“For what?” Gwen asked, one eye on Ari as she battled the screeching mage.
“I don’t know!” Merlin tried. “A lot of things, apparently!”
He turned back to Ari just as one of the old mage’s bolts caught her across the face.
“No!” Merlin cried, hands sputtering with sparks.
Ari fell back heavily and landed with a crash at the edge of the lake. Lam rushed forward with their sword drawn, but Merlin got there first, throwing himself at the head of the pack.
It was time to take down this ancient nightmare.
A song roared out of Merlin’s throat as his fingers fired up. He raised his hands, calling up a dragon of flame to match the one that had attacked Camelot. The sky above the shoreline filled with its long, flowing lines, its fiery breath.
Old Merlin didn’t miss a beat. He conjured a fire-dragon of his own, one bright sinuous line at a time, green to clash with Merlin’s orange. They met in an explosion above the water, parting to whip at the trees with their long, deadly tails. As they met again and again, the sky turned viciously bright.
Merlin flagged from heat and magic exhaustion, but in the corner of his eye he saw Lam and Val sneaking up on Old Merlin. He needed to keep the old mage distracted. He pushed harder, splitting his dragon in two and attacking from both sides at once. Old Merlin looked delighted and maddened at once. “Perhaps we are the same person, carbuncle! No one else could hold out against me like this!”
The sky sizzled with lightning and the first threatening drops of rain, as if Nin had opened her mouth to disagree on that point. Both Merlins paused, looking up, but the clouds grumbled once and that was it.
Old Merlin’s hands went back to their wild symphonic dancing, and Merlin kept pouring out magic, because he could see no other choice. His dragons bit and reared and breathed fire, and on any other day it would have given him joy.
But today, this fight was going to end him.
He shrank so fast that he could feel it happening, his bones and skin narrowing down. If Merlin had been eleven when he’d left Camelot a few hours ago, he was much younger now. Nine? Eight? Even his mind felt different, like clothes nearly falling off. He needed to stop soon. If he didn’t, he’d slip into the dark place before memories—he was risking the best of his past. The first time he’d met Ari on the moon. The last time he’d kissed Val. The golden days with Arthur, so very long ago. The new wonder of Lam’s friendship. Jordan’s ferocity and Gwen’s bright torch of resistance. Even Kay, the ridiculous. Kay, who wasn’t coming back. Merlin couldn’t bear to lose the shining thought of the people he loved.
He couldn’t let himself forget.
Merlin’s mind lit up as bright as the stars.
Old Merlin was the one who needed to forget. As long as he knew about the baby, he wouldn’t let this go. There was no convincing him that the child wasn’t a threat to Arthur. No reasoning with his fears or the violence that followed in their wake. No winning this fight, because the old mage had hundreds of years to waste and Merlin had none.
He let out one last push of magic, his dragon splitting in dozens of fiery directions. A pack of dragons to rival the knights of the round table, each one pointed at Old Merlin’s great hulking beast. Instead of attacking, they flew straight into its mouth, like a brace of arrows released down its throat. Old Merlin’s dragon thrashed and burst but re-formed just as quickly. With a great swipe of its claws, it scattered Merlin’s little dragons into the sky, where they fizzled into nothing.
In that moment when Old Merlin was crowing his victory, Merlin shouted, “Grab him!”
Lam and Val took hold of the skinny old mage, keeping him down. “Restrain his fingers! Cover his mouth!” With the old mage’s access to magic cut off, Merlin limped forward.
Gwen was kneeling in the shallows of the lake, over Ari’s unconscious body. At least the baby was firmly ensconced in her arms. “He’ll be punished for this,” Gwen demanded hoarsely. “The old mage has no idea what a real queen can do.”
“I know what to do,” Merlin said—sounding a little too much like a child bragging to his mother. “And believe me, he’ll be punished.”
He pushed up the sleeves of his robes, which were puddles of fabric now. His breath stuttered with uncertainty. This was something he’d never tried. But over the course of this fight, he’d gotten so young that it freed him from his old ways. Here, finally, was a silver lining of these backward aging shenanigans. Becoming a child had changed the architecture of his mind. There was no lifetime of fear holding him back.
Val had told him the truth: he had time powers.
And he had them because he was tied to the lake.
Like Nin.
Suddenly, he understood himself in ways he hadn’t before. Because he’d come back to Camelot, to this moment, he’d found his lost origins. Merlin knew the place where his story began, the ways that he was different. Having that truth set him free—and in that same moment it set his magic free as well.
It felt like a rushing of dark water inside of him.
It felt like time flowing in every direction.
He closed the gap between himself and Old Merlin. “You thought you beat me,” he said. “But we are more than songs and sparks.”
Merlin didn’t know exactly what to do—but then he remembered Morgana, touching his forehead, gifting him a few hundred years of wretched history. What he needed to do was nearly the reverse. He needed to take the past, steal the baby right out of Old Merlin’s head.
He touched the wrinkles on the mage’s troubled forehead.
And
