the next flow of Latin. “They say their… their god, singular, mind, is very mighty. Stronger than any others. He is, in fact, the only one. They suggest—no, they insist—that you must follow him, otherwise you will be considered an… an enemy. Yes, that seems to be the word. An enemy of their faith.”

The smugness of the missionaries needed no translation at all. It oozed from them like bad wine, each man glancing about as though expecting applause.

One soldier snorted when the translator stumbled over a particularly thorny phrase. Merlin’s teeth clicked together. A small, satisfying flick of thought, a glimmer of gold in his eye — the man’s sandal caught on a flagstone, and he sprawled forward, nearly pitching into his neighbour. The hall echoed with muffled laughter before decorum returned. Merlin smirked, staff pressed tight to his chest to still its betraying tremor.

The talk turned to power and protection. The Romans made sweeping gestures, as if armies lurked just behind the door, waiting to pour in at a nod. The translator found his stride:

“They say their empire—though you may be surprised to learn it is still very much an empire—will lend you aid. Soldiers, coin, learning. All in return for your loyalty to their god and his priests. They ask whether you will… bend the knee? Not quite that, but the sense is the same.”

Mark’s reply came slow, deliberate. His voice was lower than Arthur’s had ever been, cautious, uncertain. He spoke of Camelot’s fragility, the cracks left since Queen Guinevere’s passing, the dwindling of allies. His words carried a careful balance of fear and calculation. Merlin heard it well enough: Camelot was weak, and weakness breeds bargains.

The translator fumbled one more tangle, nearly calling the missionaries “traders in sheep” before correcting to “traders in faith.” Even Merlin barked a laugh under his breath. The Romans stiffened; Mark hid a smile behind his hand.

Still, when the matter circled round again, the king agreed. Better Rome’s god than Rome’s anger. Better a crown bent than a kingdom broken.

The leader of the missionaries leaned forward, lips curling. He suggested, through the sputtering interpreter, that the king should take a new name to mark his devotion. “Constantinus,” the translator proclaimed at last, puffing with triumph, though whether he understood the weight of it was doubtful.

Merlin gripped the screen until the wood creaked. Constantine. They would carve away even his name, and call it faith. He remembered Uther’s fires, the smoke that hung over villages, the screams in the night. He would not watch another age burn under the same pretence.

He turned from the hall before the deal was sealed in full, Emrys’ hunched shadow slinking back down the narrow stair. Camelot had made its bargain, and Merlin wanted no part of it.

The path out of Camelot was easier than the one in. He knew the alleys that ducked behind taverns, the stable-yard shadows where no man troubled himself with another’s business. By the time the torches on the battlements were no more than pinpricks in the dark, Merlin’s shoulders loosened, and his breath came easier. He had left it behind before; he could do it again.

His cave lay north of the forest, where the land broke into shallow ridges and the bracken grew thick. Once, he had imagined it as a retreat, a place to rest when Camelot’s walls pressed too close. Now it was no more than a hole in the earth, damp and stubborn, where time collected like dust.

The door was a slab of rock leaned against a gap in the bank. He ducked inside, his staff scraping the ceiling. A lantern sputtered to life at a muttered word, throwing light on the full extent of his worldly goods.

A neckscarf, frayed to threads but still faintly smelling of smoke and horse. A spoon and a bowl, wooden, cracked. A small cauldron that had boiled more weeds than meals. A knife with a nick in the blade, never sharp enough for what it needed. A bundle of spare clothes folded more neatly than their worth demanded. He had lived with less, once, but he had been younger then and more hopeful.

He sat with the things for a long while, listening to the cave drip, drip, drip. They looked back at him with a kind of stubborn loyalty, as though daring him to say they were not enough.

“Arthur had a whole kingdom,” he said aloud, voice muffled against the stone. “And I have… a spoon. Fair trade, isn’t it?” His laugh cracked and died in the air.

