death to the balladeer

Said the Sun to the Earth; “I will go, and I will return, again and again, until my light is gone.” And the Earth, certain now of the pattern, began to hope for the next arrival even before the present warmth had faded.

“I will follow you anywhere. I will always return to your side,” Merlin says quietly, not as promise but as truth. Arthur smiles, as if Merlin has said something obvious, something already known.

Said the Sun to the Earth; “Even in my absence, I will still be with you. You will carry my heat in your stone, my gold in your fields.” And the Earth, unable to speak, answered with a turn of the seasons.

“You’ve always been here,” Arthur says, and in the weight of those words is a history they have not yet spoken aloud.

---

Merlin is pushed much too far in his secret keeping, so far that he's driven into a comatose state that reveals his magic to Arthur. While Arthur grapples with this devastating news and tries to figure what he's to do, Merlin rots in his strange dreams built up over years of secrets and guilt, striving against himself to tell Arthur the truth.

Notes:

art by https://kissme-withyour-cherrylipstick.tumblr.com/... ggo look at it.... look….. https://www.tumblr.com/sonny-d/793275501556989952/acbb-season-again-guys-art-is-by

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

You cannot continue this much longer, Emrys; it will kill you. Hiding, refusing your very essence; one man can only handle such a great destiny alone for so long. Your time has almost come.

This was told to Merlin by an old witch, as are all odd prophecies. Though, this one happens to be different from the rest, as it is a warning to Merlin personally, about himself rather than his kingdom or his king. He wishes he could discard the thought, but it circles restlessly ‘round his mind as he tosses and turns on the hard forest floor.

“Merlin.”

Merlin is thrown harshly from his thoughts but does not yet turn to face Arthur.

“I know you’re awake. I could hear you shuffling around.”

Merlin turns himself to face Arthur.

“What was that sorcerer talking about? What did she mean?”

You cannot continue this much longer, Emrys; it will kill you.

After nearly flinching at the question, Merlin opens and closes his mouth to consider his reply. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must’ve hit your head too hard.”

“You clearly do, otherwise you wouldn’t have spent the whole way back pouting.”

“I was not pouting, I was thinking.”

“Thinking about what the witch said. Because you know something you aren’t telling me.”

“No, I don’t. She was just some crazy old lady, spewing nonsense to save her life.” It isn’t entirely a lie; he truly does not know, though the notion does not matter much as he cannot easily differentiate lie from truth when from his own mouth. He decides he is in fact quite grateful not to know, lest he would fall very deep into something whose edges have loomed inevitably closer to him since his very first day in Camelot, and even in his time in Ealdor. He has spent much more of his life than he fully comprehends watching his reflection upon the surface of this great deepness, sneaking ever closer to its border.

“If you say so. Magic does make people crazy.”

Hiding, refusing your very essence; one man can only handle such a great destiny alone for so long.

“Yeah, makes people crazy.”

Your time has almost come.

Merlin feels a shiver of lightning stretch throughout his bones.

“Seriously, Merlin, you can tell me what’s going on.”

The sorcerer makes to create a clever response before his thoughts are again obstructed with that fiery strike sinking into his flesh.

“It’s nothing. I’m just tired,” Merlin lies before flipping again so Arthur sees only his back, and the words of the witch may once again swim loops in his mind.

Though sleep did eventually come to Merlin, it was far from restful. He slept for what he guesses to be an hour before waking with a jolt, breath coming in sharp gasps and chest heaving as his eyes dart around. The campfire crackles faintly, its glow now reduced to dim embers, casting flickering shadows on the surrounding trees. Arthur's steady breathing fills the silence, grounding Merlin momentarily. He presses his palms to his temples, trying to quiet the echoes of the witch’s voice that have begun to torment him once again.

Your time has almost come, Emrys. Hiding, refusing your very essence... it will kill you.

The words repeat in a relentless chant like a wardance through his head, each time louder, more suffocating. The mantra repeats again and again, his hands tighten on his temples as if trying to push the noise out of his head. His eyes squeeze shut as he feels his limbs grow heavy and his arms drop to the ground beside him and he hurts, he aches, he feels and feels so many sensations that a human should never be forced to until, suddenly, it’s gone.

It feels as though his head has been pulled from underwater, his ears draining and his eyes clearing up. He looks to where Arthur lay, peacefully in slumber, and reaches a hand to place on his shoulder, fingers slipping as though through mist. He feels the wind and the trees hold their breath as he watches Arthur disintegrate into dew on the grass.

The forest holds its breath, eerily silent, as if it, too, mourns.

Merlin’s spine strains upright as he chokes out a gasp, awoken disagreeably from an even more disagreeable dream, sweat sliding ungainly along his temple, and heart trembling with every great heave of his lungs, all in time with the sickening mantra of the witch.

Your time has almost come, Emrys. Hiding, refusing your very essence… it will kill you.

These words claw shreds from his soul, peeling the shell of his mind to reveal something deep within him. His arms curl upon themselves and his fingernails as talons sink into his palms while magic threatens to explode from within him. It cuts down his very will to fight, slashing and scraping from inside, accessing every dark crevice and folding it outside of himself. His skin ripples over his bones as waves of magic flood throughout his veins, indiscriminately turning blue and red lines to bursting gold, rushing up from a deep well inside his body and making to push valiantly out.

Beside his catastrophe of motion, Arthur stirs from a light sleep, groggy as he mumbles,“Merlin…?” His eyes soon widen, upon witness of an abhorrent, unspeakably nauseating sight.

Merlin, or whatever he seems to be at this moment, lifts ruptured finger tips to claw at his corroded neck, voice straining through infernal growling that seems to come from within him but not from him to produce words; “I can’t… take it… anymore…”

A violent tremor rips through his form, spilling out and trembling the earth beneath him, limbs barely attached falling limp beside him. Molten light glimmers as if trying to escape from his smoldering skin, veins straining and ready to snap. His breath leaves him unwillingly, heaving the full mass of his figure with every ragged huff.

In this wardance, Arthur fully awakens; “Merlin!” Panic threads through his nerves and pulls at his bones, prompting him to reach for his hurting friend. Though, his hand instantly recoils at a searing sensation curling into him.

Eyes typically glistening valiantly in blue wrench open, unseeing behind a palisade of malefic gold that drips like wax down cheekbones of stone, falling to the corners of thin lips that tear open to accommodate ancient words made of great and foreign power. The air fills with great gales of mad energy. Then, suddenly as it began, the winds sweep up the poor boy they assaulted, and the magic they carry consumes him entirely.

Merlin’s body goes rigid as he collapses to the hard forest ground, a hard thump in the quietude of the stilled forest. Arthur barely catches him in time, heart pounding in his chest and shocked into silence as he lightly taps Merlin’s cheek.

Receiving no response, Arthur begins to mumble,“Merlin? Merlin, what’s wrong with you?”

Again, Arthur receives no answer, only shallow breaths from Merlin’s flaccid form, his skin warm with golden trails still wet on his cheeks, streaking down from his eyes still wide and gold. An aura of foreboding surrounds them both.

Arthur wastes no time in packing up their camp and riding so swiftly back to Camelot he hardly remembers to breathe. Arthur almost hears Merlin’s scolding as he greatly strains the injuries gained in their journey, but does not find it in himself to care for his own affliction when Merlin suffers unimaginable more. Mind reeling from what he has seen, Arthur rushes through Camelot’s front gate, guided much more by the memory of his muscles than his head.

Nearly taking the door from its hinges, Arthur busts into Gaius’ chambers, Merlin cradled in his arms. Given the time, Gaius is deep in his sleep, and is quite startled to be aroused so.

“Gaius, I know it’s late, I’m sorry. Please, help,” Arthur babbles as Gaius slumps his way across the room, still sluggish with the effects of slumber. He immediately straightens upon seeing the boy cradled in Arthur’s tight grasp, and the streaks of gold pouring from his orifices. Gaius guides Arthur to the his cot to lay Merlin down.

Arthur looks to Gaius with nothing but fear in his eyes. “Gaius, what’s wrong with him?”

Exasperation floods Gaius’ face, knowing the implications of the gold dancing upon Merlin’s cheeks; that Merlin is fighting his magic, and that Arthur will likely find out. Gaius only prays that he is not the one forced to tell Arthur and betray his apprentice.

Moving with great strain, Gaius makes to light a candle and gather rags, setting both on the table beside his cot. Gaius’ hands tremble as he collects various supplies from his dimly lit chambers, the shadows dancing on the walls seeming to mock him and his cowardice. Just as Arthur grows impatient and opens his mouth to let free inquiries that feel much more like accusations, Gaius thrusts a bucket into his hands; “I need water. Go to the well, quickly.”

Arthur looks as though he may protest, demanding answers, but seems to choose Merlin’s life over his own greed for truth. The pound of his boots sounds through the corridor, and Gaius stares near dumbfounded at his door, left ajar in Arthur’s haste. He feels the weight of the secrets he is now doomed to share, weighed down as he turns back to Merlin and begins to analyze his condition.

Gaius removes Merlin’s neckerchief and pulls down the collar of his shirt to reveal that gold traces through the veins of Merlin’s neck down into his collarbones. Eyebrows raising in confusion and disgruntlement, Gaius begins to wipe the glistening smears from Merlin’s cheeks and sighs. Just as he moves to put his head in his hands, Arthur bursts back through the door, water nearly splashing from the bucket in his hands.

Arthur brings the bucket to Gaius’ side and Gaius begins to dampen a rag to continue cleaning Merlin’s skin. His focus is disturbed upon Arthur’s continued questioning.“What’s wrong with him, Gaius? It’s really serious, isn’t it? That’s why you’re acting like that.”

If he was not being watched, Gaius would have flipped his eyes to the ceiling and cursed the name of every god he knows, but he instead must stay collected. Having forgotten to invent a witty excuse in the time he tried to buy himself, Gaius states with a fake calm,“It’s… a sickness, I’ve seen it before. Do not worry, I will cure him.”

Arthur makes a face of utter befuddlement in question of Gaius’ intellect. “Gaius, do not lie to me.”

Gaius quirks his head up and attempts to invent a good reasoning for his lame excuse, before being swiftly cut off.“Do not lie again. I may not have your extent of knowledge, Gaius, but I am not stupid. I know that nowhere in all of these books would I find a man’s eyes turning yellow and the entire forest shaking to be a symptom of a common illness. This is the work of magic. Now, tell me why he has the eyes of a sorcerer.”

Lips pressed tight, Gaius looks to Merlin, silently begging that he wake up and snake his way out of this unfortunate scenario, as he always has, and upon accepting that he will not, begs his forgiveness.

“Answer me. He isn't a sorcerer, Gaius, I know he isn’t, so what is wrong with him?” Arthur looks desperate.

Gaius opens his mouth to talk before closing it and giving an apologetic look.

“He isn’t a sorcerer,” Arthur pleads.

“I’m sorry, Sire.”

Arthur looks to Gaius, almost offended, mouth slightly agape,“No. No, Merlin is not a sorcerer. I would have noticed.”

Gaius makes a face of sorrow and apology, both to Arthur and Merlin, who he sees as his son and has now betrayed. Arthur returns the expression with one of equal sorrow and acceptance rather than apology.

“You’re serious.”

Arthur turns as though he may walk out the door and not come back, and Gaius very well believes he would. Instead, he paces beside the door before turning to Gaius and nearly pleading “Gaius, swear to me you aren't lying. Swear to me that you speak the absolute truth. ”

“I’m sorry, Sire, I-”

“Swear it.” Arthur cuts in.

Gaius takes a long breath. “It’s true, Sire. Merlin has magic. Many believe him to be the most powerful sorcerer to walk this land.”

Arthur’s expression fills with disbelief, nearly humor, before he returns to his pacing. “I could have you both executed for this. For housing a sorcerer, for lying to your king for nearly a decade.”

Gaius opens his mouth to speak, to defend himself, before he is promptly interrupted.

“My father would have.”

“Then I pray you are a better man than he.”

Arthur scowls at the comment, seemingly remembering many misdeeds of his father before him, and aiming to right his wrongs; “Consider yourselves lucky. For how much you’ve both done for me, despite lying through your teeth at every turn, I owe a fair trial.”

Using every ounce of will not to slam the door behind him, Arthur promptly storms from Gaius’ chambers back to his own, every step away from Merlin’s fading form feeling like another betrayal. His fists clench at his sides so that his nails drive into his palms, and his jaw aches with the effort of refraining from screaming. Upon reaching his chambers, he dismisses the guards at his door, their presence only enhancing the foulness of his current disposition.

His room greets him with great silence. He paces like a lion in a cage, eyes wild with fury and every movement laced with infuriated anguish. Even in all that he’s seen, all that he’s suffered, between the betrayals of Morgana and Agravaine, this knowledge hurts more than he can stand. He feels as though he needs to take a knife to his chest, cut out his throbbing heart so that it ceases the flood of sorrow that ravages his head.

Though the view of a hunting dagger within its sheath at his bedside tempts him, he resists, instead ripping his tunic from his form, soaked with rage-induced perspiration. Hurling the red cloth, he makes to sit at his table before pouring a goblet of wine, indulging in a sip to calm himself before once again being overcome with frustration and agitation that too at a wall. Though, it does nothing to quell the tides of rage storming beneath his breast.

Wood screeching on the hard stone floor, Arthur flings himself from his chair to stalk back and forth within his room, boots scraping hard on the floor with every step, arms taut at his sides. He feels an overwhelming need to beat something with his fists until they are raw and red with blood, but every object he turns to could not bear the weight of his torment, and every inch of his chambers reminds him of his servant.

He paces until the drag of his feet is unbearable, and his body sags with the ache of travel and the agonizing weight of betrayal. He strips of his boots, tossing them angrily and slamming himself onto his bed, feeling the heat of his body infect the previously serene cold. He does not blow out the candle at his bedside.

Arthur wishes for sleep, to experience the parody of death, but the gods above are not so merciful. He rolls in his bed like a chicken over a fire, eventually taking to spreading out fully and staring daggers into his ceiling, willing it to crumble atop his head and grant him glorious unconsciousness.

Arthur sits in the chair as though he had been dropped like a ragdoll. Distantly, he knows his chambers are a mess, but he cannot feel it around him, only the rage within him, eternally unquelled. His mind is the loudest thing around him, shrieking with a mix of voices he could not begin to pick apart. He thinks he may go mad, more than he already is, with the piercing sound. Eventually, the strain bleeds to exhaustion, his jaw loosening, his chest sagging, and the voices become less like commands and more like a hum, until his eyes close against the ceiling’s relentless stare and sleep finally drags him under.

The silence is absolute.

Arthur finds himself within the upper corridors of his castle, where the wind is meant to blow through the large slits in the stone, but today he finds that the air is eerily still, even that within his lungs. The corridor stretches long beneath an indigo sky, slivers of moonlight illuminating torches lining the back wall. Arthur vaguely recalls that the torches are meant to be set ablaze rather than lit by another source.

The notion quickly diminishes alongside the torches, one by one, as if chased away by an unknowable hand. The darkness thickens as it stalks towards him, its bounds becoming unknown, and he wills his body to turn from it, to run, but he’s never been one to perform such cowardice. Instead, he finds that his feet move steadily towards it, and his fingers reach out.

Fear wells within him, though it does not stop him, as he marches valiantly to the black web before him, watching as it folds over itself like oil in water. The corridor stretches and retracts around him, pushing him to his destination, until he is close enough for the darkness to surround him, and rewrite the castle stones beside him into tapestries woven with the gold of fate, displaying scenes both familiar and unfamiliar; the coronation of Guinevere, the funeral pyre of his father, and an empty pyre on which a sorcerer would be burned. He sees Gaius being led to it, a grave reminder of a past mistake, but Gaius begins to morph, straightening into a young boy with hair resembling a raven and eyes shining with prophetic gold.

