EPILOGUE
-MERLIN-
The Night Merlin Left Camelot
The crystal vials on my workbench rattled as I paced, my robes trailing shadows across the stone floor.
Each step felt heavier than the last, weighted by the knowledge of what was coming—what had always been coming, ever since that night when Uther's screams still echoed through these halls, before we carried him to the Whispering Wilds and allowed that witch to remove the dragon—to give the abomination to Arthur.
When we'd emerged from the Wilds, one king was dead, and the other was forever changed.
Arthur believed he could control the dragon.
He couldn't.
That was the rift between us, the fundamental break that no amount of history or affection could bridge. It started with trust. It broke with fear. Now it would end in war.
I stopped before the window, watching rain streak down the glass. Beyond lay the kingdom we'd both sworn to protect—Arthur with his sword, me with my magic. Once, that had been enough.
Uther's last days replayed behind my eyes: the violent consumption, flesh burning from within as the dragon's power devoured him. And Arthur had bound that same beast to himself in an act of supreme courage or supreme folly—I still couldn't decide which.
Along with Blodeuwyn, I'd helped seal the dragon inside him.
I'd vowed to keep the world safe. Together, with Arthur.
But I'd also promised myself that if he slipped, if he fell into the same darkness his father had, that I would intervene—whatever the cost. The weight of that promise hung like a millstone around my neck, grinding against my conscience with every passing day.
I'd watched him grow from a bright-eyed boy into a king whose shadow lengthened with each passing season, whose nights grew more tormented by whispers no one else could hear.
My fingers traced the constellation patterns on my sleeve, feeling the embedded magic pulse in response.
The stars there shifted slightly, as if sensing my unease.
How many years had I walked this earth, guiding kings and queens toward their destinies?
Yet none had wounded me as deeply as this betrayal—this slow, agonizing transformation of a boy I'd loved into a tyrant I had to oppose.
I understood, in those first years, why Arthur believed he needed to act. The dragon fed on magic, grew stronger when surrounded by it. To weaken the beast, Arthur had to weaken the source.
Starve the dragon. Starve magic.
I could accept that logic, cold as it was.
But starving magic didn't have to mean ending it. It didn't have to mean execution squads combing the countryside, burning homes, dragging children from their mothers' arms. It didn't have to mean what happened at Hawthorn Glen.
I'd tried. Gods, I'd tried. Offered alternatives. Binding spells. Oath magic. Sanctuaries where practitioners could be monitored, contained if necessary. Places where magic could exist under watchful eyes without the threat of extinction.
Arthur refused every suggestion.
That was when I finally saw past the justifications, past the fear, past the noble rhetoric about protecting his kingdom.
What drove him wasn't necessity.
It was bloodlust.
The dragon's hunger had become his own, and he'd convinced himself each death was duty rather than desire. Each pyre fed the beast he claimed to contain.
The crystals braided into my beard clinked softly as I exhaled, their delicate sound at odds with the storm brewing within me.
I'd taught him everything—shown him the delicate balance between power and restraint—only to watch him systematically destroy it all in the name of control.
The very magic that could have saved him, he now hunted ruthlessly.
If he slips, I will stop him.
It had been my pact with myself.
And now I had to honor it.
Because the dragon was waking. Arthur's anger grew sharper, his fear deeper with each passing day. He wouldn't hear reason, wouldn't accept warnings.
He thought himself stronger than Uther.
"This is how your father fell," I'd told him during our final meeting before everything shattered.
His eyes had flashed with something that wasn't entirely human. "I am not my father. And I don't need your chains."
In that moment, trust between us was shattered like glass beneath a hammer.
And it was then that I realized Arthur was headed for the same fate as his father.
The realization had settled over me like frost, cold but inevitable. But unlike Uther, Arthur couldn't simply die. His death would shatter the binding, unleash the dragon into the world—a creature of pure destruction with no host to contain it. Killing him wasn't an option.
But replacing him was.
I left Camelot that night.
After the altercation between us, the heated words, the anger—the destruction of the tower—I gathered what mattered—texts, artifacts, the ring Nimue had given me—and walked through the gates one last time.
Guards saw me pass. None tried to stop me.
Even then, Arthur's knights feared what I might do if provoked.
The Standing Stones hummed as I approached them, as though welcoming me home. As they were constructed from my own blood, they recognized me and allowed me to cross through them.
I took my first breath of Annwyn's air and vowed that this would now be my domicile. My haven. My home.
Here, in the otherworld, power ran deep and ancient. Not the sanitized, controlled magic Arthur allowed his court, but the raw stuff of creation itself. Wild. Hungry. Alive.
I built my fortress in the Twilight Valleys, where reality bent and time moved differently. Refugees came—practitioners fleeing Arthur's purges, others displaced, anyone who remembered what magic truly meant. They needed a leader. I became one.
But leadership wasn't enough.
