From This Day On (1/2)
Title: From This Day On
Wordcount: ~19,000 words
Summary: While on a hike, Merlin and Gwaine stumble upon the Lost City of Camelot, cursed to wake up every morning a century in the future, and Merlin decides it's his duty to break the spell--with help from a prince, an imprisoned seer, and quite a few others. A Brigadoon AU.
Warnings: minor character death, imprisonment, and a bit of violence, no worse than in canon.
A/N: Because every fandom needs a Brigadoon AU, right? Title is from the show.
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
[…] The legend of the Lost City of Camelot has its origins in the writings of Queen Nimueh I of Camelot, after the coup that gave her the throne, and as many scholars debate its true existence as debate the existence of the island of Atlantis. If it is true, the discovery of the city of Camelot would be the unquestionable find of the millennium, and if it isn’t, it’s still the most valuable allegory available for the dangers of attempting to eradicate magic from a kingdom. The story of a king blind enough to commit mass murders of sorcerers (even going so far as to nearly eradicate both Dragonlords and the dragons themselves) is chilling on its own, but the story of his whole castle, city, and all its inhabitants (with the exception of a trapped dragon) disappearing overnight, leaving the kingdom free for Nimueh and the few remaining magic users to take, is the stuff of nightmares and fairy tales.
However, the legend is given credence by the writings of one of Queen Nimueh’s contemporaries, a sorcerer known simply by the name Emrys (whose place in prophecies at the time is a legend of its own), who in his writings on magic, natural philosophy, and the art of the Dragonlord, mentions the Lost City of Camelot only once, to say that the son of the blind king was the only one who might have been strong enough to change his father’s ways. […]
~Excerpt from “Myth and Legend from the Formation of Albion”
Merlin Emerson hates camping.
Well, okay, he really doesn’t hate camping. Some of his best memories from when he was a kid are camping in the woods behind his house with his father, and he loves being out in nature, whether that means in the woods or at the beach or just sprawling out under a tree when he doesn’t have a lecture. Much as he scoffs at the sects of Druids who talk about magic users having to be One With Nature (capital letters very much implied), he actually sort of thinks it’s true, which makes camping great.
No, Merlin just hates camping with Gwaine, yet somehow he ends up spending a week in the wild woods in the middle of Camelot with him every year, a tradition that started gods-knew-how when they were sixteen and continues even though they’re getting ready to head into their last year of university. There are three things that must happen while camping with Gwaine: one of them must get slapped (yet to happen, but they’re only halfway through the week), they must get lost at least once (which they somehow always manage even though they’ve been in the woods quite a lot throughout their lives, mostly because Gwaine insists on finding a different area to camp in every year), and they must get so drunk they can’t even stand.
Judging by the way his head is pounding and his mouth feels like a mouse crawled into it and promptly perished, Merlin is betting the drunk thing happened last night. He groans his eyes open when a cacophony of birds starts outside the tent, like nature’s overly cheery alarm clock. Gwaine is sprawled out next to him, mouth open and snoring unattractively. “Wake up,” he hisses. Gwaine doesn’t do a thing. “Come on, you were the one who wanted to go for a dawn hike and then took out the whiskey. Wake up.” He shoves Gwaine’s shoulder and gets him blinking awake at last.
“This is your revenge, isn’t it,” Gwaine mumbles, so indistinct Merlin can only translate because he has the dubious pleasure of being fluent in Hungover Gwaine. “Greatest fucking sorcerer in a century, blah blah blah, can’t even cure a simple hangover.”
“The hike was your idea,” Merlin reminds him, and gropes for the water bottle he filled in the stream last night. “I would be happy sitting at the campsite.”
Gwaine manages to sit up. Merlin decides not to ask how he ended up shirtless, since he’s fairly sure he fell asleep in a t-shirt and sweatshirt. “Yeah, but you’re also the one who’s been whining that we’ve been coming here for years and never got to see the Dragon Caves, and today’s the only day this week that isn’t supposed to be too hot too do it.”
Merlin nods and levers himself to his feet. After years of camping and then being roommates at university, they know how to deal with hangovers together, so he wanders out to the stream near their campsite and ducks his face in the water while Gwaine pokes at the embers of their campfire, then starts their awful instant coffee in a kettle over the fire once Gwaine gets it going again to give Gwaine the chance to do the same.
Within twenty minutes, they’ve managed coffee and breakfast and clothes, so Merlin clears up their campsite and casts protections against animals and other curious campers and lets Gwaine pack their rucksacks up for the day’s hike. It’s a misty morning, a little chilly after some showers in the night, but the sun’s starting to break through by the time they get started, heading deeper into the woods on the path that Gwaine swears is a hiking trail but looks more like a deer path to Merlin.
The birds seem more agitated than usual this morning (“such a fucking princess, Merlin, it’s just the hangover talking,” says Gwaine when Merlin mentions it), and when he sees a deer he can’t coax it over like he usually does when he’s with Gwaine just to make him laugh. “Okay, something’s off,” he says when the mist only gets thicker as they walk, instead of lighter in the daylight.
Gwaine seems to have shaken off his hangover entirely, the bastard, and just turns around from where he’s walking ahead on the path to make sure Merlin gets the full effect of his rolled eyes. “Because the birds are acting funny?”
“Because …” He probes out with his magic, stopping to listen even if he isn’t really using his ears at all. Gwaine stops too, head cocked like he’s expecting to hear something out of the ordinary, because he knows that when Merlin uses his magic like this it’s something serious. There’s some other spell around, something old and strong, and it’s nothing he’s noticed in this part of the woods before. “Something’s definitely off,” he says, firm, and instead of backing off and calling for help like his teachers would tell him to do, he steps forward.
Of everyone he knows, Gwaine’s the most likely to want to get into trouble, but he still pauses, lagging behind when Merlin starts walking again. “Off like we’re going to get attacked by a massive reptilian something, or off like we walk in the mist too much and we grow tentacles?”
“I’m not going to ask where you got either of those ideas,” Merlin says, distracted, and keeps walking. “Off like there’s something there that shouldn’t be.” No, that’s not right. “Like there’s something there that isn’t usually, and someone put it there a long time ago,” he corrects.
“We’re going to end up the newspapers as those tragic student hikers who stumble on some sort of cosmic horror and end up dismembered,” Gwaine laments, and continues rambling on in that vein until they step out of the woods.
“Wait, what?” says Merlin, because as far as he’s aware there isn’t a clearing several square kilometers across in the middle of Camelot Woods, much less one with a town and a fucking Medieval castle in the middle of it. Or at least there wasn’t the last time they were in this section of the woods, and there isn’t on the maps, just the Dragon Caves he wanted to visit. But there it is, not an illusion or a mirage, fields around stone walls around a large cluster of huts around more walls around a white castle the likes of which he’s pretty sure isn’t still standing in Albion, or at least not without major renovations. “Where the hell are we?”
A grin breaks out across Gwaine’s face, the same grin that Merlin recognizes with a sinking heart from adventures in the past. The ones that generally end badly. “No use waiting around. Let’s find out.”
*
There are actual armored guards at the gate to get into the town. And not armored guards in the sense that the rulers of Albion’s various kingdoms travel around with dangerous-looking people with weapons, these men are wearing actual chainmail and carrying actual swords, and they collectively gape at Merlin and Gwaine walking through the gates without saying a thing, even when Gwaine tries to ask where they are.
“Okay,” says Gwaine when they get inside and have a good gawk at the straw-roofed huts and the horses and everyone wearing clothes they’ve only seen in history books, “it’s one of those … history villages, right? We somehow got way more lost than we assumed, and ended up here on some sort of festival day.”
Merlin closes his eyes and listens again, feels that old, old magic under everything, even as he notes the absence of protection spells against fire or leaks on the houses, the lack of charms around people’s necks, the lack of any magic in anyone that isn’t just the barest of sparks. “I … don’t know.”
“Right, great.” Gwaine clears his throat and uses his best smile on a passing woman. “Excuse me, ma’am, but would you happen to be able to tell us what’s going on?”
She gives them-and their clothes-a wide-eyed look. “I think you’ll be wanting to go to the courtyard,” she says, and flees.
“Helpful,” mutters Merlin, but he can already tell that the crowd is trickling in a certain direction, towards the castle, so he’s guessing something is going on there, and he catches Gwaine’s eye and nods there. Gwaine nods back, so they adjust their packs and walk through the town, where nobody talks to them and everyone seems nervous and unwilling even to look at them, into the courtyard of the castle that looks even more imposing and old than it did in the distance, where there’s a stone block raised up above everything else.
And, Merlin realizes when the crowd quiets at some invisible signal, a man up on a balcony on the castle-several men, but only one of them is wearing a crown, and at his gesture the masses part to let a terrified man through, prodded along by a hooded man with an axe, and Merlin’s brain blanks, because this can’t be happening, this definitely isn’t happening, whatever it is. “People of Camelot,” says the man on the balcony, but Merlin can’t look at him because he’s stuck looking at the man being pushed to kneel in front of the block. “I greet you with sadness on this, the tenth day of the curse. Today you see before you a sorcerer, one who will not undo the curse and be pardoned for his magic, so he must be condemned to death.”
A woman behind them snorts under her breath. “Notice he never condemns his Lady Morgana, just locks her up in her room.”
“Hush,” says another, just as quiet. “You know as well as I that the Lady Morgana is our only-”
“This is a sad day indeed,” continues the man on the balcony, interrupting their conversation, and Merlin forces his eyes up there, because he has a sick, horrified feeling about what’s going to happen. “It would have been a day of celebration, before the curse, the twentieth anniversary of a stronger Camelot without magic. Instead, I can only tell you that we are trying to break the curse, and to remind you never to go into the woods, not until it’s over.” He raises his hand, and Merlin finds he can’t even look at that, skirts his gaze away where it sticks on a dark-haired girl his age peering out a nearby window, pale and upset, and then when he can’t look at her on a man standing behind the one on the balcony, wearing a less fancy crown and standing with his jaw set.
He isn’t looking when it happens, but he hears the sound and Gwaine’s low curse, and turns to look at him as the crowd starts talking again and an old woman starts wailing-the man’s mother, Merlin realizes when she starts cursing them, saying she should go into the woods and put them all out of their misery, and then there are guards coming from everywhere and before whatever spell she starts chanting can finish she’s gone as well, another spark of magic out of this strange, empty, old city.
Gwaine grips his arm. “Merlin, we need to get out of here and tell someone about this. That wasn’t a joke. And what’s all this talk about magic?”
Merlin looks around, dazed, because he knows this story. It was his favorite growing up, even if his mother scolded his father every time he told it as a bedtime story, and he wrote a whole paper on it for his Philosophy of Magic course last term. “It’s the Lost City of Camelot,” he says at Gwaine’s questioning look.
“That’s a fairy tale.” Gwaine gestures around. “This is a bunch of nutters and anti-magic separatists with weapons, and I’m thinking we should get out of here and make a run for the nearest ranger station so someone can do something about it.”
“Gwaine.” He takes him by the shoulders and shakes him lightly. “This is not on the maps. If there were a castle in these woods someone would have noticed it by now, which means it probably wasn’t here before this morning when everything started feeling weird, which means really powerful magic. I think a castle appearing out of nowhere with no warning is about the same level of unlikely as the Lost City of Camelot appearing out of nowhere.”