The boy waves a hand before himself, the gold of his eyes flowing into another great vision, this time of a girl with equally raven-esque hair and golden eyes, dressed in garb of brilliant green that wilts into a tattered black, eyes darkening with hatred, mouth agape in a scream, stretching further until her jaw falls from her head and her eyes melt to the ground. Mirth pools unto the floor, rising higher and higher, threatening to consume him, and eventually it does.

Eyes washed over with mirth soon clear, and are revealed to a courtyard of lush green, light dripping in from the skies above illuminating the lushness. The sun soon begins to fall, fading over a far horizon. The ground arches like the underside of a dome, sky curving beneath his feet while the stars hang in puddles across the ceiling. Trees begin to grow sideways, roots exposed and wriggling like poisoned worms, their leaves shimmering with whispers that crawl into Arthur’s ears and make him forget himself.

The moon looms enormous in the distance, no longer a shape in the sky but a presence, eyes wide and watchful. Its face cracks down the center like an old mask, glowing faintly from within. Beneath it stands a woman with her back turned, and Arthur finds he knows her.

She turns herself partially to him, showing once again from behind her raven’s hair eyes of molten gold. She outstretches a hand, palm reaching to him, then twisting to outstretch a finger, pointing not at but behind him. He turns to see his castle - no, not his castle, this is a blasphemous, sacreligious mockery of his castle. It is a skeleton, a ruin stretched impossibly tall into the sky, with glowing windows blinking like eyes in its hollow ribs. There are people inside, shifting silhouettes moving without sound, their mouths locked open in silent laughter or screams. One of them wears his armor, another carries a tray of food that wilts into ash and blows into the night. A third limps forward with a familiar gait, hunched and thin, a flash of a crimson scarf over a violet tunic-

The wind returns at once, sharp and cold and loud. It screams through the corridor behind him, and the courtyard cracks like glass beneath his feet. The moon begins to fall, harsh and violent, and Arthur does not move. The woman is gone. The wind screams louder. He tries to breathe but the air is thick and suffocating, heavy with guilt and greed and devastation. His hands lift against his will, pressed flat to his chest, and suddenly there’s the warmth there of a heartbeat. He realizes with terror that it is not his own.

You knew, you always knew, but you would not open your eyes!

The ground gives way.

Arthur gasps, jerking violently upward. He feels the cold from the dream lingering still on his skin, beading at the base of his neck. His chest heaves in a hollow rhythm, lungs straining with exertion. His chambers are cloaked in the soft blue of twilight, moonlight casting faint lines over the stone walls with an air of abnormality, as if they are an illusion. As if he may touch them, and watch them peel away to reveal the watchful eyes of something quite ancient.

He drags a hand down his face, tracing the curve of his undereye, fingers trembling. He reminds himself that the throb in his chest is real, and not the imagined heat of someone else's heart beneath his own ribs. His pulse is rapid and uneasy, as though his body has only just remembered it's alive. He sits up, blankets tangled around his legs, and stares at the opposite wall like it might speak.

It doesn’t.

For a moment, one disorienting, disembodied moment, he forgets that he is livid. The dream had been so strange, so suffocating and disorienting, that its swept his mind blank with cold. But, he sits up, and the sharp corner of his overturned chair catches his eye. A goblet lies on its side by the hearth, wine long soaked into the rug. His armor stand is askew, one bracer hanging by its strap like a limp limb.

His shoulders ache. His arms feel heavy. He tries to shake it off, stand, dress, move like he always does, but every motion feels sluggish, and a half second too slow. The dream refuses to unhook itself. He still sees it in flashes; the skeletal castle, the upside-down sky, and that terrible, watchful moon.

His dream settles deep into his bones and through some god’s grace he sees past his terrible rage and into the words spoken by that evil witch the night before. He has a vague inkling of their implication push against his defenses, but he quickly shakes the thought, shoving his training shirt over his head and marching fakely valiant to the training grounds, that he might find solace through the shredding of a training dummy,

The training court is empty when he arrives, much attributed to the sun not yet cresting the horizon. The morning chill clings to the air in a damp shroud. Arthur picks up a dull sword, stares at the dummy positioned at the center of the space, and doesn't wait for ceremony.

He lunges. The strike is fast, punishing, nearly reckless. It lands with a crack loud enough to echo back at him from surrounding stone walls, jarring his shoulder and rattling down his spine. He clutches the hilt tighter, adamant not to loosen his grip for anything. Not the weight in his chest, nor the heat behind his eyes. He throws everything into each blow, the dream, the witch’s words, every act of betrayal and treason against him, and the sickening possibility of yet another. The dummy barely shifts, but Arthur imagines it collapsing under the force, splintering apart like the certainty in his life, like trust rendered to ash. He pants once, sharp and animal, then resets his feet and strikes again.

With each strike he remembers every vile incident of his kingship, the betrayal of Morgana, then of Agrivaine. He remembers the devastation of heartbreak upon seeing his own trusted knight take lips of his wife. He remembers the death of his father.

He remembers before he was crowned king. He remembers when Morgana nearly died, before she had betrayed her kingdom, when the people mourned her. Arthur had struck a training dummy under pouring rain, uncanny to how he does now. He also remembers that such an incident was vital in the lead up to Morgana’s betrayal, and chooses to lunge at the dummy, forcing his sword through in lieu of thinking about the implications of that notion.

He remembers Morgana’s final months, in which she slipped further and further every passing day, and not one person around her stopped to question what was wrong until it was too late.

Arthur stops himself with another blow before he is able to compare Morgana’s behavior to Merlin’s. It’s an absurd thought to have; Merlin is not only Arthur’s servant, but his closest friend, who has done nothing but save his life over and over for nearly a decade. Though, if he was able to mislead Arthur for such a time…

He wipes sweat from his brow and returns focus to his sword.

Later, he sits silently at his lone dining table within his chambers. The silence is eerie. Dinner arrives late.

Not by Merlin’s hands, but by a young, wide-eyed servant Arthur vaguely recognizes from the kitchens. The boy stumbles in with a tray too heavy for his arms, sloshes gravy onto the edge of the plate, and sets it down with graceless clatter. He bows, mutters out an honorary title and hurries out before Arthur can say anything, not that he planned to.

He stares at the plate for a long time.

Venison. Stewed turnips. A heel of bread gone crusty on the edge. Something green and wilted. It’s all perfectly fine, maybe even good, but he would never know, as his stomach recoils the moment he picks up the fork. Maybe it’s the silence of the chambers, save for the low popping of the hearth. Maybe it’s the ringing left in his arms from the relentless morning he spent at the training field. Maybe it’s the way the chair legs scrape across the stone too loudly when he sits.

But really, it’s that Merlin didn’t bring it.

It’s a stupid thing, really, to become so dependent on one person’s very presence. Even if Merlin’s been late with meals, or hasn’t brought them at all because he was off on ‘important errands,’ there was still the value of his attendance keeping Arthur at ease. But with this new servant, and without his own, something is wrong, it feels as though the room’s center of gravity has shifted.

He picks at the food with the side of his fork. The turnips squish against the plate. He watches the gravy pool at the edge and thinks about the sound of the training dummy cracking under his blows, the way it didn’t feel like enough.

He thinks about Morgana, her face rising out of memory. Her voice, once soft and determined, curdling into something cold and edged with fury. He does not know when that happened, when she slipped so far from him that he could no longer see her on the other side.

She used to come to him with her thoughts, her doubts, her worries about the visions. And he listened, at least, he thought he did. But he did not understand, did not try to understand, and when she stopped talking, he let her. In fact, he ignored it, and called it weakness, madness. Her silence became the edge of the chasm between them, and he stepped back instead of forward.

He thinks of what could have been if she’d had someone to let her speak, and to listen. Then, he thinks of Merlin.

His fork clatters to his plate and his chair scrapes against the floor as he clambers to his feet, in determination rather than the anger of the night before. His mouth is dry, and there’s a sensation in his head just west of an ache that compels him to move.

His dinner sits abandoned and he has the passing thought that if Merlin had brought it, he’d be awful sore that Arthur had hardly touched it. But Merlin had not brought it, and Arthur has a sneaking suspicion that he is to blame.

Merlin wakes; at least, he thinks he does. His eyes flicker open, to be met only with darkness and weight, to breath like a whetstone dragging across the soft of his ribs. There is no motion in his limbs, he cannot recall how to tell his body to move. It’s akin to floating in velvet sludge, thick and drowsed and just barely wrong.

He blinks once, and then he’s standing, and he feels deep within his bones the deadness of everything around him. Not in the sense of the morbid rotting of death, such is the opposite of life, but a hollowness, a silencing, an utter lack of life. The forest stands before him in perfect symmetry, a corridor of bark and bough without motion. Trees line up like cathedral pillars, hushed in reverent mockery. The leaves do not flutter. The soil beneath his feet does not sink or shift. Even the wind, a thing that should curl curiously through branches and thread itself through his hair, is present only in theory, a concept with no sensation. It moves, but does not touch.

Merlin steps forward. His boots do not crunch or echo. The world simply accepts him without notice. He feels immediately ill. He’s lived beside the forest across all time, breathing with the trees and laughing with the stream, leaving his mark on it as much as it left on him. But in this place, that connection is numbed like nerve endings soaked in snowmelt. There is nothing, not a whisper, not a thrum. Only hollow echo, as if this place had been painted to resemble life but not yet achieved it. It is a sick replica.

The sky above is bruised indigo, thick with forgotten hours. What light filters through the branches arrives not from the sun but from something internal, as though the air itself glows faintly with exhausted moonlight. Torch sconces, absurdly mounted along the trunks of trees, shimmer with a flame that does not burn, made instead of soft static. They line the path behind him, not ahead. He does not see what is ahead.

He walks for lifetimes, or maybe only minutes, until his feet feel raw. Suddenly, Arthur is before him.

He does not appear so much as become obvious, as though Merlin had somehow failed to notice his king standing just a few paces ahead all this time. He wears no crown, only armor, dull and unpolished, gleaming not with light but with the memory of it. His face is stone-calm, expression arrested mid-thought. He does not blink, nor does he shift his weight. Merlin cannot tell if he’s breathing, or if his heart still pumps.

He opens his mouth to speak, but the words are unsorted. They spill in confused syllables.

“The trees will not forgive me.”

Arthur does not react.

“You bled out in the starlight.”

The world tilts. The trees lean infinitesimally closer.

“I buried the sun.”

Arthur steps forward, not in threat, not in warmth. Simply forward. Like a verdict.

Merlin chokes, tries to speak the truth, tries to name what he is, but what leaves his mouth is foreign;

“Please…”

Arthur slams open the door to Gaius’ chambers once again, startling the poor old man, currently leaned over Merlin with a rag to his forehead. Arthur steps swiftly to his side. “Move.”

Gaius turns around with an expression of exasperation.“Pardon?”

Arthur doesn’t repeat himself. He’s already halfway to the bedside, eyes locked onto Merlin’s pale, sweat-damp face, expression unreadable but seething underneath. He lightly pushes past Gaius to stoop low and slide his arms beneath Merlin with surprising gentleness, as if he’s holding something breakable. His movements are careful, but deliberate, his grip sure. Merlin’s head lolls slightly against his shoulder.

Gaius steps forward, arms slightly outstretched. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Arthur turns, already heading for the door. “I’m taking him to my chambers.”

Gaius stiffens. “Arthur-”

“It’s more comfortable there,” Arthur bites out, eyes forward. “He’ll rest better.”

There’s a pause. A long one. Then, quieter, a flicker of guilt flashing across Arthur’s features.“This is my fault.”

Gaius begins to open his mouth in protest, though he is quickly shut down by the look stretched over Arthur’s features. It is something heavy, something unspoken, but crushing. Arthur’s face isn’t stoic anymore, not quite, and it’s not soft either, but hollowed out around the edges, as if he’s trying to hold together too many parts of himself all at once.

Despite attempts to once again object, his face has already betrayed him, eyebrows knit together in what could only be concern veiled behind authority. He sees the way Arthur holds Merlin, he sees the grip, tight but not clinging. Protective, but not possessive. It is resigned and resolute.

“…As you wish, sire,” Gaius says finally, voice dropping.

Arthur pauses, finally meeting his eyes.

“I will assist however you need.”

Arthur gives a small nod, and without another word, disappears through the threshold, the soft shuffle of Merlin’s limp form the only sound trailing behind him.

Arthur is halfway down the hallway before he realizes he forgot to put on his boots.

The stone is cold under his feet, damp from a leaking torch or from the hour, he doesn’t care. His arms are full of Merlin, crumpled and damp and barely breathing, and every step echoes like an accusation. He can feel Gaius’s eyes on his back as he storms down the hall, and he almost wants the man to shout at him, to stop him, to say something righteous and infuriating so Arthur can yell back. But there’s nothing. Only footsteps, and unyielding fury, and guilt.

He kicks open the door to his chambers, harder than he needs to, and it bounces off the stone wall with a hollow thunk. He has to watch each of his movements to narrowly avoid knocking Merlin into the doorframe. He hisses under his breath and adjusts his grip.

“You’re making this very difficult,” he mutters, his voice clipped, like he’s angry at Merlin for being unconscious. He supposes he is; that’s the easiest thing to do.

He stalks to the bed and dumps Merlin down with more force than necessary. The mattress gives a soft creak as Merlin sinks into it. Arthur stands over him, heaving.

His room is still a disaster; blankets kicked halfway to the hearth, the chair upturned from when he knocked it over in a rage, his goblet still on its side near the hearth, wine long since dried into a sticky puddle within the rug. He had forgotten, for a moment, how furious he still is. That stupid nightmare, all shadowed corridors and meaningless riddles, had distracted him, but now the sight of Merlin curled pale and unmoving in his bed sends the anger roaring back into him.

He throws the chair upright and drags it to the bedside, setting it down with a violent scrape. He recognizes for a moment that the legs don’t sit evenly. He drops into it, and it groans under his weight.

“You absolute arse,” he says to Merlin, voice low and sharp. “You could have said something. You had years to say something but instead you’re making me do this shit.”

Merlin doesn’t respond. Arthur leans forward, elbows on knees, glaring at him. He looks worse in the light. He looks waxen, bruised at the eyes and still with that same faint wheeze Arthur had heard when he first carried him back from the forest still shudders in his chest, soft and uneven.

“I’ve half a mind to shout at you anyway,” Arthur goes on. “Just for the principle of it.”

He scrubs a hand through his hair, dragging hard against his scalp, trying to summon something clearer than buzzing. His gaze flickers to Merlin again. Arthur leans back, arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling. He swears it glares back. He thinks of the witch, of her voice like rot and honey, and of her words dripping in prophecy.

Arthur had tried to sit still, truly. He had even made it through the first hour without losing his temper at anything in particular, which he considers a minor miracle. But patience, it seemed, is not one of his stronger virtues, especially when his only companion is the dying sound of the hearth and the quiet rasp of Merlin's breath.

So he paces. He curses the chair for being too hard, then curses himself for sitting in it. He stands only to sit again. Eventually, he rests with one arm slung across the backrest, elbow cocked awkwardly, as if angling his body just right would make the night more bearable. It does not.

