She was killing everyone.
Her father, her mother, the boys she’d beaten with the sword. Everyone who’d cheered when she was born and chanted her into exile when she turned out to be different. Merlin let out a pure, agonized sound when he saw Aethelwyn running for the woods. He hummed to save her, but the sound was stolen from his lips. He wasn’t allowed to interfere with the Lady of the Lake’s origins, and that meant he watched helpless as the woman who’d taken him in turned to a scattering of bones and hair and dust. Nin had pitched them all forward in time until everyone around her was dead—everyone but Merlin.
Gods, that felt painfully familiar.
Nimue marched somberly to the lake, one hand firmly over her heart. She walked into the water without slowing, even as it dragged at her clothes, turned her hair to weeds.
“No,” Merlin said. “Don’t do this.” His words didn’t reach her, though. And it was too late. It was already done.
The water welcomed her the way her people never had. The surface broke around her body, closing over her head. But Nin wasn’t content to simply die in the water. After she disappeared from view, her heart-magic worked even as she drowned. The water throbbed, echoing her pulse, and then falling still.
In that moment, the lake changed—sealed itself off, the little rivers at the edges disappearing. She’d made the lake her own, binding it with her death as she had been bound to it by her birth. She’d stolen a piece of time and started a cycle of misery.
It started to rain, and every drop felt like Nin.
Her body washed up, gently nudging the shore. Merlin went and picked her up. She was lighter than he expected, a small part of a massive story, and yet this moment contained the beginning of every downfall.
Merlin trudged to shore and laid her body to rest. He used his hands and his magic to dig a muddy grave. As he packed on dark, wet earth, he kept expecting to be stopped. It seemed the story didn’t care what happened after she died.
But Merlin did.
Nimue wasn’t his enemy. The Lady of the Lake was. Nin was the spirit that Nimue left behind in the waters of time. Merlin could see it now: she was constantly remaking the tragedy of her own ending. She’d created a cycle of heroic boys with their swords so she could watch them fail.
Nin had even given Merlin the steps of the cycle. He muttered them as he smoothed over damp, rich soil that still seemed to breathe with life. “Find Arthur, train Arthur, nudge him onto the nearest throne, defeat the greatest evil in the world, unite all of humankind.”
Merlin had believed he was helping.
But she’d known it would never work—made sure of it, when she had to. Nin had chosen Arthur, forging Excalibur for him in the waters of her own lake, but she hadn’t chosen him because she could see the promise of Camelot.
Merlin’s connection to Nin’s waters gave her the perfect window to watch the story spin as the shining boy hero was cut down, his spirit set loose to try over and over again. That’s why she’d kept Merlin alive, even though he might prove the only threat to her existence. She’d needed him more than she’d feared him. So, she’d kept him busy with her cycle and in the dark for as long as she could. And now she planned to start a new string of horrors that fed off Ari—she finally had a girl for a hero and it didn’t even matter.
Nin didn’t care.
She only needed more tragedy.
Merlin knew what it was like to be magical, miserable, and lonely. He had been through ages of pain and actual worlds of hurt. In the end, though, he’d been cared for and learned to let himself care in return. It had been the hardest work of his life, but it was worth it not to wind up like Nimue—even if the Lady of the Lake was the most powerful being he’d ever known.
And that was the worst irony of them all.
Merlin let the rain soak him through, finally grasping the answers he’d come all the way back for. He would have to die in the lake to be as strong as Nin.
It was the only way.
And there was only one task left.
“I need to return to my family at the moment they need me the most,” Merlin chanted, making his request to the universe part of the song the universe itself was always singing.
Dawn rose and fell like heroes did, a hundred thousand times. Camelot came and went, the valiant strike of a match against an endless dark. Entire civilizations blinked into being and blinked out. Merlin waved his hand, humming through all of human history like it was merely the overture.
He stopped when he was alone again.
Earth had been abandoned, everyone gone in the wake of their own self-made catastrophes. The lake was still there, spoiled and polluted. The forest had been mostly leveled, and the few trees left were marked for demolition, Mercer Ms carved in their bark.
Merlin turned away from all of it and looked up to the stars, seeking the path he needed. He tried not to break under the gravity of what he’d just learned. He was Merlin, the great mage of Earth.
But he was also Kairos, and this was finally his moment.
Crossing the galaxy after six months on medieval Earth was a new wonder. The endless black and nothing of space—followed by bursts of light and life at every starbus stop—created a scale of how far humanity had come. And how far it still needed to go.
Ari, Val, and Gwen smooshed against the
