by Dan Wingreen
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Aidan Collins," Arthur said, and held out his hand.
Years of experience with awkward politeness in uncomfortable situations took over, and Aidan found himself taking Arthur's hand without a thought and giving it a respectful shake. Arthur raised his eyebrows, and Aidan froze internally even as his hand kept stupidly shaking. Was he not supposed to touch him? Did he break some kind of royal protocol? Or, he thought, as he remembered the man standing in front of him was raised two thousand years ago, did he have no idea what a handshake was and was going for some kind of forearm-clasp-between-warriors thing?
He glanced at Lee for some idea of what he should do, but instead of scowling at him or looking like he was about to burst out laughing at Aidan's impropriety, he was practically beaming. As much, anyway, as someone could, without actually smiling. It suddenly occurred to Aidan that, despite the strange formality, this wasn't as much about getting Arthur's approval or satisfying some kind of royal etiquette as it was about Lee showing Aidan off to his king and his friend, the way he said he wanted to back at the White House before he teleported Aidan away. And if Aidan realized that, then he was sure that Arthur did, too. He relaxed, slightly.
"M-me too," Aidan said. He fought back a wince, but just barely. "I mean, it's nice to meet you too. Your majesty."
He felt awkward saying that last part, and it only got worse when Arthur laughed.
"Please, don't. Call me Arthur. Or, if that isn't socially acceptable these days with somebody you just met, you can call me whatever would be appropriate," he said with an easy smile.
"And what if it's appropriate for him to be calling you 'your majesty'?" Lee asked, dropping the formality for his more natural teasing annoyingness.
"Then times haven't changed as much as I would have hoped," Arthur said.
Aidan wouldn't exactly call it a grumble, but only because he couldn't wrap his head around King freaking Arthur complaining under his breath like a normal person.
Lee laughed. Arthur loftily ignored him and focused on Aidan. "So, what would be socially acceptable? Apparently whatever magic made it possible for me to learn languages wasn't as accommodating with customs."
Aidan could have easily taken the question as that of a king demanding answers from his subject, but he seemed to be trying to put Aidan at ease as much as he was asking something he wanted a real answer to, and that made Aidan relax a little bit more.
"Mr Pendragon?" he answered. "Or King Pendragon, maybe."
Arthur's lip curled slightly. "I suppose it was too much to hope that formality had died out in the last two thousand years."
He seemed legitimately annoyed it hadn't and Aidan had no idea what to do. "Well…you might not even be legally recognized as a king, since that's higher than a prime minister and that's kinda illegal."
Aidan had no idea why he said that, but it seemed to brighten Arthur up for a moment. "That would be nice," he said, almost wistfully. Aidan's lips twitched. It seemed Lee hadn't been lying about Arthur. The expression died on Arthur's face a moment later, though. "What do you mean when you say that it's 'illegal' to be higher than a prime minister?" He paused. "And what is a prime minister?"
"Um, it's kind of like a king, actually, but he's picked by a group of ministers when the old prime minister dies or steps down."
"Picked from where? The peasants?" Arthur asked.
Aidan shook his head, wondering at the turns in his life that lead to him giving pre-magic school civics lessons to King Arthur in the middle of a cave. "No, from the group of ministers. The prime minister picks one person from each state to be a minister and they pick the next prime minister. And, we don't really have peasants anymore." He thought for a second, then corrected himself. "Well, we're not called that anyway, but the effect is basically the same, I guess. Except maybe with better hygiene?"
Arthur closed his eyes, and sighed. It was a heavy, world-weary sigh, one that seemed to add every second of those two thousand years to his shoulders.
"So Merlin wasn't exaggerating," he said. He didn't sound surprised, just disappointed.
"No," Lee said, answering for Aidan. "I wasn't. But I did leave a lot out."
Arthur slowly opened his eyes. "Then I think you should tell me everything you held back before.”
"I think Aidan should do that," Lee said. "He's lived through it in a way I haven't. He can tell you what it's like growing up in the world we have to save."
Aidan was torn between poking fun of Lee's melodrama and having a minor panic attack at being put on the spot like that. Neither impulse lasted long. This was why they'd woken Arthur up, after all. As much as he might have liked to try to get to know who he was as a person instead of the legend, and he was just now realizing he wanted that very much, it could wait until later. This was much more important.
"Where should I start?" Aidan asked, trying not to think about all the things he was less than eager to relive.