At last he moved. The largest cloth he owned — an old cloak, holes chewed by moths — he spread upon the ground. One by one he laid the objects upon it, tying the ends together into a clumsy bindle. It sagged like an old hound but held. He hefted it once, testing the weight. It would do.

From his pocket he drew a small vial, stoppered tight. He turned it in his hand, watching the lamplight seep through the glass. He had brewed the draught years ago, against a day when Emrys’ bones would be too much to bear. The liquid glowed faintly, like dawn trapped in water.

He unstoppered it and drank. Heat threaded through his limbs, easing the ache, loosening the sinew. His spine unbent, his face uncreased, the old man’s mask falling away until the lantern showed a man of thirty again, dark hair, sharp eyes. The staff remained, though — habit, not necessity.

The cave looked suddenly small. He ducked out with his bindle slung over one shoulder, and the night air wrapped round him, cold and sharp, like a challenge. Eastward lay the road, long and rough, but it would do.

The days that followed blurred into one another, yet each carried its own edge. He passed through woods where the trees leaned together as though conspiring, through marshes where the ground sucked at his boots, through villages where children stared at him with round eyes until their mothers tugged them inside.

Once he shared a crust of bread with a shepherd and his dog, the man muttering in a dialect Merlin half-understood, but smiling enough to fill the gaps. Another night he slept beneath a dolmen, old stones crowding round him like giants huddled in conspiracy. He wondered, briefly, if they remembered more than he did.

Always eastward, the land flattening, the air growing salt-thick. He dreamed of Arthur once, standing on a shore, hair whipped by wind, but woke with only the crash of waves in his ears.

At last the coast lay before him. The sea stretched out, grey and endless, chewing at the land with patient teeth. In the harbour a merchant boat tugged against its ropes, canvas half-raised, crew bustling with the briskness of men eager to be gone.

Merlin stepped onto the quay, bindle over his shoulder, staff tapping the planks. The smell of tar and fish curled round him. He hailed the nearest sailor, a broad man with arms like knots of oak.

“Passage,” Merlin said simply.

The man squinted. “And what’s your trade, then? We don’t carry folk for the pleasure of their company.”

The question struck him like a stone flung from the past. He had heard it before — Arthur, arms folded, grin crooked, demanding what he could do, sitting languidly on a throne in a distant dinner party. He almost answered with the truth: sorcery. But the Romans’ faces rose before him, as did Uther's - it seemed he would return to living in secrecy.

So he forced a smile, thin but steady. “I juggle,” he said. “And tell stories. Sometimes both at once, if the wind is calm.”

The sailor barked a laugh, clapped him on the shoulder, and jerked a thumb toward the gangplank. “Then you’ll do. We can always use a fool to keep the crew from mutiny.” Oh, the nostalgia.

Merlin stepped aboard. The deck tilted under him, the ropes creaked, the gulls shrieked. The land of Albion lay behind, wrapped in fog and memory. Ahead, the sea opened like a door.

Chapter Text

The men who hauled Merlin aboard were the loudest creatures he’d met in several decades. They bellowed over one another, tripping across ropes and shouting insults with the good humour of men too used to danger to take it seriously. The ship rocked beneath their feet like a creature trying to shrug them off.

Merlin, still adjusting to his younger face, felt an odd embarrassment at the vigour in his limbs. After so long wearing the weight of years, he half-expected his knees to protest the climb or his lungs to wheeze at the salt air. Instead, they behaved with irritating enthusiasm.

The first man to greet him was a sailor of such breadth that he seemed made entirely of chest and forearms. His smile contained more gaps than teeth. “You’re the juggler then?”

“I am… someone who juggles,” Merlin said, hedging. “Under protest, sometimes.”

The man laughed, a great gust of sound that startled a gull off the rigging. “You’ll fit in fine. Captain says you’re to earn your passage with stories and tricks. You’ll find we’ve plenty of ears and none too many brains.”

“That’s… reassuring.”