Arthur shifts his gaze to Merlin, unmoving on the bed, looking so pale it’s offensive. Arthur stares, as he’s been doing that often as of late. He watches the rise and fall of Merlin’s chest, eyes flitting to the twitch of a finger, a muscle in his jaw, anything that hints of a soul still within the still, cold body laid across his bed.

There have been nights in which Arthur fought bandits with less fury than he now fights sleep. His eyelids drag and droop and burn at the corners, but he resists. He will not sleep, not with Merlin in such a condition.

Merlin looks like a corpse pretending, and it makes Arthur feel just as sick. He grumbles something under his breath and stands abruptly, the scrape of the chair legs echoing like a battle cry in the stillness of the chamber. He needs to move. He adjusts the blankets around Merlin for the fifth time, even though they haven’t shifted, then he adjusts the pillow, then he sits down again, hard, frustrated.

“Idiot,” he mutters, not unkindly. “You’d hate this, you know, being waited on, and having me flutter about like a nursemaid.” His voice twists with a dry sort of laugh that barely survives into breath. “You’d call me a prat and complain about how I’m tucking the blanket wrong. Wake up already so you can yell at me.”

Arthur slides his face into his palms, peeking through his fingers as though his words may have had some impact, before pinching his hand tight again in realization that they did not.

Arthur tilts his head just enough to look at him again.

“You could’ve told me,” he whispers. “Whatever it was… whatever this is. You didn’t have to…” His voice catches. He lets it die.

A log in the fire cracks with a low, shivering moan. Shadows dance across the bed like dark hands reaching, stretching, retreating. In the thick quiet that follows, Arthur reaches out and very gently tucks the covers around Merlin one last time. His hand hovers above his friend’s shoulder a moment longer than it should.

Then he sits back, arms crossed. He stares with anger, guilt, fear, everything all at once. He stays there until morning.

Merlin is walking, though he cannot remember from where. His boots scuff over stone, or maybe grass, it shifts each time he looks down. The air is heavy, close, like the sky is pressing in on him, though, from the corner of his eye, he sees no stars, only stone ceiling.

He tries to call out, but his voice goes nowhere, swallowed before it leaves his throat. He feels it buzzing in his chest, useless.

The corridor bends. He does not remember turning. Doors blink in and out, sometimes open and sometimes gone. He reaches for a handle once, but finds only smooth wall against his fingertips.

A whisper passes him. He spins, certain someone has gone by, but there’s no one. The whisper repeats, but now it comes from somewhere else, moving again and again until it is all around him. He cannot catch the words, only the shape of them; round vowels, sharp consonants, a lullaby he might’ve known as a child, or maybe he did not.

His feet are wet. He looks down, startled, to see not water but apples in the hundreds, rolling and shifting underfoot. Their skins shine like mirrors. He bends to pick one up but it disappears with his touch, vanishing into its shadow.

The shadow thickens. His pulse quickens. He feels watched, though he cannot tell from where. He calls out again, and receives nothing.

At the far end of the corridor, a figure stands. Though, maybe it’s just a door in the shape of a man. The edges flicker. He takes a step toward it, then another. The figure raises a hand, or perhaps it is the door creaking open.

Before he can reach it, the floor tilts. The apples slide away. The stars blink out. He’s falling, falling, falling-

Arthur has spent hardly a day at Merlin’s side, and though he hasn’t yet been able to bring himself to let the boy out of his sight, he grows mad with inactivity. Work piles just outside his door, meetings and speeches and knights requesting his advice, but no matter the weight of his responsibility, he cannot pull himself from his friend’s bedside.

He’s exhausted, restless, and impossibly irritated with how slowly time seems to pass when Merlin isn’t moving through it beside him. The quiet of his chambers scratches at his ears, and even the fire crackles too loud, like it mocks him for doing nothing.

It takes a full hour of pacing, silent arguments with himself, and watching Merlin’s unmoving form with a gut wrenching guilt before Arthur convinces himself he can step away. He only wishes to go for a half hour, long enough to do something, absolutely anything, that might help. He leaves a knight standing guard at the door - not that anyone would dare cross him now - and makes his way to the library.

Geoffrey looks up from his usual post at the front desk, perched behind a pile of scrolls that seems more useful in protecting from intruders than as a workspace. The air is musty with old parchment, candle wax, and worn leather bindings.

As Arthur steps in, he briefly notices the librarian’s young assistant flitting between shelves with a stack of catalogues nearly as tall as he is. Dubhghall, as he recalls, a soft-voiced and sharp-eyed boy, in a robe sizes too big and a green sash draped over his right shoulder. The boy moves with practiced clumsiness, brushing past furniture with the same absent grace Merlin always had, as if he hadn’t quite grown into the space around him. Arthur blinks and looks away before the thought can finish forming.

“I need any books you have relating to magic,” Arthur snappily demands.

Geoffrey freezes, but does not move to gather what was requested. His pen stills above the page, eyes narrowing slightly behind his thick spectacles. “I’m afraid most of them were burned years ago, sire. I only have a few left. You may want to ask Gaius. If you don’t mind my asking, Sire, why would you need such books?”

Arthur’s patience, never particularly abundant, stretches thin. “Because I am your king, and I have asked for them,” he snaps. “I would like what you have, then I will visit Gaius. I am in a hurry.”

Geoffrey blinks. “As you wish, sire.”

He turns stiffly and begins his search, muttering under his breath about classifications and how everything’s “hopelessly disordered since young Dubhghall took over the binding ledger… well-meaning boy, but always humming… you’d think he was under a spell himself, the way he stares into empty air.”

Arthur ignores him. He can only tolerate one cryptic servant at a time.

The books he receives are dusty and brittle things, their bindings stiff with disuse and suspicion. He fears one wrong move may send them cascading into dust between his fingers. He tucks them under his arm and stalks out without a thank you.

Next, he moves to visit Gaius. The old physician looks up in mild surprise as Arthur once again slams open his door, this time with books tucked beneath one arm and his jaw clenched tight enough to splinter.

“I need everything you have on magic,” Arthur says without greeting. “Healing spells to old wives’ tales, everything.”

Gaius’s eyebrows rise slowly into what can only be described as a practiced arch of judgment. “That’s quite a sudden area of interest.”

Arthur does not flinch. “It is not sudden,” he says. “Just… belated.”

There is a pause. Gaius studies him with the kind of gaze that has seen too many kings lie to themselves.

“I have to help him, Gaius. I have to understand why…” Arthur cuts himself off before he can voice his evil thoughts.

Gaius’s face softens, and without another word, he stands to begin pulling books from the upper shelves.

Soon enough, Arthur finds himself back in his own chambers, seated at the table where his dinner has once again gone cold. He scatters the pile of books messily across his table, not caring for his volume. He opens the first, flips through words he can barely focus on, barely comprehend.

Magic is written about like it is disease and salvation both; a great power and a great burden, a curse and a gift. A hundred metaphors are thrown before him and none of them explain what Merlin is, or any mention of his predicament.

Still, Arthur reads. He drags his finger down the page and forces his mind to stay tethered, even as his vision blurs at the edges and the words begin to crawl.

“Before the first word was spoken, magic already knew the silence.”

The flickering light of the candle beside him bends unnaturally. His hand hesitates. He blinks and the world tilts, just slightly, like a cart catching on a rut in the road. Then, something begins to shift. The text swims, the fire flickers blue, the air smells sweet and wrong and undeniably familiar, like lilies, or forest air trapped behind glass.

Merlin wakes, but not into the world he knows.

He breathes, but it feels like inhaling dust through gauze. His eyes open to the impression of dark stone glowing not with light, but with memory. There’s no warmth here, no pulse in the air, the first sign something is wrong. Merlin always feels the world beating beneath his feet; trees breathing, wind whispering, dirt humming. But here, everything is dead silent and stilled, sealed in the ancient quiet of something long abandoned.

He knows this place to be the Crystal Cave, the birthplace of magic.

And yet, it isn’t the same.

The crystals don’t shimmer, they stare. Written into them are not ancient prophecies but the truths of past. Long spires rise from floor and ceiling like ribs from some ancient, calcified beast. The walls gently pulse with a hollow iridescence, as if remembering light. The usual hum of magic is gone, replaced with a dreadful vacancy, as though the cave itself has exhaled its soul and forgotten how to call it back.

Merlin steps forward, and the sound of his footfall arrives before his foot meets stone. The echo precedes him. He stops. The silence swells, pressing into his ears, into the back of his throat, filling him with a static dissonance. He tries again, takes another step. The echo again is early, anticipatory, impossible. He glances down and the ground beneath him ripples like warped glass, bending reality in tiny, hungry spirals. His reflection in the obsidian surface stretches too tall, too thin, a stranger made of shadow and bone.

In the distance, far deeper in the cave, a single crystal throbs. Not with light, but rather with awareness, as if it watches.

Merlin walks toward it. The walls pull away and the cave elongates. Light has no source here, yet everything glows with a soft, choked shimmer, the kind that doesn’t comfort but accuses. This place does not want him here, or perhaps it does, but only to bury him.

He runs his fingers along the side of a jagged crystal. It is warm. He has the thought that it shouldn’t be. Then, unbidden and unmerciful, it grows with a breath of life;

Arthur, cloaked in crimson, crowned in flame. His eyes don’t meet Merlin’s. Morgana, hair tangled with ash, standing in a clearing where nothing grows. Freya, sinking. Freya, still. Will, his mouth open but no sound. Gaius, turning away. Kilgharrah, old and chained, ancient bones crying out. Himself as a boy, knees in the dirt, hands glowing with frightened golden light.

The cave flickers, time folds, the air crinkles. The crystals twist with soundless tension. From far behind, his name echoes.

“Merlin.”

He turns, and Arthur is there, but not truly. He’s washed in too much light, made indistinct; it makes his form bleed into the space around him. He floats a few inches above the cave floor, bound by no gravity. His crown is aflame. His hands are outstretched.

Merlin tries to speak, but his throat cinches shut. Arthur’s mouth moves in a clear yell, but Merlin hears it before Arthur speaks it.

“Merlin!”

He runs toward him and the distance stretches, every step drawing him further away. His legs work against some unseen tide, some backward tide, like he's moving through time running in the wrong direction. His limbs are dragged by threads, every bone disconnected from the next.

Arthur’s form flickers, light twisting around him. His face looks young and old and bleeding and golden all at once. He is not real, but he is. He is every version of Arthur that Merlin has ever come to know, whilst also being none of them.

Merlin gets close enough to reach. Arthur opens his arms. Merlin understands what he is supposed to say, now, here, finally after so many years. Merlin tries. The right words rise up - I’m a sorcerer - but before they manage to abscond, Arthur ignites.

Not in fire but in undoing, light with edges, brilliance that devours shape. He opens his mouth and from it pours not flame, but music composed of screaming metal and divine thunder. The crystals resonate with it, they crack and collapse inward, then erupt outward. The sound rips through Merlin’s body like a second heartbeat. He falls back, breathless, watching as Arthur dissolves into golden shards, suspended midair like glass splinters catching a sun that does not shine.

The cave shakes, the ceiling breaks apart, stone unravels, and from deep within the earth, a whisper coils upward, impossibly gentle;

Before the first word was spoken, magic already knew the silence.

The voice is his own, and is the cave’s, and is that of all that is around him.

He falls with no end, only air and the rush of everything he’s ever felt, said, not said, held back, and burned for.

Then, there is stillness, and serenity.

Merlin jerks. His eyes snap open, or he believes they would, if they could. He tries to move and can’t, limbs pinned by invisible weight. The world around him is green and low and heavy, his lungs slow and syrup-thick. He smells fever and dust and stale linen.

He is in his body, but only barely. He wants to scream, but he can’t open his mouth. He is not sure he still has one. The only sound is the slow drag of someone breathing nearby. Then, darkness once again.

Arthur wakes with a start. The fire in the hearth has burned down to a faint cradle of embers, casting long shadows across the walls of his chambers. The chair beneath him creaks as he shifts, body stiff and sore from yet another night spent slumped beside Merlin’s bed. The blanket he draped over himself hours ago lies bunched at his feet, kicked away in his sleep.

It takes him a moment to understand what roused him. Then he hears:

“...no... Arthur, listen... the prophecy... only for you... to fulfill the prophecy…”

The words are barely more than whispers, tattered syllables caught on shallow breath. Arthur jerks upright, heart stuttering as he turns to look at Merlin. It’s the most he can recall Merlin moving in the last two weeks.

His face is pale and sweat-slicked, eyes still closed, brows faintly furrowed. His lips part again, murmuring more fragmented words Arthur can’t make out, and then fall still. He does not again stir. His breath rattles in his throat, then evens out once more into shallow rhythm in perfect display that he is still unconscious, still somewhere else.

Arthur stares at him. “Prophecy.” The word rings in his ears, echoing too loudly in the stillness. His chest tightens with something like panic, but colder, like a puzzle slotting together in the wrong order.

Merlin had hardly so much as twitched in his sleep. Gaius had said it was normal, that he was healing, but Arthur had still watched over him with hawk-eyed paranoia. Every flinch of his fingers, every shallow breath, he clocked it all like a soldier monitoring a wound he doesn’t trust to close. But this, the mumbling, the name, the prophecy, it breaks the pattern. It cuts through the quiet like a blade.

Arthur leans back in the chair, hands braced on his knees, spine rigid. He doesn’t sleep again that night.

The morning light spills through the tall windows in dusty streaks, painting long lines across the stone floor. Arthur hasn’t moved much since the night before, save to stoke the fire and dampen the cloth on Merlin’s forehead. The room smells faintly of sweat and bitter herbs. Merlin hasn’t made another sound.

The door creaks open.

Gaius enters with a practiced quiet, balancing a small tray of vials and cloths. He pauses just inside the threshold when he sees Arthur already awake, perched at Merlin’s bedside like a gargoyle carved from tension.

“Morning, sire,” Gaius says cautiously.

Arthur grunts. “He spoke.”

Gaius stops mid-step. “He… spoke?”

“Last night,” Arthur says, not taking his eyes off Merlin. “In his sleep. He said my name. Something fulfilling a prophecy.” His voice is flat, like he’s repeating battlefield orders.

Gaius’s brows pull together. He is not surprised, and not quite alarmed either. He sets the tray down with slow precision and checks Merlin’s pulse, his temperature, his breath. It’s a routine that feels ceremonial now, more habit than hope. Arthur watches the whole process with thinly-veiled impatience. When Gaius straightens up, Arthur speaks again.

“What prophecy?”

Gaius folds his hands in front of him. “That’s… a complicated question, sire.”

Arthur turns toward him then, slowly. “If Merlin’s raving in his sleep about some prophecy that involves me, I believe I’m due an answer.”

Gaius sighs. His face bears the look of someone who’s waited years for this moment, and dreaded every second.

“There is a prophecy,” he begins, “spoken of in the earliest days of magic, long before Albion had a name. It speaks of you, as the once and future king, who would unite the land of Albion, not through conquest, but through peace. But it is that you will not do such a deed alone. There is someone else in this prophecy, your other half.”

“My other half?”

“Emrys,” Gaius says softly, voice just above a whisper, as if the name itself carries weight. “A sorcerer born of magic itself, destined to protect you. To shape your reign.”

“Emrys.” Arthur glances to Merlin, and the air fills with grim understanding.

Arthur turns away, mouth pressing into a thin, furious line. His eyes flick to the still figure on the bed.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Because it would have cost him everything. Potentially his life, and your trust. You were raised to hate magic, Arthur, as your father did.”

Arthur’s jaw works silently, clenching hard. He says nothing, only stares down at Merlin, as if trying to see the truth beneath the skin flushed with fever.

