Merlin fic: Stars Never Rise
Title Stars Never Rise
Category Series AU, Canon Era; Merlin/Morgana
Warnings: Highlight to read: character death, violence, allusions to torture
Words ~8400
Summary Emrys of legend is both the greatest hope the Druids have, and the most powerful weapon that King Uther wields.
A/N Uh, I wrote Merlin fic? Which is strange, but damn, I love that show to bits. Infinite thanks to khaleesea on Tumblr for giving me a much needed beta-read.
A/N 2: There's a sequel on the way, but it's being written for the Paperlegends Big Bang, so it won't go up until August. (Also I changed the title of this fic cause I'm a lame-o.)
It takes few words to change the path the future will favour. Queen Ygraine shuddered and died at the moment her babe wailed his first, and a year and almost two later, King Uther Pendragon learns of the prophecies that the Druids speak. King Uther listens, and he learns, and he kills his fear by conquering.
The throne room is lit dimly by a two wall sconces, and Uther speaks in the dimness to his finest knights.
“There are two that you will bring me: The Witch Seer Morgana of the house of Gorlois, a child less than five; and a babe in arms with gold eyes, perhaps not yet born, whom the prophets know as Emrys. He will come from a village just beyond our border with King Cenred. I don’t care what you have to do to retrieve him. It will be worth it.”
So with this edict, those few words, Camelot’s future stutters, shifts to a place filled with vengeance that runs so deep that no victory can sate it; with a King so mired in hatred that were the streets of Camelot flooded with the blood of his enemies, he would still call for more to slake his thirst.
--
“Don’t you know,” they whisper around the campfire, “that the King keeps the boy Emrys beside him in the throne room, cowering beneath the dais.”
Children huddle close, eyes wide in the dark, and scared.
“He took Emrys as a whelping babe, as his eyes glowed like flame and the sun quaked under his wandering gaze. The King feeds him table scraps from his own hand, meat raw with blood and berries dripping red, and they say it is the King’s own hand that wields the tools that break Emrys and bind him to service of the throne of Camelot.”
Starlight filters down through the trees, and the moon is on the wane, hanging fat and yellow. Horses whicker softly in their shelters and the children of the Druid camp crowd in, fire colouring their cheeks and lighting their eyes. When news comes of Emrys, all of them listen. Just as King Uther of Camelot is so very fond of his pet sorcerer, so too are the druids helplessly enamoured with him; their downfall, doom, and most quiet of hopes.
“Do you know,” they ask around the campfire, “the power that flows through Emrys?”
The children shake their heads (because they know, but this is the best part of the story, the only good part at all).
“He can call mountains crumbling down from their perch in the heavens, for Destruction bows to him as Lord. Beneath his hands flowers twist and grow, for to him, Creation sings and sighs her love. Emrys is Albion and Albion lives in him, and so he breathes her fires and weeps her rains and one day, he will fight her vengeance.”
Those that hear these words shiver and bow their heads and pray for that day to be sooner, to be now.
“Today he carries Uther’s destruction in the palm of his hand, but tomorrow he will be our only hope. Uther understands this not; Uther, the Tyrant, who would see us all dead, gives his slave our name so that we will never forget that it is our Emrys who hunts us so viciously, but he knows not the power of prophecy; the power in a name as ancient and forever as that one. He tries to kill our hope, but he only kindles it.”
The words the Druids never tell their children are that, maybe, that hope they are waiting for is trapped in a world that might have been, with a future that now can never be. That maybe Emrys will never lead them to safety, and that maybe he will hunt them down until the day he dies.
The Druids sleep uneasily. Softly bundled in a swaddle of furs, the little boy Mordred dreams of the day Emrys will turn on his master. His eyes are blue like thunder as his dreaming twists and turns.
--
Arthur peeks from behind Mother’s--NOT Mother’s, she’s not Mother, remember, or Father will be so sad again--heavy skirts, curious about the squalling, red-faced babe that a train of honour guards are carrying through the wide stone courtyard. Their scabbards hang heavily at their sides. Thick dirt, dried in the bright yellow sun, slings across the shine of their armour. They have very bright cloaks, very red, and Arthur will wear those cloaks one day, too, and look twice as magnificent, for when he wears them, he will be both Prince and knight.
The baby screams from within its swaddling, tears beading in its tiny eyes, and when it starts to rain, it doesn’t stop for days. Arthur pouts (protests!) inside his chambers, trapped by stupid rain and stupid chills and stupid nannies who aren’t Mother (remember, Arthur, can’t call another one Mother) and won’t let him have any fun, like his real Mother would, and he kicks his toys, and listens to that wailing baby. Sound slips easily throughout the castle, and through cracks in the stone and the through the thinness of mortar, Arthur can’t help but listen; listen.
Shh, just listen!
Sometimes, when he’s listening really, really hard, he starts to see these pictures in his head that aren’t his, and don’t belong there, blurred and indistinct and draped in fear. They’re more voices and impressions of feeling than pictures, really--a warm voice that breaks into screaming, rain on his face, cold locked inside his bones even though he’s wrapped in a million layers of furs, and an ache he doesn’t understand, because something is wrong and the gold that lives in his veins is telling him, wrong wrong wrong.
The first time he hears that strange imprint in his brain, Arthur shrinks and shivers and is so very scared in a way the Prince shouldn’t be, because he should be strong, strong like Father and strong like Mother would have wanted him to be, if she hadn’t flown away to heaven. The second time, he cries because he understands what it is to be lonely and scared and like he’s so far away from the home he’s supposed to be living in. The third time he listens, Arthur tries to talk back, whispering it’s okay, I’m here, you’re not alone, I’m here, don’t be scared. When he does that, he can feel a kind of grabbing, like tiny fingers holding on to him as tight as they can (which is not very) and he hears the memory of a voice that is kind of loving and like he imagines what Mother must have sounded like.
Father takes the baby away--away, Arthur, for a little while, and I know you want a friend, but this one is bad, Arthur, rotten to his bones, and evil--and Arthur can’t sleep. Silence rattles in his ears, and the air seems colder, even though he pulls his blankets up against himself so tight he feels he might crush his ribs together until they fuse solid. When he reaches out to the loneliness that used to live beside his mind, all he feels is emptiness, like his brain is smaller than it once was.
Arthur shivers and ducks his head and thinks it isn’t fair, none of this is fair.
He doesn’t see the boy Emrys for years, and when finally some bleak child--monster--emerges from the shadows, like he was there all along, to follow in King Uther’s long strides with all the fierce loyalty of a fanatic, Arthur doesn’t make the connection; doesn’t see through to that same loneliness he had felt when he was small and lonely himself and had, for a few weeks, found a strange companionship in a scared little baby.
--
A young girl all in white and answering to the name Morgana (but no one calls her that anymore, and only now is she starting to understand why) is relearning everything in a room as pale as it is boring. She stares up from her place on the floor and marvels at how even the bold blue of the riding cloak thrown over the chair back bleeds colour into the wash of pale, flimsy sunlight. Holding her hand up in front of her eyes, she breathes a breath that puffs in the chill. Her hand is pale, fingers so thin with cold that she fears the blood in them might yet freeze, and they will crack off like icicles.
There is a pool, in her mind, and it helps.
There is a pool of green and warmth and both life and unlife that Morgana floats through each night, and tries so hard (and yet unsuccessfully) to find in the day when she becomes tired of walking in this place of fear and loneliness. Another world lives below that pool--no, another thousand worlds, but only one she ever wants to see.
Morgana says, “I tire of this lesson,” this lesson that cramps her eyes and thuds achingly behind her temples, and Morgana says, “I will show you the world if you let me leave. I will show you everything if you let me go.”
The seneschal smiles at her, wide like a wolf and hungry.
“What say you, witch? I will let you go to your other place for two days if, when you get back, you tell me everything.”
The girl who calls herself Morgana because no one else will , who is lonely and scared when she remembers a time fuzzy with warmth and love and the hand of her mother, lays down on the soft mattress of the bed and waits while the seneschal decants a small glass of sleeping draught. One day (she knows, for she has seen it) she will not need the sleeping draught, and the key to the pool in her mind will be all her own. For now, she slips the lip of the glass between her lips and gulps the draught down; feels calm like she never is during the daylit hours as her limbs fill with weight and become all bone, nothing but leaden bone, sinking slowly down, pulling her down into the pool. It spreads open in her mind like a flower, and she sinks heavily into it, so heavy, slipping beneath the surface and sinking low into the mossy green.
In that pool, beyond and behind the surface glassy like the calmest water and thick like mercury, there is a world which she wishes to call her own. She swims toward it, dragging herself past so many yawning openings, water filled caves in the golden lit deeps. The entrance she swims into, white gown fluttering behind her, is scratched where she marked it, that first day when she had been scared and had no idea what she was doing.
They had pulled her away from her home, ripped her from her father’s arms and slitting his throat in front of her wide young eyes so that she would always know that there was no home for her to return to but the one they trapped her in, in the castle so cold and so pale. Uther had watched with narrowed eyes as the seneschal forced the flask of sleep between her gnashing teeth, and then she was falling, drowning in the deeps of her own mind (but not her mind, too big to be her mind alone) and thrashing helplessly, tangling herself in her fluttering clothing, rich velvets heavy and dragging her down, down.
But she had found the Other Now, and it was warm and bright and she saw her father, and her mother, and was warm with love there; she had marked that cave with a spark of something forbidden that crackled between her fingers so that she could find her way back there, again and forever.
The girl Morgana, who is too young yet to begin her monthly bleed, crawls across the strange threshold of her favourite (but not only) entrance to another place, flopping onto dry stone, and runs through to the wide lawns and steady arms of her father.
