Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There are silences which echo like cathedral bells—spreading outward, concentric and unceasing, shaking the air not by force but by absence—and the silence that filled the morning after Arthur Pendragon died was one of these. It did not merely hush the world; it hollowed it.

The lake did not stir.

Even the birds, those small custodians of continuity, seemed to have agreed—without argument and with no sense of occasion—that nothing ought to sing today. Not in this place. Not near this shoreline, where the moss lay wet and gleaming as if it too had wept in the night.

Merlin sat still, as though motion had become a stranger to his limbs. The stillness was not fatigue, nor paralysis, but something older—a kind of reverence that even he, with all his years of magic and grief and sorrow-etched love, could not quite name. He had not moved since the Lady of the Lake had vanished, bearing Arthur's body into the grey heart of the water. Nor had he spoken. Even thought had been slow to return, arriving in fragments like mist creeping in from the edge of a ruined field.

His hands rested limply upon his thighs, palms open to the morning as if to catch it, though there was nothing to receive. Not warmth. Not clarity. Not hope.

In his lap, balanced with a reverence he had never thought to afford a mere object, lay the empty scabbard. Black leather soft with wear, the gilded trim dulled to the colour of old harvest moonlight. It was longer than it ought to be now. Without Excalibur within it, it looked hollowed—unresolved—like a question no longer worth asking but still present in the room.

Merlin had known death before. He had watched men fall—brave and foolish and some both at once. He had buried dreams with his own hands, burnt pyres alone in the woods, held fading lives close to his heart until their last breath rattled out into the dawn. But Arthur's death was not a flame or a sword-thrust or even a storm. It was a door closing behind him with quiet finality, and the realisation that there would be no footsteps returning from the other side. Not for a long, long time.

And yet—not final.

That was the agony of it. That peculiar cruelty of prophecy: a promise, yes, but stretched like goldleaf over centuries. He shall rise again, Kilgharrah had said, with that maddening calm only dragons could maintain in the face of all mortal suffering. When Albion’s need is greatest, the Once and Future King shall return.

Merlin, who had spent so many years wondering if he would survive long enough to see it, now faced the unthinkable: he had. Or would. If he endured. And endurance had never before seemed so much like punishment.

The scabbard felt heavier than any sword.

He looked not at the lake, though he sat before it as a mourner sits before the grave of a lover, but at the thin curl of smoke that rose from the edge of the horizon, where distant hearths had already accepted the turning of the year. Samhain had passed with no fires lit in Camelot. No feast. No rites. The solstice would come soon. The world would shift and turn, and winter would lay its first breath on the earth—and Arthur would not feel it.

There was no wind. Only the slow, invisible hands of time smoothing the air.

Merlin exhaled, though he had not realised he’d been holding breath, and the sound it made was small. Not a sigh. Not grief. A release of something much older—like dust escaping from a book long unopened.

In that moment, the land felt like it belonged to someone else. Albion was not his anymore. It was a place on loan. A field he had tilled with magic and mourning, only to find the crop would not rise for centuries yet.

He turned his gaze downward.

The ground was soft with dew, but the moss beneath him bore the pattern of his boots and knees. An imprint. Proof that he had been here. That he had waited.

He thought of Gwen. Of her hand, trembling around the hilt of Arthur’s sword once, years ago, in the training yard when she had defied expectation. He thought of Leon, still upright no doubt, still loyal, still standing like the last tower in a fallen keep. He thought of Gaius, whose voice sometimes came to him in dreams—not as comfort, but as memory made sound.

He thought of Morgana. Not with hatred. That had long burned out. He thought of her like one thinks of winter: terrible, inevitable, and once—just once—beautiful before the frost came.

But most of all, he thought of the boy with the golden hair and terrible table manners who had grown, by increments too painful to notice until it was too late, into the king who had called him friend.

Arthur.

The name was a wound. It opened without blood, without heat. A slow unmaking.

And still—no tears.

What were tears, after all, but water given shape? And there was too much water here already.

He stood.

The movement was not elegant. His legs had numbed beneath him, and his back complained like an old door in a forgotten house. But the body obeyed, eventually. He gathered his cloak, drew it over his shoulders as if it were armour, and secured the scabbard to his belt.

