For all the Aris out there,
who have to hide who they are in order to feel safe.
And for the Merlins,
who need a few extra lifetimes to unveil their identity.
Stay strong, have hope, and please don’t hurt yourself.
We are the best part of this future.
“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot.
It is a silly place.”
—Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Merlin crash-landed in the past with a great, undignified belly flop.
The chaos of waves left him torn between gasps and muttered curses. He had rocketed through the time portal, an endless skydive without parameters or parachutes, before it dumped him in this flooded, cramped circle of stone.
“Anyone else down here?” He bobbed. “No? Just me?” He splashed around, finding rough stone, and high above, a hole punch of blue sky. This was no cavern. The walls had been hacked in a pattern that spoke of plans and intentions and humanity. He was in a well.
“Nothing a little magic won’t fix.” But when Merlin went to dig some up, he was near empty. Trying to keep everyone together in a time portal with completely different laws of physics had drained him. And it hadn’t even worked. He would worry about that later; for now he had to get out and see if their great gamble had paid off.
He braced his arms and legs for a long climb. The well was narrow enough that he could jam himself between two opposing sides, scuttling upward and hurting his back and his neck and his dignity most of all. “Dignity is for knights,” he scoffed under his breath. Merlin was a mage. A bit of absurdity came with the territory.
When he reached the top, he gripped the edge, hoisted one leg, and rolled over. He hit the flagstones of a central square with a resounding smack. He stood, shoved his glasses into place, and looked around.
At Camelot.
It wasn’t off in some hazy distance, surrounded by dragons and dreams. The city was here, the city was now. A normal day in Camelot should have been bustling with crowds, crying babies, forges clanging, and those incessant flutists—a shrill reminder that music wouldn’t improve for centuries. Yet all was silent, still. Layers of odors that he hadn’t even known he’d missed stampeded his senses. Damp earth. Sprightly grass. Meat cooked in a godless amount of butter…
And there was his castle rising above the whole scene, keeping watch over the city. It was Arthur’s, too, yes, but Merlin had designed it for the young king, giving it towers and secrets that regular castles could hardly dream about. It had been his highest achievement, next to Arthur’s reign. Only now the castle looked small—the starscrapers of the twenty-second century had broken his sense of scale—and yet the way it stood against this perfect blue morning left a mark.
On the sky. On his soul.
He was home.
Merlin’s memories should have risen up to meet him, rather like the flagstones had risen up to meet his face, but none were forthcoming. Perhaps he was too nervous. After all, he wasn’t supposed to be facing his past alone. The time portal had tried to burst his body into atomic confetti, but even worse, it had ripped his friends away from one another. He looked around for Ari, Gwen, Jordan, Lam, and Val, wondering if they’d all landed safely in the square while he alone had had the misfortune of shooting straight down the barrel of a smelly well.
All he found was one young person with a gaping mouth and fishy-wide eyes watching his every move. They had ruddy white skin and scruffy brown hair, and they said a word that sounded a fair bit like shit.
It was hard to adjust now that he had gotten used to the distinct Mercer accent of the future. Not Mercer; English, the language is English, Merlin corrected. Curse that consumer monster with its uncanny knack for swallowing culture and rebranding history! Actually, he’d gone back far enough that England didn’t exist quite yet. The island was known as Britannia during this time. He spent a moment mentally mapping it out: Camelot’s golden age had flowered just before the Norman invasion, and after the island’s run-in with the Roman Empire, which left nothing but divisions and bathhouses in its wake.
“Good day!” Merlin shouted heartily, causing the scruffy kid to drop their bucket.
They eyed him, then the well. “Did you spring from the roots of the stone?”
“Stones don’t have roots,” he quipped, though he enjoyed the way this language lent itself to metaphor. His future-y friends had been so amused by his allegorical loquaciousness, but it was a remnant of his origins, a rare one he actually treasured. Not that he knew his precise origins. The farthest back he could remember was waking up in the crystal cave, ancient and alone.
“Then where did you come from?” the small stranger asked.
Merlin suppressed the desire to say a galaxy far, far away. “I’m from Camelot.”
He was only half a foot taller than this young person, which begged the question, how old was Merlin these days? Was it possible he’d gotten younger since they left the future? Perhaps the portal had shaved off more of his life. A penalty for time travel? Morgana had given up her existence to send them back, while Excalibur had broken to bits. Was this his price?
He loved magic, but sometimes it was unmistakably the worst.
The kid grumbled as they sent the bucket down the well, while Merlin twisted water from the ruby robes Ari had gifted him on Ketch. He tried not to look suspicious, though that ship had probably sailed to distant seas by now. First things first, he needed to find the crowds. Ari was always at the center of the action, the others not far behind. They were her little ducklings. Thinking of Jordan and her knightly skills, he course-corrected: lethal ducklings. “What’s happening today? Where is everyone?”
“All attend King Arthur’s wedding,” the kid said, sweating under the weight of the bucket as they brought it back up. “He takes his bride in the tournament ring.”
Oh, yes, the ever-delightful treatment of women as possessions. He was definitely back.
Something clicked oddly. “Gweneviere? Arthur is already marrying Gweneviere?” He didn’t know why he was surprised. He’d commanded the portal to take them back to Arthur’s eighteenth birthday season, which had been a particularly momentous time for the young king and a rather squishy blank period in Merlin’s memories. That’s when the enchanted chalice had appeared—and disappeared—and that’s what Arthur’s spirit had sent them back to retrieve.
“The Lady Gweneviere comes from afar,” the kid said eagerly. “An exotic beauty. My friend says she’s a force for good in Camelot, but my mother believes she bewitched the king.”
Ah, another piece of the past he hadn’t missed. The perfect storm of antipolitical, cultural, and social correctness. His friends were in for a migraine of homophobic, racist, and gender-related fuckery. He had to find them. Fast.
“Where is the wedding?” he barked, making the kid jump.
They pointed beyond the city walls, and Merlin left at a run. His path wound him around Camelot’s central castle, as glowering as it was grand, with eight-foot-thick walls, stones capped with dark moss, and mere arrow slits for windows. He forced himself not to look up at the tallest tower. Another version of him might be up there, even now. Merlin had told his friends he didn’t want to expose them to the horrors of the Middle Ages, which was true, but some of those horrors weren’t just historical. They were deeply, deeply personal. He had to avoid a run-in with his old self at all costs.