She spends a whole day and a whole night there, before she sighs and remembers Duty and Debt, flickering through to Another Place, where sorcerers and Druids cannot help but tell her their treasons. The King’s Witch (Morgana, mustn’t ever forget, Morgana, that’s her name, though she was shorter than her nightstand when last anyone called her that) spreads these secrets at Uther’s feet, waiting for his smile to tell her that yes, she has earned another glass of the draught, another reprieve, another key to the Other Now and the freedom of the house of Gorlois.
--
Gold threads through the eyes of the King’s strange shadow, when she is finished in her telling (of Nimueh and where she hides and the King’s men that she kills with fire and fear, but she doesn’t tell it true, and not complete) and waiting for Uther to give her leave to rise from her place on her knees before his throne.
“She is honest and her mind is open and, and--” the boy pauses, eyebrows creasing for an instant. He nods decisively while she holds her breath (because this once, she is lying, about one small little thing, and will he find out?) before he continues. “Nimueh is hiding in the village of Ethrain, in the stables of an inn, and--” he gropes around in her mind, and she guides him (gently) to the careful half-truth she constructed while she watched the beautiful sorceress quietly weeping over a locket Morgana knows to be Ygraine’s--“she will not know you’re coming. Your men will spill her blood. I see her dead in the girl’s mind. Your victory is complete, Sire.” The boy smiles, bows his head, looks pleased and so damn relieved. “She will die quietly.”
Greed froths at Uther’s tightly closed mouth, the symptom of a poison Uther fashioned for himself and swallowed with vicious abandon.
--
Morgana cries so hard when her lie is found out (Nimueh escapes, leaving six knights burning on six pyres behind her, and there was never any hope of her capture) that she has to sleep with her head curled on her arm so that the chill of her tears on the pillow doesn’t chafe at her cheek. The boy, the King’s own warlock, doesn’t emerge for days, and when he does there is a new fear of her in his eyes; there are new twists to his hands, and new scars spiralling his fingers, and he walks with a slouch that tells her of broken ribs poorly bandaged.
She never tells him a lie again, because he is like her; he is just as lost as she is.
When her punishment arrives, and it is nothing more than a shift in the meals that they bring her--dry bread, thin soup, watery oats--and longer hours spent straining her mind for the seneschal, she thinks of the boy and tries not to retch.
--
Rain is falling still, sowing rot in the crops where they lay on the fields. It should be harvest, but the rains won’t stop and the wheat can’t dry and winter will be cold and hungry indeed this year. Hopeful rumours from the servants’ quarters say that the King knows this, and that the King can stop it, and will stop it; will loosen the lead on his pet sorcerer and send the clouds away, just until harvest is over and done. Arthur fervently hopes the rains stop before anyone becomes desperate enough to actually request his father use sorcery to his face. Uther would never stand for that, and will never admit how much his rule has become dependent on the hollow-eyed scrapling of a boy, who hides so ineffectually behind the throne for hours that stretch long through the windows; who follows the King wherever he goes, as attached to Uther as his shadow, and almost as unnoticeable.
Years ago, Arthur had looked forward to the day he would hold court on his own--he can remember thinking about it with a child’s eager mind. He had imagined people in fancy dress, with elaborately dyed fabric and gold chains as long as he was tall, bowing before him and begging for him to share his wisdom. (In his dreams, Arthur had always been wise, when he was young; in his childhood dreams he had yet to know his own cowardice and folly.) Arthur had once taken to daydreaming as he sat with a quill in his hand, supposedly practicing his letters, about how the throne room would fill to bursting when he held court, townspeople and nobles alike so impatient to see him that they jostled into each other for position, their voices spilling through the halls and murmuring dimly even onto the furthest parapets of the town, where guardsmen walked and watched for danger.
In his daydreams as a child, his people always loved him, and they were always right to; in his dreams he was a just prince, and an honourable one.
Arthur turned thirteen this past June. In the two weeks preceding his birthday, his father vowed to clear the city of lechery, vice, and nascent sorcery so that Arthur might bring in his thirteenth year with as much purity as he should live it. The courtyard had stunk of death and blood is still crusted between the flagstones, and Arthur had watched and said nothing but, “Thank you, Father, on behalf of myself and the people of Camelot.”
Arthur no longer believes that his daydreams will ever come true.
“Send the next party in,” Arthur says. His voice has dropped, but not yet enough that it can fill the room as his father’s does. King Uther is away, though, visiting some noble in some kingdom that Arthur would be scolded for forgetting the name of, so Arthur speaks slowly and clearly, to help the echoes bounce around cleaner, and he almost sounds regal. Lord Eamon, standing deferentially beside the throne and one step down the dais, beckons Arthur in with a lazy hand. Arthur tilts his head.
“A noble from the Northlands by the name of Lord Maedric, my Prince. He fears Mercia may be making preparations for petty raiding along the borders under the guise of common bandits. Your Liege Father would prefer that you send a small detachment of knights on horseback to investigate these claims and begin preparing preliminary defenses. Defenses only, mind--we must ensure that none of our actions are seen as directly hostile against Mercia itself.”
It will be years before Arthur is able to remember what happens next without feeling the terror as if it’s happening anew: the doors open and then
the doors are flung wide and splintered wood explodes in a spiral of raw power and then
someone walks through, strides though--oh god oh god--deep blue cloak clasped tight at his shoulder with silver and jewels and the fabric is rich, just as rich as the fabric the obeisant nobles of his daydreams had worn, and the fabric swishes softly at his ankles even though
static crackles through the air and some strange wind twists everything--benches, candles, pitchers of water, resistant guardsmen--through the air as though they were nothing, insubstantial, as if
as if
The sorcerer pulls his hands free from his robes and speaks with a deep voice and fire is born in his hands, grows larger under his concentration, and he’s getting closer and closer and he’s talking, saying, “Has dearest Father left his one and only heir all alone? Not so safe without that traitorous whelp Emrys slinking underfoot, are you?”
Arthur can’t breathe. His mouth opens and his throat closes and he freezes down into the throne he doesn’t yet belong in. The hall fills with noise, swords scraping clean from their scabbards, fire roaring in the sorcerer’s hands, funneling into a pillar. Everything is loud, it’s so loud, heart pounding in his chest his throat, stomach throttling his voice, but that’s okay because there are others who are screaming for him, screaming as fire burns their flesh (popping sound of burning fat and smell of charred meat and he will never be able to walk past the kitchens again, and he really won’t though because this is it, this is the last of Arthur son of Uther of the Noble House Pendragon, and Father).
“No.”
He almost doesn’t hear it, and why should he, the screaming is so loud, but there it is. Arthur turns his head, slowly, shakily, and the King’s sorcerer melts from behind the throne, slinking, crouched low, hair and clothing as black as a panther.
(When did he get there, Arthur didn’t notice him at all, black clothes and wan skin and the eyes of magic itself.)
The hand that his father’s slave raises to the side is pulled with scars and taut with remembered pain; glowing with the fury of his magic. Heat blazes through the air, and (hysterical, Arthur laughs, giggling high in his throat, and it is hysterical) Lord Maedric is panic as Emrys sucks the fire from him, funnels it into his own hand, draws it to his side where it rages, white hot and snapping with the jaws of a dragon and the angry wings of a wyvern.
“But don’t you see,” Maedric cries, desperate as he tries to hold fast to the power that Emrys sucks from him. “For you and for all of us, I’m here to save you and save all of us!”
Emrys, eyes wide with fire and thunder and crackling with power, says, “How can you think to save me when you would kill my King? My Prince?”
Arthur’s heart hammers and hammers in his chest and it’s crawling out his throat, isn’t it, (and some traitorous part of Arthur’s brain thinks Emrys is either very brave or very sad, or maybe a lot of both.)
The heel of Maedric’s boot catches on his cloak and he falls backwards, scrambling away from Emrys as he advances. So small, Emrys is so small, maybe eleven or maybe twelve, black clothing making him seem even smaller.
“The Crown has given me everything,” Emrys screams, “and you would take that away!?”
Emrys throws his hands forward and says something guttural to the monster he created from the fire. It roars and gathers its wings together, leaping forward and devouring Maedric, burning him where he lies. Arthur stares while it happens, not at the screaming and writhing bundle of melting fat and burning hair, but at the small boy who stands in black and holds devastation in the palm of his hand. His eyes are gold and wild and absolutely mad, and Arthur thinks--can’t stop himself for thinking--that this is why; the madness of power is obvious, and maybe Father is right, and maybe sorcerers cannot ever be allowed free in Camelot.
The throne room takes days to air out, and for weeks still it seems as though the smell of rendered fat and burnt meat has been worn into the tapestries and polished into the flagstones. But soon enough, Uther returns, and Emrys whispers in his ear about the pull of some strange sorcerer’s magic deep in the Forest of Gedref, and it is the courtyard that smells of burning once again.
--
“Have you seen her,” the Druids whisper to each other, as they keep watch in the long darkness of a winter’s night. “Have you seen her, as she presses herself against the glass, watching as they lead another to the pyre? Have you seen the fog that films over the window as she screams?”
Those who have never set foot far from their home camp shake their heads, and are glad that they can.
“She is the witch who knows all that will come to be, and she is the one who lies down with Emrys in the silence of the night, and as she whispers in his ear, the candles gutter under the weight of secrets told.” Unease edges around the small gathering of young Druids--this is important, it is important to understand Emrys, but this is his most private life.
“Does he love her?” The Druids are romantic at heart, after all. Almost impossible not to be, when the sky is your ceiling and the wind in the treetops your childhood lullaby. This is important. Emrys must have love, or he is not their Emrys, their hope and future, at all.