It did not fit right. Nothing did anymore.

He took one last look—not at the lake, but at the trees beyond it. The path would lead east, through the stony woods and into the hills where the old road still lingered beneath root and bramble. Ealdor lay that way, though it was not the home it had once been.

There were no roads now that led to home.

He stepped forward, and the moss yielded beneath him with a soft sound like a whisper. The silence was not broken. Only shifted. The kind of silence that follows behind, walking at your back, pressing you forward even when you long to stay.

And somewhere, far beneath the lake, where neither time nor sun could reach, the king slept in the arms of water.

The wizard would wait.

Chapter Text

The map of the world had not changed, but the meaning of its roads had.

Merlin stood at the fork between east and west, watching the wind stir the last colour from the trees, and made the least courageous decision of his life: he turned north. Not to Ealdor, not to Camelot—just away.

He had not set out with a plan. He had not packed like someone with a destination. A half-loaf of bread, a knife, a spellbook too scorched to be useful, and a cloak that smelled faintly of smoke and memory. That was all.

The world did not try to stop him. There were no signs. No dragons in the sky. No celestial omens carved into the frost. Just long grass, the sharp breath of early winter, and the thick, woollen quiet of grief.

It was the kind of silence that bruised.

He waited a week before writing.

Not out of principle. Not out of pride. Simply because he did not know how to begin.

There was too much. There was nothing.

He lit a fire in the hollow of a sycamore grove and tried not to think about the scabbard beside him, its weight heavier for being empty. The sky overhead was milky and dull. He felt ancient. Like a ruin.

Eventually, without ceremony, he pulled out a scrap of parchment and began.

Gaius,

I’m alive. I am—well, I’m not dead, anyway. I’ve gone north. Nowhere in particular. I can’t—won’t—come back to Camelot yet. You’ll understand why. Or you won’t. Either way, I’m not ready.

The land is very quiet. Everything feels like it’s holding its breath. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve been walking. Fixing small things. Fences. Gates. A child’s doll. It’s not much, but it passes time.

I didn’t say goodbye. I know. I didn’t know how. I still don’t.

M.

He folded the parchment, pressed his palms together around it, whispered the spell under his breath, and felt the air shiver as it vanished.

It was a small, precise spell. One he’d invented centuries ago for wet winters and poor messengers. He had taught it to Gaius during one particularly tiresome plague season, mostly to avoid talking to people in person.

Now it served nobler purposes: silence, distance, guilt.

The reply arrived three days later.

It drifted gently into camp at dusk, settling beside his foot like a feather that had changed its mind. The seal was crooked. The parchment smelled faintly of rosemary and ink.

My dear boy,

I ought to scold you. But I won’t. You always do this—hide under the excuse of silence, as if not being seen makes the grief smaller. It doesn’t. It just leaves the rest of us squinting at shadows.

Gwen is holding steady. She meets with the court every morning, and rules with more patience than the entire line of Pendragons combined. Leon has taken on too much, as usual, but he refuses to rest. Percival’s left—north, I think. No one asked. No one needed to.

The castle is too quiet. And I am too old. But I am still here. For now.

You could write again. You could come home. I won’t ask. But I will be here, should you decide to.

—Gaius

Merlin didn’t reply for another five days.

He had taken to sleeping in the shell of an old Roman tower. It overlooked a creek and the beginnings of a forgotten orchard. Trees leaned against it like gossiping old women. A fox had made a home near the base and occasionally left him small offerings—half-chewed fruit, a feather, a mouse that looked mildly offended.

He cooked what he could, mostly badly. He fixed things when the locals weren’t looking. He spoke to trees out of habit. He kept the scabbard wrapped in cloth, tucked beneath his bedroll, like a secret he couldn’t forget and couldn’t explain.

And he wrote again.

Gaius,

Thank you. For answering. And for not asking the wrong questions.

I saw Ealdor from the ridge. Could’ve walked down. Didn’t. Couldn’t. Not sure which. It’s been too long, and I’ve changed, and the thought of seeing something familiar through the eyes of strangers—

Well. You know.

The forest here doesn’t remember me. I think I like it for that. There’s a kindness in being anonymous.

Tell Gwen I’m—no, don’t tell her anything. Just tell her I’m not dead. Yet.