“I did not wish to tell you, it is not my place,” Gaius murmurs, “but you deserved to know. And if you have questions, I will answer them. All of them.”

He bows and turns to leave, but Arthur’s voice stops him in the doorway.

“Wait.”

Gaius turns.

“Tell me about his magic,” Arthur says. His voice isn’t angry, it isn’t anything at all, only quiet.

Gaius pauses. His expression is unreadable. And then, nodding slowly, “Very well.”

He steps back inside and closes the door behind him.

“What do you wish to know?”

It begins not as a conversation, but as a story. Arthur doesn’t interrupt, only listens. Gaius’s voice is soft but heavy, like stones shifting after years buried under silence. He speaks at first not of Merlin, not directly at least, but of something older, something rooted deeper than any crown, any kingdom.

Magic, he says, was once a language, spoken by wind and river, mountain and flame. It was not feared, not cursed. It was sung in lullabies and carved into trees. The world listened to it like a mother listening to her child. The oldest stories say that magic itself has a birthplace; a cavern carved into the spine of the earth, the Crystal Cave. There, time folds in on itself. There, the past and future are neighbors. There, names are etched into the walls by the world itself.

The very first is that of Emrys.

The tale Gaius tells is half memory, half myth. He speaks of druids who dreamt of a boy made of starlight and storm. A boy who spoke to the earth and found it already knew his name. A boy born with too much power, too much fate - a vessel of the old world bound to the rise of the new. He was not made to rule, but to guard the one who would. Two fates, intertwined by prophecy and blood and belief.

The druids feared him. The High Priestesses whispered of him in the same breath as the gods. The seers saw him walking beside a golden king, unseen, unthanked, but vital. He was not just a sorcerer, he was magic itself. He was Emrys, and he is Merlin, son of Hunith and Balinor.

The room around Arthur dims, not from the hour, but from the weight of what Gaius says. His servant, his friend, a boy with crooked grins and muddy boots who he’s scolded, shouted at, amd relied on has been carrying a truth heavy enough to break a lesser man.

Arthur thinks of their moments together, of near-deaths and impossible survivals. The way Merlin always knew and the way he never left. He understands now what Gaius is giving him; a history rewritten by love and sacrifice. He is a legend hidden in plain sight.

And perhaps what stings the very deepest is the terror of his father. Uther had declared war on sorcery, on magic, on the very thing that not only helped Camelot along its way, but built the future of Albion.

Arthur feels something shift beneath his ribs. It isn’t just anger and it isn’t just betrayal. It’s more akin to awe, or maybe fear, and something else, completely unidentifiable.

Gaius finishes with a silence so final it feels like closing a book that’s waited too long to be read. Then, without a word, he leaves Arthur in the quiet.

Far away, or perhaps very near, the world folds in on itself. The air goes colorless, the temperature of water left too long untouched, and Merlin dreams.

It is not a dream in the shape of rest, nor one borne of sleep. It is memory turned inside out, dripping down the edges of the Crystal Cave. The walls shine with impossible clarity. Light fractures into ancient glyphs across the surface of the stones. There is no sound, but the cave hums with the candle of remembrance.

He’s standing, or some adjacent of standing. He sees a boy that looks like him, though younger and more afraid, staring into the pulsing crystals and whispering a name.

Arthur…

But he cannot speak the rest. The cave waits.

The prophecy has already been spoken, it breathes, but you must still choose to live it.

Merlin tries. His mouth shapes words that echo in no language. His feet are lead. His hands ache with old magic. He aches to say it, to say everything, but the words twist, dissolve, become smoke and silt and blood and stars.

But he fails, again and again. Then, just as the light burns too bright, he wakes, or something akin to waking.

He is frozen and cold, a breath caught halfway between worlds. His mouth is half-open, and he hears himself say:

“…Arthur… the prophecy… only for you…”

And the darkness swallows the rest.

The castle sleeps around him, save for the slow, near-imperceptible drip of the lit candle dwindling on the desk. Its wax curls in on itself like a dying blossom, flickering shadows across the walls of Arthur’s chambers. He doesn’t move, he just stares, the same as he does every night.

Merlin lies much too still in the bed. His chest rises and falls, but there’s something eerie in its rhythm, and something unnatural in the way his limbs fold, the paleness of his skin, the faint shimmer of sweat that never seems to dry. As if he’s caught halfway through something, not sleeping, not waking, just suspended.

Arthur watches him like a man watches embers in a hearth that refuse to catch. He feels himself bristle, jaw tight, hands curled on the armrest of his chair like he’s ready for a fight, but there’s no one left to blame. He’s already torn into a training dummy, barked at servants, gone through half a dozen half-baked plans to fix this. Now all he can do it sit and pray.

His eyes narrow. He wants to shout at Merlin to wake up, to stop wasting his time, to do something, but the anger is thin, and brittle. It does not hold up inside his chest. His thoughts snarl into themselves.

He recalls their hopeless return from the search for Balinor. He recalls the devastation wrecking Merlin’s face upon Balinor’s death, and believing it only be attributed to mourning of Camelot, that its only potential savior had died. Arthur had told him not to cry, that no man is worth his tears. He understands much differently now.

Arthur recalls the death of his own father, of the night he spent mourning, and of Merlin waiting for him, so that he did not feel alone. The moment strikes hard and fast, like a sword slipping between ribs. He remembers the fire, the smoke, the crushing collapse of everything he thought was certain. He remembers how Merlin stood at his side, unspeaking, unmoving, bearing the weight like it was his own. He never once mentioned his father again.

Arthur’s hand trembles where it rests on the chair. “He must hate me.”

The thought lands so plainly it feels like truth. Of course Merlin would after all that he’s been through. Arthur doesn’t know what’s worse, that he might be right, or that Merlin wouldn’t say it even if he were.

Outside, wind curls around the stone, low and tired. Inside, Arthur burns in hatred, all alone.

The passage of time is not something Merlin can track in any conventional sense anymore. There are no ticking clocks in this endless cycle, only the blur of centuries, the echo of repeated failure, and the gnawing, hollow ache of hope long since curdled into despair. Time folds, stretches, fractures, until it starts again, and always, it ends the same way.

Merlin wakes to a battlefield. The air tastes of iron and ozone. Ash rains like snow upon charred fields. Distant screaming filters in like a memory, half-formed, half-forgotten. Beneath his fingers is blood-wet earth. He knows this place, not by any familiarity, but because it is always the same. Arthur lies dying before him.

He doesn’t always get here at the same moment, but this one is the worst; Arthur staring at him, pleading without voice, the light leaving his eyes as Merlin’s hands tremble, stained red. The words are in his mouth, as they always are, but he never says them.

“I have magic.”

The words rot and die in his throat. He falters, sometimes because of fear, sometimes because of pride, or sometimes because of some desperate, pathetic hope that this time, this one instance, he won’t need to say it. He hopes that fate will be kind, and that destiny will forgive him, and Arthur will survive anyway. He never does.

Merlin screams. It echoes like wind through an empty tomb. No one hears. Time tears apart and he wakes again.

Sometimes, it’s Camelot, with its old halls, and the warm golden light. Arthur stands beside him, alive and laughing. He thinks this is it. He’s back. He’s fixed it. All he has to do is tell the truth.

But again, fear sets in. It is not the loud, sharp fear of battle but the quieter kind, the fear of change, and of rejection. It is the fear that Arthur will look at him and see a monster, just as he sees himself.

So he continues to lie. He lets it slide. He makes a joke. He swallows it down.

The days stretch. The moments bleed. He watches things unravel, and again, Arthur dies. The cycle repeats.

Sometimes, he lives through centuries. The old world dies; castles fall and kingdoms crumble. He walks the earth like a shadow, always watching and waiting. Sometimes he fights, or he hides. Sometimes he forgets who he is, just to escape the weight of it. Once, he tries to die.

He stands at the edge of the world, the sea roaring below. The waves reach like hands to take him. But the magic won’t let him go. It is stitched into his bones, his breath, his blood. The magic keeps him and curses him as he curses it. And so, he lives.

Millenia. He learns to wear different skins. Glass towers instead of stone. Electricity rises instead of fire. He watches stars fall and nations rise. People forget him, and still he waits.

He finds Arthur once, in a museum of all places. His face is on a plaque. The once and future king, they call him. Merlin laughs until he cries.

Sometimes, he dreams of the Crystal Cave. There, it is quiet and ageless. Time does not flow normally in that place, instead it pools and reflects, a mirror of what was and what may be. He stands before the crystals to see all of his failures written across its surface.

In one vision, Arthur is burning on a pyre. In another, Morgana turns and walks away from him. In another, Gwen weeps alone. In all of them, Merlin is silent.

The voice of Emrys speaks to him. It is not his voice, not really. It is older, colder, and tired in a way only immortals can be.

"You are the fulcrum," it says. "And you have tipped wrong."

He tries to argue that it is hard, and that he was afraid, that fate is cruel and that he is only human, but he is not. The cave is silent.

"Then begin again," the voice says. "And this time, do not fail."

He wakes up in a field. The sky is young, the grass is dewy, and Camelot rises, pristine and golden, in the distance. He is young again, and he has not yet met Arthur. His heart cracks.

But he goes as he always does. He meets the prince, earns his place, and watches destiny spiral around them like storm clouds. And still, when it matters most, he says nothing. He is so very tired.

At one point, he lives long enough to see the stars dim and magic die from the world. He is all that is left. His name is forgotten, his purpose a myth. He walks through cities built on the bones of dreams and wonders if destiny was ever real.

But then, he finds it again; a rift, an opening, a chance to go back once again and correct his mistake. And so, he goes. This time, he tells himself, he will succeed. He will not flinch and he will not falter.

But he does as he always does. He never reaches the moment, his fear always wins. It is inevitable.

Or sometimes, it isn’t fear, it’s love, of the twisted kind. It is love of the kind that keeps secrets to protect the people one cares for, even when it kills them. He thinks he’s sparing Arthur, that knowing would destroy him, that revealing the truth would ruin the trust between them, not understanding that it is quite the opposite.

Every time, Arthur dies not knowing who Merlin is. The cave shows him thousands of outcomes in a kaleidoscope of ruin.

It shows a coronation with no crown, a kingdom with no king, a war without end. It shows magic extinguished by silence, a boy holding power too vast, too wild, and no one to teach him what to do with it. It shows a prophecy unfulfilled.

He claws at the surface of time. He screams at the stars. He begs the cave. But, inevitably the loop begins again.

And again.

Until it doesn’t.

He opens his eyes and hears Arthur say his name, but he is not in the cave, nor is he in the field. He is not in the palace or the battlefield or the pyre. He is somewhere warm. Somewhere soft. Somewhere still.

He cannot speak, his body will not move, but he hears Arthur.

And maybe, this time, finally he will…

Everything is green. A milky, electric, soaking sort of green that seeps into the edges of Merlin’s thoughts like moss overtaking stone. Not the green of leaves or springtime, this green is chemical, bruised, and ancient. It hums in the corners of his vision, coats the walls of his skull, crawls beneath his eyelids.

His breath fogs, but he doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t feel anything but a kind of lightness, as if he’s been scooped hollow, belly to bones, and replaced with stale air. Not floating, he’s still here, anchored, but filled with the wrong thing.

There’s no sound, not properly. Somewhere, distantly, he hears Arthur…Arthur… over and over again, the word skipping like a stone across the surface of a lake. Not an echo, more like a repeat, like time keeps restarting in miniature every time he thinks he’s grasped it. As it repeats, he begins to recognize that it is his own softly whispered voice.

He thinks Arthur must be nearby, but that doesn’t feel right. Nothing feels right. His hands are wrong, heavy at the wrist and numb at the fingertips. He tries to shift, just a little, to scratch the sweat beading down his temple, and it feels like spiders crawling across his skin. No, not spiders, he knows it isn’t, but his body has other ideas.

A tremor moves through him like a tidal pulse. Not pain but force, like gravity doubling in an instant. He moves a finger and is punished with another wave, smack, a ripple of green light and hollowness that leaves him panting in his own mind. A water skin pressed too hard, straining at the seams.

You failed, someone whispers. It may very well be his own voice, or it may be that of Emrys. It might be the wind.

He tries to answer but his mouth doesn’t work, nothing does. He can only whisper, and even that costs him. “Please…”

The walls tilt. They stretch and pull like rubber, the space between the window and the door suddenly miles long. He watches, unblinking, as the edge of the curtain begins to breathe, soft and rhythmic like the rise and fall of lungs. He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He doesn’t remember waking up. He doesn’t know which one he’s doing now.

He feels something beside him, or above him, or behind his ribs. He feels something watching and waiting. Merlin wants to scream but there’s no breath in him. His lungs are full of dust, his bones full of static. He’s not ready yet, says a voice, far away, yet somehow just behind his ear. A woman’s voice. Worn thin by age and prophecy. He’s still hiding.

There’s nothing to hide behind anymore. Everything is too far, too big, too green. The world rolls in waves. His fingers twitch and it’s like frostbite. Blood rushes back and hits his veins like knives. He knows what this is. Not entirely a dream, nor is it entirely sleep. It is a prison of magic and body, in a warning from the earth itself.

He finally sees the Crystal Cave, but it’s shattered. The walls are shards floating in a void, pieces of the birthplace scattered like teeth in a god’s mouth. Magic bleeds from the cracks, thick and luminous, but it does not glow; it rather aches.

Merlin whispers again, but this time not with his voice, only with his fear.

The door creaks softly open as Arthur returns to his chambers, the weight of court still heavy on his shoulders. He’s traded the crown for a collar, the formalities for footsteps, but the tension hasn’t left him. It never does, these days, even here.

He’s gotten used to the silence, too used to it, he supposes. Every day a hush hangs like a velvet shroud over every corner of the room. The stillness of Merlin, unmoving in the same bed where Arthur’s barely slept, always with one eye cracked open and ears tuned to the faintest breath.

Arthur stops just past the threshold, his hand still resting on the edge of the doorframe. His gaze snaps to the bed before he knows why. Merlin’s condition hasn’t changed. He’s still there, gaunt and pale, thin arms above the covers, brow furrowed faintly in sleep. Yet, the air feels thinner, and brighter, and indescribably wrong. He takes a cautious step forward.

The covers have shifted slightly, much more than they usually do. The pillow bears the faintest new indent. There’s a tension in the line of Merlin’s throat, a whisper of movement around the eyes, as if they’ve tightened, as if he’s not completely lost anymore.

Arthur cannot identify how, but he knows; Merlin’s been awake. It was not for long, and it was not all the way, but something has changed. It is the kind of change that leaves a residue in the room, a static in the air, a flicker in the firelight that shouldn’t be there.

“Merlin…” Arthur mutters, much more for himself than anyone else. Merlin does not respond.

He hesitates just beside the bed, then sinks into the chair that’s become more familiar than his own bed. He rests his arms on his knees, staring. The green glass bottle on the bedside table is in a different place than he left it. It is wrong by an inch, maybe less, but Arthur has spent too many nights here not to notice. He leans forward.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” he says softly, as if accusing Merlin of a crime. “You’re waiting until I’m gone, you arse.”

He earns no response.

Arthur exhales sharply through his nose, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re still mad I threw a plate, probably. Never mind the prophecy, or the dragonlord business. No, it’s the plate. That’s what you’ll wake up and give me hell about.”

He drags a hand through his hair, then glances again at Merlin’s face, and freezes. A single tear, so faint and slow it could be mistaken for sweat, crawls down Merlin’s temple. Arthur blinks once, then twice. It’s real. His jaw tenses.

“You’re not allowed to cry,” he says aloud, harsher than he means it. “I’m still furious with you.”