“He loves her now, and he loves her tomorrow, but he will not always and forever love her most. After all, she is not the twin side of his coin, is she.”
The children nod, wisdom without the temperament of age, and Mordred looks a little sad and a little scared, and so this is how the story continues:
“He trusts her, you see, but it is her mistrust that will be his downfall and our salvation. Because he thinks he knows her, wholly and completely and unreservedly, but he will know not all that she holds back. See,” and here they beckon, come closer, crooked fingers and mouths cinched tight with warning, “he lulls her into a sleep of deep and sacred magic with rituals told to him by the power of the ancient earth, rituals so old that even we have forgotten them, and as she sleeps, her spirit flees her body and drifts across to the Other World, ice climbing up on her limbs as they forget the warmth of the earth and shiver in the coldness of the dead. And while she’s there, in the Other World, she sees things that will happen and things that can no longer ever be.
“And this is where his trust comes in, and this is how she betrays him, for from her mind, he cannot pull what she does not let him.”
The children nod as though they understand.
“What she does not let him see will be her undoing, his unravelling, and our last bastion of hope. And for the young Pendragon, it will be the end of the world.”
--
“The recent reports I’ve been hearing from the seneschal have disturbed me greatly, Witch. I’m becoming concerned that you no longer know your duty.” Uther feigns interest in the rough vellum that he rifles through, but his eyes lock with hers as he speaks and as he waits.
“I am sorry, my Lord. The worlds you wish to see behind the veil are becoming hard for me to find.”
“Well then. Perhaps I need to give you a guide. Emrys?”
The boy slips from behind the King’s chair, and though Morgana knows where he stands (under the King’s hand, leaning against the King’s leg, tall and lance-thin), her eyes try to slide away from him and a voice that does not belong to her whispers inside her mind that there is nothing to look at, nothing, no one you need take note of. A scarf of gold floats over the blue of Emrys’s eyes and he stares at her where she kneels.
“Yes, my Lord?” He speaks soft and low.
Uther has already dismissed them, the quill in his hand scraping against the vellum, voice gone vacant and careless. Uther trusts Emrys with so much, and Morgana wants to never know what he had to do to build that trust. (She does, though, for has Seen it in her nightmarish ramblings; has stumbled into places she wishes to never go again; places full of red and hatred and the screaming of a lost boy and the breaking of his lost soul.)
“You must lead the Witch to where I need her to go.”
The Witch closes her eyes, and wonders if she will ever be free inside her mind again.
--
Fire burns steadily in the candles that light up every shadow, hot wax gathering in a thousand tiny pools. Emrys chants in the pale dimness of the Witch’s chambers, as she lies on her back and trembles at the tugging that lines her gut, pulling down and down (and deeper down and quiet, for this is where the angels and the demons and the leviathans of old lay their heads). Emrys shifts on his chair, slides to the floor and sways where he sits, arm raised and fingers splayed. He lets the magic of the room, of the castle, of the soil beneath the keep, fill him to brimming, and there is nothing left of him but the magic of the heavy earth, slow and silent; plodding and silent. Dragging his arm down; it becomes heavy, weighed with the weight of ages, all of the ages that Camelot has ever been, and before that, when men still wrestled with the beasts as equals and the Old Ways took their due with every drop of blood spilled and every tiny prayer of thanks at the fresh and miraculous coming of each dawn.
The chanting slows as the Witch closes her eyes and puffs her breath cold from her freezing lungs. The candles gutter, and their flickering is the only movement in the room. Emrys hums a thread of ancient song and sinks to the cold stone, head pillowed by the whispering magic of the earth. The thread, so gold, that he lashed to her holds her to this world, in a time just ahead of him or just in step, though she rails and struggles and tries to slip into Another Place that holds A Different Now.
Emrys waits, tethered to the Witch and the Witch to him, while she dreams.
--
Emrys apologises in his own way, for clipping her wings as she dreams. A nightingale that sings to her in the mornings and a hawk that lets it be, as it swoops just beyond her window and alights on her arm without so much as breaking her skin. A nest of sparrows cuddled tight against the window’s corner edging; a hummingbird that feeds daily on the vining flowers that wrap her bedposts. Always birds, and always free, and he tells her this is what I dream of, this is what I wish for you with each successive gifting.
In the snap of autumn, Morgana’s room becomes an aviary, and through the chirping it is difficult to hear the screaming outside; it is easy to pretend that she is just a girl with an admirer who showers her with fine things she adores. Flowers twist over the scars on his fingers and she giggles as he coaxes the hummingbird into the circle of his arms. He smiles, a fishhook scar stretching over his lips, like her laughter is the first he’s ever heard.
Emrys takes to lacing their fingers as he pulls her to sleep, and she takes to smiling as he does.
--
That winter brings death in higher numbers than has been seen since the first five years of the Purge, and the Druids run scared into trap after trap, their every movement known before they make it.
Morgana’s eyes bleed to white, gold burnt out with the power that she siphons through them.
--
Snow glints with the fire of the sun and spikes through Arthur’s head. Brecka champs his hooves against the frosted ground. Arthur pats his flank and rubs gently at his forelock. Spring blooms across the horizon, but still the air is cold with winter; too cold to sit the horses still for long. A short luncheon break, and then they must away again, through forests that feign emptiness but, as Emrys informs them, are full of outlaws.
The knights of Camelot sprawl through the clearing, red cloaks pulled tight around them, huddled in small groups around a dozen small fires. They jostle each other and laugh loudly and tell bawdy jokes that would have made Arthur blush even a couple years ago. Arthur watches them.
“They have admirably high spirits, mi’Lord.”
Arthur half turns. Emrys stands just behind him, thick black cloak vivid against the backdrop of snow but a face so pale it seems to fade before Arthur’s eyes; a ghost wrapped in human furs.
“They are knights of Camelot,” Arthur says, and he tries to believe that that still means they are men of honour. (He isn’t so sure anymore; Arthur doesn’t know what honour is, or what Camelot truly stands for, or if Uther has finally swallowed it whole.)
“They are walking into a nest of sorcerers.”
“With an even greater sorcerer to lead them.”
“Do you really think they find that thought reassuring?”
“I do,” Arthur says.
Emrys smiles like he knows what Arthur is thinking of--a day of fire in the throne room, and the power of death in the hands of a child who swore to defend the Crown to his death.
“Indeed,” Emrys murmurs. Whistling low, he calls his horse to him from its ranging in the woods. It unsettles the men, Arthur knows, that Emrys allows his horse such freedom; that he rides with neither bit nor bridle, and were he permitted by the Crown, would not strap it with a saddle.
“Come, my Lord,” Emrys says. “I feel the tugging of their magic, and our Seer has warned us of their escape route through the caves. We should not give them time to reach it.”
Nodding, Arthur says, “Saddle up, men.”
Emrys watches from the trees as they ride out, cantering beside the line of red, a whisper in the woods. With a soft clucking and gentle word, Emrys peels his horse off the line and out into the trees. Arthur watches as Emrys stops beside a fully fletched evergreen and holds out his wrist. A falcon wriggles its way out through the branches and perches calmly on the black leather of Emrys’s fur lined glove. Emrys smiles--that’s new, the smiling--and nudges his horse on, back to the front, beside Arthur, a barely-fledged merlin tight on his arm.
“I see you’ve gained a friend,” Arthur says. The knights that ride behind him whisper about witchcraft and familiars.
“‘Tis not for me. I asked him if he wished to meet my friend, and he is most excited to. I shall bring him back for the Seer, in thanks for her aid today.” Emrys smiles, and oh, but this is very dangerous.
“Shh, Sire, hush, quiet!” Emrys pulls back to a stop, eyes bright like dragonfire, and wide.
Arthur throws his arm up; horse tack creaks in the chill as the company comes to still. Fur lined scabbards smooth the sound of drawn swords, and in the back, archers nock their shortbows.
Emrys raises his arm high, the falcon flying off to wheel above the treetops.
“They are here, Sire,” Emrys says, voice clear enough to carry through the thin air. “They are hiding right within your sight. I can feel them.”
Above them all, the falcon swoops and cries.
“Ábeþecian,” Emrys commands.
In the chill light, two dozen or more Druids seem to melt from the air to crouch before Arthur’s eyes.
“To arms! Your Liege the King commands you leave none alive,” Arthur bellows. Several shamans step forward, casting their arms wide, pulling a crackling shield between them while the rest of their number--oh god, women and children and fathers with neither sword nor staff to guard them--flee towards the face of the cliff that holds unknown branching tunnels leading to Lot’s kingdom, and away.
Emrys waves his hand, and their shield shatters with a crack like a whip. Another wave, he sends the shamans flying back with a pulsing tide of his magic. They do not rise from where they lay, hearts stopped from the pressure.
“Well, Sire,” Emrys says, no inflection in his voice at all, “they are all yours.”
But Arthur can’t move, can’t raise his sword, as his men loop around the fleeing Druids, routing them all, swords shining bright and blood steaming in the cold. Arthur can’t move, can’t move, doesn’t so much as stir from Emrys’s side, as screaming bursts around him.
(As a boy, Arthur dreamed of being the kind of prince who would never sit still while his people suffered, but now. He sits still and watches the slaughter of children whose eyes were once so bright they might swallow the stars. Arthur watches his father’s men and says nothing; does nothing.)
Later, when swords are wiped clean and bodies are piled and burned and horses are led with soothing words back to the trail they came through, Arthur shivers and watches Emrys call his falcon back from the sky with a smile that has nothing to do at all with duty. Arthur sees it, the bonds that wrap around the two most important servants of Camelot and tie them to each other more tightly than they are tied to the King, and he says nothing.