“Excuse me.” They turn in unison to find a young woman standing behind them, her brows drawn together. She’s dressed like she belongs in a book of fairy tales as some sort of deserving peasant girl, clean plain dress and flowers tucked in her hair, and she’s the only one in the crowd who dares to look at or talk to them directly, judging by the stares she’s getting. “Are you from outside?”
“Yes, and we were just leaving,” says Gwaine, taking Merlin’s arm to steer him, but Merlin stops him with a look.
“We are. Can you tell us what’s going on? Where we are?”
She looks around nervously, and up at the window where the dark-haired woman was. She’s gone now. “I think we’d better not do this in front of everyone. Come home with me, I promise you won’t be harmed.”
Merlin turns his best imploring look on Gwaine, who finally makes a face and nods. “Okay,” says Merlin for them both. “I’m Merlin, and he’s Gwaine. You are?”
“Guinevere. Just Gwen, really. And you really should come with me.” She gives a nearby guard a nervous look. “We don’t get many people from outside here. The last one came five days ago, and he’s with me now, people are only just starting to trust that he isn’t a sorcerer.” Merlin tries not to stiffen up. “Not that it’s a problem if he were, not that he is, at this point, as long as-well, we can talk about that at my home.” Gwen ushers them along as she talks, taking them down a few cobbled streets to a blacksmith’s forge, where she kisses the cheek of a man who must be her father and then leads them inside. “Lancelot! We’ve got guests.”
Another man steps out from behind what looks like a curtain at the back of the main room (possibly the only room) of the hut, and Merlin tries not to stare, because really, between he and Gwaine, it’s a real toss-up of which one of them looks more like a model, especially with apparently-Lancelot’s shirt half-unlaced. “Guests from outside, it seems,” he observes, eyeing Merlin’s jeans and Gwaine’s shirt with a big picture of a cartoon dragon on it.
“Yes. I thought I’d bring them to you, since, well, you would know what to do.” She actually wrings her hands, which Merlin is pretty sure people don’t do outside of novels.
Lancelot smiles at her, so obviously besotted that it’s almost a little depressing. “You were the one who helped me, Gwen. I’ve just been following your advice.” He looks back at Merlin and Gwaine. “I’ve been here for five days, which isn’t much, but I’m the only person who’s walked in since the curse-until you two, that is.”
“What sort of curse?” Merlin asks. Whatever it is, it’s going to be big magic, the kind of thing that almost nobody can do these days, or at least doesn’t bother to do. Most times a curse is just giving someone bad luck or some physical embarrassment or discomfort, and the worst ones generally come out of family grudges. There hasn’t been a curse that affected more than a city block since the ‘40s.
“Oh.” Her face falls. “Of course you wouldn’t know. I suppose the world’s forgotten us by now. That’s what she said, that the world would forget us, and ten days, that’s-” She stops when Lancelot rests a hand on her shoulder and straightens. “There was a sorceress-Nimueh, her name was.” Queen Nimueh, leader of the Magical Renaissance in Albion even if she couldn’t make the kingdoms stop warring. The first person to write about the Lost City of Camelot, and Merlin knows that Gwaine realizes that when he lets out a low whistle. “She put a curse on us so that every day when we wake up, we’re a hundred years in the future, and if any of us leave, even go as far as the woods, the next time we go to sleep we’ll never wake up again.”
“Holy fucking shit,” breathes Merlin, because that isn’t just big magic, that’s the biggest, that’s the kind of thing they tell stories about, the kind of thing that nobody’s supposed to be able to do anymore (the kind of thing that he wonders, when he’s testing the limits of his powers or on the nights when the magic feels too big for his body, rising up and choking him, if he’d be able to do. But he can’t say that, not really, not even to his parents, because it sounds stupidly, unspeakably arrogant).
“Wait,” says Gwaine, heading right for the practicalities while Merlin is still floundering imagining the amount of raw power and feeling that would have to go into that kind of curse. “Does that mean we can’t leave?”
“Oh, no!” Gwen shakes her head, looking horrified. “You’re fine! Lancelot just stayed because-um.”
“Because of Gwen,” Lancelot says, smiling at her again. “There was little to stay for in my own life, and when I met her, she needed comfort and I wanted to stay for her.”
“As far as almost everyone knows,” Gwen adds, “he’s just a peasant who came to visit Camelot at exactly the wrong time and I took him in. We don’t want to know how people will react if they know he walked in after the curse.”
Merlin does the math. “Five days-so you came here five hundred years ago? Wow. This is all kind of … this city is a legend, you know? The Lost City of Camelot, the city without magic.” He stops, and turns that over in his head again, turns over the scene in the courtyard just minutes ago. “Oh wow, the city without magic. That’s … not good. Your king, he kills sorcerers, right?”
She wrings her hands again. “He says any sorcerer who breaks the curse would be pardoned, but everyone else … oh, are you? Lancelot, we’ve talked these past few days, he says that there’s more magic out in Albion than there ever was when we still heard from the outside. You can’t-you shouldn’t let King Uther know. Or the prince, actually, though he’s a bit less strict with it ever since my lady was locked up.”
“Oh, right, the prince,” says Merlin without thinking, and gets an expressive wiggle of the eyebrows from Gwaine, who knows that Merlin owns and still has a yearly reread of the trilogy someone wrote about the prince from the Lost City of Camelot and his adventures after his city disappeared (although he doubts that he’s actually called Prince Frederick), and that he wrote a whole paper on him based off Emrys’s writings for his Myths of Early Albion course. “What’s the prince’s name? And who’s this lady? I’ve heard her mentioned a few times.”
“Prince Arthur. But really, you should avoid him, he still arrests sorcerers and the way you two look …” Gwen pauses, bites her lip, and waits for Lancelot to encourage her before she continues. “And the Lady Morgana is the king’s ward. Was, maybe. We found out she’s got magic on the second day of the curse, and the king didn’t kill her, maybe because when we dream every night she’s the one who sees what’s going on outside, and what might be coming up. I’m her maidservant, though she’s locked in her rooms so there isn’t much to be done, these days.”
Merlin nods slowly as he tries to think his way through everything. He suspects he and Gwaine wouldn’t get back with help in time to keep Camelot from drifting off into the mists again, so if he does anything, it’s going to be on his own-and he needs to do something, since even if the king kills his kind there are plenty of people in the city like Gwen who don’t deserve this. “Can you take me to see her?”
“I can try. I’ll go see her and see if she can think of a way to sneak you in, or maybe you can get in by magic. I’ve got a place you can hide in the mean time.”
“That would be great, thanks.”
He looks at Gwaine in a half-arsed apology, but Gwaine’s grinning and rummaging through his rucksack. “Okay, Merlin, you go talk to the lady in the tower even if it’s a waste of a fairy tale cliché, and I’m going to take pictures of everything so people won’t think it’s a collective hallucination when we try to tell them about it. Sound like a plan?”
“You’re amazing,” says Merlin with a grin of his own.
“Come on, then,” says Gwen, pulling at his arm. “I don’t want to be late. Lancelot, look after him, would you? Make sure the guards don’t see … whatever that is and think it’s sorcery.”
*
Merlin ends up crammed behind a tapestry in a little stone nook in a castle corridor, where Gwen leaves him with an apologetic look to run off and get Lady Morgana’s breakfast and laundry. “You could be here as long as an hour, and I’m sorry,” she hisses, “just don’t draw attention to yourself, this is the safest place I know.”
And that’s why, twenty minutes in, Merlin can’t help a sneeze from behind the musty tapestry, and five seconds later he’s hauled out by the collar by a bloke his age who’s just unfairly pretty, blond and armored and wearing an intense snarl with his sword at Merlin’s throat-the man from the balcony, he realizes after a second. “Who the hell are you and why are you skulking around my castle?”
Part of Merlin’s mind registers that “my castle” probably means he’s just met the prince Gwen said he should avoid if at all possible, but unfortunately it’s not the part of mind that controls his mouth, so he snaps “None of your business, arsehole” before he can stop himself.
“What did you call me?” The prince backs Merlin up against the nearest wall, sword still up. “Do you know who I am?”
Merlin isn’t sure that his magic would do something useful fast enough to keep him from getting stabbed, and even less sure that he would want it to, so he raises his hands in surrender. “I’m guessing you’re Prince Arthur? Sorry, I didn’t recognize you, I’m, um.”
Prince Arthur steps back, sword still out but lowered, and gives him a once-over, then pauses and does it again, wide-eyed. If they were in a club, Merlin would be pretty pleased, but he’s relatively sure that Arthur’s just seeing jeans and trainers for the first time. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s the latest fashion?” Merlin tries. Somewhere out there in the city Gwaine has just started laughing uncontrollably and doesn’t know why. It’s a bad lie, especially coming from him of all people, and it makes the prince take another step back, mouth falling open. He scrambles for another excuse. “I need to do laundry.”
“You’re from outside.” The prince’s arm falls down by his side, sword swiping the stone floor with a clang. “You’re-we haven’t had visitors since the curse, how did you get here? I talk to Morgana every morning, she didn’t say you were coming. Who are you?”
“I just … walked through the gate. I mean, it’s all been kind of a surprise, I’m only now figuring out that this is the lost city-that this is Camelot, me and my friend Gwaine were just out for a hike when we found you. I’m Merlin.” He holds out his hand to shake and the prince just looks at it like he’s afraid Merlin is diseased. Right, because royalty can’t touch the common folk. Merlin decides Prince Arthur is a wanker and drops his hand.
“Merlin,” drawls the prince like he’s thinking really hard about it (so maybe he’s not an arse, just a bit slow). “Where is your friend?”
“In the city.” He squares his shoulders because he isn’t even from Camelot (well, okay, Ealdor is one of those little towns that gets swapped around a lot in the constant squabbles, but it’s been in Escetia ever since he was born, so even if the prince were still a prince he wouldn’t be Merlin’s). “You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you exactly where, because you don’t look that friendly. I’m just here to figure out what’s going on, is all.”
Prince Arthur sheathes his sword and crosses his arms in one smooth motion. “Then you’re here to see Morgana.”
“Who’s Morgana?” Merlin asks, his eyes as wide and guileless as he can make them.
He fails miserably, even though the innocent act is usually the one he can pull on anyone but his parents and Gwaine. “If you’re lurking about on this corridor, and knew to do it, you’re waiting to see Morgana.” Merlin winces, because he’s sneaking in to see some woman he’s never met who’s under house arrest, and probably the Prince isn’t going to like that much. “Smarter than you look, then,” Arthur adds, and Merlin blinks at him to find his face a little lighter. “She’s the only one of us who knows anything about what goes on outside Camelot, other than what she’s told us.”
“So you aren’t going to run me through or lock me up or something?”
“What good would it do?” Arthur gives him a hard look again, eyes narrowed. “You are coming with me, though. Before you get anywhere close to Morgana, you’re going to talk to me.”
Merlin thinks of Gwen and her likely reaction to him going missing. “The person who left me here will worry.”