M.

The next letter arrived in the middle of the night, when the wind was making too many promises.

Merlin,

You are not forgotten. Not by me. Not by Gwen. Though she won’t say it aloud. She rules as if Arthur might walk through the door at any moment. I think that’s how she keeps from falling apart. She believes he will return. Do you?

I have started sleeping in your old chair. The back still tilts annoyingly to the left. I keep meaning to mend it. I never do.

The candle shop down the road has closed. The new one sells something called “amber spice.” I miss lavender.

Write back. Even if you have nothing to say.

—Gaius

Merlin lit a small fire.

Sat.

Folded his knees beneath him.

Looked at the sky and whispered, “You left me with the hard part, you royal bastard.”

A fox trotted past. Didn’t stop.

Merlin rubbed his face with both hands. Then reached for his pen.

Gaius,

I fixed a windmill today. No one saw. Felt smug anyway.

The stars look different up here. Like someone rearranged them out of spite. Orion’s missing an arm. Not metaphorically. Just—gone. I suppose it’s possible the sky moves on, too.

I keep dreaming about Arthur. Sometimes he’s shouting. Sometimes he’s smiling. Sometimes he’s silent. I think that’s worse.

Is it foolish to keep hoping for something prophecy-shaped?

Anyway. Still breathing. Still here.

—M.

And so the weeks passed.

The notches Merlin carved in the beams of the ruined tower grew deeper. He stopped counting, but kept carving anyway. Some habits were steadier than calendars. He kept to the edges of villages. Helped where he could. Disappeared before anyone asked for a name.

And every few days, like the turning of a clock that no longer cared for time, a letter would drift into his campfire’s glow. And another would vanish from his palm.

Words, weightless and slow, passing between two men who had seen too much and said too little. A ritual. A tether. A long, thin thread across the silence.

Neither of them said it, but they both knew:

The waiting had only just begun.

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.

Chapter Text

The road south no longer knew where it was going.

What remained of it—once cut from Roman stone—had fractured into mud veins and goat tracks, winding blindly through flood-streaked valleys and old forests whose names no one remembered. Travellers kept to hills now, where trees did not press so close, and the ground did not weep under every step. Merlin followed the pathless ridgelines, passing outcroppings of flint and broken shale, where ravens nested in silence and the air tasted of rust and woodsmoke.

He moved without ceremony, unnoticed and unspoken. A figure clad in rough cloth, with a walking stick too finely carved for a beggar, too plain for a priest. He passed ruins often—shattered villas swallowed by ivy, burial mounds split open by frost, forgotten Roman milestones tilting in damp earth. He did not linger. He had long since stopped collecting names for places that no longer answered to them.

The letter that had reached him came folded into bark, sealed with a pressed thistle flower. The writing was shaky but unmistakable.

Merlin,
I forget small things more often now. Where I’ve left the kettle. Why I’ve walked into a room. My hands are not as steady as they once were, and the stairs seem taller.
Still—I’ve seen worse. You know that better than most.
If you’re nearby, come. If not, never mind this foolishness.
I remain, for the moment, stubborn.
—Gaius

Merlin reread it twice before folding it into his satchel, tucking it beside the scabbard. That night, he rebuilt his wards with fresh circles. In the frost-hardened soil behind a crumbled waystone, he whispered a protection across the old trade route that wound, half-used, toward Camelot. Just one more barrier between the world and a place he no longer lived in—but couldn’t leave alone.

It took him over six weeks to make the crossing. The detours alone added days: washed-out fords, flooded lowlands, bridges fallen to rot. He avoided towns where possible, trading only when necessary. A loaf here. A needle there. Quiet transactions, always with the hood drawn low.

By the time he reached the outer hills, Camelot had changed its scent.

Once it had smelled of metal and horses, baking bread and wet wool. Now it carried the breath of stone left out too long in the rain. Woodsmoke. Quiet rot. A city in decline, but one that refused to crumble outright.

He entered at dusk beneath the north postern gate. No one stopped him. The guards were lean-faced and inattentive, their armour dulled by long use. Inside, the square was empty but for a few clustered stalls—herbs, salt, old tools. The light from the windows flickered low and uncertain, as if the candles were saving their strength.