Once, Arthur thought he would grow up and become a prince worthy of love and honour; once, Arthur dreamed of justice. And in this way, this bitter and hateful way, Arthur swears to put his duty to his people before his duty to his Father, who would murder twenty-seven people and proclaim it done for the sake of Arthur’s name-day.
Let Uther reap the blood he has sown.
--
In May, with fire still swollen in her lungs and the screams of a jealous lover (who did not deserve to die for such a simple charm of impotence) rattling through her ears, the Witch Seer slips her lead for the first time, but not the last.
Green lawns and a white horse await her; Gwen smiles, Arthur smiles, and Merlin beams like the sun.
Morgana twirls a sword in a motion the muscles of this place know well, and laughs, at home.
(Later, much later, when she will lie with sheets twisted around her ankles and a damp forehead tipped against her own and the golden warmth of the earth’s magic twined around her heart, Morgana will both wonder and not truly care whether she first loved Merlin or Emrys, or if there is really any difference between them.)
--
She never tells him a lie, but she sometimes doesn’t tell him everything; of the place she finds where she knows the golden boy Arthur, kind and loving and fierce, and the soft and patient Guinevere, who would have been her friend. Without Uther ever knowing about it, in those worlds, she learns what it means to be brave; to be loved and to be feared and to feel the thrill of righteous judgement flow through her, as she raises her sword arm to the marauders who would slaughter the family of her friend (who is not really Emrys, though he wears the same face and bears the same heart).
But most importantly, she learns what it is to keep a secret; in that world, she keeps the gold of her eyes and dreams that speak of a future dark and deadly a secret in her bitter soaked heart, and in her world they call her home? That secret is the fact that she can keep one at all.
--
“See, the King and his hapless men never really broke Morgana, the Witch Seer, because they thought her gift harmless. They thought her docile. They equated her silence with compliance. This is why we will one day all rejoice.”
--
Ice white sheets twist around her ankles, and she sleeps unsteady. Frost climbs slowly, through the room and over candles (unlit for days now), leaching over the feet of her bedposts and climbing up the golden green of the forever flowering vines. She has slept for weeks, and in the morning--this morning--she will wake, eyes wide with white, a white that flooded away the fire of gold a long time ago, and she will speak the voice of Truth.
Sun crawls across the floor with rays thin like spider legs--too thin for warmth and barely enough for light--and dew beads along the window pane. The witch stiffens, eyes roving as she sleeps, and her breath is cold and hard. She awakes when the frost tips her nose and sprawls over her cheekbones; Emrys has been waiting. He pokes at her mind and waits while she draws back to the nightmare she knows as reality.
Tell me what you have seen. You have been sleeping too long.
The baby sparrows outside her window have grown as she slept, but they are not yet fully fledged. Her merlin cackles at her from his perch, and she soothes him with a word. He is worried for her, and she is, too.
No, I have not slept long enough. Emrys, she whispers, unsure, something is changing, and I don’t understand.
Tell me what’s to happen, and we’ll figure it out. I promise.
But that’s what the Witch is scared of--that Emrys will take her dreams and understand them; will take the future that lies in them to his King and say look what will happen, and see how I’ll prevent it, and aren’t you proud of me and all the work I’ve done for you and sit still while Uther pets his hair with one hand and grips Emrys by his neck all the tighter with the other. The Witch (who knows her name is Morgana, though she was never supposed to) is scared that Emrys won’t lay aside the bonds of blood that tie him to the King even for her; not in time.
She has seen fire in her dreams, and she knows it is cleansing, and the face of the King’s son, fury and despair deep in the lines on his face, and Emrys screaming.
She has seen her own dying face and knows that Emrys will scream, loud, over her. She will die as a traitor to the Crown, and he will turn their world on its head over it, and she is hopeful in a way she has never been before, because he might even set the world right.
Morgana, the witch with the hidden name and even deeper hidden love still living in her heart, is happy that one day, Emrys will be free.
It is amusing, she thinks as she feels the bitterness that will one day consume her starting to line the darker places of her heart, that by the time it happens--when finally Emrys cares enough to burn his world over her--she won’t care at all. Morgana saw the twisting of her face and tasted the darkness in her future self and knows that when she dies, she will not die at peace.
Anger coils in the pit of her stomach, but not yet, it is not the time for anger and hatred yet; that will come soon enough, but it is not yet.
Morgana goes to Emrys that night, and loves him in the privacy of his sparse chambers, on the warmed furs that he spreads with reverence for her before the fire. She kisses the scarring on his hands--the first mark she left on him, so many years ago, and the most unforgivable--and holds his black hair tightly and struggles to keep her mind from wandering to the Other World by accident, because this is what she wants to remember: the quivering in her legs and arching of her spine and the sticky warmth of his arms around her.
“Is it better now,” he asks her, as sweat cools between them. Gold shifts behind his eyes and calls his heavy woolen cloak to cover them. He lifts his head up and rests his forehead against hers, swiping a bead of sweat from the corner of her eye. “You must know. Whatever you have seen, if there are any who bring harm to you--I will raze their families to the ground for you.”
“I know,” she says. Uther burns in her dreams every night, and some nights, it is Truth. Emrys is not ready to do that for her yet; not ready to face Uther, the god who hangs his world, and tell Uther that he will not obey. But one day. But soon. Well, soon he will see Uther set light to her pyre, and he will know that it is wrong. Emrys understands her, not fully and yet completely, and the gold that he once thrashed to her ribs to tether them together has climbed through them both and tied around their hearts.
In a different world, in one Morgana sees in her wanderings, she is alone and in her loneliness destroys all that she holds dear, with poison and lies and the blood she paints with her sword. She does not like herself in that world, but she understands loneliness and fear and where it leads.
Emrys sighs and curls up inside her mind, close to sleeping already, and she is glad for his company--Morgana is a different person without it.
Deep below the castle, the last Great Dragon calls to her, desperate, for he knows the future too, and the day is soon when she will free him; in a year, maybe less, she will slip through the tunnels below the castle and break the chains that hold him, with magic she doesn’t fully understand. She will watch him fly away, a thing of the Old Ways. She will hold her arms out at her sides and wish that she could take off, too, but she is heavy with her flesh and bone that holds a thousand worlds and the infinity of the future.
Morgana holds tight to the arm that Emrys wraps over her ribs. In a year (but maybe less) the Dragon will promise her a tithe of blood if she breaks his chains, and she will say yes, why not let the people of this great Kingdom of apathy bleed just as we do. Fire will follow, and death, hers and Uther’s, but who dies first? White shades around the edges of her eyes, and Morgana cannot see what happens next.
Summer freezes into winter, and if Morgana had never lost her sentiment, she would have begged for time to slow. But Morgana is not that lost girl who would have given anything to spend even one more day dreaming, and so she braces herself; lets every execution clog her heart with bitter ash.
--
”It is coming,” the Druids say, as they hide in the heart of a dank cave large enough for them all but too small for their spirits. Emrys has driven them so far away, but, “It is coming--the day of blood and renewal. The stars are bright, and they spark like fire.”
For if there is one thing the Druids know, it is the sky. Open freedom and endless time stretching thin from now until the vastness of forever.
--
April burns in the sky, slushing the last creeping piles of snow between its toes and whispering to the flowers, grow. Seven knights of Camelot and their Prince and his Warlock ride slowly through the muddy road. Arthur checks that his sword is clean of the bandits it ran through before sliding it home to its worn leather scabbard.
“A fine blade, my Lord.”
Emrys, riding beside him on his slight mare, sitting on the thinnest saddle he could commission, nods to Arthur’s side
“Was a gift,” Arthur says. “A parting gift from the armoury’s blacksmith before he left us not two years ago.”
“Ah, yes, Tom.” Emrys nods to himself. “Uprooted his business to follow after his lovesick daughter.”
“You sound surprised,” Arthur says.
“Not surprised. Just...”
They both fall silent and listen to the squelching of mud under hooves. The ground they are treading is on the knife-edge of treason. The blacksmith’s daughter has a freedom neither of them are allowed to dream of--she fell in love with a peasant who tried to play at being knight, and followed him far away.
“Well,” Emrys says, “perhaps we will hear of them once again.”
A flower--one of the first of the season--bends up from the ground by the highway. Emrys calls it to him with a whistle and twists it into his horse’s mane.
“For the Witch,” he explains, “so that she can hold what she Sees.”
The men of Camelot plod towards a tomb that holds the last dragon egg, mud flung up by their horses to spatter their capes. Far away, home in Camelot, a Witch is caught with the broken ends of the Great Dragon's chain at her feet, the thudding pressure of giant wings fading in the distance. She doesn’t scream, nor does she fight, for this is a story that she recognizes; this is the story of her end.
--
The courtyard is silent, the people of Camelot quiet and attending to a funeral, not celebrating an execution. She wears rough-spun wool around her in a shapeless sack, but in the light flickering through the morning sun, the ghost of fine white fabric flutters around her, angel-soft.
“This Witch I hereby declare to be a traitor to the Crown, and for her crime of treason, I sentence her to death.” Uther is tall, and his people are so very small. But the Witch who calls herself Morgana, because no one else will, towers over them all.
She looks into the eyes of a knight cloaked in bright red. “My name is Morgana.” The tinder under her feet catches alight. Black smoke gusts over her face, but she doesn’t close her white soaked eyes.
“You must remember,” she presses. “Morgana.”
Sir Leon swallows and nods; looks at his feet and doesn’t look up again, as she starts to burn, starts to shriek even as she coughs up smoke. A dragon, wheeling above them all, promises revenge as her smoke rises to meet him.
And Emrys, riding north with his Lord the Prince Arthur, feels her as she dies, and screams.