He was shown to his quarters — which turned out to be the same quarters as everyone else’s. The sleeping space was a long, low-ceilinged room below deck, lined with straw pallets that smelled of salt, sweat, and the faint melancholy of unwashed socks. It was dark except for a few tallow lamps that guttered as the ship rocked.

“Mind the rats,” said his guide cheerfully, kicking one away from a sack of grain. “They bite less than the men, though not by much.”

“Comforting,” Merlin murmured, eyeing a particularly confident rat inspecting his boot.

“Captain’s got his own cabin, mind you,” the man went on, “but the rest of us share. Builds character.”

“Yes,” said Merlin. “Or removes the desire for it entirely.”

He set his bundle down on one of the least offensive pallets, if only to mark the spot, and was promptly ushered back up the stairs. “Come on, show what you can do before we lose daylight.”

Above, the ship’s great oars had been lowered into the water, eight men to each side, straining in rhythm. The creak of the wood, the slap of the sea, the rough shouts of timing—it was all a kind of coarse symphony. The air was warmer up here, thick with pitch and the scent of salt and sweat.

The captain stood at the helm, a tall, stern figure whose expression suggested he was perpetually disappointed in someone, usually the wind. He nodded once at Merlin and said nothing, which Merlin took as permission enough.

He was handed three apples—bruised, a little soft, one already nibbled by something less discerning. “Make them dance, lad!” one of the rowers called.

So he did.

He tossed the first into the air, then the second, then the third, catching them with the easy rhythm of a man whose coordination owed more to enchantment than practice. The apples flickered in the late light, rising and falling like tiny suns.

When the rhythm of the oars faltered, he made a flick of his fingers behind his back, and the apples spun themselves for an instant, perfectly aligned, defying the lurch of the deck. No one noticed the faint gold gleam beneath his lashes—they only roared approval, clapping their hands against the wood, calling for more.

One man laughed so hard he dropped his oar; another splashed his neighbour with a full bucket of seawater, to further chaos.

The captain bellowed for order, though there was a smile tucked somewhere under his beard. “Enough! Break for food before you drown us all.”

The oarsmen pulled their paddles in with relief. A few slumped against the gunwale, panting and grinning; others stretched and muttered fond curses at one another.

From the galley came the smell of something cooking—thick stew, by the aroma, heavy with fish and herbs that had seen better days.

Merlin followed the men below, ducking his head as the timbers groaned overhead. The ship’s cook was a woman, surprisingly. A compact woman with arms that could probably fell trees, but still a woman. Upon his surprised look, she snorted.

"Our captain doesn't believe in that superstitious nonsense of women sinking his ship. I saved his life!"

She stood behind a great pot, ladling stew into wooden bowls with the indifference of one who had long ago stopped caring for gratitude.

“Mind the bones,” she said as she handed him his portion. “And if it moves, it’s yours.”

“Delightful,” said Merlin, accepting it with a bow. “My compliments to the chef’s courage.”

She eyed him, then snorted again, half amused, half dismissive.

The crew gathered along benches and crates, clattering bowls and spoons in a riot of noise. The stew was salty, coarse, but hot—and after so many nights of wandering on dry bread, Merlin found it almost heavenly.

The captain raised a wooden cup, the light from the swinging lamps catching on his rings. “To our voyage!” he said, his voice carrying above the din. “To fair winds, full nets, and—” he glanced at Merlin, “—the strange fellow who juggles apples better than my men juggle sense. May his stories be worth the crossing.”

The men banged their bowls in approval, and someone sloshed ale across the table in a premature cheer. Merlin lifted his own cup—a rough clay thing that smelled faintly of seawater—and inclined his head.

“May the sea forgive us for whatever this is,” he said quietly, which drew laughter from those close enough to hear.

The captain smiled thinly. “Well, Master Juggler, you’ve bought your supper. Now let’s hear what else you’ve got in that clever tongue of yours.”