He didn’t go straight to Gaius’s chambers.

Instead, he walked the perimeter of the inner wall, where moss grew between the stones and old watch-holes had been filled with mortar. He paused at the base of the library tower. A child sat on the step there, humming to herself, the tune unfamiliar but haunting in its cadence. She looked at him, blinked, then looked away. Nothing remarkable in him, nothing to be afraid of.

That was the point.

When he reached the physician’s house, the shutters were closed. An oil lamp glowed faintly behind the sill. He knocked once and waited.

The door creaked open. The figure behind it was older than Merlin remembered, not in years, but in angle. Gaius stood stooped, his shoulders drawn inward as if the very air weighed more than it should. His beard had thinned to something like a memory, and his hands rested too long on the door frame before he moved.

For a heartbeat, neither of them said anything.

Then Gaius stepped back and gestured him in.

The room was warm, sparsely so. The hearth was burning but low. Bundles of dried herbs hung above the shelf, smaller than they had been years ago. A kettle sat half-full beside a dwindling stack of parchment. The bed in the corner had a second blanket folded over it.

“You’ve come far,” Gaius said, voice rougher than it had been. He didn’t ask from where.

Merlin nodded once. “Not far enough.”

“Still walking in straight lines, then.”

Merlin looked at him carefully. “You’re not well.”

Gaius didn’t argue. He moved back to the chair by the fire, lowering himself with quiet effort. He reached for the kettle, poured water into a clay cup, then gestured at the bench across from him.

“I have two kinds of tea now. Bitter, and slightly less bitter. Take your pick.”

Merlin sat. He accepted the cup. The tea tasted like boiled grass and something slightly singed.

“Less bitter,” he said flatly.

“Mm.” Gaius nodded. “It’s the singeing. Adds character.”

They sat a long while like that, the only sound the crackle of the fire and the faintest whisper of a draught pushing under the sill. Gaius’s hands shook slightly when he reached for the ladle, but he didn’t spill anything. His face bore the set lines of a man who’d long stopped being surprised by what his body could no longer do.

“You should’ve come sooner,” he said, not unkindly.

“I know.”

“But then,” he added, setting the ladle down, “you never were very good at timing.”

Merlin’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t reply.

Gaius raised his famous eyebrow, and Merlin was struck by a sudden wave of nostalgia, when both him and that eyebrow were considerably healthier, more well kempt. That eyebrow, which had scorned him so many times, had lightened to a wisp.

"It wasn't an insult Merlin, as much as a compliment." Gaius smiled mildly. "I meant to say, in better phrasing, you have extraordinary luck despite your slightly erratic timing."

“Is it bad?” Merlin asked finally.

Gaius gave a long breath. Not quite a sigh.

“I have days. And I have other days.”

“And which are these?”

“Somewhere in between.”

The fire popped. Merlin watched the flame fold around the log. It reminded him of something—but it passed before he could name it.

Gaius’s eyes drifted toward him, steady beneath the sag of his brow.

“You’re thinner,” he said.

“You’re older.”

For a moment, they both allowed a thin flicker of a smile to cross their faces, brief and untroubled.

Outside, wind stirred the eaves. The city shifted slightly in its bones. There was nothing to announce Merlin’s return—no bells, no lightning. Just a man sitting in a room he once knew well, across from the only person left who still knew him.

“You’ll stay?” Gaius asked, quiet now.

Merlin looked down at the tea.

“Yes,” he said. “For now.”

He would not say how long that meant.

Neither of them asked.

Chapter Text

By late winter, Gaius could no longer write without smudging the ink. He refused to dictate, of course—he still insisted that Merlin’s script was illegible at best, heretical at worst—and so correspondence dwindled into vague notes in margins and slow-moving gestures toward herb jars. His hands, though clever still in their movements, had become too uncertain for the fine motions they once commanded. The grind of pestle and mortar was an effort now. The tea strainer had become his adversary. And the fire, once maintained with ritual fuss, burned low more often than not, because bending to stoke it came with a cough that lingered longer than either of them liked to admit.

