“Damn straight, he is.” Val ran his fingers over the neatly filed volumes. “Someone really should write the rest of the story. You know, the cycles that came after the first Arthur? All the way to the end, with your magical sword sticking Nin’s lake into a billion icy bits? Seems like a pretty huge omission if you ask me.”
“Actually, a pair of twenty-first-century authors came rather close!” Merlin said, skimming through the books and pulling out one with an electric pink, glowing Excalibur on the cover. “They got a few things lopsided, of course. I am a good dancer.”
Val artfully dodged that one. “What’s this?” He pulled out a folder filled with shiny silver discs. “A whole television show with your name on it! Should we put the lights down low and watch?”
Merlin pursed his lips. “Quite fun in places, that one. I do like the dragon. But, well, they had a tendency to make it seem as if Arthur and Merlin could be love interests, only to pull out at the last possible second.”
Val quirked an eyebrow, a double entendre no doubt simmering behind his smirk. When he spoke, it was more frustration than amusement. “Ugh, why would anyone do that?”
“It was called queerbaiting,” Merlin said, the word like a stone in his shoe. “And it was sadly common in that age.”
Val made a disgusted face and a retching sound to go with it.
Merlin had to agree. He’d heard the arguments. That they were just stories. But he knew, from deep personal experience playing a role in one of the most enduring legends in Western history, that stories were never just a string of pretty words on a page or attractive strangers on a screen. They climbed inside your head, reordered things. Tore up parts of you by the roots and planted new ideas.
Magic, really.
And not always the sparkly kind.
Merlin had told himself stories. He’d said he wasn’t a hero because he’d stood beside brave men and played the enchanted sidekick for so long. He had given in to the idea that because he’d once been lonely and lost, he always would be. He’d believed that love was for fools who couldn’t see the inevitable ending. That hope was always going to die, spitted on the end of someone’s sword. But the tales he’d told himself weren’t just wrong—they were dangerously wrong. They were pain and fear buffed to a shine until they glittered like truth.
Now Merlin’s old stories didn’t just sound like piffle. They sounded like exactly what Nin would want him to believe. It was time for something new.
“Queerbaiting, hmm?” Val asked, coming down the ladder to slip into his waiting arms. “I feel a sudden, intense need to make out with you.”
Merlin felt a smile breaking through, bright as the glint of Ketchan sun. “Righting the wrongs of the past again, are we?”
“Something like that,” Val said, pulling him close. Suddenly Merlin was glad they’d brought new lamps into the library, because they made it easy to see the dramatic dips in Val’s smile, the dark starburst of lashes above his amber-brown eyes.
Their lips touched, and just as Merlin left the world behind, Val pulled back and pointed at the dust motes that had stopped falling halfway to the floor, the curtains that were no longer rustling in the breeze.
“Kai,” Val whispered. “You froze the universe again.”
“That does seem to happen when we kiss.”
They pushed toward each other, slower this time, and to be honest Merlin didn’t mind if they altered the fabric of reality with how good this felt. Maybe reality could do with some altering. At their sides, their hands swirled around each other and then locked. They kissed for so long he couldn’t tell if it was measured in minutes or hours. When they eventually pulled apart, because the universe rudely had to keep existing, Merlin knew they would be back at it soon enough.
Finally, a cycle worth getting caught up in.
Merlin didn’t ask Val to come with him to the cave where Error was hidden, for obvious reasons. The empty sandstone loomed around him, the ship sitting idle since its dramatic entrance in the battle of CamelotTM.
Merlin had an idea. A gift for Ari and Gwen. It was their three-year anniversary, and he figured that their love child was on the hook for a top-notch present after all they’d been through.
It was going to take a great deal of magic. The first step in the plan was to page through the past until he found the right moment to steal a few specific items. But when he opened a portal, that wasn’t where his feet and his whims had carried him.
He emerged into a small home on Ketch. He padded down the hall and peeked through an open archway into the living room, where Gwen was sitting with her feet tucked up on a bright couch. Ari was on the floor, slashing around a foam sword.
They were both older, Ari covered in tattoos and Gwen’s curves back at full strength. They were laughing, waiting. Ari held out the sword, paused, and then a tiny girl burst into the room on the shoulders of a slightly older Merlin. She held Kairos aloft, her little hands just big enough to clutch the hilt.
“Do you have that, baby?” Gwen asked, leaping up to help her. “It’s heavy. And sharp.”
“She’s got it,” Ari said, showing her how to hold it, and then sliding seamlessly into the role of a knight in the arena. Merlin—thirties Merlin—roared and steered the girl forward.
Gwen stood up on the couch just as the girl’s hold on the sword wilted and shouted, in a plummy royal tone, “Avalon is the winner! Ari comes in a close second! Now the queen says it’s time to feast!”
“Mama! Queen Mama! Kai Dwagon!”
Slightly older Merlin roared once more, politely, and put her down as Ari grabbed the sword in a bit of