All eyes turned toward him. The ship rocked gently, the firelight playing over faces browned and lined by salt and sun. Merlin set his spoon aside, leaned back, and met the expectant silence.

Then, just before speaking, he smiled—a small, private thing, half amusement, half memory.

And began—

"In a land of myth and a time of magic, the destiny of a great kingdom rests on the shoulders of a young boy...His name? Arthur. Arthur Pendragon."

Chapter Text

The wind worried the sails as a mother worries a fevered child.
Lantern-light trembled on the sea’s skin, painting restless gold on the black waves.
Merlin sat upon a coil of rope, cloak pooled round his boots, staff beside him like a tame spear.
The sailors had eaten, badly but enough, and now they demanded story instead of bread.
The captain nodded toward him — and so he began.

“In a land of myth, and a time of magic,” he said, voice quiet but sure, “the destiny of a great kingdom rested on the shoulders of a young boy.
His name — Arthur. Arthur Pendragon.”

He let the syllables hang there, as if waiting for the sea to echo them back.

“He was born beneath a curse. His father, Uther, had called upon a sorceress to shape deceit into love — and from that falsehood came a true child.
A son born of magic, though the king would spend the rest of his life hunting the very power that made his heir possible.”

He smiled thinly; several sailors shifted, whispering of tyrants they’d known. He made the first lie.

“To guard the boy, he was raised among common folk.
Until the day destiny, impatient thing, dragged him by the collar to the princehood of Camelot.”

The ship creaked.
Merlin’s eyes half-closed as memory tugged behind his words.

“He met his servant first — a thin fool who could not hold his tongue nor his temper, who had a talent for trouble and a knack for survival.”
His mouth twitched. “The boy threw a bucket at the prince, and the prince drew a sword, and that was the start of legend.”

A ripple of laughter.
Merlin continued, voice deepening, like the sea itself. It would be fun to make it a bit dramatic, would it not?

“Camelot then was gold on the outside, rot within.
The king’s hatred of sorcery lay heavy as fog. Every spark of power snuffed, every whisper silenced.
Yet magic crept where laws could not.
In the dark woods, the old ways lingered; dragons slept beneath mountains; and a prophet dreamed in chains.”

He glanced down into the water, as though he could see through it to that same cavern, to the coiled shape that had once spoken his name.

“Kilgharrah, the last of the great dragons — fire made wisdom, chained by Uther’s fear.
He told the boy—” here Merlin paused, considering, “—he told the servant, that their fates were bound. That the prince and the fool would rise together, or fall as one.”

A heart-beat pause.

“And so they did rise. They fought monsters born of grief and envy — witches and shades, and one called Nimueh, whose beauty was the first lie she told.
They faced serpents that wore men’s faces, knights turned to ghosts, and a sword so pure it would wound its bearer before any foe.
There was Morgana too — once kind, once gentle, until pain taught her to see only enemies.
Her sister, Morgause, whispered that power and vengeance were the same.
Together they brought darkness that no torch could chase away.
And yet… in the heart of it, the young king and his servant still laughed, still fought, still believed that right could triumph if only they tried hard enough.”

The ship rolled; the lantern swung, throwing light across his lined face — youth restored, but eyes ancient.

“They found the dragonlord, Balinor, last of his kind — and he taught the servant the speech of fire."
Merlin coughed at that memory, the salty tang of the ocean kissing his eyelashes. "On that day, dragons flew again over Albion, and men looked up in fear and awe, not knowing which they felt more." True, more fear than anything, but y'know one person must have been awed.
Years passed. The boy became the king his father had never managed to be.
He drew the sword from the stone, not by strength, but by worth." Better not say it was a ruse to improve a sulky man.
"The blade was called Excalibur, and it was promised to him by the Lady of the Lake, forged by a dragon." Better not say it was forged by the king's late father-in-law, and that poor poor servant boy argued tenaciously with a dragon to get it's breath which may have resulted on a very bad attack.
He gathered knights: Lancelot, pure of heart; Gwaine, drunk of spirit; Percival, strong as mountain roots; Elyan, brother of the queen.
And Guinevere herself — once a maid, then a queen, her kindness stronger than any steel her father wrought.”