Still, Gaius did not complain. He greeted the stiff mornings with the same dry sense of order as he always had, making small noises of disapproval at the state of the floorboards or the temperature of the broth, muttering vague curses at whatever apprentice—real or imagined—had last cleaned the copper pot and, evidently, left it cursed. Once, he called Merlin a “leaf-footed menace” for startling him by returning early from market. He said it without looking up from the scroll he had been too tired to finish reading.

They settled into a kind of rhythm—familiar, steady, and quietly brittle. In the colder afternoons, Gaius would sit in the armchair by the window with a blanket folded carefully over his knees, squinting at whatever dried specimen Merlin laid before him. Sometimes he spoke. Sometimes he simply reached for Merlin’s hand and repositioned the sprig or seedpod, correcting an error without remarking on it. It was in those small, precise movements that the old teacher still lived, keen-eyed and particular.

The days passed with the soft-footed weight of inevitability. The shutters creaked. The mortar flaked. And still Merlin waited.

He did not know, until he did, that it would be the last morning.

The dawn was pale and cold, the kind that made stones sweat under their moss. Merlin rose before the light touched the sill and crossed the room to stir the fire. The air in the cottage had turned thin. There was no warmth yet in the season. He knelt, struck flint, and fed the embers until they answered him.

Only then did he notice the stillness.

Not absence—something else. A kind of completion. As though a breath had been taken and never needed returning.

He crossed to the cot.

Gaius lay composed, as though he had only just closed his eyes. His fingers were tucked gently into the linen folds. His expression was soft with something close to amusement, the faint lift of the mouth giving him a look of having solved a long-standing riddle and found the answer perfectly acceptable.

Merlin sat. For a long time he said nothing.

Then, slowly, he reached out and laid a hand on Gaius’s chest, where once the rise and fall had been steady and strong and certain. There was only stillness now. And beneath his palm, the heat was fading.

He bowed his head. Tears came without resistance, as sudden and natural as rain through a broken roof. No wrenching cry, no keening—but his shoulders folded forward, hands clenched in the blankets, the weight of grief sliding down his spine and into the hollow of his chest. He wept with the silence of someone who had waited too long to grieve.

When it passed, or when he had simply emptied enough of himself to move again, he dressed the body. He used lavender water to wash the hands. He smoothed the hair. He changed the cot linen and folded the blanket once at the foot of the bed. The shutters he opened just slightly, letting the morning in—not harsh, but clean. Pale gold across the stone floor.

Three days later, Gaius was laid to rest.

The chapel had not changed. Its ceiling rose in calm vaults overhead, and the iron candelabras, though warped by rust and smoke, still caught the light as they always had. Gwen stood at the front of the gathering—composed, black-gloved, her veil drawn back. She read the rites herself, voice firm, though once, just once, it caught at the edge of a name. Leon and Percival stood behind her, dressed in the muted greys of formal mourning, each with a hand clasped to the other’s shoulder. They had aged, not unkindly, but with the quiet gravity of men who had fought and lost and still chosen to stand.

Merlin kept to the back of the room, hidden beneath the hood of a travelling cloak that smelled faintly of pine and wet earth. No one turned. Or if they did, they said nothing. It was not cowardice that held him back—at least not in the way it once had been. It was simply that the language he spoke now was silence, and grief, and long walks in the dark. To explain himself would be to betray what he had become.

The service was brief. The coffin was lowered beneath the old yew tree that marked the rear of the chapel garden, where the grass grew in thick whorls and the moss wrapped around stone like a blanket. The grave had been dug deep, the headstone carved with care. Gaius of Camelot: Healer, Guide, and Keeper of Fire.

Before the final prayers were spoken, Merlin slipped away.

He did not wait to be seen.

He walked the length of the city that night.

Not the market or the citadel, but the unseen corners—under the arches near the old grain store, through the broken archway where the weavers once hung their winter cloth, down to the dry well where, years ago, he had tossed a ring into the dark and listened for the splash that never came.

He carried no torch. He didn’t need one. The streets, even in shadow, remembered his feet.

When he reached the outer gate, he paused. Set one palm to the stones and let the magic settle—not rushed, not in defiance, but in quiet affirmation. He whispered names he had not used in years. Drew the sigils slowly. Renewed the wards that had grown brittle with time. A circle of iron. A thread of salt. A single carved symbol pressed beneath the lintel of the gatekeeper’s door.