Still, the tear falls. Arthur does not reach for it to wipe it away, he just watches it make its quiet, glistening path down Merlin’s skin. Watches the proof that something happened while he was gone, something internal, unspoken, and unseen.

And Arthur hates, more than he’s hated anything else, that he doesn’t know what it was.

It begins as have all others; disjointed, silent, and impossibly vast. But unlike the bruised color palettes of his other dreams, this one is lush, verdant, and sickeningly green. The grass pulses with luminescence beneath his feet, as though it has a heartbeat of its own, or is mimicking his. Trees spiral upward like coils of copper wire, branches spinning out into impossible spirals, draped with golden vines that whisper softly in a language he doesn’t understand but inherently knows. The orchard stretches infinitely in every direction, glimmering with dew that glows like starlight, and the air smells like sugar and static.

Merlin feels both weightless and impossibly heavy. Each step is fluid, his footfalls not quite touching the ground, yet his bones thrum with the strain of centuries. He is younger here, his limbs spindly, hands much too big, the curve of his back uncertain, but his eyes remain old, full of silence and storms.

A figure stands before him at the fork of two identical paths, fitted in a mask fashioned from a silver plate and violet feathers. Their voice is discordant, a chorus layered imperfectly over itself. "Choose your apple."

A tree before him swells and bulges, as if pregnant with truth. On its branch, three apples hang. One is gold and warm to the touch, another is cold and glossy like obsidian, and the third shifts between colors, never staying the same for more than a blink.

"One will show you love. One will show you fear. One will show you truth." says the figure, now doubled and then tripled, copies of itself watching from various angles of the orchard.

Merlin reaches for the color-changing fruit, the one of truth, but the tree scuttles sideways on gnarled roots, dragging itself three feet left. He pauses, frowns, reaches again. The ground sloshes beneath him like thick soup. His hand passes through air that feels more like fabric, catching threads of color on his fingertips.

The orchard begins to fill with noise; not quite sound, much alike the memory of it. A door creaking open, Arthur laughing, Gaius shouting his name from a far, unreachable place, horses galloping backwards. It all echoes, repeats, layers-

"Choose wisely," a masked figure whispers into his ear from several yards away. "You always choose wrong."

Merlin grits his teeth. "I won't this time."

He reaches one again for the apple of changing color. As soon as it leaves the branch, the orchard around him shifts. The trees flatten into puddles of color, leaking into one another like bruised watercolors. The sky flickers black and then blood-orange, then static.

The apple pulses in his hand. He sees Arthur’s face reflected in its surface, contorted in anger. He sees Camelot in flames. He sees a great white dragon coiling through smoke. He sees himself, older, wearier, silent, watching everything, and doing nothing.

The apple bursts, dripping thick black ichor down his wrist, but it doesn't stain. Instead, it peels the world back with it, as though it were only painted on a canvas. Behind it is a wide, white nothing, and a single red door with a brass handle. He hears footsteps, not behind him, but within him. It is as if something inside is walking toward the surface of his mind.

The masked figure, now only one, stands at the edge of the canvas-peeled world. Its mask splits in half vertically, revealing a blur of a face, as if a dozen identities are superimposed onto one skull. The eyes shift colors.

“You are not ready.”

Merlin turns to the red door. It breathes like a lung. His hand reaches forward without his permission, driven by something old and bitter. A voice, not his own, is whispering in his throat.

He touches the handle. Everything is encompassed by green, then silence, then nothing.

Merlin wakes to green.

It coats the world like a film, not quite a filter, but a heaviness. It is not the green of leaves or grass, but the internal green of closed eyelids in sunlight, sickly, grainy, muffled, and lightless. The color presses in behind his eyes even though they’re open, staring at a ceiling he cannot comprehend as distance warps and weaves before him. The ceiling is close, then it is far, then it is breathing, then it is not.

His breath comes in sharp, shallow puffs. His chest rises, but he cannot feel it. His fingers twitch against something soft and damp and warm, but the motion feels foreign and disjointed, as if it is not his own. There is weight on his body, but it comes like tides, or like velvet sand that swells and vanishes without permission. His heart thumps thick and slow, like it’s suspended in honey. Then there is a sound.

The sound doesn’t echo, it repeats. A soft rustling, then again. A breath, then again. Whispered murmurs, replayed with the precision of a child imitating voices behind a curtain.

"You are not ready."

It starts small, as a whisper he is not sure he hears.

A whisper from somewhere near the bed. Then again, closer. Then again, from above. Then again, behind his left ear. Then again, spoken by a voice that is-

“Gaius?” His lips form around the words, but no sound escapes.

He sees him, blurry in the corner of the room, standing still and wrong. The shadows cast from the torches don’t flicker over his face. Gaius doesn’t blink, and his mouth doesn’t move when the words come again.

"You are not ready."

Another figure stands beside him, this one taller and darker. He recognizes this form to be that of his father.

Merlin feels the weight of his presence before his mind fully comprehends the face. There is a gut-knotted knowing to it; the same beard, the same haunted eyes. There is a memory stored in his bones before it had time to nest in his mind. Balinor’s mouth moves, but he says nothing. The words come not from him, but from everywhere.

"You are not ready."

Then, Arthur.

Arthur who does not speak. Arthur who sits in the corner with arms crossed, looking half made of wax and half made of storm. Arthur whose expression is not angry, but disappointed, and contemplative. That is worse, unimaginably so. His mouth moves. The voice is too soft to be real. It’s a murmur, a current, a sound that is not such.

"You are not ready."

It builds, loops, each voice tangling into the next, like woven threads too tight to unravel. Gaius. Balinor. Arthur. Gaius. Balinor. Arthur.

"You are not ready."

Merlin’s chest tightens.

He tries to lift his arm, but it’s no longer an arm, it is a swollen sac of blood and air, bloated and senseless. Sweat beads across his temple and slides down the side of his face, but it feels like insects, like tiny feet marching, like crawling things from the orchard of his dreams. He gasps, but the air gets stuck behind his teeth.

You are not ready.

The words claw at his ribs. His lungs fight to expand.

You are not ready.

He twists his head just barely to the side and Gaius is there now, sitting on the bed. Hands clasped in his lap. Staring forward, expressionless.

Merlin wants to scream, or cry. He wants to thrash his body and expel every part of the poison in his blood that keeps him trapped in this green-soaked purgatory. But all he can do is tremble, and even that feels borrowed.

You are not ready.

Arthur is by the door now, right hand rested on the hilt of his sword, backlit by a flickering torch. No, not flickering; the flame repeats its motion, stutters the way a heartbeat does when it skips.

You are not ready.

Merlin hears the words in the soil. In the wood. In the air between his breaths. They are not voices anymore, they are truth, raw and pure. Then they are silence, so abrupt it feels like his ears have imploded. It is suffocating. Then-

“Soon,” says Balinor. It is the only word he speaks.

“Soon,” repeats Gaius, blinking for the first time.

Arthur looks at him, truly looks, and for a moment, Merlin sees not the man, but the prophecy, looming large in gold and grief.

But the room tips sideways and Merlin hard and deep back into green, and into stillness, and into the weightless prison of his own flesh. The last thing he hears, whispered in his own voice from some place behind his spine:

You have always known.

Arthur stands just inside the doorway, watching Merlin as if waiting for him to vanish, to disintegrate into ash and join the dust on his mantel. The room is dim, lit only by the lazy glow of the hearth and a single candle guttering low on the table. Shadows stretch long over the walls, draping the chamber in the illusion of stillness, but Arthur knows better. There is movement here, subtle and strange; the twitch of Merlin’s fingers, the uneven rise and fall of his chest, the glassy flutter of his eyes beneath half-lowered lids.

Merlin’s cheeks have begun to sink, fat and muscle disintegrating from his already lean body. Arthur had seen death before, countless times in countless places and countless ways. He knows the face of death. This is not what he knows; this is harrowingly worse.

He steps forward, careful with his footsteps, as if afraid to make too much noise. He holds a bowl of fresh water between his hands. He does not trust servants to do it right, nor anyone. He hardly trusts Gaius anymore; he’s become to lost in the anger and guilt of betrayal. He feels that this is his responsibility, his burden, and his friend.

Arthur sets the bowl atop his nightstand and picks up a fresh washcloth, dipping it into the water and watching it drip like the sands of time before wringing it out.

“Stupid,” he mutters, though it’s unclear whether he refers to himself or Merlin.

He dabs gently at Merlin’s brow. The fever is gone now, mostly, but his skin still has a sickly waxen pallor, much too pale and much too dry. Arthur brushes the hair off his forehead, then lets his hand linger, just for a second, as if trying to memorize the shape of him.

“I just know you’d hate this,” Arthur says under his breath, a flicker of humor in his throat like it doesn’t quite belong there. “You’d complain about the draft, or the soup, or…”

He receives no answer, as he never does, only the sputtering of the fire and the crackle of breath that sounds just off of sleep.

Arthur drops the cloth and stands, then paces, then runs a hand through his hair like he’s trying to wrench the frustration out through his scalp. He turns, looks at Merlin again, and the anger rises like bile.

“This is your fault,” he snaps, voice cracking. “You idiot, you absolute arse. How am I supposed to fix this if you won’t tell me anything? You should’ve told me. Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you trust me?”

The words echo too loudly, they hang there in the air, bitter and lonely. Arthur swipes the bowl off the table. It shatters.

The sound startles him the way he wishes it would startle Merlin. He breathes hard, chest heaving, knuckles white. He leans both hands on the table, arms trembling, and stares down at the mess; shards of ceramic and water pooling like blood.

Slowly, his shoulders sag, his jaw clenches, and all at once, the anger folds in on itself. His hands curl uselessly at his sides. He turns back toward the bed. He takes one step, then another, then, he crumples.

The chair groans beneath him as he falls into it. He presses his palms to his face, elbows on his knees, and holds there for a long moment. Then, quietly, like something slipping through the cracks in a dam:

“Please.”

He doesn’t even hear himself at first. Then again, louder:

“Please, wake up.”

His hands fall to his lap. His eyes are red. His face feels open, and raw.

“I can’t-” He takes a breath that sounds suspiciously like a weep. “I can’t lose you too.”

His voice is hoarse, just barely resonating. He does not sob, it is something much quieter than that. It is the kind of cry that does not come out in sounds, only breaths, like leaking from a wound that never bled.

“I’m not ready.”

The words come unbidden, and for a moment, they don’t feel like his own. They feel like something he’s heard before, somewhere deep, somewhere not quite real. They echo in his chest with a familiarity he cannot name.

“I’m not ready,” he repeats, this time as a whisper, and stares at the boy in the bed who once made him laugh, and lie, and learn what love looked like in loyalty.

Outside, the candle flickers, and inside, Merlin does not move.

It starts with the wind, loud and rushing, like the collapse of a great mountain, obliterated and leaving only a trace of frost-like glaze. Everything glimmers with a touch of this cold. It is frozen, but not as snow freezes - it is frozen as one is in waiting, in an aching, empty kind of stillness that comes just before something breaks.

He stands in a room with no walls, in a sort of sterile white that erases shadows. The silence hums, not with magic or as the stars do, but with absence, as if something was scraped away and the space scavenges to reattain it.

A chair is before him, and again behind him. He does not recall turning around, but Arthur now positions behind him. He is older here, crowned and tired, and with the same faint scar under his left eye from a skirmish with bandits two summers ago. But, his armor is duller and his voice is absent. Something sits wrong in the curve of his spine, a certain stiffness resting in his shoulders that Merlin does not recall.

Arthur’s lips move, and the room buzzes forward to listen.

“You should have told me.”

Merlin steps back.

Arthur doesn’t follow.

“You should have told me,” Arthur says again, voice like a stone dropped into water, voice rippling not with sound but with effect. The words do not echo, rather, they expand, threatening to push Merlin from his white space.

“I tried,” Merlin whispers, or so he thinks he does. His throat does not feel as he remembers it should. His mouth moves, but the air around him crushes his words to dust. Ash floats from his lips in place of syllables. He watches it fall, coating the white floor in flakes of burnt parchment. Some sticks to his hands. He moves to brush it off, but as his hand pulls away he notices teeth in the place of what he swiped.

“What did you do?” Arthur asks, quiet.

Merlin looks down. He clenches a dagger between his palms. It is lightly coated with blood.

He cannot place where it originated; he does not remember drawing it, but it is his hands that wrap menacingly around the hilt. The hilt wraps around his hands in return. He notices the blade to be part of himself.

“I didn’t mean to,” Merlin says. “I was trying to save you.”

“You killed me.”

Merlin looks up. Arthur is standing now. He does not bleed, but his skin pales and his eyes gloss over with the irkling of death.

There’s a hollow in his chest that pulses light and color, warping the white room like heatwaves. His eyes glow gold, not with magic, and not with hale, only with fullness. They overflow as though all they have seen blocks the lids from connecting anymore.

Merlin falls to his knees. The room twists and warps. The walls stretch taller, longer, unwieldy, growing out of sight. He looks down and understands the floor to be water now, but when he dips his hand in, it bites, the dull teeth of memory gnawing into his unprotected hand.

The bridge, the lake, the prophecy and the pyre.

“Please,” Merlin says. “I didn’t want this.”

Arthur’s voice is steady. “You did.”

A door appears. It is accessorized with a chain lock, not allowing nearly enough space to fit through lest one is desperate enough to escape himself. Merlin finds that he is. He runs.

The hallway is too long. His feet slam onto the deafening whispers that surround him, slivers of voices he knows and has tried to forget.

Kilgharrah. “You’ve always known this would come at a cost.”

Freya. “We could have had time.”

Morgana. “Lies rot from the inside out.”

And Arthur, over and over. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Their eyes look upon him in terror. He stops running. The hallway ends, and he’s back in the white space.

Arthur is there, waiting. His eyes are bewildered. He faces Merlin, and points over Merlin’s shoulder. Merlin turns to face a mirror. Behind him is Arthur’s face of terror, and slowly, his own self comes into view.

Though, he finds that he does not recognize himself. The person in the mirror wears his skin, but it hangs differently. His face is longer, thinner, drawn with regret. His eyes are hollowed out with firelight. His hair is wet. His hands are bloody.

He raises a hand. The mirror follows his movement. Its shape is so distinctly similar to his own, yet so very contradicting. It shivers where it stands, long and thin and leached of color, like something spilled and never cleaned, like the silhouette of a body chalked out and left to rot. It wears his shape like an afterthought, like a bad memory trying to crawl back into the now.

He takes a step forward, holding his hand just from the mirror, and does so, but not as it should, not cleanly. There’s a smear in the motion, a wrongness between frames, like watching a flame in a window wobble from two places at once. It follows him like memory follows grief. It echoes him before he moves.

Its face sits unnaturally. It is too long, eyes sunk like wells, too black. They are his eyes, he supposes, with a great degree of terror. His mouth tears open just barely. He inches his palm forward and presses it to the glass. The mirror follows suit, hand reaching up to press against Merlin’s, and spindly fingers folding to grasp tightly to Merlin’s. Its lips further part, stretching as goo into a twisted and crooked warped grimace.

It phases like mist through the glass of the mirror, pulling itself by its grip on Merlin’s hand. He stumbles back. The room shifts, unhooks, warps. The ceiling tilts in a breath held and suspended in the air. The walls sigh inward, peeling light away with their movement.

Merlin watches with horror as his own reflection steps towards him. It is no longer within the mirror. Now, all held by the glass is the fear stretched wide across Arthur’s face. Merlin recognizes this look, he’s seen it glaze the faces of many enemies.