“The person who left you here is trying to sneak a possibly-suspicious outsider in to see a prisoner, so she’s probably right to. How is Guinevere this morning?” Arthur takes his arm and starts propelling him down the corridor before Merlin can try to save Gwen’s arse. They run into a few servants on the way, listlessly scrubbing floors or doing other chores that Merlin’s sure are vital to the castle somehow, and all of them give Merlin a curious look but they never bother to say anything, just drop their eyes when they see who he’s with. It’s not a very long walk before Arthur’s pushing him through a door and shutting it behind them, leaving them standing in a large, sunny room with a good view of the courtyard and a doorway to a room with a big red-curtained bed in it, by which he cleverly surmises that they’re in Arthur’s personal chambers.
“Not that I’m not glad that this isn’t a dungeon or an executioner’s block or something, but if I’m not in trouble what am I here for?”
Arthur raises his eyebrows. “You’re here to tell me everything, of course, starting with how you found us.”
“It’s not … I mean, there isn’t a marker saying ‘Lost City of Camelot, show up on this date in this year and you’ll see a castle where people murder sorcerers before lunch’ in the woods. We were out hiking in the woods, there was something off, a lot of mist, and then suddenly there was a castle that wasn’t on the map.”
“Oh. I suppose … a thousand years is a long time, nobody would know where to look for us even if they knew what had happened.”
He looks angry, but he sounds sad, and Merlin shifts uncomfortably, casts around for anything at all useful to say. “You’re a legend, if that helps. The whole city is, I mean, but you and your father especially.” Not in a good way, but they can get to that later.
“It doesn’t. Generally it’s best if you’re a legend after you die.” Arthur picks a paper up off the table and doesn’t bother pretending to read it before he turns back to Merlin, shoulders straightening and eyes going sharp again. “That’s enough of that, though. You’re going to tell me about what it’s like out there. Morgana tells me such strange things, in the mornings. Is it true there are metal dragons that take you from place to place?”
*
An hour later, Merlin is trying to explain the internet to Arthur (and failing, judging by the dubious look on Arthur’s face) when someone knocks on the door. Within a few seconds, Merlin is shoved under the table, actually under it, and Arthur is answering the door, cool as can be. “Ah, Guinevere,” he says, and Merlin relaxes but doesn’t move. “Can I help you?”
“Morgana is asking for you again.”
“Really? I rather thought you might be looking for Merlin.” Merlin winces and hears Gwen make a pitiful sort of squeaking sound. “You’ll be glad to know that I found him instead of my father. Come on out, Merlin, before she goes back to Morgana and tells her I had you thrown in the dungeons.”
Merlin crawls out from under the table and wonders if he should bother explaining that he wasn’t hiding like a little girl and Arthur was actually the one who shoved him there. Judging by Gwen’s relieved expression, though, he doesn’t have to mention it. “Hi, Gwen. Sorry. I sort of wasn’t given a choice about all of this.”
“Never mind. It explains why Lady Morgana told me to come here after you weren’t with-um, my father.” Gwaine and Lancelot, that means, most likely. “Are you all right?”
Arthur claps a hand on Merlin’s shoulder when he stands and speaks instead of letting Merlin answer, which is annoying but not enough to bother with arguing about it. “He’s fine. He’s been telling me about airplanes. Morgana is ready to see him, then? Let’s go.”
“I don’t-we shouldn’t-” Gwen looks back and forth between them imploringly, but Merlin really doesn’t have any leverage so he just looks helplessly back as Arthur steers them out the door, never moving his hand from Merlin’s shoulder. He takes them right down the main corridors, ignoring the odd looks that everyone they pass give at the sight of Merlin, and past Merlin’s erstwhile hiding place to a room with two guards outside it.
“Good morning again,” says Arthur, and takes a key out from somewhere while ignoring both of the guards, who seem a bit nervous about letting him in, or maybe letting Merlin in, since Arthur and Gwen are both regular visitors.
“Who’s the-” one of the guards starts, before Arthur breezes past them, shoving Merlin in front of him and Gwen trailing behind, and they’re suddenly in another bedroom, this one with a lot less weapons strewn about and more silks, and the dark-haired lady he saw through the window at the execution sitting at a table waiting for them.
She’s gorgeous in the same improbable fairy-tale way as Arthur is, as Lancelot is, like maybe everyone was just that much more attractive in the past. Gwaine is going to fall to his knees and swear his devotion when he meets her. “You’re him, then,” she says after a moment of sizing him up. “Emrys.”
“Um, Emrys is a historical figure, actually.” He winces, because he’s actually probably not historical to them. Judging by historians’ best guesses, he probably would have been within a decade on either side of them in age, if things were still as they were meant to be. “I’m just Merlin.”
“Either way. You’re … I knew you would be coming eventually.” She stands up and gives him a hard look, then looks over his shoulder at Arthur and Gwen, who are standing silent. “The two of you go and get his friend, and Lancelot, if you wish, Gwen. Merlin and I need to talk on our own.”
Arthur frowns. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’ve never met him before, and-”
“Do you think it matters if he tries to kill me, Arthur?” Merlin steps back, lets them square off and stare at each other. “While we’re all under this curse, while Uther has me locked up, do you really think it matters to me? I think he can help, but you need to leave us alone so I can be sure.”
“Him?” Arthur jerks his head in Merlin’s direction. “What could he do?”
“Use your eyes, Arthur, he’s a sorcerer.” Merlin winces, but Arthur doesn’t draw his sword again, or start shouting or threatening to drag him off to the dungeon. He steps back from Merlin, wary and wanting to keep his eyes on him, but he doesn’t shout. “We’ve got to take the chance that he’s powerful enough to help us. Go, bring his companion before the guards find him, make yourself useful for once.”
“Of course.” Arthur bobs a nod that’s almost a bow and storms out of the room with one last suspicious glance at Merlin, which hurts more than he was expecting it would.
“My lady?” says Gwen, looking between them.
Lady Morgana’s face softens. “Go on, you actually know what the man looks like, and I didn’t send Arthur just to keep him from bothering me. Give us a little while.” Gwen looks nervously between them, but she goes, and Merlin listens to her murmur to the guards on the other side of the door for a minute before she goes off behind Arthur.
“I don’t know if I can do anything,” he starts, but she cuts him off.
“They’ll have told you that I dream every night about what happens while we sleep.” He nods, since she seems to expect a response to that, and takes a seat when she gestures him towards one. “Gaius, our physician, tells me that I’m a Seer, and would have seen much smaller spans of time had things continued as normal. If I’d lived.” She snorts. “He always neglects to mention that part, even with the chains on my door now. You’ll want to talk to him later, though. He knows more about magic than anyone else in this castle, now.”
“What makes you think I could do anything? I’m a student, and I’ve got a lot of power, yeah, but this is big magic. Like, really big. It takes five normal-strength sorcerers to launch a rocket-ship properly, how am I supposed to do this alone?”
Morgana walks restlessly to the window. “Because you have to. I can’t, I’ve tried and failed-all my magic will do is show me the outside, and some of the future. The rest of it isn’t unlocked yet. None of the other sorcerers hidden in Camelot are powerful enough or brave enough to try. How many more magical visitors can we expect to get?”
“I don’t know! Gwaine and I will make it known, so in a hundred years every sorcerer in the world will be here to work together and fix it. It could happen.”
“Lots of things could happen.” She walks back and sits down at the table across from him, close enough that he can see the circles around her eyes that make it clear that even if she’s been sleeping like the princess in a fairy tale that doesn’t mean it’s been restful. “I know how much things can change in a century-a whole city forgotten and made into legend, another one built, going from traveling by horse to traveling in the sky in machines nobody believes me about … they could have forgotten you, by then. Refuted you. They forgot us quickly enough, with help from Nimueh. I haven’t had the heart to tell Arthur how thoroughly we’re forgotten.”
“I’d read about you,” he offers. “As a legend, yes, but enough that I knew where I was when we got here. You haven’t been forgotten that much. I can’t get anyone today, no matter what advances we’ve made this forest is big enough that we couldn’t get to help in time and the magic on the city would make too much interference to contact them, but in a hundred years-”
She shakes her head. “Someday, we’re going to wake up in the morning and there won’t be forest at the boundary of the spell, there will be nothing but fire and ash. We’ll have outlived the world and there will be no hope at all, and it could be in twenty days or it could be tomorrow, but I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want to see Arthur’s face on that morning, either.”
That can’t possibly mean anything good, it really can’t. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you can’t break the spell, I’m going to break out this evening and go to the woods.”
*
The thing is, he can’t exactly blame Morgana, because she’s right. He could tell her to wait another day, or a week, but he’s not the one who can see the future, and he can’t imagine what it would be like to dream the end of the world and know without a doubt he was going to wake up to it.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he likes it. “So that means that if I’m not good enough,” he says, once he’s had time to swallow down his first reaction, “it’s going to be my fault that everyone in this city dies.”
“It will be mine. And I don’t like it either, but we’re all dead, for all it matters to anyone. We’re a children’s tale, now. In a hundred years we might not even be that.”
Merlin looks around, like anything in her room is going to help him. As far as he knows, they and the doctor are the only sorcerers left in the city. “I’ve never tried to undo magic this big. Nothing even close.” He can feel the spell woven into everything, when he concentrates, but he can’t find the trigger, can’t find anything, really. The spell is just there, the same way the magic in the few dragons he’s met is just there. “I’ll try, but I’ll need to check on the borders of the spell, I think, see if I can find a weak spot to pick at.”
“Of course. Arthur will take you, when he comes back.”
Merlin winces at the thought. It’s hard to get the look on Arthur’s face out of his mind, when Morgana said he’s a sorcerer. It’s not something he’s ever had to be ashamed of before, much less apologize for, and the desire to do it is both new and completely unwelcome. Still, it’s not as if he’s going to object. Having the prince with him will go a long way towards him not getting executed. “Have you seen me fix it?” he asks instead of any of the other hundreds of questions he’s got building up. “You’re a Seer, and you knew about me right away, called me Emrys. Will I do it?”
“I can’t see everything. Or most things that would be of any use to us.” She shifts restlessly. “I think you could. Whether you figure out how is another matter entirely.”
There’s really no answer he can make to that, so it’s a relief when they’re interrupted by the guards talking outside and then Arthur and Gwen coming back, this time with Gwaine and Lancelot in tow. Gwaine, predictably enough, gapes when he sees Morgana. “Damn, Merlin, you get all the luck.”
She ignores him, which Merlin doesn’t bother to tell her will only encourage him. “Arthur, take Merlin out to the borders, let him see what he can. We’ll stay here, and have Gaius waiting for you when you return.” Arthur opens his mouth, glaring, but she just raises her eyebrows and shuts up. Merlin suspects it’s going to take him all of three minutes to get really jealous of that trick. “You’re the only one who can, Arthur. Go.”
“Fine. But you’re the one who gets to tell my father where I’ve-” Arthur breaks off and nobody fills the silence, Gwaine and Lancelot because they’re confused, Gwen and Merlin because they’re horrified, Morgana because her mouth is pursed tight on something that looks like hurt. “Morgana, I’m-”
“Let’s go,” says Merlin, because he can’t see this conversation going anywhere good and he doesn’t think they’ll want to have it out in public.