Merlin looked down, fingers tight upon his knee.

“There were victories enough to fill books.
The Cup of Life. The Questing Beast. The rise and fall of Albion’s enemies.
But destiny, as I have learned, does not end in triumph. It simply… folds upon itself.”

The wind sighed through the rigging.
The sailors leaned in, scarcely blinking.

“Camlann came at last — friend against friend, prophecy against hope.
The king rode to meet his end, not as conqueror, but as man.
Beside him stood the servant — still foolish, still stubborn, still hiding the truth of who he was.”

Merlin’s throat tightened; he hid it behind a sip from a dented mug.

“When the dust settled, the king lay dying.
And the servant carried him to the water’s edge, where the Lady waited once more.
The sword was returned. The promise kept.
They say the king sleeps still, in Avalon, until the land calls him home again.”

He fell silent.
Only the creak of timber, the hiss of spray.

A sailor whispered, awed, “And the servant? What became of him?”

Merlin glanced up, a faint smile ghosting across his lips.

“Ah. Some say he went mad with grief. Some that he turned to stone.
Some say he wanders the world still, waiting.
Lonely people like to tell stories about lonely people, you see — it makes them feel less alone.”

A gust of laughter.
Merlin’s gaze drifted toward the horizon — eastward, where dawn was beginning to fret the clouds.

The captain stretched, breaking the spell. “A fine tale,” he said, voice rough. “If half of it’s true, your Arthur was a marvel.”

“All tales are half true,” Merlin replied. “It’s the better half that lives.”

The sailors set to their duties again.
Already the myth was growing larger than the man, that man he had loved and cherished and admired. He shook his head as if to clear out water. He was probably drunk. Admire Arthur? His admirable lack of manners, certainly.

The sea smelled of change, and far in the east a gull cried, thin as a promise.

He thought, not without irony,

So this is how legends begin, with a story told well enough to outlast him. Arthur would be pleased.

***

Morning came not as a dawn, but as a slow unblinding.
The fog had crept in overnight, soft as breath, and wrapped the ship until sea and sky became one pale, formless world.
The sailors moved through it like ghosts, voices muffled, ropes creaking in the white hush.

Merlin sat awake long before the bell rang, his back against a barrel of dried fish. The boards beneath him sweated with salt, and the air smelled of brine, tallow, and the indefinable musk of men who have shared too much air for too long.

By the time the fog thinned, land was showing itself shyly — green and brown, the kind of hesitant earth that looked as though it had not yet decided whether to belong to the sea. The sailors cheered, though none could yet name the place. It might have been Gaul, or some other stretch of coast that answered to whichever kingdom had the loudest army that month.

They rowed the last mile, their song uneven but spirited. The smell of pine came down the wind; gulls screeched above, circling in hungry benediction. When the ship at last scraped against the shingle, the crew sprang to life with the energy of men who have been still too long.

“Up, jugglers and gods alike!” the cook bellowed — the broad woman with arms like flour sacks and a laugh that seemed to live somewhere in her chest. “You, golden eyes! You’ve hands, haven’t you? Make them useful!”

Merlin, who had been quietly watching the coastline unfold, blinked and rose with an unconvincing sigh. “Golden eyes, indeed,” he muttered. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

The ship’s belly opened like a stubborn beast — crates, barrels, ropes, and sacks tumbled forth in an untidy procession. Merlin fell into step with the others, passing down bundles of cloth, bolts of wool, jars of salt, and the occasional pig that protested its fate with piercing eloquence. The wood of the dock was slick beneath his boots, the planks damp with algae and the slosh of waves.

“Mind your step,” someone called as a barrel rolled past him and into the sea with a satisfying plop.