I needed to find Arthur's replacement. Someone who could inherit the Dragonmark without becoming the monster Arthur was becoming.
Someone with strength enough to contain the beast, wisdom enough to control it, power enough to rule.
Someone strong enough to take the Dragonmark from him.
Someone who could bear that terrible weight.
I had thought that person could have been Corvin of Blackhollow. But my visions told me otherwise.
Corvin could not take the dragon—he wasn't strong enough. He would break under its influence, just as Arthur was breaking.
No, there was another coming. Someone who could take the dragon. Someone who was strong enough.
Someone with water magic, not fire.
And then, one night, my visions revealed exactly who this replacement would be.
A girl with white hair and violet eyes. My daughter. The child Nimue had hidden from me, protected with spells so old and deep that even I couldn't break them.
Guinevere.
Guinevere carried water magic in her blood—Nimue's gift.
But she also carried my blood, making her one of the strongest beings the realm would ever know.
She could become a balancing force to Arthur's destructive flames.
Where the dragon devoured, water could contain.
Where fire raged, tides could calm. Not only that, but she was born of both worlds: Logres and Annwyn.
Daughter to a woman of primordial magic and a man who walked between reality and dream.
She belonged nowhere, which meant she could belong everywhere.
She is the tide between two realms. What better vessel than the one who already walks the line?
Arthur tried to dominate the dragon through sheer will, crushing it beneath layers of control and fear. That approach was failing. I watched it crack further every day.
But Guinevere? Her magic was flow, not force. She didn't need to suppress the beast—she could bind it, soothe it, reshape its nature through balance rather than brutality. Water wore down stone. Given time, tides reshaped entire coastlines.
She could carry the mark without being consumed by it.
More than that, she remained uncorrupted by power. Arthur showed all the signs of becoming Uther: controlling, paranoid, violent in his certainty.
Perhaps she could do what neither Uther nor Arthur could—burn without burning others.
Yes, she was the answer. The way forward. But there existed one problem: where was she?
Each of my scrying attempts to locate her had ended in mist and shadow. Every divination spell twisted away from Guinevere's location.
Nimue had made certain I couldn't find her.
But Guinevere was out there. Somewhere.
Old magic whispered of her existence. Dreams revealed fragments—a laugh, a gesture, the way she tilted her head when thinking. She had my power. Nimue's grace.
If the dragon must live, let it live inside someone worthy.
I spent months crafting the spell. Not a tracking charm—those Nimue would deflect.
Not a summons—those could be refused. Instead, I wove something subtler: a call that would resonate in Guinevere's blood, a pull she wouldn't understand but couldn't ignore.
It would draw her north, toward the Standing Stones, toward me.
Toward her destiny.
The ritual required blood, starlight, and words in a language dead before Camelot rose.
I spoke them.
The pull went out across Logres like a ripple.
Somewhere, my daughter felt it. Somewhere, she would know that when the time came—if ever she were in trouble—she would find haven here. In the northernmost reaches—in Annwyn. With her father.
I did not know when the day would come that I would be reunited with her, but I took comfort in the fact that I knew that day would come. Eventually. Now it was time to be patient. To wait.
I breathed out my own impatience. My chest ached—not from magic, but from memory.
Arthur.
Gods, I'd raised that boy. Held him when nightmares woke him. Taught him to read the old language by candlelight. He'd looked at me with such trust, such fierce determination to be worthy.
I will make you proud.
And he had. For a time.
I loved him. Still did, despite everything. That was the poison in this—the awareness that my affection had dulled my judgment. I'd made excuses for his first harsh decree, rationalized the second. By the third, the pattern was undeniable.
Loving him had blinded me too long.
Now I stood in twilight, plotting his destruction.
Not death. Never death. The dragon would consume everything if its host died without a successor.
And not only that, but I was incapable of killing the boy I had loved as if I were his own father.
The very thought of ending Arthur's life turned my stomach to lead, made my hands tremble with something deeper than magical exhaustion.
How could I destroy the child who had once fallen asleep against my shoulder while I read him stories of ancient heroes?
The young man who had wept in my arms the night before his coronation, terrified he would fail his people?
Even now, corrupted as he was by the dragon's influence and his own festering paranoia, Arthur remained the golden-haired boy who had pulled that sword from stone with such innocent determination.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see him at fifteen years old, eyes bright with wonder as I taught him his first cantrip, marveling at the way fire danced between his small fingers.
"Will I be as powerful as you someday, Merlin?"
"More powerful, if you remember why power exists."
I had believed that once. Believed he would surpass me not just in strength, but in wisdom. In compassion.
The memory was a blade twisting in my chest. Loving him—truly, deeply loving him as the son I'd never had—was both my greatest strength and my most crippling weakness. It had given me the patience to nurture his potential, but it had also made me dangerously blind to the signs of his fall.
THE END