Work Text:
a challenge
He watched Lancelot embrace death with open arms. Grief wreaked havoc in him as the tendrils of darkness spun webs before pulling the knight into the void within a breath. Only seconds before had the Cailleach told him that, despite his welcoming of passing, it was not his time. With his eyes glossed by sorrow and his throat attempting to swallow something akin to a rock, he realised she may be right but it was not what he wanted.
It was only seconds before his true end had arrived did he relieve the memory when a gap in the world began to open in front of his very sad and wrinkled eyes.
"Not letting me into heaven, I see?"
The Cailleach chortled briefly; she was not beyond humour. "Only if you believe in such a thing."
Merlin agreed with her silently, heart opened and mind shown to many ways a path can come to its end. Heaven, while a simple design in one's mind, could never be as kind as to not sift through many before allowing entrance to few. Death has never been a merciful finale even to those in suffering.
She was worn with her duty, the century-old bags bruised and purple underneath her watchful gaze. It seemed even the gatekeeper to the spirit world reached an end, wherever that may halt or lead on to. Reincarnation, maybe. She wouldn't expect a happy life for many years, her current life inevitably made to drag into a new one - a child to grow into a war-ridden man with a limp, or one living in poverty before the tight coil of hunger in their stomach claimed them and their entire family. Nevertheless, it was a break from the screams she tuned into daily.
"It seemed like a good plan," Merlin wheezed, a small grin waltzing on his dry lips. "Guess I'm not getting my send out, then?" He leaned back in his chair, calm inside his small cottage out in the abandoned countryside. His surprise to her visit was nonexistent, having already considered the many ways he'd leave. The one in front of him began to blossom when he was still young, circling the Cailleach.
So, Emrys, you choose to challenge me after all?
She shook her head slowly, skin beginning to peel away into dust and her eyes glowing a dying amber. Merlin reached to grab her hand before it, too, descended into nothingness along with the rest of her vessel.
There was a pause in time before he felt the first layer of his aged flesh disappear.
_____
Robes dragged behind him, a mourning black. A red handkerchief had been wrapped tightly around his neck.
His cheekbones were sharp as were his eyes, a startling blue amidst the dreary clouds and rolling thunder, smooth in its wake as yet another background noise. Skin not devoid of colour and hair a blended brown, you would not have thought him to be the gatekeeper to the other world.
He, unlike his predecessor, had still a millennia or more to go before he felt tired of meddling. His thin, wiry body made not a movement as he sewed the portal shut, cries fading into echoes. Ghosts from the past walked with him, swords thumping against chainmail and capes fluttering, frolicking in the wind.
With each moment the faint forms moulded into blood and bone, collected laughter bringing joy to the lonesome being. Even with his title being demanded by many realms, he took his time to reinstate life into the kingdom of Camelot. Times had changed and technology advanced, but the spirit of its past people continued to dance with the new.
The knights and their king, aware of their past lives, went on to rebuild their nation. Until their deaths, a gatekeeper was content with wandering alongside them.