Arthur doesn’t look relieved, exactly, but he does relax, and gives Morgana a complicated look, the kind Merlin and Gwaine exchange because they know each other so well, before turning away and letting Gwen step forward to start fussing over Morgana’s hair. “Come along, Merlin. I don’t suppose you know how to ride a horse, with your air-planes taking you everywhere.”
Merlin takes that for the opportunity it is and starts chattering about cars being a more common mode of transport while they leave the room and walk down the hallways, keeping his voice down so people don’t stare at him even more than they already are. They don’t seem to dare to ask questions with Arthur there-not that anybody dared in the morning before the execution either, so maybe they just don’t want to know-but he isn’t taking the risk of anybody telling the king, who he really doesn’t fancy meeting.
It takes nearly an hour to get out of the city, because Arthur stops to talk to everyone who so much as looks at him once they get out of the castle, if only for a few seconds, to check and make sure that they’re okay, keeping their spirits up and all. He looks awkward about it, not used to it, and they look uncomfortable answering him, but then again it takes more than ten days to get used to a curse this big, and it’s all sort of endearing. Which is not good, because Merlin was perfectly happy with his conclusion that the prince of the Lost City of Camelot is a dick.
Luckily for Merlin, the second they’re outside the gates the concerned ruler face is gone and Arthur is scowling and gesturing around impatiently. “Do whatever it is you need to do as quickly as you can, please. We may be cursed, but no matter what Morgana thinks I do have duties.”
“I’m not … promising anything, right? I’m good, but I’m not this good.” He gestures around. “But I’ll try. We’ve got till the edge of the woods, so let’s go a little further, it’s likely to be weaker close to the edge.”
Arthur lags behind, the closer they go, but Merlin knows why and he isn’t going to bother to be obnoxious about it, so he makes a point of stopping at least ten meters from the edge of the spell and kneels so he can get his hands in the dirt, since whoever did the spell (and he’s going to not think for a few minutes about how it was probably Queen Nimueh I because she’s a bit of a hero and everything is very confusing just now) seems to have pinned it into the earth. “What are you going to do?” Arthur asks just as Merlin is about to start trying to find the boundaries of the spell. “Do you have to chant, or … use blood, or something?”
“Um, no.” He’s about to ask where the hell he got all that from, but, right, city without magic, so Merlin can’t really blame him for being ignorant. “Just shut up a minute, would you?” Arthur looks affronted and Merlin rolls his eyes. “Or come down here with me, you rule the land so you’ve got some connection to it, that might help.”
For a second, Arthur just stands there looking stiff and uncomfortable while Merlin remembers once again that he was raised to hate magic, and then he kneels down, even if his enthusiasm is lacking, and gives Merlin his hand. “Do whatever you need to do.”
Merlin puts Arthur’s palm flat on the ground and lays his own next to it, and then takes a deep breath and goes as deep into the magic and the dirt beneath his fingers as he can. The first thing he figures out is that whoever cast this spell-Nimueh, if all the legends are true, and it’s too cohesive to be the work of multiple sorcerers-was really fucking good. There’s no atom within the spell that’s free of it other than the weird blips that are Merlin, Gwaine, and Lancelot and the air around them, it goes into the sky and into the soil so they can’t even dig their way out, and the mechanics behind it all are dizzying, the complicated give-and-take of sustaining life across centuries.
From there he tries to pull at the structure of it, tries to figure out what went into it and what thread to pick at to unravel all of it. He doesn’t do anything too complicated, just batters at it with all the brute force he can muster, all the depths of magic he doesn’t get to use in his classes because it’s very impressive and all having huge amounts of power but it’s actually kind of useless unless you’re in a high-ranking position. He might as well be trying to make the moon go backwards for all the good it does, but he pours the magic in anyway, because it’s got to be good for something and he wants it to be-
“Merlin!” says Arthur, and Merlin reels back and realizes his cheek is stinging. When he focuses his eyes Arthur’s close, holding him up by the shoulder, jaw set and eyes a little wild. “What was that?”
“What was what?” he asks, or thinks he asks. He feels like his mouth is working slower than his brain so he might have slurred it a little judging by Arthur’s expression. Merlin shakes his head, brings himself back to his body a little more, gets the sharp throb of his cheek in reward. “You slapped me!” he accuses.
“You were sitting there not moving for ten minutes and then all of Camelot started shaking, of course I slapped you! Are you trying to bring the castle down?”
Merlin looks hazily around to see dust settling and decides that trying to rip the spell apart by brute force isn’t going to work. “No, I was just … trying. Sorry. I didn’t realize it would do that.”
“I should hope not.” Arthur’s got the arrogant-prince voice from earlier on, but he still looks too shaken for it to be real. “And whatever you were trying, it’s quite obvious it didn’t work. Come along, Gaius should be in Morgana’s room by now, hopefully without alerting my father to anything suspicious, and you might as well hear what he’s got to say.”
*
Things in the town and the palace are tense as Arthur leads Merlin back through, ignoring the conversations all around them about the earthquake, and was it from outside or in, and either way what caused it (which makes Merlin duck his head, guilty). The guards at the gates look even more nervous, and when they reach Morgana’s room there are no guards at all, the ones from earlier probably off seeing if Merlin’s attempt at breaking the curse caused any damage to the palace. Morgana is locked in, after all, Arthur’s key the only thing that gets them through.
Everyone inside looks up in tandem when Arthur lets them in. Lancelot is at the window, probably keeping watch. Gwaine and Morgana are eyeing each other suspiciously from opposite sides of the table, Gwaine with his camera in his hands. Gwen is talking softly with an older man wearing actual robes of the sort that Merlin hasn’t seen since he read picture books, and she’s the one who stands up to greet them. “Was that you, Merlin? Or something to do with the spell? It was just after Gaius and I got here-this is Gaius, by the way. He’s the physician.”
“Yes, it was him,” says Arthur, just as Merlin is opening his mouth to say the same thing but more apologetically.
The physician crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow in the same way that some of Merlin’s professors have a habit of doing when he overdoes it a bit on assignments. “You alone caused that? Anyone in the city with any magic at all must have felt it, that could be very dangerous.”
“Right, so, I won’t try brute strength again, it was just a first try and then His Royal Highness over here decided I was finished with and dragged me back in again.”
Arthur glares at him. “What, you’d rather we stayed out there so next time you could leave us still stuck in this curse but with a crumbling heap of ruin instead of a castle?”
“I wouldn’t have brought the whole city down! I have never in my life brought a building down!” Gwaine coughs. Merlin corrects himself. “I have never in my life brought down a building that wasn’t already falling down.”
“And I’d rather your first time wasn’t my home!”
Before Merlin can come up with a good enough retort for that, the physician interrupts. “Do you mean to tell me, boy, that you did that much just throwing magic at the spell?” Merlin nods. “Just how powerful are you?”
“Um, very? But apparently not enough, I don’t know how one person managed to put that whole spell together.”
“Nimueh had years to plot her revenge, to think of what would hurt Uther worst.” Arthur clenches his jaw, Morgana looks at her lap, and Gwen reaches out for Lancelot’s hand. Merlin looks between all of them and wonders if he needs to say something before Gaius speaks again. “She was powerful, but it was the force of her need for vengeance that makes the spell so difficult to break. I doubt brute force will do the job.”
Merlin makes a helpless gesture. “Well, how was I supposed to know that? They don’t exactly teach us this sort of thing in school, you know. I could tell you six different ways to start a fire and turn a house upside down-”
“Even if you can’t cure a hangover,” Gwaine interjects.
“-yes, thank you, but this is a pretty big curse and I can see why you all think I’m this big savior who’s come by destiny or whatever to save the day but I’m not and I can’t and …” He carefully doesn’t look Morgana’s way. “It’s not fair to pin your hopes on me.”
There’s a moment of silence while everyone shifts uncomfortably, which Merlin would feel more guilty about if he hadn’t meant every word of it. “I apologize, Merlin,” says Arthur eventually, and much to his surprise he actually sounds honest about it. “I suppose I assumed that you were some sort of godsend and assumed you would be able to do it no trouble. If it’s true as Morgana says that sorcery is … respected, in your time, then perhaps you can tell them about us after today. See what they can do. If they care to, considering our reputation.”
Merlin has no idea what to say to that, because it’s disconcerting to say the least that Arthur is suddenly being nice to him, but Gwaine breaks in and saves his arse just like always. “Come on, now, no need to give up hope just yet. Merlin said he might not be able to help, not that he definitely can’t.”
“Exactly,” says Gaius, much to Merlin’s surprise, and goes to rummage in a bag that Merlin hadn’t noticed before, bringing out a thick book. “I kept this through the Purges in case of emergency, sire, and I hope you will forgive me for it, but it may be of some help in this.”
“I don’t care if it is sorcery, as long as it helps. We can’t afford to be proud.” Merlin raises his eyebrows and looks around in time to see that Gwen, Morgana and Gaius all seem surprised by that as well, in their own ways. “If you’ll pardon me, however, I must be going to assure my father that what happened was entirely natural. It would be best if you kept to this room, Merlin-and Gwaine as well, of course. I don’t want to have to break you out of the dungeons before sundown.”
With that, he sweeps out, leaving the rest of them tense and not sure what to do. Gaius is still holding the book of magic that Merlin can’t wait to get his hands on, and Morgana’s staring at it as well, eyes narrowed. Gwen seems to notice, because she’s the next one to speak. “Well, I suppose I should talk to the kitchens and see if I can get some extra food up here without raising too much suspicion.”
Gwaine grins and gestures to his rucksack. “No worries for Merlin and me, we’ve got some food packed up from this morning. Just worry about yourselves.”
“Very well, then. My lady?”
Morgana snaps around to look at her. “Yes, of course, Gwen. Do as you wish. We’ll be fine in here.”
Gwen curtsies, lets Lancelot clasp her hand with a blush, and ducks out of the room again. “You’d best start looking at the book, my boy,” says Gaius before the silence can descend again, and Merlin takes it from him and stares. He’s pretty sure he knows academics who would commit murder to get their hands on it.
“I’ll help,” says Morgana, and gives Gwaine a pointed look until he vacates his place at the table, leaving a chair for Gaius to take while Merlin pulls up a stool. “I may not be practiced in magic, but perhaps I’ll recognize the spell that would help.”
“It will likely be a combination, my lady,” Gaius warns. “As I said, Nimueh had many years to plan her revenge, and I doubt she used a spell that could be found in any book and easily countered. If it’s strong and intricate enough to withstand the amount of power Merlin must have thrown at it earlier, we will have to be very clever to come up with the key to undo it.”
Lancelot, after a look between them all, takes up a post by the door. “I’ll keep an ear out for anyone coming and make sure we have warning to hide if someone besides the prince tries to come in.”
“Great.” Merlin opens the first page of the book and looks over his shoulder at Gwaine, who’s fidgeting around looking unimpressed, probably wanting to go out and do detective work or something. “Gwaine, I know it’s boring, but would you mind taking pictures of the pages as we go through the book? I’m pretty sure my teachers will kill me if we tell them about all this and I don’t have some pictures of the book.”
“Sure,” says Gwaine, relaxing slightly and wandering around to stand behind them, earning a glower from Morgana.
Gaius clears his throat. “Very well, then, let’s begin.”