The future shifts and shakes.
--.
Category Series AU, Canon Era; Merlin/Morgana
Warnings: Highlight to read: character death, violence, allusions to torture
Words ~8400
Summary Emrys of legend is both the greatest hope the Druids have, and the most powerful weapon that King Uther wields.
A/N Uh, I wrote Merlin fic? Which is strange, but damn, I love that show to bits. Infinite thanks to khaleesea on Tumblr for giving me a much needed beta-read.
A/N 2: There's a sequel on the way, but it's being written for the Paperlegends Big Bang, so it won't go up until August. (Also I changed the title of this fic cause I'm a lame-o.)
It takes few words to change the path the future will favour. Queen Ygraine shuddered and died at the moment her babe wailed his first, and a year and almost two later, King Uther Pendragon learns of the prophecies that the Druids speak. King Uther listens, and he learns, and he kills his fear by conquering.
The throne room is lit dimly by a two wall sconces, and Uther speaks in the dimness to his finest knights.
“There are two that you will bring me: The Witch Seer Morgana of the house of Gorlois, a child less than five; and a babe in arms with gold eyes, perhaps not yet born, whom the prophets know as Emrys. He will come from a village just beyond our border with King Cenred. I don’t care what you have to do to retrieve him. It will be worth it.”
So with this edict, those few words, Camelot’s future stutters, shifts to a place filled with vengeance that runs so deep that no victory can sate it; with a King so mired in hatred that were the streets of Camelot flooded with the blood of his enemies, he would still call for more to slake his thirst.
--
“Don’t you know,” they whisper around the campfire, “that the King keeps the boy Emrys beside him in the throne room, cowering beneath the dais.”
Children huddle close, eyes wide in the dark, and scared.
“He took Emrys as a whelping babe, as his eyes glowed like flame and the sun quaked under his wandering gaze. The King feeds him table scraps from his own hand, meat raw with blood and berries dripping red, and they say it is the King’s own hand that wields the tools that break Emrys and bind him to service of the throne of Camelot.”
Starlight filters down through the trees, and the moon is on the wane, hanging fat and yellow. Horses whicker softly in their shelters and the children of the Druid camp crowd in, fire colouring their cheeks and lighting their eyes. When news comes of Emrys, all of them listen. Just as King Uther of Camelot is so very fond of his pet sorcerer, so too are the druids helplessly enamoured with him; their downfall, doom, and most quiet of hopes.
“Do you know,” they ask around the campfire, “the power that flows through Emrys?”
The children shake their heads (because they know, but this is the best part of the story, the only good part at all).
“He can call mountains crumbling down from their perch in the heavens, for Destruction bows to him as Lord. Beneath his hands flowers twist and grow, for to him, Creation sings and sighs her love. Emrys is Albion and Albion lives in him, and so he breathes her fires and weeps her rains and one day, he will fight her vengeance.”
Those that hear these words shiver and bow their heads and pray for that day to be sooner, to be now.
“Today he carries Uther’s destruction in the palm of his hand, but tomorrow he will be our only hope. Uther understands this not; Uther, the Tyrant, who would see us all dead, gives his slave our name so that we will never forget that it is our Emrys who hunts us so viciously, but he knows not the power of prophecy; the power in a name as ancient and forever as that one. He tries to kill our hope, but he only kindles it.”
The words the Druids never tell their children are that, maybe, that hope they are waiting for is trapped in a world that might have been, with a future that now can never be. That maybe Emrys will never lead them to safety, and that maybe he will hunt them down until the day he dies.
The Druids sleep uneasily. Softly bundled in a swaddle of furs, the little boy Mordred dreams of the day Emrys will turn on his master. His eyes are blue like thunder as his dreaming twists and turns.
--
Arthur peeks from behind Mother’s--NOT Mother’s, she’s not Mother, remember, or Father will be so sad again--heavy skirts, curious about the squalling, red-faced babe that a train of honour guards are carrying through the wide stone courtyard. Their scabbards hang heavily at their sides. Thick dirt, dried in the bright yellow sun, slings across the shine of their armour. They have very bright cloaks, very red, and Arthur will wear those cloaks one day, too, and look twice as magnificent, for when he wears them, he will be both Prince and knight.
The baby screams from within its swaddling, tears beading in its tiny eyes, and when it starts to rain, it doesn’t stop for days. Arthur pouts (protests!) inside his chambers, trapped by stupid rain and stupid chills and stupid nannies who aren’t Mother (remember, Arthur, can’t call another one Mother) and won’t let him have any fun, like his real Mother would, and he kicks his toys, and listens to that wailing baby. Sound slips easily throughout the castle, and through cracks in the stone and the through the thinness of mortar, Arthur can’t help but listen; listen.
Shh, just listen!
Sometimes, when he’s listening really, really hard, he starts to see these pictures in his head that aren’t his, and don’t belong there, blurred and indistinct and draped in fear. They’re more voices and impressions of feeling than pictures, really--a warm voice that breaks into screaming, rain on his face, cold locked inside his bones even though he’s wrapped in a million layers of furs, and an ache he doesn’t understand, because something is wrong and the gold that lives in his veins is telling him, wrong wrong wrong.
The first time he hears that strange imprint in his brain, Arthur shrinks and shivers and is so very scared in a way the Prince shouldn’t be, because he should be strong, strong like Father and strong like Mother would have wanted him to be, if she hadn’t flown away to heaven. The second time, he cries because he understands what it is to be lonely and scared and like he’s so far away from the home he’s supposed to be living in. The third time he listens, Arthur tries to talk back, whispering it’s okay, I’m here, you’re not alone, I’m here, don’t be scared. When he does that, he can feel a kind of grabbing, like tiny fingers holding on to him as tight as they can (which is not very) and he hears the memory of a voice that is kind of loving and like he imagines what Mother must have sounded like.
Father takes the baby away--away, Arthur, for a little while, and I know you want a friend, but this one is bad, Arthur, rotten to his bones, and evil--and Arthur can’t sleep. Silence rattles in his ears, and the air seems colder, even though he pulls his blankets up against himself so tight he feels he might crush his ribs together until they fuse solid. When he reaches out to the loneliness that used to live beside his mind, all he feels is emptiness, like his brain is smaller than it once was.
Arthur shivers and ducks his head and thinks it isn’t fair, none of this is fair.
He doesn’t see the boy Emrys for years, and when finally some bleak child--monster--emerges from the shadows, like he was there all along, to follow in King Uther’s long strides with all the fierce loyalty of a fanatic, Arthur doesn’t make the connection; doesn’t see through to that same loneliness he had felt when he was small and lonely himself and had, for a few weeks, found a strange companionship in a scared little baby.
--
A young girl all in white and answering to the name Morgana (but no one calls her that anymore, and only now is she starting to understand why) is relearning everything in a room as pale as it is boring. She stares up from her place on the floor and marvels at how even the bold blue of the riding cloak thrown over the chair back bleeds colour into the wash of pale, flimsy sunlight. Holding her hand up in front of her eyes, she breathes a breath that puffs in the chill. Her hand is pale, fingers so thin with cold that she fears the blood in them might yet freeze, and they will crack off like icicles.
There is a pool, in her mind, and it helps.
There is a pool of green and warmth and both life and unlife that Morgana floats through each night, and tries so hard (and yet unsuccessfully) to find in the day when she becomes tired of walking in this place of fear and loneliness. Another world lives below that pool--no, another thousand worlds, but only one she ever wants to see.
Morgana says, “I tire of this lesson,” this lesson that cramps her eyes and thuds achingly behind her temples, and Morgana says, “I will show you the world if you let me leave. I will show you everything if you let me go.”
The seneschal smiles at her, wide like a wolf and hungry.
“What say you, witch? I will let you go to your other place for two days if, when you get back, you tell me everything.”
The girl who calls herself Morgana because no one else will , who is lonely and scared when she remembers a time fuzzy with warmth and love and the hand of her mother, lays down on the soft mattress of the bed and waits while the seneschal decants a small glass of sleeping draught. One day (she knows, for she has seen it) she will not need the sleeping draught, and the key to the pool in her mind will be all her own. For now, she slips the lip of the glass between her lips and gulps the draught down; feels calm like she never is during the daylit hours as her limbs fill with weight and become all bone, nothing but leaden bone, sinking slowly down, pulling her down into the pool. It spreads open in her mind like a flower, and she sinks heavily into it, so heavy, slipping beneath the surface and sinking low into the mossy green.
In that pool, beyond and behind the surface glassy like the calmest water and thick like mercury, there is a world which she wishes to call her own. She swims toward it, dragging herself past so many yawning openings, water filled caves in the golden lit deeps. The entrance she swims into, white gown fluttering behind her, is scratched where she marked it, that first day when she had been scared and had no idea what she was doing.
They had pulled her away from her home, ripped her from her father’s arms and slitting his throat in front of her wide young eyes so that she would always know that there was no home for her to return to but the one they trapped her in, in the castle so cold and so pale. Uther had watched with narrowed eyes as the seneschal forced the flask of sleep between her gnashing teeth, and then she was falling, drowning in the deeps of her own mind (but not her mind, too big to be her mind alone) and thrashing helplessly, tangling herself in her fluttering clothing, rich velvets heavy and dragging her down, down.
But she had found the Other Now, and it was warm and bright and she saw her father, and her mother, and was warm with love there; she had marked that cave with a spark of something forbidden that crackled between her fingers so that she could find her way back there, again and forever.
The girl Morgana, who is too young yet to begin her monthly bleed, crawls across the strange threshold of her favourite (but not only) entrance to another place, flopping onto dry stone, and runs through to the wide lawns and steady arms of her father.