He feels deeply rooted into the marrow of his bones a need to scream, though the sound gets caught between his ribs and curdles there. His mouth is wide but he cannot feel it. He presses his hands to his face, his skin, his hair, his entire form; the shape is wrong, nothing is in its right place. His bones are gone, and his teeth are too many, and there are more yet as they continuously fall from his mouth. He’s weeping. He moves his misshapen hands to wipe his tears and finds that he has many more eyes than he recalls. Instead, he dredges his horrible fingers beneath each globe and feels it slide along green pus and over his purpling cheeks before falling to the floor.

He gazes up, for now with only two eyes, and watches Arthur in the mirror. He does not run, nor does he speak. He only looks. Just for a second, Merlin turns behind him to share Arthur’s gaze, just long enough to feel his own terror shape someone else’s face.

Arthur sits at Merlin’s bedside, staring at the ceiling as if the tapestries might shift into something new if only he glares long enough. Sleep had been skittish for weeks; when it came at all it left him wrung out, as if it served to play tricks rather than grant rest. Tonight, he sits as he has been, rigid in the chair, elbows on his knees, eyes tracing grooves in the wood of his ceiling.

Beside him, Merlin breathes uneven, looking more as if he runs to battle than sleeps soundly in a king’s bed. Despite the time, Arthur still cannot grow used to the sound, it feels to vulnerable for his typically closed off and inhumanly jolly friend.

Exhaustion creeps along the veins of his neck, and Arthur turns his head to the side to relieve it, glancing at the book he’d been reading upon his desk. It details the practices and customs of the Druids. These people once summoned suspicion and fear by the mere mention of their name in a reflex hammered in deep by his father. Yet, as he looks to this book, he feels no flicker of fear well up within him, only a memory.

He recalls years past in which he served under his father with great frustration, in which he disagreed with many of his father’s ideas, often thinking him a tyrannical man driven mad with grief. He recalls aiding the escape of a druid boy under his father’s nose.

He used to think and to know the evils of magic, but he looked into the eyes of the child before him and did not see as his father did. He did not think of the crime of sorcery, but of helping a child lest he be sent downwards following his death. He had not believed it to be rebellion then, but as an instinct, of something good and right in a word that is often not.

Arthur swallowed. He hasn’t considered that choice in years. How easily had it been buried beneath everything else? And yet, staring at the ceiling with Merlin’s ragged breathing keeping time beside him, it rose now like it had been waiting.

He had known once, looking into the eyes of that druid boy, that magic is not inherently bad. He knew it also looking into the eyes of the spirit within druid camp he had torn apart. He remembered his apology, laced with an unreal amount of sincerity.

He had looked at something unearthly, something his father would have called monstrous, and he had felt not fear nor hatred, but awe. Awe, and shame that he had thought otherwise. He had believed his mistake to be so grave that he was willing to die as repentance.

“I… used to be good.”

His words are swallowed by the harrows of the night.

The ceiling swims with an inky green. Not painted, nor lit by any ghastly light, but with the same view as if one looked at such things through the water of a pond. The bedroom is not so much a room as an oversized jar tipped lightly on its side, and Merlin acts as the insect within, flapping and buzzing without moving an inch.

Lightness presses to his skin. His skin feels as though it is inflated by his bones and coursing blood, feeling the rubber of his flesh stretch with every unstable beat of his heart. He is both weightless as a feather and heavy such that his own weight pins him to the bed. Sensation speaks to him in waves, the wide coming to lift him, empty him, then retract and drop him again, thick as tar.

The rug shuffles below him, then he hears it again, then again. It echos, though the sound is never distorted, only repeated. Each sound sits beside the rest as brothers, multiplying infinitely alongside his endless breaths.

His hand spasms lightly, and a current burns along his veins harshly then dies, leaving a trail of dull airlessness. He twitches again, and is punished by another tide that smothers him flat. A coolness slides down his temple; a drop of sweat that grows legs as it travels down, skittering swiftly around the curve of his cheek and melting into the sheet beneath.

He hears someone within the room.

At the far end, the air peels back, depth having miscalculated the distance, and it reveals the figure of Morgana. She is very far, yet close enough that Merlin could reach his hand to brush his fingertips over her cold skin, should he wish to. Something is wrapped dutifully around her hand, black and scaled with many protruding heads. It climbs her hand and hisses without making a sound.

Merlin’s chest rattles, and his mouth opens, letting free a breath that escapes as a whisper, thinner than the leaves of a moth. His lungs stretch and strain to no avail. Arthur’s name hangs just behind his teeth, yet will not cross the gap.

Another tide slams hard into him. His bones float within himself, not feeling part of him but rather like alien objects that reside within him. He fights to push himself backwards, sinking deep into the pillows behind him, shoulders dragging inch by inch. Each scrape further bends his surroundings, bending the ceiling. Morgana glides with it, fixed in air, scaled creature spilling over her like a ribbon of tar.

He feels a pain in the back of his neck, as though something writhes within, dying, and he soon notices a head missing from the creature. The agony sends a harsh wave of memory through him, a blue poison dumped carelessly over a beautiful meal, a crossbow rigged within a armoire, a bath of scalding water, hot enough to singe a sword.

The Fomorrah hisses again, this time with a whisper that resonates within his ears, and he moves again, scooting, jolting, begging that his muscles seize enough to maneuver himself away from this terror. His skull hums with the green of a bog, and the air is thick. He runs out of space to climb.

Another wave strikes, vicious, swallowing sight and sound together. Morgana bends, snake-teeth glinting, and the ceilings twists closer. His ears fill with the creaks of the wood and the whispers of his own breath.

Then the floor, the bed, the room, all fold inward, collapsing into the green tide. He falls with it. The jar finally tips and the insect is dumped out. Darkness rolls forward. The snake’s mouth opens wide as the moon cracks above him, pouring light like blood.

The moon rests particularly close to the ground, as if it is hung from a string and dangled alongside the stars by a mystical puppeteer settled deep within the clouds above. He finds, also, that the moon is much too blue, as though this puppeteer painted it himself with the very finest of materials.

Light drips from it unnaturally, warm cerulean dribbling down to rest softly upon Merlin’s cheeks. It coats the grass beneath his bare feet in a light sheen pooling beside the shadows of various shrubs. If he closes his eyes and holds his breath, he hears the space around him hum, deep and old like a dream heard through a wall.

He stands within the clearing of the trees, clothes too clean and body too rested. Something is very gently wrong, like a painting by someone who is colorblind. He knows he’s dreaming, or dead, or both.

Still, the wind stirs, and there are new footfalls upon the grass. Merlin tilts his head to find that they are of Arthur.

There stands the king, alive, whole and golden like the day the crown was first placed upon his head. He bears no sword, nor is he clad in armor. He is adorned in the soft clothes of leisure, worn only in the comfort of his own chambers with only his servant there with him. His hair is tousled by his fingers running through it and his mouth is turned yet into a half-smile, unsure, but patient.

Merlin forgets how to breathe. His name falls out in a whisper. “Arthur.”

The king’s expression lightens, warm and startled, seeing something unexpected but much welcome.

“Merlin,” he says, with a familiar inflection. Exasperated fondness, tinged with disbelief. “I thought I’d lost you again.”

Again. Merlin’s legs nearly give.

Arthur takes a step closer, eyes trailing him slowly like he’s afraid the image will flicker and vanish.

“Where’ve you been?” Arthur says gently. “I waited at the lake. You never came.”

The words slice him. He wants to apologize, but his throat closes. Instead, he laughs, shaky and soft, and blurts, “I thought you were dead.”

“I was.” Arthur tilts his head. “You were too, weren’t you?”

He can’t lie, not here, with that unnatural light looking down with the ancient glow of eyes that have seen all.

“Yeah.”

Arthur simply nods.

The trees sigh. A breeze rolls through and the leaves turn over, glinting on their undersides. A single apple thuds softly to the moss in the distance.

Merlin takes a breath. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Arthur studies him, sharp eyes softening. “You always do.”

“No.” Merlin shakes his head. “It’s serious this time. It’s the reason I’ve stayed beside you, and yammered about destiny, and…”

He chokes. The words wedge between the ridges of his throat.

Arthur doesn’t rush him. He simply waits, and in that waiting, Merlin feels the strain of his entire body, the exhaustion rooted deep within him that he could never hope to wash away.

He begins slowly.

“There’s magic in me,” Merlin says. “I was born with it. Before I ever met you, before destiny ever dragged us together, I was already... wrong.”

The words hang, soft but brittle. He expects suspicion, anger, even revulsion. Arthur doesn’t flinch.

“You mean, you’re a sorcerer?” Arthur asks, calmly, quietly.

Merlin casts his gaze downward in silent response.

“How long have you…”

Merlin laughs, bitter and shy. “Since before you were a man. Since before you were crowned. I’ve lied to you every day. I’ve saved your life more times than I can count and you never knew it was me.”

Arthur’s face is unreadable, and it makes Merlin ache. He wants to press his hand to the king’s chest, just to feel if the heart is still beating like his is, uneven and frantic.

“I thought it would destroy you to know,” he whispers. “I thought it would make you hate me. Or maybe you wouldn’t hate me, but you wouldn’t trust me and you wouldn’t know what to do with me.”

Arthur is silent for a moment, then, “But you still stayed.”

Merlin nods.

“You protected me.”

“I did.”

“And lied to me.”

“I… did.”

The moon shifts behind a cloud, briefly shadowing them. Arthur steps forward to leave only inches between them. He searches Merlin’s face like he would look at a puzzle he almost understands.

“Why now?”

“Because I’m tired,” Merlin says, and it comes out a whisper of a sob. “Because I can’t hold it anymore. I really don’t like lying to you.”

There’s a long silence. Aeolus holds his breath. Then Arthur says, “I knew.”

The words knock something loose in Merlin.

“What?” he breathes, eyes widening.

Arthur shrugs casually, but his eyes are wet. “I knew something. I didn’t know what, exactly. But I saw the way the world bent around you. I saw the way you’d vanish into the trees and come back with miracles. I never asked.”

Merlin stares at him. The forrest grows quieter, as if leaning in to hear what happens next. Something in the earth groans.

“I was afraid,” Arthur says. “Afraid that if I named it, you’d disappear. That if I knew for sure, I’d lose you.”

Merlin breaks, not into tears nor into screams. He simply folds, as would parchment or a cloth. He falls into Arthur’s arms with a gracelessness that does not suit a sorcerer or a man or anything with any semblance of pride.

Arthur catches him and holds him like he always should have. He apologizes for the many punches to the arm by wrapping a hand around a shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin says, the words coming out choked,“I should’ve- if things had been different, I would have told you. I wasn’t- if I had been braver-”

“You are brave,” Arthur says,“You are one of the bravest men I know.”

The king’s eyes glow with no trace of rage, or of disappointment, nor even of fear.

The moment is flawless, marvellous, incomparable to anything; it is much too perfect. Merlin takes a step back. He looks around, lightly at first, then begins a desperate swivel of his head. The trees sway heavily as if their roots are being shaken, and the earth below bellows with the strain. Merlin looks down to watch the ground tremble and gazes upon glass underfoot, cracks slowly wiggling along from the harsh thrash of the surrounding trees.

The forest begins to bleed, red drops pouring into the cracks in the glass floor. The moon begins to flicker and swerve, as if the string it has been hung by is tearing. Arthur’s hand upon Merlin’s shoulder turns cold. Merlin looks to meet his eyes, but they no longer hold the same gleam they did just moment ago. Rather, they flood horribly with absolute terror.

Expression matching, Merlin throws Arthur’s hand from his shoulder, and steps precariously backwards, foot landing hard upon and unstable crack. He watches in horror as the glass beneath his feet shatters by his own doing and drops him harshly down head to the unseeable ground.

He watches Arthur above, as he is watched from below. He falls steadily, such that it nearly feels as though he is suspended in air. As Arthur’s face grows distant, his gaze shifts to the mirror that had broken off a wall in this black abyss, and now rests at his eye level.

He looks in the mirror and sees himself, though it is not as he knows himself to be. Instead, he sees a face twisted with wickedry and evil. Deep in his mind there is a signal of recognition regarding this figure, as though he’s seen it before, in an abysmal setting similar to this, yet lit much brighter.

He meets hollowed eyes that glow from deep within their sockets, and a mouth twisting up into a shape that could not belong to the word mercy. Another flicker of recognition flashes across Merlin’s mind. He sees himself, but not as he is. Instead, he sees all that he tried not to be. He sees the sag in his face, heaviest under his eyes, and blood streaked across his hollowed cheeks and soaking his tunic.

His hands itch to crawl to his face, to cover his eyes or hold his head or pull his hair, but the force of his fall holds his arms tightly to his sides. His mouth wants to scream, but it can hardly open, and pressure of the air holds his throat closed.

Arthur is gone from view, whether he exists or not is now a mystery. The trees have wilted and now droop down into this dark space in the form of tendrils, reaching closer to him, shoving past the mirror, latching to his wrists, his ankles, around his core and pulling him down faster. The sky hung with bright stars and the painted moon fade from sight and Merlin is sucked into pure darkness.

Landing as dust, Merlin opens his eyes (he does not know that he closed them) and finds neither the clearing in the forest nor the dark void he fell through for god knows how long. Before him stretches a hall, lined horribly with doors of various material make-ups, all looming menacingly. They run inconceivably long, such that Merlin’s throat dries and head aches with the effort of looking.

The walls fade into the backing landscape of abyss painted with just a whisper of color. The light comes from nowhere, soft yet much too bright, and yellowed like an old paper lamp. There are panels of wood missing from the floor, leaving gaps that glow utterly black.

The doors are scattered hastily along the walls with no pattern, some the size of a castle gate and accented by tall archways, while some are the size of a mousehole. Some have cracks or slits that show firelight flickering on the other side, while some are boarded up, nails curling strangely from the sides as if whatever resides within had tried to push its way out.

Merlin cautiously brings his hand to the knob of a door painted blue with the skies of Camelot. His fingers curl firmly around it, resting upon the cold metal. He does not open it.

He picks another. The handle is warm. The doorknob pulses like a heartbeat. This one opens with a sound like a breath drawn underwater.

Inside is a familiar throne room, flickering. It is empty, save for the shadows and a young prince with golden hair standing upon the dais, crown too big for his brow, blood pooling beneath him in great, murky puddles. He breaths hard, a sword driven into his belly. Merlin stands beside him, older, dirtier, trembling, with smoke on his fingers. He sees it for what it is; the moment he chose to strike first. Arthur turns toward him with glassy eyes.

“Why?”

The door slams shut before Merlin can answer.

The next he opens is of molding wood with accents of rusting iron, opening to reveal a small hut of Ealdor, aflame. Hunith screams from somewhere unseen, but her voice sounds like it has been overcome with wax. Merlin stands in the scorched grass just past the doorway. He had not stepped in. The illusion begins over, once, twice, thrice, rewinds and repeats. A blur of fire and his face not moving.

He staggers back, throat tight, hand against a wall that he does not feel.

He does not open every door, only enough to remember what they are. They are moments of his failure, in which he had a choice and made the wrong one, over and over. Some doors whisper, while some knock, soft as the click of teeth in a cold jaw. One screams when he passes, high and feminine, laughter that spirals quickly into sobs. One shows only himself himself, walking down this very hall, knocking on doors that do not open. He walks swiftly away.

The hallway comes to an end with a door already ajar, a spiraling staircase shown behind it. The banister is brass but bends like bone when he grips it. The steps do not creak, but the air around them does, whimpering with each ascent as if the hallway grows anxious at the thought of being left behind.