*
Part Two
Wordcount: ~19,000 words
Summary: While on a hike, Merlin and Gwaine stumble upon the Lost City of Camelot, cursed to wake up every morning a century in the future, and Merlin decides it's his duty to break the spell--with help from a prince, an imprisoned seer, and quite a few others. A Brigadoon AU.
Warnings: minor character death, imprisonment, and a bit of violence, no worse than in canon.
A/N: Because every fandom needs a Brigadoon AU, right? Title is from the show.
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
[…] The legend of the Lost City of Camelot has its origins in the writings of Queen Nimueh I of Camelot, after the coup that gave her the throne, and as many scholars debate its true existence as debate the existence of the island of Atlantis. If it is true, the discovery of the city of Camelot would be the unquestionable find of the millennium, and if it isn’t, it’s still the most valuable allegory available for the dangers of attempting to eradicate magic from a kingdom. The story of a king blind enough to commit mass murders of sorcerers (even going so far as to nearly eradicate both Dragonlords and the dragons themselves) is chilling on its own, but the story of his whole castle, city, and all its inhabitants (with the exception of a trapped dragon) disappearing overnight, leaving the kingdom free for Nimueh and the few remaining magic users to take, is the stuff of nightmares and fairy tales.
However, the legend is given credence by the writings of one of Queen Nimueh’s contemporaries, a sorcerer known simply by the name Emrys (whose place in prophecies at the time is a legend of its own), who in his writings on magic, natural philosophy, and the art of the Dragonlord, mentions the Lost City of Camelot only once, to say that the son of the blind king was the only one who might have been strong enough to change his father’s ways. […]
~Excerpt from “Myth and Legend from the Formation of Albion”
Merlin Emerson hates camping.
Well, okay, he really doesn’t hate camping. Some of his best memories from when he was a kid are camping in the woods behind his house with his father, and he loves being out in nature, whether that means in the woods or at the beach or just sprawling out under a tree when he doesn’t have a lecture. Much as he scoffs at the sects of Druids who talk about magic users having to be One With Nature (capital letters very much implied), he actually sort of thinks it’s true, which makes camping great.
No, Merlin just hates camping with Gwaine, yet somehow he ends up spending a week in the wild woods in the middle of Camelot with him every year, a tradition that started gods-knew-how when they were sixteen and continues even though they’re getting ready to head into their last year of university. There are three things that must happen while camping with Gwaine: one of them must get slapped (yet to happen, but they’re only halfway through the week), they must get lost at least once (which they somehow always manage even though they’ve been in the woods quite a lot throughout their lives, mostly because Gwaine insists on finding a different area to camp in every year), and they must get so drunk they can’t even stand.
Judging by the way his head is pounding and his mouth feels like a mouse crawled into it and promptly perished, Merlin is betting the drunk thing happened last night. He groans his eyes open when a cacophony of birds starts outside the tent, like nature’s overly cheery alarm clock. Gwaine is sprawled out next to him, mouth open and snoring unattractively. “Wake up,” he hisses. Gwaine doesn’t do a thing. “Come on, you were the one who wanted to go for a dawn hike and then took out the whiskey. Wake up.” He shoves Gwaine’s shoulder and gets him blinking awake at last.
“This is your revenge, isn’t it,” Gwaine mumbles, so indistinct Merlin can only translate because he has the dubious pleasure of being fluent in Hungover Gwaine. “Greatest fucking sorcerer in a century, blah blah blah, can’t even cure a simple hangover.”
“The hike was your idea,” Merlin reminds him, and gropes for the water bottle he filled in the stream last night. “I would be happy sitting at the campsite.”
Gwaine manages to sit up. Merlin decides not to ask how he ended up shirtless, since he’s fairly sure he fell asleep in a t-shirt and sweatshirt. “Yeah, but you’re also the one who’s been whining that we’ve been coming here for years and never got to see the Dragon Caves, and today’s the only day this week that isn’t supposed to be too hot too do it.”
Merlin nods and levers himself to his feet. After years of camping and then being roommates at university, they know how to deal with hangovers together, so he wanders out to the stream near their campsite and ducks his face in the water while Gwaine pokes at the embers of their campfire, then starts their awful instant coffee in a kettle over the fire once Gwaine gets it going again to give Gwaine the chance to do the same.
Within twenty minutes, they’ve managed coffee and breakfast and clothes, so Merlin clears up their campsite and casts protections against animals and other curious campers and lets Gwaine pack their rucksacks up for the day’s hike. It’s a misty morning, a little chilly after some showers in the night, but the sun’s starting to break through by the time they get started, heading deeper into the woods on the path that Gwaine swears is a hiking trail but looks more like a deer path to Merlin.
The birds seem more agitated than usual this morning (“such a fucking princess, Merlin, it’s just the hangover talking,” says Gwaine when Merlin mentions it), and when he sees a deer he can’t coax it over like he usually does when he’s with Gwaine just to make him laugh. “Okay, something’s off,” he says when the mist only gets thicker as they walk, instead of lighter in the daylight.
Gwaine seems to have shaken off his hangover entirely, the bastard, and just turns around from where he’s walking ahead on the path to make sure Merlin gets the full effect of his rolled eyes. “Because the birds are acting funny?”
“Because …” He probes out with his magic, stopping to listen even if he isn’t really using his ears at all. Gwaine stops too, head cocked like he’s expecting to hear something out of the ordinary, because he knows that when Merlin uses his magic like this it’s something serious. There’s some other spell around, something old and strong, and it’s nothing he’s noticed in this part of the woods before. “Something’s definitely off,” he says, firm, and instead of backing off and calling for help like his teachers would tell him to do, he steps forward.
Of everyone he knows, Gwaine’s the most likely to want to get into trouble, but he still pauses, lagging behind when Merlin starts walking again. “Off like we’re going to get attacked by a massive reptilian something, or off like we walk in the mist too much and we grow tentacles?”
“I’m not going to ask where you got either of those ideas,” Merlin says, distracted, and keeps walking. “Off like there’s something there that shouldn’t be.” No, that’s not right. “Like there’s something there that isn’t usually, and someone put it there a long time ago,” he corrects.
“We’re going to end up the newspapers as those tragic student hikers who stumble on some sort of cosmic horror and end up dismembered,” Gwaine laments, and continues rambling on in that vein until they step out of the woods.
“Wait, what?” says Merlin, because as far as he’s aware there isn’t a clearing several square kilometers across in the middle of Camelot Woods, much less one with a town and a fucking Medieval castle in the middle of it. Or at least there wasn’t the last time they were in this section of the woods, and there isn’t on the maps, just the Dragon Caves he wanted to visit. But there it is, not an illusion or a mirage, fields around stone walls around a large cluster of huts around more walls around a white castle the likes of which he’s pretty sure isn’t still standing in Albion, or at least not without major renovations. “Where the hell are we?”
A grin breaks out across Gwaine’s face, the same grin that Merlin recognizes with a sinking heart from adventures in the past. The ones that generally end badly. “No use waiting around. Let’s find out.”
*
There are actual armored guards at the gate to get into the town. And not armored guards in the sense that the rulers of Albion’s various kingdoms travel around with dangerous-looking people with weapons, these men are wearing actual chainmail and carrying actual swords, and they collectively gape at Merlin and Gwaine walking through the gates without saying a thing, even when Gwaine tries to ask where they are.
“Okay,” says Gwaine when they get inside and have a good gawk at the straw-roofed huts and the horses and everyone wearing clothes they’ve only seen in history books, “it’s one of those … history villages, right? We somehow got way more lost than we assumed, and ended up here on some sort of festival day.”
Merlin closes his eyes and listens again, feels that old, old magic under everything, even as he notes the absence of protection spells against fire or leaks on the houses, the lack of charms around people’s necks, the lack of any magic in anyone that isn’t just the barest of sparks. “I … don’t know.”
“Right, great.” Gwaine clears his throat and uses his best smile on a passing woman. “Excuse me, ma’am, but would you happen to be able to tell us what’s going on?”
She gives them-and their clothes-a wide-eyed look. “I think you’ll be wanting to go to the courtyard,” she says, and flees.
“Helpful,” mutters Merlin, but he can already tell that the crowd is trickling in a certain direction, towards the castle, so he’s guessing something is going on there, and he catches Gwaine’s eye and nods there. Gwaine nods back, so they adjust their packs and walk through the town, where nobody talks to them and everyone seems nervous and unwilling even to look at them, into the courtyard of the castle that looks even more imposing and old than it did in the distance, where there’s a stone block raised up above everything else.
And, Merlin realizes when the crowd quiets at some invisible signal, a man up on a balcony on the castle-several men, but only one of them is wearing a crown, and at his gesture the masses part to let a terrified man through, prodded along by a hooded man with an axe, and Merlin’s brain blanks, because this can’t be happening, this definitely isn’t happening, whatever it is. “People of Camelot,” says the man on the balcony, but Merlin can’t look at him because he’s stuck looking at the man being pushed to kneel in front of the block. “I greet you with sadness on this, the tenth day of the curse. Today you see before you a sorcerer, one who will not undo the curse and be pardoned for his magic, so he must be condemned to death.”
A woman behind them snorts under her breath. “Notice he never condemns his Lady Morgana, just locks her up in her room.”
“Hush,” says another, just as quiet. “You know as well as I that the Lady Morgana is our only-”
“This is a sad day indeed,” continues the man on the balcony, interrupting their conversation, and Merlin forces his eyes up there, because he has a sick, horrified feeling about what’s going to happen. “It would have been a day of celebration, before the curse, the twentieth anniversary of a stronger Camelot without magic. Instead, I can only tell you that we are trying to break the curse, and to remind you never to go into the woods, not until it’s over.” He raises his hand, and Merlin finds he can’t even look at that, skirts his gaze away where it sticks on a dark-haired girl his age peering out a nearby window, pale and upset, and then when he can’t look at her on a man standing behind the one on the balcony, wearing a less fancy crown and standing with his jaw set.
He isn’t looking when it happens, but he hears the sound and Gwaine’s low curse, and turns to look at him as the crowd starts talking again and an old woman starts wailing-the man’s mother, Merlin realizes when she starts cursing them, saying she should go into the woods and put them all out of their misery, and then there are guards coming from everywhere and before whatever spell she starts chanting can finish she’s gone as well, another spark of magic out of this strange, empty, old city.
Gwaine grips his arm. “Merlin, we need to get out of here and tell someone about this. That wasn’t a joke. And what’s all this talk about magic?”
Merlin looks around, dazed, because he knows this story. It was his favorite growing up, even if his mother scolded his father every time he told it as a bedtime story, and he wrote a whole paper on it for his Philosophy of Magic course last term. “It’s the Lost City of Camelot,” he says at Gwaine’s questioning look.
“That’s a fairy tale.” Gwaine gestures around. “This is a bunch of nutters and anti-magic separatists with weapons, and I’m thinking we should get out of here and make a run for the nearest ranger station so someone can do something about it.”
“Gwaine.” He takes him by the shoulders and shakes him lightly. “This is not on the maps. If there were a castle in these woods someone would have noticed it by now, which means it probably wasn’t here before this morning when everything started feeling weird, which means really powerful magic. I think a castle appearing out of nowhere with no warning is about the same level of unlikely as the Lost City of Camelot appearing out of nowhere.”