She spends a whole day and a whole night there, before she sighs and remembers Duty and Debt, flickering through to Another Place, where sorcerers and Druids cannot help but tell her their treasons. The King’s Witch (Morgana, mustn’t ever forget, Morgana, that’s her name, though she was shorter than her nightstand when last anyone called her that) spreads these secrets at Uther’s feet, waiting for his smile to tell her that yes, she has earned another glass of the draught, another reprieve, another key to the Other Now and the freedom of the house of Gorlois.
--
Gold threads through the eyes of the King’s strange shadow, when she is finished in her telling (of Nimueh and where she hides and the King’s men that she kills with fire and fear, but she doesn’t tell it true, and not complete) and waiting for Uther to give her leave to rise from her place on her knees before his throne.
“She is honest and her mind is open and, and--” the boy pauses, eyebrows creasing for an instant. He nods decisively while she holds her breath (because this once, she is lying, about one small little thing, and will he find out?) before he continues. “Nimueh is hiding in the village of Ethrain, in the stables of an inn, and--” he gropes around in her mind, and she guides him (gently) to the careful half-truth she constructed while she watched the beautiful sorceress quietly weeping over a locket Morgana knows to be Ygraine’s--“she will not know you’re coming. Your men will spill her blood. I see her dead in the girl’s mind. Your victory is complete, Sire.” The boy smiles, bows his head, looks pleased and so damn relieved. “She will die quietly.”
Greed froths at Uther’s tightly closed mouth, the symptom of a poison Uther fashioned for himself and swallowed with vicious abandon.
--
Morgana cries so hard when her lie is found out (Nimueh escapes, leaving six knights burning on six pyres behind her, and there was never any hope of her capture) that she has to sleep with her head curled on her arm so that the chill of her tears on the pillow doesn’t chafe at her cheek. The boy, the King’s own warlock, doesn’t emerge for days, and when he does there is a new fear of her in his eyes; there are new twists to his hands, and new scars spiralling his fingers, and he walks with a slouch that tells her of broken ribs poorly bandaged.
She never tells him a lie again, because he is like her; he is just as lost as she is.
When her punishment arrives, and it is nothing more than a shift in the meals that they bring her--dry bread, thin soup, watery oats--and longer hours spent straining her mind for the seneschal, she thinks of the boy and tries not to retch.
--
Rain is falling still, sowing rot in the crops where they lay on the fields. It should be harvest, but the rains won’t stop and the wheat can’t dry and winter will be cold and hungry indeed this year. Hopeful rumours from the servants’ quarters say that the King knows this, and that the King can stop it, and will stop it; will loosen the lead on his pet sorcerer and send the clouds away, just until harvest is over and done. Arthur fervently hopes the rains stop before anyone becomes desperate enough to actually request his father use sorcery to his face. Uther would never stand for that, and will never admit how much his rule has become dependent on the hollow-eyed scrapling of a boy, who hides so ineffectually behind the throne for hours that stretch long through the windows; who follows the King wherever he goes, as attached to Uther as his shadow, and almost as unnoticeable.
Years ago, Arthur had looked forward to the day he would hold court on his own--he can remember thinking about it with a child’s eager mind. He had imagined people in fancy dress, with elaborately dyed fabric and gold chains as long as he was tall, bowing before him and begging for him to share his wisdom. (In his dreams, Arthur had always been wise, when he was young; in his childhood dreams he had yet to know his own cowardice and folly.) Arthur had once taken to daydreaming as he sat with a quill in his hand, supposedly practicing his letters, about how the throne room would fill to bursting when he held court, townspeople and nobles alike so impatient to see him that they jostled into each other for position, their voices spilling through the halls and murmuring dimly even onto the furthest parapets of the town, where guardsmen walked and watched for danger.
In his daydreams as a child, his people always loved him, and they were always right to; in his dreams he was a just prince, and an honourable one.
Arthur turned thirteen this past June. In the two weeks preceding his birthday, his father vowed to clear the city of lechery, vice, and nascent sorcery so that Arthur might bring in his thirteenth year with as much purity as he should live it. The courtyard had stunk of death and blood is still crusted between the flagstones, and Arthur had watched and said nothing but, “Thank you, Father, on behalf of myself and the people of Camelot.”
Arthur no longer believes that his daydreams will ever come true.
“Send the next party in,” Arthur says. His voice has dropped, but not yet enough that it can fill the room as his father’s does. King Uther is away, though, visiting some noble in some kingdom that Arthur would be scolded for forgetting the name of, so Arthur speaks slowly and clearly, to help the echoes bounce around cleaner, and he almost sounds regal. Lord Eamon, standing deferentially beside the throne and one step down the dais, beckons Arthur in with a lazy hand. Arthur tilts his head.
“A noble from the Northlands by the name of Lord Maedric, my Prince. He fears Mercia may be making preparations for petty raiding along the borders under the guise of common bandits. Your Liege Father would prefer that you send a small detachment of knights on horseback to investigate these claims and begin preparing preliminary defenses. Defenses only, mind--we must ensure that none of our actions are seen as directly hostile against Mercia itself.”
It will be years before Arthur is able to remember what happens next without feeling the terror as if it’s happening anew: the doors open and then
the doors are flung wide and splintered wood explodes in a spiral of raw power and then
someone walks through, strides though--oh god oh god--deep blue cloak clasped tight at his shoulder with silver and jewels and the fabric is rich, just as rich as the fabric the obeisant nobles of his daydreams had worn, and the fabric swishes softly at his ankles even though
static crackles through the air and some strange wind twists everything--benches, candles, pitchers of water, resistant guardsmen--through the air as though they were nothing, insubstantial, as if
as if
The sorcerer pulls his hands free from his robes and speaks with a deep voice and fire is born in his hands, grows larger under his concentration, and he’s getting closer and closer and he’s talking, saying, “Has dearest Father left his one and only heir all alone? Not so safe without that traitorous whelp Emrys slinking underfoot, are you?”
Arthur can’t breathe. His mouth opens and his throat closes and he freezes down into the throne he doesn’t yet belong in. The hall fills with noise, swords scraping clean from their scabbards, fire roaring in the sorcerer’s hands, funneling into a pillar. Everything is loud, it’s so loud, heart pounding in his chest his throat, stomach throttling his voice, but that’s okay because there are others who are screaming for him, screaming as fire burns their flesh (popping sound of burning fat and smell of charred meat and he will never be able to walk past the kitchens again, and he really won’t though because this is it, this is the last of Arthur son of Uther of the Noble House Pendragon, and Father).
“No.”
He almost doesn’t hear it, and why should he, the screaming is so loud, but there it is. Arthur turns his head, slowly, shakily, and the King’s sorcerer melts from behind the throne, slinking, crouched low, hair and clothing as black as a panther.
(When did he get there, Arthur didn’t notice him at all, black clothes and wan skin and the eyes of magic itself.)
The hand that his father’s slave raises to the side is pulled with scars and taut with remembered pain; glowing with the fury of his magic. Heat blazes through the air, and (hysterical, Arthur laughs, giggling high in his throat, and it is hysterical) Lord Maedric is panic as Emrys sucks the fire from him, funnels it into his own hand, draws it to his side where it rages, white hot and snapping with the jaws of a dragon and the angry wings of a wyvern.
“But don’t you see,” Maedric cries, desperate as he tries to hold fast to the power that Emrys sucks from him. “For you and for all of us, I’m here to save you and save all of us!”
Emrys, eyes wide with fire and thunder and crackling with power, says, “How can you think to save me when you would kill my King? My Prince?”
Arthur’s heart hammers and hammers in his chest and it’s crawling out his throat, isn’t it, (and some traitorous part of Arthur’s brain thinks Emrys is either very brave or very sad, or maybe a lot of both.)
The heel of Maedric’s boot catches on his cloak and he falls backwards, scrambling away from Emrys as he advances. So small, Emrys is so small, maybe eleven or maybe twelve, black clothing making him seem even smaller.
“The Crown has given me everything,” Emrys screams, “and you would take that away!?”
Emrys throws his hands forward and says something guttural to the monster he created from the fire. It roars and gathers its wings together, leaping forward and devouring Maedric, burning him where he lies. Arthur stares while it happens, not at the screaming and writhing bundle of melting fat and burning hair, but at the small boy who stands in black and holds devastation in the palm of his hand. His eyes are gold and wild and absolutely mad, and Arthur thinks--can’t stop himself for thinking--that this is why; the madness of power is obvious, and maybe Father is right, and maybe sorcerers cannot ever be allowed free in Camelot.
The throne room takes days to air out, and for weeks still it seems as though the smell of rendered fat and burnt meat has been worn into the tapestries and polished into the flagstones. But soon enough, Uther returns, and Emrys whispers in his ear about the pull of some strange sorcerer’s magic deep in the Forest of Gedref, and it is the courtyard that smells of burning once again.
--
“Have you seen her,” the Druids whisper to each other, as they keep watch in the long darkness of a winter’s night. “Have you seen her, as she presses herself against the glass, watching as they lead another to the pyre? Have you seen the fog that films over the window as she screams?”
Those who have never set foot far from their home camp shake their heads, and are glad that they can.
“She is the witch who knows all that will come to be, and she is the one who lies down with Emrys in the silence of the night, and as she whispers in his ear, the candles gutter under the weight of secrets told.” Unease edges around the small gathering of young Druids--this is important, it is important to understand Emrys, but this is his most private life.
“Does he love her?” The Druids are romantic at heart, after all. Almost impossible not to be, when the sky is your ceiling and the wind in the treetops your childhood lullaby. This is important. Emrys must have love, or he is not their Emrys, their hope and future, at all.