Ache settles into his legs as he climbs, growing wearier with every step. The light grows thin as a scent of ash slitherers in, alongside smoke and candlewax the scent of himself before he was.

Just after his legs are set to give, they are graced with a landing in a room of black stone, ornamented by a table in the center. Two familiar apples set upon the table, one is black and frosted with the blood of truth, the other is gold gleaming warm like honey. Behind sits a familiar masked figure, hands outstretched to hover over each apple. The scene is achingly familiar.

Merlin does not reach for an apple yet, he simply sits upon the floor, legs crossed and hands in his lap, palms upturned eyes sprouting from bruised pores to look at him. He remembers the clearing in the forest, the sighing of the trees, the perfect tender moment he shared. Though now, he remembers this masked figure awaiting him from somewhere within the forest.

He remembers the throne room, blood pooling onto the dais. The haunting voice of his king scratches the side of his memory. He finds that in this instance as well, this masked figure had lingered someone nearby, just out of sight. Perhaps in this instance, he lurked within the sword.

He remembers the burning cottage, and his mother’s screams of molten wax. He finds that this masked figure was hidden in scorched grass.

He remembers the first door, the one that his hand lingered unmoved upon for much too long. He remembers how it pulsed with the beating of his heart, controlling the flow of his blood.

He looks to the apples, one of gold one of black. He focuses intently on the one of gold, and it shows everything he believes he’s wanted. It is borne of goodness, of peace and loyalty. He thinks of Arthur’s face, illuminated under that paper moon.

He changes focus to the apple of blackness; it draws with promise, yet no presence. It does not distinguish itself, does not try to seduce, it only waits as a truth to be discovered.

A voice speaks, possibly that of the naked figure, maybe his own, Do you want it to be real, or do you want it to yourself?

Slowly, Merlin lifts his hand, eyes aglow from their nestlement between the folds of his palm. He hovers over each apple, thinking of the consequences of either outcome He finds that one looks much more appealing than the other, but he also knows his fair share of trickery.

He hovers two fingers over the shining onyx, tracing the side before reaching both hands to grip it tightly. It softens under his grip, as if accepting him, and he gently raises it to his mouth to cautiously take a bite. He feels anticipation radiating ominously from the figure before him as his teeth sink in.

It does not have a taste, not anything conceivable anyway, instead it has whispers of something once held dear. He tastes blood in the back of his mouth that sticks to his tongue but there is no wound.

He swallows, and the world opens sideways. His knees give out but he doesn’t fall. He’s floating, or flying, or simply no longer supported by the idea of something beneath him. His arms flail, but they don’t move. Everything is loud, and bright.

He hears voices scream, though none of them are in pain. Rather, they don’t scream at all, they sing. A hum resounds though a hallway, a drop of blood drips from a door, a lyre and a flute play together, and the crackle of leaves whisper great secrets. He hears laughter, too, choked and private.

He sees a hand, his own, trembling over a bed that holds Arthur, or a dream of Arthur, or rather just the shape of grief he built around the fear of losing him.

He sees a staircase without end, looping like a serpent swallowing itself. Every step carries a version of him up or down or nowhere. One wears his oldest face, boyish and bloodied, one carries a staff, one wears chains, and one does not speak.

He sees the forest again, and now the many eyes that lingered within. The grass sings a song in a tongue he once knew, before it was strangled by fear. Hand reach for him, fingers twisted from the branches of the trees. They pull him into the dirt and try to fit masks upon his face; the first is joy, then duty, then the last is himself.

They whisper:

Pick one, and live inside it. Forget the rest.

He sees himself curled in a corner, mouthing words he doesn’t know are spells. He sees Gaius's shadow standing over him. He sees Arthur stepping into fire to reach him, and stepping back out, empty-handed. He sees the piercing eyes of a dragon.

The world condenses. He blinks, and he is sitting again. The room is familiar, but changed, now brighter and higher. The walls no longer close in like breath held too long. There is gold in the cracks now, veins of soft light winding through stone in a slow, patient flood. The figure is there, but the mask is gone. He is not monstrous.

He is not cruel looking, or regal, or strange. He is ordinary, older than Merlin but not ancient. Worn, not ruined. His face is lined with something like kindness, but also something colder, like memory unsoftened.

He looks like Merlin might look, if he were allowed to age.

“Did you see it?” the figure asks.

“I don’t know,” Merlin replies. His voice comes out dry and cracked. “I saw… something. I think I’ve seen it all before.”

The figure nods. “Of course you have. You’ve been dreaming it your whole life.”

He walks slowly around the table, not threatening but thoughtful.

“These places, these doors, the forest. They were not punishments, you know. Nor were they illusions. They were memories. Distorted but real, and yours.”

Merlin closes his eyes. The after-image of the dragon's eye still burns behind his lids.

“Why show them to me now?” he asks. “Why all this?”

The man leans on the table. His eyes are sharp now, sea-glass and dark forest both.

“Because you must to choose,” he says. “And I believe that now, you have.”

Merlin swallows, and realizes the taste of the apple has changed. It lingers now, bitter and bright, like cold iron.

“But, who are you?” he asks, but smth deep and primal already knows.

He places one hand to his chest in a gesture not of greeting, but of claim.

“I, my young boy, am you,” he begins, “Your liveness, your sense of being, your flesh and blood. Ah, not quite that last one, I am not alive. You see, I am your immortality. I, my child, am Emrys.”

Merlin looks upon him with eyes of wonder. Emrys stands tall, not aged or ageless, but something else entirely. He is carved, like a statue that's been worshipped and wept upon in equal measure. He doesn’t smile, but he looks as though he once did.

“You came further this time,” he says, voice low, almost kind, but with the weight of a world tucked behind the words. “You weren’t meant to.” A pause, then something curious. “Or perhaps you always were.”

Merlin’s mouth is dry. The taste of the apple sits heavy on his tongue, tart and uncanny, having grown on a tree that never knew the sun. He says nothing, only stares.

Emrys tilts his head, faintly amused. “You dream so vividly. Or maybe it’s that you remember so poorly.”

He steps forward, and the floor beneath him is crafted of starlight, fracturing with every step. The room has brightened, but not warmed. Emrys walks, and the space folds around him to allow his passage, as if bending the world itself to his will and whim. “You’ve been trying to unmake me,” he says, “from the moment you learned I was you. But we are not opposites, boy, we are halves. Only, you are the half that was loved.”

At that, Merlin finds a voice, though it rasps. “I am not you.”

Emrys does not stop walking. Rather, he circles like a tide pulling in. “Then tell me who I am.”

Merlin does not answer. Emrys watches him carefully, his eyes brighter than stars, but colder than the ice of the fjords. He raises a hand, and in doing so, pulls open a seam in the air itself, not a door, but something older, softer, as though the sky had turned to silk and tearing. Beyond it lies a long corridor, its walls trembling, its distance unknowable. The space rearranges to allow for its presence.

“Walk with me,” Emrys says. “Let me show you what you made. What I had to become.”

Merlin doesn’t move. He watches the shimmer in the air, the shadows that coil as ribbon around the seam. “What if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll stay here. And this time, you won’t wake up.”

It is not a threat. Emrys says it like he’s telling the time.

Merlin exhales slowly and follows. The corridor does not greet him, nor swallow him. It simply exists, impossibly long and yet close as breath. The door seals itself behind them.

They walk, and with each step, Merlin feels the dreams pressing in. Not with memory but with real pressure, weight, time stacked and warping. The air hums low in the fashion of a tuning fork struck. The walls are a mad patchwork of shifting light and liquid shadow, stone or smoke, with forms not unlike doorways every view paces. They remind him horribly of a particular large and ghostly veil.

“The first ones are innocent,” Emrys says, as they pass. “You were to be eased into the truth. Do you remember this?”

One door shows Merlin, younger, lost in a forest of dread and ire. His hands are covered in blood, not his own, and someone calls his name from far off, the voice echoing the wrong way down his spine.

Another shows Arthur’s coronation, but the sky is black and it rains petals instead of water, each one turning to ash as it lands.

“You dreamed these to comfort yourself,” Emrys says. “Even the ones where things went wrong, they were still the only way your mind knew to make sense of failure. You tried to wrap it in meaning, in metaphor, and in beauty.”

The corridor begins to narrow. The walls pulse something sticky and familiar. The scenes shift.

The next door shows Gwen at the pyre, her mouth stitched shut and tears trailing down her face like glowing beads. Merlin stands frozen, eyes wide. He does not move to stop it.

In another, Gaius with his back turned, silent, as Uther crowns Morgana with a smile much too wide.

“These are the ones you buried,” Emrys says, tone clipped now. “Do you remember? You barely slept. The dreams clawed at you then, but you would not look. You thought to kill me by starving me of acknowledgement.”

Merlin swallows hard, throat tight.

“I’ve been waiting,” Emrys continues. “Waiting rather patiently, for you to see what I’ve seen.”

Another door, Arthur again, except this time he kneels in the snow, eyes wide, arms cradling the lifeless body of his servant. The blood is wrong, too dark, too thick, yet glowing with gold. It smokes as it hits the ground.

“Why are you showing me this?” Merlin finally asks.

Emrys pauses. The light shifts. “Because you must remember what you’ve chosen to forget. You must know that I am what grew in the silence where you should have grieved.”

Merlin stops walking. The corridor breathes around him. “You mean to punish me.”

“No,” says Emrys, and he turns, now face to face. “I mean to save you.”

There is just a tingle, nearly imperceivable, of desperate insanity in his eyes.

The corridor breaks. There is no threshold, no grand door to mark the great change, only a gradual thinning, like breath on glass, until the walls lose their shape entirely and the floor no longer carries the sharp tap of footsteps. Instead, frost begins to bloom underfoot, delicate as spun sugar, and the once uniform corridor dissolves into something wild. Trees emerge from shadow like ribs of the earth made tall and crooked. They don’t sway, but there’s movement in them all the same, a stillness watching expectantly.

Merlin slows instinctively. Emrys does not look back at him. He walks ahead with a calm that Merlin does not find it in himself to trust, hands folded behind his back like a teacher on the final leg of a cruel lesson.

“Do you remember this place?” he asks, but his voice sounds different now, less theatrical and performative, less ornamental. Something about this place strips the performance away. “I doubt you do. You were not meant to. That is to say, you did not mean yourself to.”

The light changes too. It is no longer the golden dusk of earlier dreams, nor the moon-pale glow of Emrys’ illusions. This is deeper and stranger, seemingly belonging under ice, blue and brittle. It seeps deep into fractures, casting no shadow but carving every shape. The air smells of the old stone of a cavern centuries untouched.

“You should know,” Emrys says, finally coming to a stop. “This part of you never stopped calling out. With every shovelful of dirt you dropped atop, it roared. You covered it with the mask of your obsession that cruelly mimicked love.”

He steps aside, and reveals to Merlin the dreadful scene.

It is not all at once, not with a thunderclap or some majestic unveiling. It is simply there, waiting, as it’s always been. It curls at the center of a clearing rimmed by trees so black they don’t reflect the light, so still they don’t even breathe.

The form of a dragon, not Kilgharrah, nor Aithusa, nor anything Merlin has ever known by name or as kinship.

It is part of the landscape, as stone and smoke that move like the wind. Its wings are half folded, broken in places, yet it radiates something so immense that it presses down on the air itself. Its head is tucked low, but its eyes, like twin coals deep in a hearth that only just has not died, are open, and they watch him dutifully.

Merlin goes completely still. No magic stirs in him, no words rise, no warnings spill from Emrys’ wise tongue. There is only that gaze, piercing yet dull, making known the unmistakable sense that this creature, this presence, knows him much better than he knows himself.

Merlin steps forward, breath held somewhere behind his teeth. The dragon stands still, neck bowed, wings half-furled in a gesture that could be reverence or exhaustion. It is pale and vast and coiled like a creature not built for the ground. Its scales are veined with a dim shimmer, as starlight filtered through a screen of frost.

He approaches cautiously, and wordlessly. The dragon watches him with eyes that do not blink, eyes that have seen too far and too long to still understand small things like blinking. A sound builds in the back of its throat, something halfway between wind and weep. The noise fills the space between them but does not expect anything in return.

Words spill from its mouth, but he has no idea what they mean. They aren’t in any tongue he knows, no dialect, no spellwork, no forgotten Druid chant. It attempts again, slower this time, the sounds rumbling out like a dying fire spitting embers, but he still cannot understand.

He opens his own mouth, and nothing comes. His throat is dry and his voice is gone. Shame flickers across his features like a moth trying to escape a lantern glass. He lifts his hands slowly, almost guiltily, and tries to gesture something, he doesn’t know what.

The dragon tilts its head, considering. Then, with aching grace, it raises its own limbs and begins to move. Deliberate, slow pantomime. Its clawed hands carve out gestures in the space between them. Not quite language, nor mime. Rather, a performance of meaning, and it requests that he join.

He mirrors it clumsily, his body unsure, movements sluggish beside its flowing rhythm. The dragon pauses. It sees he still doesn’t know. His expression betrays him, his furrowed brow, the way his mouth has gone slack in dismay. His eyes are still too human to hide anything.

Then, ever so gently, it raises one taloned forelimb and presses it to his brow. He doesn’t flinch. The claws do not cut. They pass through, like breath through fog, like thought through dream.

Suddenly, the world folds inward.

He is inside something - or maybe someone - else, and there is agony. Agony not like fire or blade, but the kind that sinks in quietly and never stops echoing. Loneliness that feels like it has weight, centuries old. Guilt that loops endlessly, with no beginning to the regret and no end to the grief.

He sees flashes and fragments of that cursed forest of his hollow dreams, now overgrown, rotted. He sees a hand reach out and be swatted away. He sees chains not made of iron, but of memory and duty and blood. And at the core of it all, curled like a dying star, the dragon’s pain.

He stumbles backward, breath knocked from his chest - not by any physical prowess, but by the force of overwhelming knowledge.

The firm voice of Emrys cuts through the silence.

"You must kill it."

The words cleave through the moment like the crack of thunder through glass, not shouted, not even spoken loudly, but harsh enough to wrench Merlin out of the vision like a fish yanked from water. He stumbles back, breath catching in his throat, the image still wet behind his eyes, clinging to him with all its sorrow and smoke. He’s not sure what world he’s returned to. The floor is stable beneath him, but the light feels wrong, too gold and humming faintly like it’s been stolen from a memory he once trusted.

Emrys stands behind him now, or maybe he always did, not masked nor hidden. He is simply there, severe and shining, the same as he was in every version Merlin tried not to remember. That unblinking gaze, ageless and untouched, like something carved out of inevitability. His expression is unreadable, but his presence is a vice, cold metal against skin.

The dragon, still before him, has not moved. Its long neck bows slightly, smoke exhaling in a quiet thread from its nostrils. There is no fear in it, nor resignation either. Instead its eyes fill with recognition, like it has waited centuries for this exact second and has run out of anything else to say.

Merlin does not speak. His mouth tastes like iron and ash.

Emrys steps forward, the soft heel of his boot tapping the ground like a metronome to something dreadful. The air trembles faintly around him, not with magic, but with pressure, the kind that precedes collapse. He doesn’t look at Merlin as he moves, only at the dragon, as though Merlin’s choice is already made, or never mattered.

“This is the thing that’s been leeching from you,” he says, voice low and unshakable, the kind that doesn’t need to rise to be heard. “The part that made you hesitate. The part that whispered doubt when you were meant to act. You spared out of guilt, or cowardice, but you’ve known what it was. You’ve always known.”

The dragon does not move. Its golden eyes flicker, not with fear but with memory, as though it, too, has heard this argument before.