“Excuse me.” They turn in unison to find a young woman standing behind them, her brows drawn together. She’s dressed like she belongs in a book of fairy tales as some sort of deserving peasant girl, clean plain dress and flowers tucked in her hair, and she’s the only one in the crowd who dares to look at or talk to them directly, judging by the stares she’s getting. “Are you from outside?”
“Yes, and we were just leaving,” says Gwaine, taking Merlin’s arm to steer him, but Merlin stops him with a look.
“We are. Can you tell us what’s going on? Where we are?”
She looks around nervously, and up at the window where the dark-haired woman was. She’s gone now. “I think we’d better not do this in front of everyone. Come home with me, I promise you won’t be harmed.”
Merlin turns his best imploring look on Gwaine, who finally makes a face and nods. “Okay,” says Merlin for them both. “I’m Merlin, and he’s Gwaine. You are?”
“Guinevere. Just Gwen, really. And you really should come with me.” She gives a nearby guard a nervous look. “We don’t get many people from outside here. The last one came five days ago, and he’s with me now, people are only just starting to trust that he isn’t a sorcerer.” Merlin tries not to stiffen up. “Not that it’s a problem if he were, not that he is, at this point, as long as-well, we can talk about that at my home.” Gwen ushers them along as she talks, taking them down a few cobbled streets to a blacksmith’s forge, where she kisses the cheek of a man who must be her father and then leads them inside. “Lancelot! We’ve got guests.”
Another man steps out from behind what looks like a curtain at the back of the main room (possibly the only room) of the hut, and Merlin tries not to stare, because really, between he and Gwaine, it’s a real toss-up of which one of them looks more like a model, especially with apparently-Lancelot’s shirt half-unlaced. “Guests from outside, it seems,” he observes, eyeing Merlin’s jeans and Gwaine’s shirt with a big picture of a cartoon dragon on it.
“Yes. I thought I’d bring them to you, since, well, you would know what to do.” She actually wrings her hands, which Merlin is pretty sure people don’t do outside of novels.
Lancelot smiles at her, so obviously besotted that it’s almost a little depressing. “You were the one who helped me, Gwen. I’ve just been following your advice.” He looks back at Merlin and Gwaine. “I’ve been here for five days, which isn’t much, but I’m the only person who’s walked in since the curse-until you two, that is.”
“What sort of curse?” Merlin asks. Whatever it is, it’s going to be big magic, the kind of thing that almost nobody can do these days, or at least doesn’t bother to do. Most times a curse is just giving someone bad luck or some physical embarrassment or discomfort, and the worst ones generally come out of family grudges. There hasn’t been a curse that affected more than a city block since the ‘40s.
“Oh.” Her face falls. “Of course you wouldn’t know. I suppose the world’s forgotten us by now. That’s what she said, that the world would forget us, and ten days, that’s-” She stops when Lancelot rests a hand on her shoulder and straightens. “There was a sorceress-Nimueh, her name was.” Queen Nimueh, leader of the Magical Renaissance in Albion even if she couldn’t make the kingdoms stop warring. The first person to write about the Lost City of Camelot, and Merlin knows that Gwaine realizes that when he lets out a low whistle. “She put a curse on us so that every day when we wake up, we’re a hundred years in the future, and if any of us leave, even go as far as the woods, the next time we go to sleep we’ll never wake up again.”
“Holy fucking shit,” breathes Merlin, because that isn’t just big magic, that’s the biggest, that’s the kind of thing they tell stories about, the kind of thing that nobody’s supposed to be able to do anymore (the kind of thing that he wonders, when he’s testing the limits of his powers or on the nights when the magic feels too big for his body, rising up and choking him, if he’d be able to do. But he can’t say that, not really, not even to his parents, because it sounds stupidly, unspeakably arrogant).
“Wait,” says Gwaine, heading right for the practicalities while Merlin is still floundering imagining the amount of raw power and feeling that would have to go into that kind of curse. “Does that mean we can’t leave?”
“Oh, no!” Gwen shakes her head, looking horrified. “You’re fine! Lancelot just stayed because-um.”
“Because of Gwen,” Lancelot says, smiling at her again. “There was little to stay for in my own life, and when I met her, she needed comfort and I wanted to stay for her.”
“As far as almost everyone knows,” Gwen adds, “he’s just a peasant who came to visit Camelot at exactly the wrong time and I took him in. We don’t want to know how people will react if they know he walked in after the curse.”
Merlin does the math. “Five days-so you came here five hundred years ago? Wow. This is all kind of … this city is a legend, you know? The Lost City of Camelot, the city without magic.” He stops, and turns that over in his head again, turns over the scene in the courtyard just minutes ago. “Oh wow, the city without magic. That’s … not good. Your king, he kills sorcerers, right?”
She wrings her hands again. “He says any sorcerer who breaks the curse would be pardoned, but everyone else … oh, are you? Lancelot, we’ve talked these past few days, he says that there’s more magic out in Albion than there ever was when we still heard from the outside. You can’t-you shouldn’t let King Uther know. Or the prince, actually, though he’s a bit less strict with it ever since my lady was locked up.”
“Oh, right, the prince,” says Merlin without thinking, and gets an expressive wiggle of the eyebrows from Gwaine, who knows that Merlin owns and still has a yearly reread of the trilogy someone wrote about the prince from the Lost City of Camelot and his adventures after his city disappeared (although he doubts that he’s actually called Prince Frederick), and that he wrote a whole paper on him based off Emrys’s writings for his Myths of Early Albion course. “What’s the prince’s name? And who’s this lady? I’ve heard her mentioned a few times.”
“Prince Arthur. But really, you should avoid him, he still arrests sorcerers and the way you two look …” Gwen pauses, bites her lip, and waits for Lancelot to encourage her before she continues. “And the Lady Morgana is the king’s ward. Was, maybe. We found out she’s got magic on the second day of the curse, and the king didn’t kill her, maybe because when we dream every night she’s the one who sees what’s going on outside, and what might be coming up. I’m her maidservant, though she’s locked in her rooms so there isn’t much to be done, these days.”
Merlin nods slowly as he tries to think his way through everything. He suspects he and Gwaine wouldn’t get back with help in time to keep Camelot from drifting off into the mists again, so if he does anything, it’s going to be on his own-and he needs to do something, since even if the king kills his kind there are plenty of people in the city like Gwen who don’t deserve this. “Can you take me to see her?”
“I can try. I’ll go see her and see if she can think of a way to sneak you in, or maybe you can get in by magic. I’ve got a place you can hide in the mean time.”
“That would be great, thanks.”
He looks at Gwaine in a half-arsed apology, but Gwaine’s grinning and rummaging through his rucksack. “Okay, Merlin, you go talk to the lady in the tower even if it’s a waste of a fairy tale cliché, and I’m going to take pictures of everything so people won’t think it’s a collective hallucination when we try to tell them about it. Sound like a plan?”
“You’re amazing,” says Merlin with a grin of his own.
“Come on, then,” says Gwen, pulling at his arm. “I don’t want to be late. Lancelot, look after him, would you? Make sure the guards don’t see … whatever that is and think it’s sorcery.”
*
Merlin ends up crammed behind a tapestry in a little stone nook in a castle corridor, where Gwen leaves him with an apologetic look to run off and get Lady Morgana’s breakfast and laundry. “You could be here as long as an hour, and I’m sorry,” she hisses, “just don’t draw attention to yourself, this is the safest place I know.”
And that’s why, twenty minutes in, Merlin can’t help a sneeze from behind the musty tapestry, and five seconds later he’s hauled out by the collar by a bloke his age who’s just unfairly pretty, blond and armored and wearing an intense snarl with his sword at Merlin’s throat-the man from the balcony, he realizes after a second. “Who the hell are you and why are you skulking around my castle?”
Part of Merlin’s mind registers that “my castle” probably means he’s just met the prince Gwen said he should avoid if at all possible, but unfortunately it’s not the part of mind that controls his mouth, so he snaps “None of your business, arsehole” before he can stop himself.
“What did you call me?” The prince backs Merlin up against the nearest wall, sword still up. “Do you know who I am?”
Merlin isn’t sure that his magic would do something useful fast enough to keep him from getting stabbed, and even less sure that he would want it to, so he raises his hands in surrender. “I’m guessing you’re Prince Arthur? Sorry, I didn’t recognize you, I’m, um.”
Prince Arthur steps back, sword still out but lowered, and gives him a once-over, then pauses and does it again, wide-eyed. If they were in a club, Merlin would be pretty pleased, but he’s relatively sure that Arthur’s just seeing jeans and trainers for the first time. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s the latest fashion?” Merlin tries. Somewhere out there in the city Gwaine has just started laughing uncontrollably and doesn’t know why. It’s a bad lie, especially coming from him of all people, and it makes the prince take another step back, mouth falling open. He scrambles for another excuse. “I need to do laundry.”
“You’re from outside.” The prince’s arm falls down by his side, sword swiping the stone floor with a clang. “You’re-we haven’t had visitors since the curse, how did you get here? I talk to Morgana every morning, she didn’t say you were coming. Who are you?”
“I just … walked through the gate. I mean, it’s all been kind of a surprise, I’m only now figuring out that this is the lost city-that this is Camelot, me and my friend Gwaine were just out for a hike when we found you. I’m Merlin.” He holds out his hand to shake and the prince just looks at it like he’s afraid Merlin is diseased. Right, because royalty can’t touch the common folk. Merlin decides Prince Arthur is a wanker and drops his hand.
“Merlin,” drawls the prince like he’s thinking really hard about it (so maybe he’s not an arse, just a bit slow). “Where is your friend?”
“In the city.” He squares his shoulders because he isn’t even from Camelot (well, okay, Ealdor is one of those little towns that gets swapped around a lot in the constant squabbles, but it’s been in Escetia ever since he was born, so even if the prince were still a prince he wouldn’t be Merlin’s). “You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you exactly where, because you don’t look that friendly. I’m just here to figure out what’s going on, is all.”
Prince Arthur sheathes his sword and crosses his arms in one smooth motion. “Then you’re here to see Morgana.”
“Who’s Morgana?” Merlin asks, his eyes as wide and guileless as he can make them.
He fails miserably, even though the innocent act is usually the one he can pull on anyone but his parents and Gwaine. “If you’re lurking about on this corridor, and knew to do it, you’re waiting to see Morgana.” Merlin winces, because he’s sneaking in to see some woman he’s never met who’s under house arrest, and probably the Prince isn’t going to like that much. “Smarter than you look, then,” Arthur adds, and Merlin blinks at him to find his face a little lighter. “She’s the only one of us who knows anything about what goes on outside Camelot, other than what she’s told us.”
“So you aren’t going to run me through or lock me up or something?”
“What good would it do?” Arthur gives him a hard look again, eyes narrowed. “You are coming with me, though. Before you get anywhere close to Morgana, you’re going to talk to me.”
Merlin thinks of Gwen and her likely reaction to him going missing. “The person who left me here will worry.”