“He loves her now, and he loves her tomorrow, but he will not always and forever love her most. After all, she is not the twin side of his coin, is she.”
The children nod, wisdom without the temperament of age, and Mordred looks a little sad and a little scared, and so this is how the story continues:
“He trusts her, you see, but it is her mistrust that will be his downfall and our salvation. Because he thinks he knows her, wholly and completely and unreservedly, but he will know not all that she holds back. See,” and here they beckon, come closer, crooked fingers and mouths cinched tight with warning, “he lulls her into a sleep of deep and sacred magic with rituals told to him by the power of the ancient earth, rituals so old that even we have forgotten them, and as she sleeps, her spirit flees her body and drifts across to the Other World, ice climbing up on her limbs as they forget the warmth of the earth and shiver in the coldness of the dead. And while she’s there, in the Other World, she sees things that will happen and things that can no longer ever be.
“And this is where his trust comes in, and this is how she betrays him, for from her mind, he cannot pull what she does not let him.”
The children nod as though they understand.
“What she does not let him see will be her undoing, his unravelling, and our last bastion of hope. And for the young Pendragon, it will be the end of the world.”
--
“The recent reports I’ve been hearing from the seneschal have disturbed me greatly, Witch. I’m becoming concerned that you no longer know your duty.” Uther feigns interest in the rough vellum that he rifles through, but his eyes lock with hers as he speaks and as he waits.
“I am sorry, my Lord. The worlds you wish to see behind the veil are becoming hard for me to find.”
“Well then. Perhaps I need to give you a guide. Emrys?”
The boy slips from behind the King’s chair, and though Morgana knows where he stands (under the King’s hand, leaning against the King’s leg, tall and lance-thin), her eyes try to slide away from him and a voice that does not belong to her whispers inside her mind that there is nothing to look at, nothing, no one you need take note of. A scarf of gold floats over the blue of Emrys’s eyes and he stares at her where she kneels.
“Yes, my Lord?” He speaks soft and low.
Uther has already dismissed them, the quill in his hand scraping against the vellum, voice gone vacant and careless. Uther trusts Emrys with so much, and Morgana wants to never know what he had to do to build that trust. (She does, though, for has Seen it in her nightmarish ramblings; has stumbled into places she wishes to never go again; places full of red and hatred and the screaming of a lost boy and the breaking of his lost soul.)
“You must lead the Witch to where I need her to go.”
The Witch closes her eyes, and wonders if she will ever be free inside her mind again.
--
Fire burns steadily in the candles that light up every shadow, hot wax gathering in a thousand tiny pools. Emrys chants in the pale dimness of the Witch’s chambers, as she lies on her back and trembles at the tugging that lines her gut, pulling down and down (and deeper down and quiet, for this is where the angels and the demons and the leviathans of old lay their heads). Emrys shifts on his chair, slides to the floor and sways where he sits, arm raised and fingers splayed. He lets the magic of the room, of the castle, of the soil beneath the keep, fill him to brimming, and there is nothing left of him but the magic of the heavy earth, slow and silent; plodding and silent. Dragging his arm down; it becomes heavy, weighed with the weight of ages, all of the ages that Camelot has ever been, and before that, when men still wrestled with the beasts as equals and the Old Ways took their due with every drop of blood spilled and every tiny prayer of thanks at the fresh and miraculous coming of each dawn.
The chanting slows as the Witch closes her eyes and puffs her breath cold from her freezing lungs. The candles gutter, and their flickering is the only movement in the room. Emrys hums a thread of ancient song and sinks to the cold stone, head pillowed by the whispering magic of the earth. The thread, so gold, that he lashed to her holds her to this world, in a time just ahead of him or just in step, though she rails and struggles and tries to slip into Another Place that holds A Different Now.
Emrys waits, tethered to the Witch and the Witch to him, while she dreams.
--
Emrys apologises in his own way, for clipping her wings as she dreams. A nightingale that sings to her in the mornings and a hawk that lets it be, as it swoops just beyond her window and alights on her arm without so much as breaking her skin. A nest of sparrows cuddled tight against the window’s corner edging; a hummingbird that feeds daily on the vining flowers that wrap her bedposts. Always birds, and always free, and he tells her this is what I dream of, this is what I wish for you with each successive gifting.
In the snap of autumn, Morgana’s room becomes an aviary, and through the chirping it is difficult to hear the screaming outside; it is easy to pretend that she is just a girl with an admirer who showers her with fine things she adores. Flowers twist over the scars on his fingers and she giggles as he coaxes the hummingbird into the circle of his arms. He smiles, a fishhook scar stretching over his lips, like her laughter is the first he’s ever heard.
Emrys takes to lacing their fingers as he pulls her to sleep, and she takes to smiling as he does.
--
That winter brings death in higher numbers than has been seen since the first five years of the Purge, and the Druids run scared into trap after trap, their every movement known before they make it.
Morgana’s eyes bleed to white, gold burnt out with the power that she siphons through them.
--
Snow glints with the fire of the sun and spikes through Arthur’s head. Brecka champs his hooves against the frosted ground. Arthur pats his flank and rubs gently at his forelock. Spring blooms across the horizon, but still the air is cold with winter; too cold to sit the horses still for long. A short luncheon break, and then they must away again, through forests that feign emptiness but, as Emrys informs them, are full of outlaws.
The knights of Camelot sprawl through the clearing, red cloaks pulled tight around them, huddled in small groups around a dozen small fires. They jostle each other and laugh loudly and tell bawdy jokes that would have made Arthur blush even a couple years ago. Arthur watches them.
“They have admirably high spirits, mi’Lord.”
Arthur half turns. Emrys stands just behind him, thick black cloak vivid against the backdrop of snow but a face so pale it seems to fade before Arthur’s eyes; a ghost wrapped in human furs.
“They are knights of Camelot,” Arthur says, and he tries to believe that that still means they are men of honour. (He isn’t so sure anymore; Arthur doesn’t know what honour is, or what Camelot truly stands for, or if Uther has finally swallowed it whole.)
“They are walking into a nest of sorcerers.”
“With an even greater sorcerer to lead them.”
“Do you really think they find that thought reassuring?”
“I do,” Arthur says.
Emrys smiles like he knows what Arthur is thinking of--a day of fire in the throne room, and the power of death in the hands of a child who swore to defend the Crown to his death.
“Indeed,” Emrys murmurs. Whistling low, he calls his horse to him from its ranging in the woods. It unsettles the men, Arthur knows, that Emrys allows his horse such freedom; that he rides with neither bit nor bridle, and were he permitted by the Crown, would not strap it with a saddle.
“Come, my Lord,” Emrys says. “I feel the tugging of their magic, and our Seer has warned us of their escape route through the caves. We should not give them time to reach it.”
Nodding, Arthur says, “Saddle up, men.”
Emrys watches from the trees as they ride out, cantering beside the line of red, a whisper in the woods. With a soft clucking and gentle word, Emrys peels his horse off the line and out into the trees. Arthur watches as Emrys stops beside a fully fletched evergreen and holds out his wrist. A falcon wriggles its way out through the branches and perches calmly on the black leather of Emrys’s fur lined glove. Emrys smiles--that’s new, the smiling--and nudges his horse on, back to the front, beside Arthur, a barely-fledged merlin tight on his arm.
“I see you’ve gained a friend,” Arthur says. The knights that ride behind him whisper about witchcraft and familiars.
“‘Tis not for me. I asked him if he wished to meet my friend, and he is most excited to. I shall bring him back for the Seer, in thanks for her aid today.” Emrys smiles, and oh, but this is very dangerous.
“Shh, Sire, hush, quiet!” Emrys pulls back to a stop, eyes bright like dragonfire, and wide.
Arthur throws his arm up; horse tack creaks in the chill as the company comes to still. Fur lined scabbards smooth the sound of drawn swords, and in the back, archers nock their shortbows.
Emrys raises his arm high, the falcon flying off to wheel above the treetops.
“They are here, Sire,” Emrys says, voice clear enough to carry through the thin air. “They are hiding right within your sight. I can feel them.”
Above them all, the falcon swoops and cries.
“Ábeþecian,” Emrys commands.
In the chill light, two dozen or more Druids seem to melt from the air to crouch before Arthur’s eyes.
“To arms! Your Liege the King commands you leave none alive,” Arthur bellows. Several shamans step forward, casting their arms wide, pulling a crackling shield between them while the rest of their number--oh god, women and children and fathers with neither sword nor staff to guard them--flee towards the face of the cliff that holds unknown branching tunnels leading to Lot’s kingdom, and away.
Emrys waves his hand, and their shield shatters with a crack like a whip. Another wave, he sends the shamans flying back with a pulsing tide of his magic. They do not rise from where they lay, hearts stopped from the pressure.
“Well, Sire,” Emrys says, no inflection in his voice at all, “they are all yours.”
But Arthur can’t move, can’t raise his sword, as his men loop around the fleeing Druids, routing them all, swords shining bright and blood steaming in the cold. Arthur can’t move, can’t move, doesn’t so much as stir from Emrys’s side, as screaming bursts around him.
(As a boy, Arthur dreamed of being the kind of prince who would never sit still while his people suffered, but now. He sits still and watches the slaughter of children whose eyes were once so bright they might swallow the stars. Arthur watches his father’s men and says nothing; does nothing.)
Later, when swords are wiped clean and bodies are piled and burned and horses are led with soothing words back to the trail they came through, Arthur shivers and watches Emrys call his falcon back from the sky with a smile that has nothing to do at all with duty. Arthur sees it, the bonds that wrap around the two most important servants of Camelot and tie them to each other more tightly than they are tied to the King, and he says nothing.
