Chapter Text
The frost came early that year, and it came with teeth.
Not the delicate frost that clings to autumn windows in lace-like webs, but the kind that bites through wool and lingers inside boots, the kind that kills the last crops standing and makes men build coffins before snow has fallen. By mid-October the ground had hardened. By November, rivers froze halfway through the bend. And by the turn of the year, the wind no longer sounded like wind—it sounded like something pulled too tightly across the mouth of the world, humming with tension.
Merlin did not name it. He didn’t need to.
He knew when a winter meant something.
The hut was sturdier than it looked. He’d built it up from the bones of a Roman waystation, tucked into a cliffside, the stones still marked faintly with old chiselled numbers, smooth as bone. There had once been a sign here—he could see the outline in the wall—but whatever Latin had stood there had long since eroded into memory. The walls were thick. The door was narrow. And the roof, which he’d sealed with pitch and charm and a great deal of irritation, no longer let in the snow.
He stayed inside for most of that winter. Days passed without incident. Without sound. He boiled roots. Burned pine and oak and sometimes the crumbled remains of scrolls that had been unreadable since Vortigern’s war. In the worst of the freeze, he spoke only to the fire.
Time passed more slowly when measured by thaw.
The days were pale and short. The light barely touched the floor by noon, and by early evening the wind had already begun clawing at the eaves. The world shrank in winter. Roads disappeared. Villages folded inward. Even the sky seemed to crouch lower. Once, in January, Merlin went outside to relieve himself and found that the snow had drifted to his chest. He stood in it for several minutes, breath steaming, staring at the horizon.
There was no sound.
He felt, for a brief moment, as if the world had stopped turning.
Then he went back inside and lit another fire.
He sent his first letter of the year just after Candlemas.
Gaius,
Still alive. Nothing worth reporting. Snow came early. Lost a boot in it. Found it again two days later frozen to a hare. The hare was alive. We negotiated. It left with the boot.
Had to dig out the south wall. Roof held. The hut’s too cold to stay dry, but it hasn’t collapsed, so I’m calling that a victory. I’ve sealed the cracks with moss and a bit of spellwork. Not elegant. Functional.
Some villagers passed by in early winter. Didn’t speak to them. Just watched. One of them was singing. Badly. It was strange to hear a human voice again.
Still not coming back. Not yet.
—M.
The letter vanished in a flick of ash. It didn’t hum with power. It didn’t glow. It just went—faded between two blinks. Simple magic. Domestic. The kind of spell he’d taught Gaius once because ravens kept eating their correspondence.
The reply came back seven days later, fluttering down onto the floor near the fire like a dead leaf that had changed its mind mid-fall.
Merlin,
Your sense of humour hasn’t improved, though I’ll take signs of life however they arrive.
Camelot has survived the worst of the cold, but just barely. The roads are impassable west of the valley. Leon’s horse broke its leg in the snow last week—he walked it home and hasn’t spoken since. Gwen has had to ration flour. She does it without complaint, but she looks like she hasn’t slept in months.
We’ve lost two healers. The sickness that came through the kitchens in December took them both. I’m managing. Slowly. I sit more. Write more. I think that means I’m getting old, which is an alarming discovery. Still, I wake up every morning. That counts for something.
We are still here. But the kingdom feels quieter than it should. As if something’s waiting, and hasn’t told us what for.
—G.
The hut creaked at night.
Not the charming kind of creaking, like an old chair beneath a familiar weight, but the long, slow groaning of a structure trying to decide if it still believed in itself. Merlin lay in bed some nights staring up at the rafters, the scabbard laid beside him like a relic no one worships anymore. He did not touch it. It did not speak. But it never aged. Never dulled. The leather was still soft. The fittings still gleamed in the firelight.
It was the only thing in the room that hadn’t been touched by time.
Even Merlin could not say that anymore.
Spring came reluctantly.
The thaw began in March. Streams cracked open like wounds, gushing with dark water that stank of rot and roots. Fields lay bare. The frost had killed most of the early shoots. Villagers emerged blinking and thin, like half-formed things. And somewhere, far to the south, a Roman road collapsed into a riverbed, and no one rebuilt it.
A boy would pass through the ruins two centuries later, calling it King Arthur’s Fall.
He spent most of spring repairing the hut and walking. Not far. Just enough. Sometimes he’d come across remnants of stone—milestones with faded numerals, pieces of villas crumbling beneath ivy, forgotten boundary walls sunk half into mud. Once, he found a mosaic of a lion and a sword in the floor of a burned villa. The face had worn away.
He didn’t know it, but these stones would become the bones of myth.
The lion would be mistaken for Arthur.
The sword, for Excalibur.
The villa, for Camelot.
People would carve new stories into the ruins, because it was easier than remembering the truth.
He wrote again before Beltane.
Gaius,
The river broke. I nearly lost the scabbard trying to fish a deer carcass out of the current. Slipped, went in up to my ribs. Got it back. Deer floated off. No loss.
I saw lights in the hills two nights ago. Not fire. Something higher up. Cold. Didn’t go investigate. I’m too old to be running into fairy nonsense unprepared.
Found the ruins of a bathhouse. The floor was mosaic. It’s cracked now. I sat there for a while. Don’t know why. Maybe because it was quiet.
Do you think we’ll be remembered? Or just misremembered? I keep thinking of Arthur, and I can’t tell anymore if I remember him or just the shape of him.
Still here. Still walking.
—M.
The reply was slow. Over a fortnight. The longest delay yet.
When it came, the script was thinner.
Merlin,
Sorry for the delay. My hands are slower these days. I drop things more. But the mind is still sharp enough.
Gwen has begun writing edicts in both Latin and Brythonic. She says it keeps the court honest. I think it’s because she fears the language is fading, and she refuses to let it go quietly.
We are being remembered, Merlin. Just not how we wanted. That’s how memory works. It smooths the corners, changes the names. Arthur is already becoming a story. I hear things. Songs. Not all of them are true. But all of them carry something of him.
We’ll speak again soon. I hope.
—Gaius
Merlin folded the letter slowly.
Set it beside the fire.
He looked out the window at the hills, still green, still rising into the wind like old shoulders beneath a blanket.
Somewhere out there, stories were taking root. Already sprouting false flowers.
He did not feel bitter.
But he did feel tired.
And for the first time since Camlann, he wondered—not if Arthur would return—but what would be left of the world when he did.