Emrys circles it slowly now, like a king appraising a treasonist on trial. “You buried it deep, because you thought mercy was some kind of virtue. You mistook its voice for compassion. But compassion does not keep the world from burning.” He stops in front of the creature, barely an arm’s length away, and for the first time, there is something sharp in his expression, not hate but disgust. “This is the rot in you.”

He turns his gaze to Merlin now, and suddenly the room feels smaller. His eyes glint with the prowess of a balladeer.

“You think you choose between cruelty and kindness,” Emrys says. “But you do not. You are choosing whether to become what you were meant to be, or to keep pretending you do not know what that means. You think you are afraid of me, but you are afraid of it, and afraid of what it costs you to keep carrying it.”

He steps back just once, then gestures with a quiet, final sort of authority.

“You must kill it.”

Merlin does not speak. Despite their low volume, Emrys’ words echo loud, through a cavernous space in his chest where certainty ought to live. His eyes remain still on the dragon, its presence as a statue, and he wonders how long it has known of this day. Perhaps it had waited all this time in some dim corridor of his soul, knowing someday the door would open again and it would be sentenced by a version of himself that saw no room for mercy.

He closes his eyes and drifts into himself, seeking answers to this terrible question in his journey. A single breath and the ground is gone beneath him, and he no longer stands in a room, not before Emrys, or the dragon, or even himself. He drifts through dreams and through time. The hallway of doors flickers by like a pulse; Arthur’s body cradled on a forest floor, Morgana turning away with tears and venom. He sees each moment again, and again, each mistake like a splinter beneath the skin. Emrys is right, these wounds fester still. Though, there is more than just old wounds.

Between those shadows are other memories, softer ones, fragile, yet untouched by bitterness. He hears the sound of the hearth crackling in Ealdor, his mother’s hands kneading bread with flour still streaked across her brow. Her eyes, how they looked at him like he was not strange or broken, but beloved. She had wiped blood from his scraped knees and told him, “You’re brave,” as if bravery and gentleness could be the same thing. And his father, no matter his failings, had stood tall in his time of duty, looking at his son like there was something in him worth guarding, even if he never lived to do it.

He sees it now, and understands it, the shape of what they gave him. It is not power nor destiny, but the first notion of goodness. An idea that one may be strong without cruelty, that love is no weakness, and that choosing gentleness, despite the world, is not a trait of failure.

His breath hitches. Alongside the warm smile of his mother stand those of Gaius, Gwenevere, Arthur, even Kilgharrah, all watching and waiting, believing in him.

He slowly fades back into his body, eyes opening with a new glint of understanding and defiance, His eyes lift to the dragon, and its stance has changed, now holding not hope, but the stillness of trust.

Behind him, Emrys is still and silent, particularly out of character.

Merlin silently steps forward. Magic pools beneath his ribs, thumping in his chest, called like a tide to the edge of his fingertips. For one breathless instant, it glows bright enough to drown the room in a cool and heartless blue. Emrys watches, encased half in shadow and expression unreadable, though something fierce and satisfied gleams just beyond his eyes.

The dragon does not move. Its wings are folded still, eyes low yet proud, showing no fear for what is to come.

Merlin raises his hand and for just a moment, it looks as though he may kill the creature before him, just as is asked. His fingers shake with the force of his magic, his brow draws tight with the weight of decision and prophecy and futures unborn written in fire and bathed in blood. His palm grows brighter still until the edges of his own vision fray with it. Power thrums up his spine and his lips part to intake a breath.

Then, his magic folds back into himself, the tide gently retracts back to sea. His hand wavers, then settles without violence but rather gentleness upon the dragon’s head, just between its horns. The dragon lifts its gaze, slow, deliberate, and meets him there. Something ancient and silent flickers in that look, not gratitude, nor even relief, only a familiar look of recognition.

The light fades. Behind him, Emrys does not speak. But the shape of his silence shifts, and he is not pleased. The air snaps, not with light, but with the sound of Emrys drawing a breath so sharply through his teeth it sounds akin to the unsheathing of a mighty blade.

“You are a fool.”

Merlin does not flinch. His hand remains as it is, fingers splayed upon warm scales, feeling the rhythm of what lives beneath. The dragon watches Emrys now too, as if it understands that it has been seen, chosen, and spared.

“No.” Emrys steps forward, and for the first time, the grace peels back. There’s fury in him, and something much more dangerous; fear. “Do you know what you’ve done?” His voice sharpens with every word, like it might break against its own edges. “You had the future in your palm. The key to everything we suffered for. And you chose this creature, this weakness.”

Merlin says nothing. The words he wishes for have not yet made themselves known to him. His heart is too loud in his ears.

Emrys’ steps echo. “That thing is the part of you that recoils when you must kill. It weeps for kings who never earned your loyalty. It lies awake grieving those who should have been left behind.”

To hear such ideas laid out so plainly only solidifies Merlin’s confidence in his decision. Emrys’ hand lifts, and the shadows coil fast around his wrist like smoke given purpose. “You’ve made this harder than it must be,” he says, and his voice, his face, even the lines of his form begin to tremble with the weight of uncontainable wrath. “Do you think kindness will save you? That sentiment is what breaks us. It is what left you weeping in the woods, begging for purpose from the stars while the world moved on without you.”

He spits the next words like venom, “I am what you become when you accept your power, and use it.”

Still, Merlin does not move. The dragon stays beneath his hand, quiet. Its eyes narrow.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Merlin finally says, soft and sure. “Not anymore.”

The shadows recoil for a moment. As though Emrys did not expect such a tone to be set in his direction. As though he, for all his power, had not been prepared for defiance born from stillness instead of strength.

Then he laughs quietly, as though it hurts. “You think this is victory?” he says. “You think mercy makes you strong? It makes you small, Merlin. It makes you forgettable. Do you know how many futures die in the name of love?”

His mouth curls into something bitter. “You could have been a god.”

The air is colder now, though no wind has been known to it. Stillness has grown teeth. Merlin stands with his palm against the dragon’s brow, unmoved, though Emrys spits words behind him like glass in a fire.

"Sentiment," Emrys hisses, nearly laughing but too angry for it. “You think that will save you? You think the creature understands mercy? It is not part of you anymore, it is what kept you from becoming what you were meant to be.”

The dragon does not stir. Its breath fogs lightly from its nostrils, steaming over Merlin’s arm. Its eyes are wide, tired, ancient. It recognizes these words.

“You know that I am right,” Emrys continues, circling them both now. “Every time you nearly claimed your fate, there it was, that sniveling thing to drag you back. Through every hesitation, every stutter, every coward’s silence. You chose to fail, and now you embrace the part of you that made you weak?”

Merlin turns, slowly. His hand still rests against the creature, fingers curled lightly into a ridge of scale. “No,” he says, not loudly, but the word cuts through the air like iron. “I didn’t choose to fail. I chose to hope.”

Emrys recoils, more wounded than enraged, but the fury quickly catches up. “Hope,” he snarls. “The lullaby of the doomed.”

Merlin steps toward him now, away from the dragon, a half-step only, but enough. “I’ve seen what you are when there’s no one left to temper you. I’ve been that. You think power means freedom, but it only ever made you lonelier. To hope, to show kindness, is to be strong.”

The words hang between them like smoke from a long-dead fire.

Emrys bares his teeth, not a smile. “Fine,” he spits, suddenly much quieter, invading much less of the space. “Go, be strong.”

He spits that last word like a curse, not a benediction, and as it lands, the space around them begins to bend.

There is no clean cut. The shift is almost imperceptible. Merlin feels something pull, not forward, not back, just through. Time retracts like a thread tugged too hard, unraveling in reverse as if the fabric of his dreaming life has decided to play itself backwards. He does not stumble. The dragon follows, or perhaps leads, its great head brushes gently against the space between his shoulder blades, as if to guide him, a slow and ancient lantern through a hall of broken recollections.

They move back through the dreams, but they are not as they were.

The forest comes into view, no longer bathed in bright moonlight, but stark in its winter bones, the grasses dead and soft with time. The twisted figures who once tried to distract him are frozen now, masks limp in their hands. He passes through, untouched, and the trees stand tall as they are rather than dipping deep into the ground with fingers sprouting. He does not stop.

He soon approaches familiar doors along a drawn out hallway, each looking much more inviting than he recalls. He does not wander as he did, instead he strides with absolute precision, the dragon’s breath hot over his shoulder. He sees every scene made anew, now untwisted, looking as it is rather than as that balladeer intended it to. He looks into the eyes of every door as he passes, head high and unflinching.

Through a new door, one incased in the glass of a marble, the Balladeer plays a harp with strings of his own hair, humming that same unbearable tune. But now, Emrys watches him, and Merlin files past with his head high.

The scenes continue to rearrange themselves. Threads that once felt cruel now seem almost mournful. Even Emrys’ voice, previously booming from invisible corners, makes not a sound. It is as if the dreams themselves mourn the loss of their puppeteer.

Another unfamiliar door swings wide, revealing a familiar white space with a mirror in the center. Merlin had never visited this space with a recollection of getting there. He sees a boy in the mirror wearing his face much differently than he wears it himself. Though with hollowed eyes and blood staining sharp cheekbones, this boy is much younger than himself. Merlin no longer looks at this view of himself in horror, in fear of what is unknown, but rather in recognition and acceptance.

Said the Sun to the Earth; "I have crossed the dark seas to find you, and yet you stand as though unmoved since the first dawn." And the Earth, in patient gravity, did not answer. Earth had been waiting so long that waiting had become nature, and still, Earth felt warmth previously unknown.

“I thought you would be taller,” Arthur says. His mouth curls into that strange, grin, but his eyes are steady. Merlin, caught between a laugh and an apology, cannot decide which to give first. Something in the eye made it known that they have walked towards each other for centuries untold.

Said the Sun to the Earth; “I am late.” And the Earth, holding its own oceans close, replied only with the faintest turning, enough to catch the light so as to be seen.

“You’re late,” Arthur says, though his voice carries no true rebuke. He looks at Merlin as though the sight alone answers a question carried for years, and generations before.

Said the Sun to the Earth; “I will go, and I will return, again and again, until my light is gone.” And the Earth, certain now of the pattern, began to hope for the next arrival even before the present warmth had faded.

“I will follow you anywhere. I will always return to your side,” Merlin says quietly, not as promise but as truth. Arthur smiles, as if Merlin has said something obvious, something already known.

Said the Sun to the Earth; “Even in my absence, I will still be with you. You will carry my heat in your stone, my gold in your fields.” And the Earth, unable to speak, answered with a turn of the seasons.

“You’ve always been here,” Arthur says, and in the weight of those words is a history they have not yet spoken aloud.

Merlin wakes, head reeling, to a room cloaked with darkness. Honest and perceived shadows dance gracefully upon the walls, lit lightly by a candle blazing yellow. The walls hold a color natural to them, untainted by the greenish mist of the horrors. He lifts his hand before his face, turning it with ease and hardly seeing it spin, such is the darkness of the room. Light snores sound beside him, and when he turns his head he sees Arthur, arms crossed over his chest and head lulled in sleep.

As Arthur begins to stir, Merlin grows weary with suspicion, mind ringing with the image of ghastly figures standing tall at the foot of his bed. Arthur tilts his head upward, slowly beginning to realize that Merlin is awake and staring deep into him, mouth slightly agape.

“Shit, are you awake?” Arthur mumbles, half rising, half still lolling on the bed, voice tinted with sleep trailing off into incredulity. Arthur’s mad ramblings are interrupted with the slow rise of Merlin’s outstretched hand towards Arthur’s cheeks. As his palm makes contact, Merlin’s face lights with hope; “Are you… real?”

Arthur freezes, mid-breath, flabbergasted. His eyes widen as the words settle between them, as if he’s been hit by a gale. For a second, his instincts as king, as protector, as someone who has spent years being frustrated with Merlin’s secrets, war with what he’s feeling. He strives madly to reconnect with his rage. “You…” His voice falters, and the anger he has rehearsed for weeks that felt immeasurably long cannot find its footing. He exhales, low and sharp, a slight grin poking at his cheeks; “You absolute idiot.”

Merlin’s stomach lurches with the weight of memory. Scenes spiral through his mind; every dream, every trial, every misstep, every failure he has endured in the last weeks of wandering, falling, fighting, seeing, and not seeing. The apples, the moon hung from a string above the forest, the endless doors, the illusions of Arthur’s death, the raging face of Emrys, all of it whirls and tumbles together. The dizziness threatens to pull him under, a tide of recollection and adrenaline, but through it all, through the vertigo, through the haze, there is clarity. Somehow, through it all, he made it out.

He swallows hard and leans closer, voice soft and tremulous. “So… uh, you know about the whole magic thing…”

Arthur blinks, a twitch of disbelief curling at the corner of his mouth. “…You didn’t tell me for ten years.”

“Well,” Merlin replies, shrugging in a way that makes his shoulders ache from both exhaustion and tension, a hint of annoyance settling into his tone, “Damn, can you blame me? What would you have done?”

Arthur rubs the back of his neck, solemn expression overcoming his candlelit face, and finally mutters, “I have no idea.”

Merlin lets out another breath, more bitter this time. “Exactly. I’d have been a bastard of a friend to make you choose between me and your father.”

The words hang heavy in the dark. Then, Arthur bears witness to the long buried pureness and good residing deep within Merlin’s heart. It is reminiscent of when they first met; Merlin shining with the light of the sun, Helios smiling warmly upon him.

Arthur’s voice lowers. “…I was cruel. To you. To all of it.”

Merlin blinks, startled.

Arthur presses on, harsher now, as if fighting himself. “I let fear guide me. I let my father’s voice drown out my own. And it- Morgana- all of Camelot-” He breaks off, inhales hard through his nose. His jaw clenches. “I was angry at you. For lying. For keeping this. But I was angrier at myself. Because once, I knew better. Once, I was… better.”

Merlin stares, stunned into silence.

The air in the chamber tightens. Then Arthur leans forward suddenly, jabbing a finger toward Merlin’s chest, as though trying to rescue the rhythm of anger. “But don’t think you’re off the hook. You had me sleeping in a chair for a week.”

Merlin looks to his hands, wrists much thinner than he recalls. “A week?”

Arthur hesitates, eyes darting. “A couple weeks.”

“How many?”

“Uh… a month?”

A grin breaks helplessly across Merlin’s face, crooked and warm despite his exhaustion. “You care.”

Arthur’s ears redden. “I cared about getting some damn answers!”

Merlin’s smile softens, lips parting as if to answer, but no words come.

Arthur leans back again, pinching the bridge of his nose. His voice is quieter when he speaks. “I seriously thought you were gonna die. I realized, you’re more important to me than the secret you carried. I guess I always knew that. I was just too much of a fool to admit it.”

The candle flickers. Merlin swallows against the lump in his throat. For once, he has no retort, no jest, no sly remark.

Arthur sighs, scrubbing at his face. “You’ll be the death of me yet, Merlin.”

Merlin smirks faintly, leaning back against the pillow. “I try my best.”

The chamber stills, the night humming gently outside. The air carries lightly the weight of prophecy, and the oncoming potential for its fulfillment. Nothing is fixed, but many things are well on their way.

Notes:

yay omg u made it!! that's so cool!! in case u didnt look in the beninging my tumblr is sonny_d and u guys and totally like look at it and it'll totally like inspire me to like create more things or whatever...

ps. sorry i dont reply to comments i get overwhelmed and dont know what to say but i appreciate all the kind words🤧

Archive of Our Own^beta

Actions

Work Header