“I rather think it minds its own,” Merlin replied.

By mid-morning, the ship was half emptied, and the crew sprawled like children after chores. The captain was haggling with a man on the dockside — a merchant by his dress, or possibly a priest by his expression — while gulls dived greedily at crumbs left on the deck.

Merlin leaned against a pile of nets, flexing his sore hands. He was not unused to work, but it had been some time since he’d done it for others. There was something oddly satisfying about the ache of honest labour — so long as it came with a meal.

The cook approached, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’ve got a good back on you,” she said, not unkindly. “And a better tongue. That story of yours last night — had half of them thinking they were kings by the time they slept.”

Merlin gave a small, crooked smile. “I’ll take no responsibility for delusions of grandeur. It never ends well.”

She laughed. “So you say. But it’s good to see the men laugh again. You’ve a knack, I’ll give you that.” She paused, studying him with a shrewd eye. “Where will you go, then? You’ve the look of a man with nowhere in mind.”

Merlin considered. The harbour stretched ahead, full of motion and noise — men shouting in tongues he half-recognised, children chasing hens through puddles, a dog barking at a fish twice its size. Beyond the docks rose a low cluster of thatched roofs, thin smoke rising like the ghost of a map. He had thought, vaguely, to keep walking until the road ran out, but the truth was he had nowhere particular left to go.

“I hadn’t got that far,” he admitted.

The cook snorted. “Didn’t think so. You’ve the look of a wanderer — all memory and no direction. Come with me then. My village is three miles inland, near the oak fields. You’ll find a meal, and maybe work, if your stories stretch to stirring porridge.”

“Only if the porridge behaves,” he said dryly.

She gave him a look somewhere between suspicion and amusement. “We’ll see. Name’s Maire.”

“Merlin,” he began automatically, then coughed. “Myrddin. With a ‘y.’”

“Odd name.”

“Odd life.”

That won a chuckle. “Right then, Myrddin. Fetch your bundle. The road’s no shorter for staring at it.”

He slung his modest belongings — cloak, bowl, the same worn knife — over his shoulder. The path curved away from the shore in a lazy ribbon of mud, the fields beyond glinting with dew and promise.

Behind them, the ship’s crew shouted their goodbyes, already busy hauling in new rope, new cargo, new stories to tell. Merlin raised a hand in answer, though his thoughts were elsewhere — on the fading sea-mist, on the weight of the air that no longer smelled of salt but of soil, and on the strange, persistent feeling that the world had quietly turned another page without waiting for him.

He followed Maire inland, boots sinking in soft earth, the road rising gently ahead.

The sky stretched wide and pale above, empty of dragons, kings, and all the old things that once crowded it.

Still — he found, to his surprise — it was pleasant to walk beside someone who asked nothing of him but a story at supper.

The road inland wound through meadows the colour of new bronze, stitched with wildflowers and bordered by hedges thick with hawthorn. Crows followed the pair for a time, as though curious about the strange traveller in his ragged cloak, but even they gave up after the first mile. The air had a damp sweetness, heavy with the scent of earth and clover, and the distant bleating of sheep stitched the silence into something almost companionable.

Maire walked at a steady pace, basket slung over her arm, shawl knotted tightly across her shoulders. She talked without expectation of reply, which suited Merlin well enough. He listened, half-attending, as she explained which fields belonged to which families, who had married whom, and which neighbours were worth avoiding. Her voice was broad and warm, softened by age and salt.

By the time the roofs of the village came into view — a scatter of timber and thatch nestled between gentle hills — the afternoon had begun to lean toward gold. Smoke curled from hearths, mingling with the smell of damp straw and bread. Chickens strutted across the path, as if personally affronted by strangers.

It reminded him, startlingly, of Ealdor.
That had been a lifetime ago.

“Welcome to Caerwyl,” Maire said, as they passed under a crude wooden arch that served as both gate and declaration of pride. “Don’t let the smell fool you. It’s mostly sheep.”

