EPILOGUE
-BLODEUWYN-
The eagle came at dusk.
It landed on the sill without sound. There was no beat of wings, no scrape of talons on stone. One moment the sill was empty, and the next, the bird was there, its eye catching the candlelight like a chip of obsidian dropped in oil.
Outside, the Wilds shifted. The trees here didn’t stand still the way trees elsewhere did. Instead, they leaned, breathed, and tilted toward sound the way a dog tilts toward a whistle only it can hear.
The Whispering Wilds were the only place where the veil was the thinnest, where the lands of the living and the dead were separated only by the thinnest gauze.
I’d lived among these woods long enough that their attention no longer registered as strange, but it was now simply background noise: something akin to the creak of a ship you’ve sailed so long you’ve stopped hearing the hull.
“Well?” I asked the bird.
The candle on my table burned without flickering.
He’s going to marry her.
“Very interesting.”
Arthur. My Arthur... and I used that word the way a sculptor uses it about a piece of marble.
It had nothing to do with possession, but authorship.
I hadn’t made him from nothing. Truly, the Pendragon blood had done the rough work, but I’d carved the channels.
I’d looked at Uther, so bloated with power he didn’t understand, and I’d seen the architecture underneath him: the draconic thread that ran through his bloodline like a vein of ore through granite.
I’d watched the beast take Uther first, the way a fire takes green wood.
By the end, Uther had been more dragon than man, but he hadn’t known the difference.
Arthur was smarter, and Arthur was stronger than his father could have ever hoped to be.
Arthur knew the power of what lived in his chest, and thus he built walls of law, crown, and rigid self-control, stacking stone on stone against the thing that leaned against them every night.
But the price he paid, that grinding, relentless war against himself, was exactly what I’d intended.
After all, you don’t create a weapon by making it comfortable.
And now he was going to marry the girl. I almost smiled.
Guinevere.
I hadn’t engineered her: that was the part that still struck me.
No, instead Merlin and Nimue, the prophet and the lake-woman, had come together to create this impossible child.
Even their pairing was a miracle in and of itself for Merlin thought in lines, cause and effect, step and consequence, the patient arithmetic of prophecy while Nimue thought in depths, in currents and pressures, and the slow geological weight of water on stone.
Their daughter should have been a contradiction, something that canceled itself out.
Instead, she was a convergence.
And I’d felt it the moment she was born, felt it the way you feel a shift in pressure before a storm, the way your ears know before your mind does that something fundamental has changed in the air.
At first there were only two: the dragons.
They were the guardians of the living world.
The male and the female. The male was fire and sovereignty, will and dominion.
The female was water and liminal space, passage and transition.
It was together that they maintained the veil: that vital membrane between the living world and the black void outside it.
I’d killed the female first. It had taken three hundred years of preparation and one very long night, and I hadn’t emerged from it unchanged.
But as she lay dying, she bled out into the lake before I could complete the harvest, her essence dissolving into the water.
I’d screamed until my throat turned inside out, screamed because I’d needed that essence.
I’d spent three centuries building toward that harvest, and instead of taking what I’d required from my kill, I’d watched it sink, disperse, and disappear into Nimue’s water.
I’d thought the female dragon’s essence was lost.
Then Nimue had lain with Merlin in the shallow water where the moonlight broke apart, and nine months later a girl was born with white hair, violet eyes, and water magic that ran three fathoms deeper than it should have for a child of Merlin’s begetting.
The female dragon’s essence hadn’t been lost after all; it had simply been absorbed into the water of the lake.
And though Nimue couldn’t feel it, it became part of her child, just as she was part of her child.
The female dragon’s essence was the water, and the water was Guinevere.
And that essence: the threshold power, the bridge between what lives and what does not, was what the sword had always been searching for.
Excalibur.
I let my attention move to thoughts of the sword with the particular discipline of someone moving a limb that’s been broken then reset but never quite healed properly.
The sword was the one thing in this unraveling world that I couldn’t approach directly.
I’d learned that lesson in the most permanent way possible: the scar of it ran deeper than skin, deeper than bone, down into whatever I was made of underneath those things.
The sword had cut me where a sword should never have been able to reach.
Now it sat in the lake’s keeping: patient and radiating its hateful, balancing light. And it knew the girl. The truth was that it had always known her, the way water knows the shape of what it flows around, because she carried the essence that the sword had been forged to protect.
She didn’t know that yet, though, and that fact was a very important one.
The veil shuddered. I felt it through the floor of the cottage, through the wood and the earth beneath.
It was a deep structural tremor like the settling of a very old house.
And it was thin now. So much thinner than it had been even a year ago.
My presence in the living world was corrosive by nature: every breath I drew here, every spell I turned in these old hands, scraped another layer from the membrane between the worlds.
But I wasn’t the only one who weakened the veil. And that was by design. My design.
I’d been patient for a very long time because the pieces needed to move before the wall came down entirely.
A controlled tear, at the right place, at the right moment, with the right hand on the sword: that was surgery.
But what would happen if the veil simply collapsed without Guinevere in position wasn’t surgery. No, that was catastrophe.
I imagined the board of players in my mind...
First was Arthur and the dragon, and Arthur’s power over the beast was waning just as the veil was.
The declaration of marriage between Arthur and the girl was his next move in a game he believed he was winning, but he was mistaken.
Then my mind wandered to Merlin in Annwyn, a man who was brilliant but blind.
Despite being highly intelligent and powerful, Merlin was a fool, because he still didn’t realize that all the visions he’d seen ever since Guinevere was born had been carefully constructed by me.
Then there was Morgan, who was searching for a threat I’d made invisible to her.
She was clever enough to find shadows but not clever enough to think about just who was casting them.
And never had her inquiries led her into the Whispering Wilds and to an old woman who might have worn a different name, but whose eyes were still the same.
And Nimue in the lake... she was able to see across the surface of things, but she was chained from acting, her power tethered. Thus, she was a non-issue.
But what of Percival? Percival with his fractured visions, his healer’s hands, and his vast, earnest, aching gift for seeing what others dismissed.
He was the one variable I watched most carefully because he was close, and he kept coming closer.
But his visions came in pieces, and he assembled them honestly, which meant he assembled them slowly, which meant he was always half a step behind.
I sat for a long moment in the stillness of my cottage then, just listening to the Wilds breathe outside my window.
I was the eldest of the three, the first of us, and I’d been here when the two great dragons circled each other in the sky above a world that didn’t have a name yet.
I’d watched every civilization that had called itself permanent become sediment and I’d seen Uther’s line rise with the predictable drama of men who believe they’re the protagonists of history. But the truth was far different.
I reached out, pinching the candle between my fingers, and the flame extinguished itself.
The Whispering Wilds fell into darkness around me. Everything in the forest that listened went suddenly quiet as animals did when something ancient passed. The veil flared once, then twice.
Then, from somewhere beyond the darkness, where there was no light, something howled.
I reclined in my chair.
And smiled.
THE END