Then, he turned his back on the city.

The path west led him through thinning woods. The branches above reached long across the sky, grey with the lingering cloud of late winter. Frost rimmed the leaves. The ground was soft beneath his boots, wet with thaw and moss.

The lake waited, silent as ever.

A mirror of slate, ringed in reeds and shadows, with the sky caught like breath above it. The trees leaned over its banks, their limbs black with damp, their roots exposed in crooked tangles. No breeze stirred. The surface held no reflection—only depth.

He stood at the edge, the hem of his cloak brushing the waterline. He did not speak. No names. No calls. No questions.

His eyes, red still, held to the centre of the lake, where once the Lady had risen.

But there was nothing now. No voice. No promise. No sword.

Just water.

He knelt.

Pressed his hand to the earth.

Not to conjure.

Just to remember.

Then he stood.

And left the lake behind, with considerable finality.

Chapter Text

It began, as many important things do, with a cart, a pig, and an ill-advised shortcut.

Merlin—though here known, uncreatively, as "Merle"—had not set out to be helpful. He was carrying nothing more than an old cloak, three potatoes, and the sort of persistent weariness. He had reached the age where one no longer expected surprises, let alone opportunities. He certainly did not expect employment.

But the farmer’s cart had been overturned in a patch of ankle-deep mud, one wheel spinning uselessly in the air like a stricken beetle. The pig—who appeared to be the more intelligent of the pair—had made a calculated escape attempt. Merlin caught it by the hind leg, returned it without ceremony, and lifted the cart with a grunt that felt far too familiar.

“You’ve got arms,” said the farmer, who had no concept of introductions but an excellent grasp of free labour. “Need work?”

Merlin blinked. “I—suppose.”

And that was that.

He was given a fork, a stable wall to sleep against, and a week’s trial period. By week’s end, he had a proper bed—straw-filled, flea-resistant, roughly horizontal—and pay in the form of silver coin. Real coin. Weighty, jingly coin. He looked at it the first time like it might vanish. Arthur had never paid him, unless one counted sarcasm as currency. Gaius had offered board and the occasional crust, and once a second-hand cloak that had fleas and history in equal measure.

This, by contrast, was civilized.

The farm, "Little Dun," was an untidy sprawl of damp fields and animals of varying ambition. The house was leaning at a meaningful angle, the geese were in open rebellion, and the landlord, Master Corwin, suffered from gout, pessimism, and a longstanding feud with his own boots.

None of this discouraged Merlin. He had lived in worse places. Several had tried to kill him.

He set to work without complaint, ate without much appetite, and kept to himself. When pressed, he offered only the name Merle, and when further pressed, pretended not to hear. He made himself useful, dependable, and entirely unremarkable. The locals decided he was dull but capable—a useful combination. By all appearances, he was on track to be just another wanderer come to mend fences, dig potatoes, and vanish before spring.

Then came the girl.

She arrived in the way cats and lightning storms tend to—unexpected, unwelcome, and absolutely unbothered by the inconvenience of her presence.

It was a bright morning in the first month of the season falling leaves. Merlin was halfway through stacking hay, humming a tune that might once have been a spell or a lament or possibly both, when she emerged from behind the goat shed and announced, “You’re Emrys.”

He turned.

She was small—no taller than his shoulder—with brilliant red hair tied back in a braid that looked like it had been done at a run, freckles scattered across her nose like a map of forgotten islands, and eyes the colour of pine needles after rain: green, sharp, and tilted slightly upward, giving her the expression of someone perpetually unimpressed by the world’s efforts. She wore trousers and a tunic several sizes too large, patched at the knees and elbows with scraps of fabric in suspiciously neat stitches.

He narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” she said, and he realised her mouth was not moving, she was speaking in his head. She took a step closer. Her boots were caked in dried river mud. “You’re Emrys. The Druidbane. The Changeless One. The Slow-Walker. They call you lots of things. I’ve decided I’ll call you ‘Master.’”

Merlin stared at her.

She stared back.

“Do you always announce your intentions like that?” he asked, mildly.

“No,” she said, “but I thought you might be dense. It seems I was correct. You’ve been hiding for years.”

“I’ve just started farming,” he corrected.