Once, Arthur thought he would grow up and become a prince worthy of love and honour; once, Arthur dreamed of justice. And in this way, this bitter and hateful way, Arthur swears to put his duty to his people before his duty to his Father, who would murder twenty-seven people and proclaim it done for the sake of Arthur’s name-day.
Let Uther reap the blood he has sown.
--
In May, with fire still swollen in her lungs and the screams of a jealous lover (who did not deserve to die for such a simple charm of impotence) rattling through her ears, the Witch Seer slips her lead for the first time, but not the last.
Green lawns and a white horse await her; Gwen smiles, Arthur smiles, and Merlin beams like the sun.
Morgana twirls a sword in a motion the muscles of this place know well, and laughs, at home.
(Later, much later, when she will lie with sheets twisted around her ankles and a damp forehead tipped against her own and the golden warmth of the earth’s magic twined around her heart, Morgana will both wonder and not truly care whether she first loved Merlin or Emrys, or if there is really any difference between them.)
--
She never tells him a lie, but she sometimes doesn’t tell him everything; of the place she finds where she knows the golden boy Arthur, kind and loving and fierce, and the soft and patient Guinevere, who would have been her friend. Without Uther ever knowing about it, in those worlds, she learns what it means to be brave; to be loved and to be feared and to feel the thrill of righteous judgement flow through her, as she raises her sword arm to the marauders who would slaughter the family of her friend (who is not really Emrys, though he wears the same face and bears the same heart).
But most importantly, she learns what it is to keep a secret; in that world, she keeps the gold of her eyes and dreams that speak of a future dark and deadly a secret in her bitter soaked heart, and in her world they call her home? That secret is the fact that she can keep one at all.
--
“See, the King and his hapless men never really broke Morgana, the Witch Seer, because they thought her gift harmless. They thought her docile. They equated her silence with compliance. This is why we will one day all rejoice.”
--
Ice white sheets twist around her ankles, and she sleeps unsteady. Frost climbs slowly, through the room and over candles (unlit for days now), leaching over the feet of her bedposts and climbing up the golden green of the forever flowering vines. She has slept for weeks, and in the morning--this morning--she will wake, eyes wide with white, a white that flooded away the fire of gold a long time ago, and she will speak the voice of Truth.
Sun crawls across the floor with rays thin like spider legs--too thin for warmth and barely enough for light--and dew beads along the window pane. The witch stiffens, eyes roving as she sleeps, and her breath is cold and hard. She awakes when the frost tips her nose and sprawls over her cheekbones; Emrys has been waiting. He pokes at her mind and waits while she draws back to the nightmare she knows as reality.
Tell me what you have seen. You have been sleeping too long.
The baby sparrows outside her window have grown as she slept, but they are not yet fully fledged. Her merlin cackles at her from his perch, and she soothes him with a word. He is worried for her, and she is, too.
No, I have not slept long enough. Emrys, she whispers, unsure, something is changing, and I don’t understand.
Tell me what’s to happen, and we’ll figure it out. I promise.
But that’s what the Witch is scared of--that Emrys will take her dreams and understand them; will take the future that lies in them to his King and say look what will happen, and see how I’ll prevent it, and aren’t you proud of me and all the work I’ve done for you and sit still while Uther pets his hair with one hand and grips Emrys by his neck all the tighter with the other. The Witch (who knows her name is Morgana, though she was never supposed to) is scared that Emrys won’t lay aside the bonds of blood that tie him to the King even for her; not in time.
She has seen fire in her dreams, and she knows it is cleansing, and the face of the King’s son, fury and despair deep in the lines on his face, and Emrys screaming.
She has seen her own dying face and knows that Emrys will scream, loud, over her. She will die as a traitor to the Crown, and he will turn their world on its head over it, and she is hopeful in a way she has never been before, because he might even set the world right.
Morgana, the witch with the hidden name and even deeper hidden love still living in her heart, is happy that one day, Emrys will be free.
It is amusing, she thinks as she feels the bitterness that will one day consume her starting to line the darker places of her heart, that by the time it happens--when finally Emrys cares enough to burn his world over her--she won’t care at all. Morgana saw the twisting of her face and tasted the darkness in her future self and knows that when she dies, she will not die at peace.
Anger coils in the pit of her stomach, but not yet, it is not the time for anger and hatred yet; that will come soon enough, but it is not yet.
Morgana goes to Emrys that night, and loves him in the privacy of his sparse chambers, on the warmed furs that he spreads with reverence for her before the fire. She kisses the scarring on his hands--the first mark she left on him, so many years ago, and the most unforgivable--and holds his black hair tightly and struggles to keep her mind from wandering to the Other World by accident, because this is what she wants to remember: the quivering in her legs and arching of her spine and the sticky warmth of his arms around her.
“Is it better now,” he asks her, as sweat cools between them. Gold shifts behind his eyes and calls his heavy woolen cloak to cover them. He lifts his head up and rests his forehead against hers, swiping a bead of sweat from the corner of her eye. “You must know. Whatever you have seen, if there are any who bring harm to you--I will raze their families to the ground for you.”
“I know,” she says. Uther burns in her dreams every night, and some nights, it is Truth. Emrys is not ready to do that for her yet; not ready to face Uther, the god who hangs his world, and tell Uther that he will not obey. But one day. But soon. Well, soon he will see Uther set light to her pyre, and he will know that it is wrong. Emrys understands her, not fully and yet completely, and the gold that he once thrashed to her ribs to tether them together has climbed through them both and tied around their hearts.
In a different world, in one Morgana sees in her wanderings, she is alone and in her loneliness destroys all that she holds dear, with poison and lies and the blood she paints with her sword. She does not like herself in that world, but she understands loneliness and fear and where it leads.
Emrys sighs and curls up inside her mind, close to sleeping already, and she is glad for his company--Morgana is a different person without it.
Deep below the castle, the last Great Dragon calls to her, desperate, for he knows the future too, and the day is soon when she will free him; in a year, maybe less, she will slip through the tunnels below the castle and break the chains that hold him, with magic she doesn’t fully understand. She will watch him fly away, a thing of the Old Ways. She will hold her arms out at her sides and wish that she could take off, too, but she is heavy with her flesh and bone that holds a thousand worlds and the infinity of the future.
Morgana holds tight to the arm that Emrys wraps over her ribs. In a year (but maybe less) the Dragon will promise her a tithe of blood if she breaks his chains, and she will say yes, why not let the people of this great Kingdom of apathy bleed just as we do. Fire will follow, and death, hers and Uther’s, but who dies first? White shades around the edges of her eyes, and Morgana cannot see what happens next.
Summer freezes into winter, and if Morgana had never lost her sentiment, she would have begged for time to slow. But Morgana is not that lost girl who would have given anything to spend even one more day dreaming, and so she braces herself; lets every execution clog her heart with bitter ash.
--
”It is coming,” the Druids say, as they hide in the heart of a dank cave large enough for them all but too small for their spirits. Emrys has driven them so far away, but, “It is coming--the day of blood and renewal. The stars are bright, and they spark like fire.”
For if there is one thing the Druids know, it is the sky. Open freedom and endless time stretching thin from now until the vastness of forever.
--
April burns in the sky, slushing the last creeping piles of snow between its toes and whispering to the flowers, grow. Seven knights of Camelot and their Prince and his Warlock ride slowly through the muddy road. Arthur checks that his sword is clean of the bandits it ran through before sliding it home to its worn leather scabbard.
“A fine blade, my Lord.”
Emrys, riding beside him on his slight mare, sitting on the thinnest saddle he could commission, nods to Arthur’s side
“Was a gift,” Arthur says. “A parting gift from the armoury’s blacksmith before he left us not two years ago.”
“Ah, yes, Tom.” Emrys nods to himself. “Uprooted his business to follow after his lovesick daughter.”
“You sound surprised,” Arthur says.
“Not surprised. Just...”
They both fall silent and listen to the squelching of mud under hooves. The ground they are treading is on the knife-edge of treason. The blacksmith’s daughter has a freedom neither of them are allowed to dream of--she fell in love with a peasant who tried to play at being knight, and followed him far away.
“Well,” Emrys says, “perhaps we will hear of them once again.”
A flower--one of the first of the season--bends up from the ground by the highway. Emrys calls it to him with a whistle and twists it into his horse’s mane.
“For the Witch,” he explains, “so that she can hold what she Sees.”
The men of Camelot plod towards a tomb that holds the last dragon egg, mud flung up by their horses to spatter their capes. Far away, home in Camelot, a Witch is caught with the broken ends of the Great Dragon's chain at her feet, the thudding pressure of giant wings fading in the distance. She doesn’t scream, nor does she fight, for this is a story that she recognizes; this is the story of her end.
--
The courtyard is silent, the people of Camelot quiet and attending to a funeral, not celebrating an execution. She wears rough-spun wool around her in a shapeless sack, but in the light flickering through the morning sun, the ghost of fine white fabric flutters around her, angel-soft.
“This Witch I hereby declare to be a traitor to the Crown, and for her crime of treason, I sentence her to death.” Uther is tall, and his people are so very small. But the Witch who calls herself Morgana, because no one else will, towers over them all.
She looks into the eyes of a knight cloaked in bright red. “My name is Morgana.” The tinder under her feet catches alight. Black smoke gusts over her face, but she doesn’t close her white soaked eyes.
“You must remember,” she presses. “Morgana.”
Sir Leon swallows and nods; looks at his feet and doesn’t look up again, as she starts to burn, starts to shriek even as she coughs up smoke. A dragon, wheeling above them all, promises revenge as her smoke rises to meet him.
And Emrys, riding north with his Lord the Prince Arthur, feels her as she dies, and screams.
The future shifts and shakes.
--.