“I’d guessed pig,” Merlin said mildly.

“Give it time. The wind changes.”

She led him through the narrow lanes, where children paused their games to stare, then fled giggling. A dog barked, was ignored. The village had the air of a place that had not been surprised in years.

Maire’s cottage stood near the edge, with a small yard fenced in wattle and filled with the stubborn herbs she grew for her stews and remedies. She pushed the door open with her hip.

“Mind the beam,” she warned. “It’s shorter than it looks.”

Merlin ducked just in time. The space within was dim but clean — rushes on the floor, a fire on the hearth, a bench beneath the window, and a table scarred by long use. A cat, old and imperious, regarded him from a stool as though questioning his credentials.

“You can put your things there,” Maire said, nodding to a corner. “I’ve no room for guests proper, but the loft’s dry and the wind doesn’t find it much.”

“Dry and windless. Luxury indeed.”

She chuckled. “Wait till the rain. You’ll change your mind.”

He did not, though he came close. The next few days blurred into a gentle monotony of weather and work. Maire rose before the dawn, tended her small flock, stirred the pot on the fire, and argued cheerfully with whoever came to buy her herbs. Merlin found himself drawn into her routines before he quite realised it.

It began with the sick child.

The mother had come to Maire in tears — fever, rashes, the usual litany of worry — and Maire, bustling for her jars, muttered that she’d lost her mortar somewhere in the chaos of the morning. Merlin, seeing the herbs scattered across the table, reached for a stone bowl and ground them with easy precision.

Maire paused mid-sentence. “You’ve done this before.”

“A little,” he said, trying not to sound too much like someone who had once brewed antidotes for kings.

By the end of the week, he had somehow become her helper; by the end of the month, her partner. His knowledge of poultices, tinctures, and feverworts was too uncanny not to be noticed, though he explained it away as “a knack from the hills.” The villagers, used to mysteries they could name, accepted that.

Language came slower. The words here were thickened by centuries and borders, their vowels softened like bread dough. Maire, patient as only those used to thick-headed men can be, corrected him between customers, switching easily between her rough Latin and the local tongue.

“You sound like a priest half the time,” she teased once, when he tried to ask for bread and accidentally invoked something sacred.

“Priests,” he said, “have far less to say worth hearing.”

He then thought of the monks, and shivered at the thought of the entirety of Albion being converted to such soulless believers in some unknown god.

Still, he learned. Enough to barter, to diagnose, to tell the small harmless lies that keep peace in a small place. He told them his name was Myrddin, a wandering herbalist; that he had lost his home to war; that he preferred quiet to company. These things, being partly true, convinced them entirely.

The seasons turned. Summer ripened into its heavy, humming fullness, then thinned to the bare bones of autumn. The fields yellowed, then blackened with frost. Merlin mended fences, mixed tonics, buried the old, and delivered the young. His hands learned again the weight of the world in smaller measures.

Sometimes, in the still of night, he would step outside and look east, where the stars seemed brighter, crueler, and wonder what part of himself he was losing to this peace. The air smelled of woodsmoke and sheep fat. The wind spoke no language he could name.

He found himself less lonely, though not less alone.

One evening, Maire poured him a cup of weak ale and studied him over the rim of her own. “You’ve the look of a man who’s forgotten how to stop running,” she said.

“Perhaps I’ve just forgotten where I was going.”

“Same thing, most days.”

They drank in companionable silence.

Outside, the night gathered softly around the eaves, and from somewhere far off came the cry of a hunting owl — a sound that might once have stirred his fears about the Camlann. Now it only made him reach for another log for the fire.

The summer that year had been a kind one — soft rains, fat barley, and a wind that smelled of salt from the western sea. Caerwyl drowsed in its contentment, roofs golden with thatch, hens muttering underfoot. Merlin had grown comfortably older; the sort of older that suited him, with silver along the temples and a stoop he no longer had to feign. He and Maire still lived at the cottage near the stream, their shelves heavy with mortars and dried herbs and jars of honey.