“The person who left you here is trying to sneak a possibly-suspicious outsider in to see a prisoner, so she’s probably right to. How is Guinevere this morning?” Arthur takes his arm and starts propelling him down the corridor before Merlin can try to save Gwen’s arse. They run into a few servants on the way, listlessly scrubbing floors or doing other chores that Merlin’s sure are vital to the castle somehow, and all of them give Merlin a curious look but they never bother to say anything, just drop their eyes when they see who he’s with. It’s not a very long walk before Arthur’s pushing him through a door and shutting it behind them, leaving them standing in a large, sunny room with a good view of the courtyard and a doorway to a room with a big red-curtained bed in it, by which he cleverly surmises that they’re in Arthur’s personal chambers.
“Not that I’m not glad that this isn’t a dungeon or an executioner’s block or something, but if I’m not in trouble what am I here for?”
Arthur raises his eyebrows. “You’re here to tell me everything, of course, starting with how you found us.”
“It’s not … I mean, there isn’t a marker saying ‘Lost City of Camelot, show up on this date in this year and you’ll see a castle where people murder sorcerers before lunch’ in the woods. We were out hiking in the woods, there was something off, a lot of mist, and then suddenly there was a castle that wasn’t on the map.”
“Oh. I suppose … a thousand years is a long time, nobody would know where to look for us even if they knew what had happened.”
He looks angry, but he sounds sad, and Merlin shifts uncomfortably, casts around for anything at all useful to say. “You’re a legend, if that helps. The whole city is, I mean, but you and your father especially.” Not in a good way, but they can get to that later.
“It doesn’t. Generally it’s best if you’re a legend after you die.” Arthur picks a paper up off the table and doesn’t bother pretending to read it before he turns back to Merlin, shoulders straightening and eyes going sharp again. “That’s enough of that, though. You’re going to tell me about what it’s like out there. Morgana tells me such strange things, in the mornings. Is it true there are metal dragons that take you from place to place?”
*
An hour later, Merlin is trying to explain the internet to Arthur (and failing, judging by the dubious look on Arthur’s face) when someone knocks on the door. Within a few seconds, Merlin is shoved under the table, actually under it, and Arthur is answering the door, cool as can be. “Ah, Guinevere,” he says, and Merlin relaxes but doesn’t move. “Can I help you?”
“Morgana is asking for you again.”
“Really? I rather thought you might be looking for Merlin.” Merlin winces and hears Gwen make a pitiful sort of squeaking sound. “You’ll be glad to know that I found him instead of my father. Come on out, Merlin, before she goes back to Morgana and tells her I had you thrown in the dungeons.”
Merlin crawls out from under the table and wonders if he should bother explaining that he wasn’t hiding like a little girl and Arthur was actually the one who shoved him there. Judging by Gwen’s relieved expression, though, he doesn’t have to mention it. “Hi, Gwen. Sorry. I sort of wasn’t given a choice about all of this.”
“Never mind. It explains why Lady Morgana told me to come here after you weren’t with-um, my father.” Gwaine and Lancelot, that means, most likely. “Are you all right?”
Arthur claps a hand on Merlin’s shoulder when he stands and speaks instead of letting Merlin answer, which is annoying but not enough to bother with arguing about it. “He’s fine. He’s been telling me about airplanes. Morgana is ready to see him, then? Let’s go.”
“I don’t-we shouldn’t-” Gwen looks back and forth between them imploringly, but Merlin really doesn’t have any leverage so he just looks helplessly back as Arthur steers them out the door, never moving his hand from Merlin’s shoulder. He takes them right down the main corridors, ignoring the odd looks that everyone they pass give at the sight of Merlin, and past Merlin’s erstwhile hiding place to a room with two guards outside it.
“Good morning again,” says Arthur, and takes a key out from somewhere while ignoring both of the guards, who seem a bit nervous about letting him in, or maybe letting Merlin in, since Arthur and Gwen are both regular visitors.
“Who’s the-” one of the guards starts, before Arthur breezes past them, shoving Merlin in front of him and Gwen trailing behind, and they’re suddenly in another bedroom, this one with a lot less weapons strewn about and more silks, and the dark-haired lady he saw through the window at the execution sitting at a table waiting for them.
She’s gorgeous in the same improbable fairy-tale way as Arthur is, as Lancelot is, like maybe everyone was just that much more attractive in the past. Gwaine is going to fall to his knees and swear his devotion when he meets her. “You’re him, then,” she says after a moment of sizing him up. “Emrys.”
“Um, Emrys is a historical figure, actually.” He winces, because he’s actually probably not historical to them. Judging by historians’ best guesses, he probably would have been within a decade on either side of them in age, if things were still as they were meant to be. “I’m just Merlin.”
“Either way. You’re … I knew you would be coming eventually.” She stands up and gives him a hard look, then looks over his shoulder at Arthur and Gwen, who are standing silent. “The two of you go and get his friend, and Lancelot, if you wish, Gwen. Merlin and I need to talk on our own.”
Arthur frowns. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’ve never met him before, and-”
“Do you think it matters if he tries to kill me, Arthur?” Merlin steps back, lets them square off and stare at each other. “While we’re all under this curse, while Uther has me locked up, do you really think it matters to me? I think he can help, but you need to leave us alone so I can be sure.”
“Him?” Arthur jerks his head in Merlin’s direction. “What could he do?”
“Use your eyes, Arthur, he’s a sorcerer.” Merlin winces, but Arthur doesn’t draw his sword again, or start shouting or threatening to drag him off to the dungeon. He steps back from Merlin, wary and wanting to keep his eyes on him, but he doesn’t shout. “We’ve got to take the chance that he’s powerful enough to help us. Go, bring his companion before the guards find him, make yourself useful for once.”
“Of course.” Arthur bobs a nod that’s almost a bow and storms out of the room with one last suspicious glance at Merlin, which hurts more than he was expecting it would.
“My lady?” says Gwen, looking between them.
Lady Morgana’s face softens. “Go on, you actually know what the man looks like, and I didn’t send Arthur just to keep him from bothering me. Give us a little while.” Gwen looks nervously between them, but she goes, and Merlin listens to her murmur to the guards on the other side of the door for a minute before she goes off behind Arthur.
“I don’t know if I can do anything,” he starts, but she cuts him off.
“They’ll have told you that I dream every night about what happens while we sleep.” He nods, since she seems to expect a response to that, and takes a seat when she gestures him towards one. “Gaius, our physician, tells me that I’m a Seer, and would have seen much smaller spans of time had things continued as normal. If I’d lived.” She snorts. “He always neglects to mention that part, even with the chains on my door now. You’ll want to talk to him later, though. He knows more about magic than anyone else in this castle, now.”
“What makes you think I could do anything? I’m a student, and I’ve got a lot of power, yeah, but this is big magic. Like, really big. It takes five normal-strength sorcerers to launch a rocket-ship properly, how am I supposed to do this alone?”
Morgana walks restlessly to the window. “Because you have to. I can’t, I’ve tried and failed-all my magic will do is show me the outside, and some of the future. The rest of it isn’t unlocked yet. None of the other sorcerers hidden in Camelot are powerful enough or brave enough to try. How many more magical visitors can we expect to get?”
“I don’t know! Gwaine and I will make it known, so in a hundred years every sorcerer in the world will be here to work together and fix it. It could happen.”
“Lots of things could happen.” She walks back and sits down at the table across from him, close enough that he can see the circles around her eyes that make it clear that even if she’s been sleeping like the princess in a fairy tale that doesn’t mean it’s been restful. “I know how much things can change in a century-a whole city forgotten and made into legend, another one built, going from traveling by horse to traveling in the sky in machines nobody believes me about … they could have forgotten you, by then. Refuted you. They forgot us quickly enough, with help from Nimueh. I haven’t had the heart to tell Arthur how thoroughly we’re forgotten.”
“I’d read about you,” he offers. “As a legend, yes, but enough that I knew where I was when we got here. You haven’t been forgotten that much. I can’t get anyone today, no matter what advances we’ve made this forest is big enough that we couldn’t get to help in time and the magic on the city would make too much interference to contact them, but in a hundred years-”
She shakes her head. “Someday, we’re going to wake up in the morning and there won’t be forest at the boundary of the spell, there will be nothing but fire and ash. We’ll have outlived the world and there will be no hope at all, and it could be in twenty days or it could be tomorrow, but I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want to see Arthur’s face on that morning, either.”
That can’t possibly mean anything good, it really can’t. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you can’t break the spell, I’m going to break out this evening and go to the woods.”
*
The thing is, he can’t exactly blame Morgana, because she’s right. He could tell her to wait another day, or a week, but he’s not the one who can see the future, and he can’t imagine what it would be like to dream the end of the world and know without a doubt he was going to wake up to it.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he likes it. “So that means that if I’m not good enough,” he says, once he’s had time to swallow down his first reaction, “it’s going to be my fault that everyone in this city dies.”
“It will be mine. And I don’t like it either, but we’re all dead, for all it matters to anyone. We’re a children’s tale, now. In a hundred years we might not even be that.”
Merlin looks around, like anything in her room is going to help him. As far as he knows, they and the doctor are the only sorcerers left in the city. “I’ve never tried to undo magic this big. Nothing even close.” He can feel the spell woven into everything, when he concentrates, but he can’t find the trigger, can’t find anything, really. The spell is just there, the same way the magic in the few dragons he’s met is just there. “I’ll try, but I’ll need to check on the borders of the spell, I think, see if I can find a weak spot to pick at.”
“Of course. Arthur will take you, when he comes back.”
Merlin winces at the thought. It’s hard to get the look on Arthur’s face out of his mind, when Morgana said he’s a sorcerer. It’s not something he’s ever had to be ashamed of before, much less apologize for, and the desire to do it is both new and completely unwelcome. Still, it’s not as if he’s going to object. Having the prince with him will go a long way towards him not getting executed. “Have you seen me fix it?” he asks instead of any of the other hundreds of questions he’s got building up. “You’re a Seer, and you knew about me right away, called me Emrys. Will I do it?”
“I can’t see everything. Or most things that would be of any use to us.” She shifts restlessly. “I think you could. Whether you figure out how is another matter entirely.”
There’s really no answer he can make to that, so it’s a relief when they’re interrupted by the guards talking outside and then Arthur and Gwen coming back, this time with Gwaine and Lancelot in tow. Gwaine, predictably enough, gapes when he sees Morgana. “Damn, Merlin, you get all the luck.”
She ignores him, which Merlin doesn’t bother to tell her will only encourage him. “Arthur, take Merlin out to the borders, let him see what he can. We’ll stay here, and have Gaius waiting for you when you return.” Arthur opens his mouth, glaring, but she just raises her eyebrows and shuts up. Merlin suspects it’s going to take him all of three minutes to get really jealous of that trick. “You’re the only one who can, Arthur. Go.”
“Fine. But you’re the one who gets to tell my father where I’ve-” Arthur breaks off and nobody fills the silence, Gwaine and Lancelot because they’re confused, Gwen and Merlin because they’re horrified, Morgana because her mouth is pursed tight on something that looks like hurt. “Morgana, I’m-”
“Let’s go,” says Merlin, because he can’t see this conversation going anywhere good and he doesn’t think they’ll want to have it out in public.