“Badly,” she added, surveying the haystack, which had collapsed slightly to the left. “Also, the goats hate you.”

“They hate everyone.”

“Ehh. I think they hate you more"

She folded her arms. The expression on her face could only be described as smugly prepared.

“I’ve got magic,” she added. “And I’m not here to burn anything. I’m here to learn.”

Merlin considered several options at once: denial, laughter, retreat. He settled on resignation.

“You’ve got the wrong man.”

“I really don’t,” she said. “You mutter in Old Speech when you milk the cow. Also, I saw you charm a hoe to till three rows without touching it.”

He winced. He had done that. Once. It had been raining and he’d been tired and, frankly, the hoe had been behaving stubbornly.

“And you are?” he asked, reaching for the fork again.

“Linnet,” she said, without blinking. “I was raised by Druids. They wanted me to train in the North Circle, but they’re all rules and riddles and metaphors. You were once the most dangerous man alive. I thought you’d be more fun.”

“You thought wrong.”

“Maybe,” she said, inspecting her nails, “but I’m here now.”

That night, Merlin found her sleeping in the loft over the grain store.

He did not ask why. He suspected she would have a monologue prepared.

Instead, he tossed her a blanket.

She caught it mid-snore.

In the weeks that followed, she refused to leave.

She worked, in her own crooked way: she fetched water, kept the barn swept, and bullied the chickens into something resembling discipline. She asked endless questions—on magic, on stars, on history, on whether warts could be used as currency (he assured her they could not). She read quickly, picked up languages by eavesdropping, and could identify half a dozen kinds of sigil by shape alone.

She also had a tendency to mutter in her sleep in what sounded like hexes. The cow stopped producing milk for three days after she had a nightmare.

Merlin pretended not to notice. And when she burned her hand trying to scry without instruction, he sat her down, handed her balm, and explained—slowly, precisely—exactly what she had done wrong.

She did not cry.

She did not thank him.

She asked three more questions and tried again.

He didn’t call her his student. She never called him her master again. But each morning she followed him into the fields, each evening she listened. Unfortunately, she was still devastatingly arrogant and devastatingly curious.

She was trouble, undoubtedly. Sharp as broken glass.

But for the first time since Gaius had gone, and he had abandoned Camelot once more, Merlin did not feel entirely alone.

And though he would never say it aloud—not to her, not to the wind, and certainly not to himself—he had begun, reluctantly, to watch the horizon again.

And Merlin, for all his grumbling and caution and mud-caked boots, had always been an optimist.

Chapter Text

A quarter of a century.

It sounded grand in the way certain milestones did, like a weighty stone dropped into a still pond, as though ripples of meaning should naturally follow. In truth, it meant little. Twenty-five years since Arthur’s death had passed with the unremarkable regularity of weather: winters lean or fat with snow, summers that baked the ground to clay or sulked in cloud. If the world marked the span at all, it was in the way certain faces had vanished from it.

Gwen was gone, leaving a Camelot ruled by men who had been children when Arthur wore the crown. Leon and Percival had lived long enough for their hair to grey, though Merlin had not seen them in decades—save for once, briefly, in the aftermath of Gaius’s funeral. Lancelot had never lasted long enough for the years to claim him. Elyan had gone before that. Hunith, his mother, remained mostly as an ache he chose not to prod too often.

His life as a farmhand had ended without drama; the fields changed hands, the animals were sold, and Merlin—now well-practised at slipping out of situations without notice—walked away. Linnet, the sharp-eyed, sharper-tongued redhead who had once decided she was his pupil, had already gone. Three years of relentless questions, half of them designed to catch him out, and then she’d vanished with a bag over her shoulder and the lofty declaration that she was “going to test the edges of the map.” He hadn’t stopped her. She would not have let him.

It was on the coast that he found the monastery—or rather, that the monastery found him. He had been standing at the edge of a windblown market, eyeing the price of smoked fish with the suspicion of a man who had once eaten far too much of it, when two monks began loudly despairing over a collapsed section of their roof. Without thinking, Merlin remarked that it could be repaired in three days if they had proper tools. He hadn’t meant it as an offer. They took it as one.