It was late afternoon when the noise came.

A sound first mistaken for thunder — then shouts, then the unmistakable clang of iron.

Maire was at the window before he could stop her. “Merciful saints,” she whispered. “They’ve come again.”

Merlin joined her, and saw the dust — a low brown smear rolling up the road. Hooves. A banner snapping red and black. Riders, armoured and hard-faced, their horses lathered white.

“Inside,” he said, already knowing she would not listen.

“Inside yourself,” she snapped. “I’ve neighbours to warn.”

“Maire—”

But she was already out the door, apron flapping, her voice cutting through the growing din. He followed, staff in hand, though his heart felt as old as the oak on the hill.

By the time he reached the green, chaos had taken root. Men with spears drove the villagers together; children cried, hens scattered. Smoke crawled upward from the baker’s roof. A soldier struck a man down for speaking too loudly.

The leader of the riders — the same Deyrn who had claimed them seasons past — dismounted heavily. His beard had gone grey, but the eyes were unchanged: cold, appraising. “You’ve been holding back your due,” he said to no one and everyone. “I warned you once.”

Maire stepped forward, chin high. “We’ve given more than we had. There’s no grain left that isn’t in your bellies.”

Deyrn’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Then I’ll take what’s left of the village instead.”

It happened in a tangle of shouts and motion. Soldiers seized her, rough hands on her arms. Merlin moved before he thought — just one step, just enough to draw attention.

“Stop,” he said, voice steady but quiet. “There’s no need.”

“Who are you?” one of them demanded.

“Only the healer. She’s nothing to you.”

“She’s the mouth that answers when not spoken to.”

The sword came down fast — too fast for thought, too fast for mercy.

Maire’s cry was short, cut in half by the blade. She crumpled, her apron blooming red.

For a heartbeat the world stilled. Merlin’s hand twitched — the faintest crackle of gold beneath his skin. Power surged, instinctive, hungry to be loosed. The air itself seemed to flinch.

He could have stopped them.

He did not.

A whisper of wind passed through the square; the magic subsided, unspent. The fear of centuries — the memory of pyres, of torches, of his own kind driven into ground and water — froze his will.

A soldier struck him behind the knee, and he fell. “Bring him,” Deyrn said. “A healer’s worth more alive.”

They dragged him through the dust. He did not resist. The villagers watched — some weeping, some expressionless, one or two already turning away. That was the worst of it: not the blows, but their silence.

The road to Deyrn’s stronghold was long and steep, cutting through forest and rock. By the time they reached the gate, dusk had bruised the sky. The castle itself was a half-finished thing — wooden palisades grafted onto older stone, a mouth of a fortress still learning how to bite.

Inside, the air smelled of sweat, smoke, and new power. Men shouted orders; the clang of hammers echoed. They pushed Merlin toward a low hall where Deyrn sat, cup in hand.

“So,” the warlord said. “The wise man of Caerwyl. You’ll serve here now. My men die too easily; perhaps you’ll fix that.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Merlin replied, his voice low.

“I expect no miracles. Just obedience.”

Merlin looked at him — at the tired brutality in the man’s face.

They took him to a corner room, bare save for a bench, a bowl, and a slit of window. The stone was damp, but the silence suited him. That night, when all else slept, he sat on the floor, back against the wall, and stared at his hands. They still trembled from holding power too long unused.

Through the narrow window he could see the faint glow of the village below, smoke still rising. Somewhere down there, Maire’s body lay beneath the oak.

He whispered a word — not a spell, just her name — and for a moment the air stilled, as if listening.

“I could have saved you,” he murmured, the words scraping his throat. “But they’d have burned the rest for it.”

He drew his cloak tighter, and leaned his head against the cold stone.

Outside, the night carried on, untroubled.