Arthur doesn’t look relieved, exactly, but he does relax, and gives Morgana a complicated look, the kind Merlin and Gwaine exchange because they know each other so well, before turning away and letting Gwen step forward to start fussing over Morgana’s hair. “Come along, Merlin. I don’t suppose you know how to ride a horse, with your air-planes taking you everywhere.”
Merlin takes that for the opportunity it is and starts chattering about cars being a more common mode of transport while they leave the room and walk down the hallways, keeping his voice down so people don’t stare at him even more than they already are. They don’t seem to dare to ask questions with Arthur there-not that anybody dared in the morning before the execution either, so maybe they just don’t want to know-but he isn’t taking the risk of anybody telling the king, who he really doesn’t fancy meeting.
It takes nearly an hour to get out of the city, because Arthur stops to talk to everyone who so much as looks at him once they get out of the castle, if only for a few seconds, to check and make sure that they’re okay, keeping their spirits up and all. He looks awkward about it, not used to it, and they look uncomfortable answering him, but then again it takes more than ten days to get used to a curse this big, and it’s all sort of endearing. Which is not good, because Merlin was perfectly happy with his conclusion that the prince of the Lost City of Camelot is a dick.
Luckily for Merlin, the second they’re outside the gates the concerned ruler face is gone and Arthur is scowling and gesturing around impatiently. “Do whatever it is you need to do as quickly as you can, please. We may be cursed, but no matter what Morgana thinks I do have duties.”
“I’m not … promising anything, right? I’m good, but I’m not this good.” He gestures around. “But I’ll try. We’ve got till the edge of the woods, so let’s go a little further, it’s likely to be weaker close to the edge.”
Arthur lags behind, the closer they go, but Merlin knows why and he isn’t going to bother to be obnoxious about it, so he makes a point of stopping at least ten meters from the edge of the spell and kneels so he can get his hands in the dirt, since whoever did the spell (and he’s going to not think for a few minutes about how it was probably Queen Nimueh I because she’s a bit of a hero and everything is very confusing just now) seems to have pinned it into the earth. “What are you going to do?” Arthur asks just as Merlin is about to start trying to find the boundaries of the spell. “Do you have to chant, or … use blood, or something?”
“Um, no.” He’s about to ask where the hell he got all that from, but, right, city without magic, so Merlin can’t really blame him for being ignorant. “Just shut up a minute, would you?” Arthur looks affronted and Merlin rolls his eyes. “Or come down here with me, you rule the land so you’ve got some connection to it, that might help.”
For a second, Arthur just stands there looking stiff and uncomfortable while Merlin remembers once again that he was raised to hate magic, and then he kneels down, even if his enthusiasm is lacking, and gives Merlin his hand. “Do whatever you need to do.”
Merlin puts Arthur’s palm flat on the ground and lays his own next to it, and then takes a deep breath and goes as deep into the magic and the dirt beneath his fingers as he can. The first thing he figures out is that whoever cast this spell-Nimueh, if all the legends are true, and it’s too cohesive to be the work of multiple sorcerers-was really fucking good. There’s no atom within the spell that’s free of it other than the weird blips that are Merlin, Gwaine, and Lancelot and the air around them, it goes into the sky and into the soil so they can’t even dig their way out, and the mechanics behind it all are dizzying, the complicated give-and-take of sustaining life across centuries.
From there he tries to pull at the structure of it, tries to figure out what went into it and what thread to pick at to unravel all of it. He doesn’t do anything too complicated, just batters at it with all the brute force he can muster, all the depths of magic he doesn’t get to use in his classes because it’s very impressive and all having huge amounts of power but it’s actually kind of useless unless you’re in a high-ranking position. He might as well be trying to make the moon go backwards for all the good it does, but he pours the magic in anyway, because it’s got to be good for something and he wants it to be-
“Merlin!” says Arthur, and Merlin reels back and realizes his cheek is stinging. When he focuses his eyes Arthur’s close, holding him up by the shoulder, jaw set and eyes a little wild. “What was that?”
“What was what?” he asks, or thinks he asks. He feels like his mouth is working slower than his brain so he might have slurred it a little judging by Arthur’s expression. Merlin shakes his head, brings himself back to his body a little more, gets the sharp throb of his cheek in reward. “You slapped me!” he accuses.
“You were sitting there not moving for ten minutes and then all of Camelot started shaking, of course I slapped you! Are you trying to bring the castle down?”
Merlin looks hazily around to see dust settling and decides that trying to rip the spell apart by brute force isn’t going to work. “No, I was just … trying. Sorry. I didn’t realize it would do that.”
“I should hope not.” Arthur’s got the arrogant-prince voice from earlier on, but he still looks too shaken for it to be real. “And whatever you were trying, it’s quite obvious it didn’t work. Come along, Gaius should be in Morgana’s room by now, hopefully without alerting my father to anything suspicious, and you might as well hear what he’s got to say.”
*
Things in the town and the palace are tense as Arthur leads Merlin back through, ignoring the conversations all around them about the earthquake, and was it from outside or in, and either way what caused it (which makes Merlin duck his head, guilty). The guards at the gates look even more nervous, and when they reach Morgana’s room there are no guards at all, the ones from earlier probably off seeing if Merlin’s attempt at breaking the curse caused any damage to the palace. Morgana is locked in, after all, Arthur’s key the only thing that gets them through.
Everyone inside looks up in tandem when Arthur lets them in. Lancelot is at the window, probably keeping watch. Gwaine and Morgana are eyeing each other suspiciously from opposite sides of the table, Gwaine with his camera in his hands. Gwen is talking softly with an older man wearing actual robes of the sort that Merlin hasn’t seen since he read picture books, and she’s the one who stands up to greet them. “Was that you, Merlin? Or something to do with the spell? It was just after Gaius and I got here-this is Gaius, by the way. He’s the physician.”
“Yes, it was him,” says Arthur, just as Merlin is opening his mouth to say the same thing but more apologetically.
The physician crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow in the same way that some of Merlin’s professors have a habit of doing when he overdoes it a bit on assignments. “You alone caused that? Anyone in the city with any magic at all must have felt it, that could be very dangerous.”
“Right, so, I won’t try brute strength again, it was just a first try and then His Royal Highness over here decided I was finished with and dragged me back in again.”
Arthur glares at him. “What, you’d rather we stayed out there so next time you could leave us still stuck in this curse but with a crumbling heap of ruin instead of a castle?”
“I wouldn’t have brought the whole city down! I have never in my life brought a building down!” Gwaine coughs. Merlin corrects himself. “I have never in my life brought down a building that wasn’t already falling down.”
“And I’d rather your first time wasn’t my home!”
Before Merlin can come up with a good enough retort for that, the physician interrupts. “Do you mean to tell me, boy, that you did that much just throwing magic at the spell?” Merlin nods. “Just how powerful are you?”
“Um, very? But apparently not enough, I don’t know how one person managed to put that whole spell together.”
“Nimueh had years to plot her revenge, to think of what would hurt Uther worst.” Arthur clenches his jaw, Morgana looks at her lap, and Gwen reaches out for Lancelot’s hand. Merlin looks between all of them and wonders if he needs to say something before Gaius speaks again. “She was powerful, but it was the force of her need for vengeance that makes the spell so difficult to break. I doubt brute force will do the job.”
Merlin makes a helpless gesture. “Well, how was I supposed to know that? They don’t exactly teach us this sort of thing in school, you know. I could tell you six different ways to start a fire and turn a house upside down-”
“Even if you can’t cure a hangover,” Gwaine interjects.
“-yes, thank you, but this is a pretty big curse and I can see why you all think I’m this big savior who’s come by destiny or whatever to save the day but I’m not and I can’t and …” He carefully doesn’t look Morgana’s way. “It’s not fair to pin your hopes on me.”
There’s a moment of silence while everyone shifts uncomfortably, which Merlin would feel more guilty about if he hadn’t meant every word of it. “I apologize, Merlin,” says Arthur eventually, and much to his surprise he actually sounds honest about it. “I suppose I assumed that you were some sort of godsend and assumed you would be able to do it no trouble. If it’s true as Morgana says that sorcery is … respected, in your time, then perhaps you can tell them about us after today. See what they can do. If they care to, considering our reputation.”
Merlin has no idea what to say to that, because it’s disconcerting to say the least that Arthur is suddenly being nice to him, but Gwaine breaks in and saves his arse just like always. “Come on, now, no need to give up hope just yet. Merlin said he might not be able to help, not that he definitely can’t.”
“Exactly,” says Gaius, much to Merlin’s surprise, and goes to rummage in a bag that Merlin hadn’t noticed before, bringing out a thick book. “I kept this through the Purges in case of emergency, sire, and I hope you will forgive me for it, but it may be of some help in this.”
“I don’t care if it is sorcery, as long as it helps. We can’t afford to be proud.” Merlin raises his eyebrows and looks around in time to see that Gwen, Morgana and Gaius all seem surprised by that as well, in their own ways. “If you’ll pardon me, however, I must be going to assure my father that what happened was entirely natural. It would be best if you kept to this room, Merlin-and Gwaine as well, of course. I don’t want to have to break you out of the dungeons before sundown.”
With that, he sweeps out, leaving the rest of them tense and not sure what to do. Gaius is still holding the book of magic that Merlin can’t wait to get his hands on, and Morgana’s staring at it as well, eyes narrowed. Gwen seems to notice, because she’s the next one to speak. “Well, I suppose I should talk to the kitchens and see if I can get some extra food up here without raising too much suspicion.”
Gwaine grins and gestures to his rucksack. “No worries for Merlin and me, we’ve got some food packed up from this morning. Just worry about yourselves.”
“Very well, then. My lady?”
Morgana snaps around to look at her. “Yes, of course, Gwen. Do as you wish. We’ll be fine in here.”
Gwen curtsies, lets Lancelot clasp her hand with a blush, and ducks out of the room again. “You’d best start looking at the book, my boy,” says Gaius before the silence can descend again, and Merlin takes it from him and stares. He’s pretty sure he knows academics who would commit murder to get their hands on it.
“I’ll help,” says Morgana, and gives Gwaine a pointed look until he vacates his place at the table, leaving a chair for Gaius to take while Merlin pulls up a stool. “I may not be practiced in magic, but perhaps I’ll recognize the spell that would help.”
“It will likely be a combination, my lady,” Gaius warns. “As I said, Nimueh had many years to plan her revenge, and I doubt she used a spell that could be found in any book and easily countered. If it’s strong and intricate enough to withstand the amount of power Merlin must have thrown at it earlier, we will have to be very clever to come up with the key to undo it.”
Lancelot, after a look between them all, takes up a post by the door. “I’ll keep an ear out for anyone coming and make sure we have warning to hide if someone besides the prince tries to come in.”
“Great.” Merlin opens the first page of the book and looks over his shoulder at Gwaine, who’s fidgeting around looking unimpressed, probably wanting to go out and do detective work or something. “Gwaine, I know it’s boring, but would you mind taking pictures of the pages as we go through the book? I’m pretty sure my teachers will kill me if we tell them about all this and I don’t have some pictures of the book.”
“Sure,” says Gwaine, relaxing slightly and wandering around to stand behind them, earning a glower from Morgana.
Gaius clears his throat. “Very well, then, let’s begin.”
*
Part Two