The monastery itself clung to a headland like a stubborn barnacle. Salt had chewed the stone pale, and the wind had sanded it smooth. When Merlin arrived at dawn with the monks, the smell of the sea hit him like a wet rag. The gulls were already screaming their war-cries, and a bell was tolling from somewhere within—a slow, hollow sound, like the heartbeat of a patient on the edge of death.

They gave him no grand welcome. Brother Cedd, the taller of the two monks from the market, simply thrust a bundle of tools into his arms and led him through a small, square gate into the main courtyard. The paving stones there were slick with moss, and the air was damp enough to curl parchment. The other monks moved with the air of men who had been awake for hours; Merlin was acutely aware that, if his disguise slipped even a little, they would notice.

His morning was spent on the roof, the lead sheets groaning under his weight, the wind pushing at him like an irritable sheepdog. It was not difficult work—he had mended worse in Camelot—but the materials were stubborn, and the monks had an unhelpful habit of appearing at the base of the ladder to ask whether “God might lend a hand.” Merlin restrained himself from suggesting that God could fetch his own nails.

Midday came with the ringing of bells and a painful headache. He was shepherded into the refectory, where the smell of boiled barley hung so heavily in the air it could have been ladled. The tables were long and plain, the benches older than most of the men sitting on them. Merlin found himself next to a young monk whose enthusiasm for the day’s bread roll was matched only by his ability to talk about it for the entire meal. Across from him, an elderly brother was silently retying the same section of his robe cord over and over.

After the meal came the scriptorium. The air inside was thick with dust and the faintly sour smell of vellum. Merlin was handed a quill, a pot of ink, and a sheet on which he was to copy a sermon on humility. He found the irony almost pleasing. Brother Cedd supervised with the expression of a man resigned to disappointment. By the second paragraph, Merlin had to stop himself from using magic to dry the ink faster.

Evening brought Vespers, the chanting echoing through the chapel like the tide filling a cave. Merlin stood at the back, blending into the shadows, while the brothers sang words that had been repeated so many times they no longer meant anything. The sound was beautiful in the way storms could be beautiful—impersonal, vast, and utterly indifferent to the people caught in them.

When the day ended, they gave him a narrow bed in a room barely wide enough to turn around in. The mattress was stuffed with something that crunched faintly when he lay down; probably hay, but he didn’t want to think too deeply about it. Outside, the sea gnawed at the cliffs. Inside, the walls hummed with the faint vibration of the wind.

He slept without dreaming.

He had not intended to stay. The roof was repaired in three days, exactly as promised. But the monastery was in need of a pair of hands for work that none of the brothers seemed inclined to do: repairing nets, scraping mildew from books, fetching timber from the village. They offered him food and a bed and the unspoken promise that no one would ask too many questions. Merlin took it.

Seasons passed in their slow procession. Winter was for mending boots and fighting draughts that slipped through the shutters like thieves. Spring was for tending the hives, whose occupants viewed every intrusion as a personal insult. Summer demanded repairs to the sea wall and the hauling of stones that left his shoulders aching. Autumn meant gathering rushes from the marsh, an activity notable mainly for the smell.

The bells divided his days with metronomic certainty: Matins, Lauds, Primese, Terce, Nonne, Vespers, Compline. He learned which could be ignored and which could not. He learned the peculiarities of the brothers: who hoarded honey-cakes, who polished the chapel candlesticks with more fervour than their prayers, who could be relied upon to look the other way if Merlin vanished for an afternoon.

The village below provided entertainment of a sort. Disputes over fishing rights were frequent; the arrival of the tax collector was treated with the enthusiasm of a plague. Stories reached him there—about Emrys. None matched the truth, but all were flattering in their own absurd way: giant-slayer, wind-talker, ghost of the coast. Merlin found them preferable to the truth, which was that Emrys had been mending roofs and copying sermons for twenty-five years while waiting for a king who did not come.

So the years folded, one into another. His hands remained busy; his mind drifted elsewhere. The monastery kept him fed, sheltered, and, perhaps most importantly, ignored. It was not happiness, but it was a kind of peace—blunt-edged, sea-worn, and tinged always with the faint taste of salt.

And some mornings, before the first bell, he would stand at the narrow window of his cell, looking east, back to Camelot.

Not waiting, he assured himself.

Merely looking.