Lee gave his hand a quick, reassuring squeeze. "Why don't you start with how we met?"
Despite all the bad things associated with that memory, Aidan found himself smiling. How could he not, when he'd gotten Lee out of it?
"Sure," he said. "Let's start there."
So that was where he started. He briefly told Arthur about Wizards Anonymous, about Carl and his kids, about walking home and the piece of trash and the alley. He told him about Bryce and Barnes, and the fear and the helplessness in the face of the horrible things they were going to do to him. He told him of wizards and sorcerers, and the solid, invisible barrier that cut society down those lines. He told him about the seemingly insane, dark avenger who stepped out of the shadows to save his life, and his less than appreciative reaction. He told him of terrorists and wizard licenses, of conformity and control. He told him about getting arrested and interrogated, about every foundation he'd built his life on crumbling down when he realized everything he'd been raised to believe was a lie. He told him about Lee's second rescue, about siphons and saviors and breathless escapes. He told him about the desert, and the People, and a boy named Two Rivers who never got to be a child.
He told him about the cave, and the necromancer, and the way the entire world could have changed if a wizard hadn't loved a sorcerer enough to sacrifice his life so the sorcerer didn't need to sacrifice his soul.
He told Arthur about divination, and the White House, and the 'Aztec' invasion that never was. About hunters and Noah, about heartbreak and realizations and determination, about torture and pain and fighting and revenge.
He told Arthur about how he burned Noah alive.
Aidan left nothing out. Not a single emotion or thought, not even the ones that made him look bad, or stupid, or the ones that embarrassed him. Once he started, he couldn't stop. He even told him things that he hadn't worked up the courage to tell Lee, like the way he almost couldn't breathe through the tight ball of fear in his chest when he was around Bryce or Barnes, or the way he still blamed himself for what happened to the village, or how he dreamed about Noah's screams as he burned in the fire and how those dreams weren't the nightmares they should have been.
It was cathartic, in a way Aidan had never thought anything could be. He told these things to Arthur, but he was telling them to Lee, too. He wanted them both to know what Lee meant to him; that no matter what happened, no matter how much awfulness and filth he picked up along the way, just being next to Lee was enough to make it all worth it. Aidan wanted to show Lee off to Arthur. To show him he was different from the Merlin he knew. Better. Because how could he not be, when he was Lee now?
Aidan had never felt freer.
By the time he was done talking they were all sitting on the rocky ground in a loose circle. Night had most likely fallen, but the cave was illuminated by a few of Lee’s balls of light. When Aidan finally ran out of things to say, Arthur studied him in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Then, slowly and deliberately, he reached over, took Aidan's hand in his own, and shook it gra
vely, his eyes brimming with such heartbreaking understanding and unreserved respect that it took Aidan's breath away.
Then the questions started, and Aidan found himself telling Arthur everything he knew about the country, the world, the people in it and what could be done to change things. Lee cut in now and then with his own insights and experiences, gained from traveling the world for centuries upon centuries, and between the three of them, they began to make plans.
And the one thing that every plan needed was a beginning.
Part V
The Beginning
Chapter 1
Powerful magic was hard to concentrate. This incontrovertible fact of life was true for people, wizards being the best and most common example, but it was equally true for objects, too. The more powerful the magic, the harder it was to put it into something. Some powerful enchantments—such as the magical power lines that crisscrossed the country and kept everyone out of the dark ages—were able to get around this limitation by being fed constant streams of magic. Others, the kind that needed to be carried and couldn't rely on being hooked in to a unending flow of processed magic, had to be handled delicately, placed in objects that naturally absorbed magic, such as crystal or metal, and needed a skilled magic user with access to processed magic to forge. The drawback, aside from the sheer difficulty of enchanting an object to be that powerful without destroying it in the process, was they could only ever be used once before literally being consumed by the magic inside of them.
The small, round crystal ball Lee had retrieved from his bag was just such an object. It had taken him years to make. Years of trial and error and failure and more than a few explosions, but even though its very purpose made it impossible to test, he had no doubts it would do what it was supposed to do: Reintroduce Arthur to a world that needed him.
And so it was, on the night after Arthur awoke from his two thousand year sleep, when almost everyone in the country was home from work but not yet in bed, every single crystal ball in the country, from personal crystals to security crystals to half-polished crystals sitting on the shelf in a ball makers shop, turned on at the same time and projected the image of the Once and Future King to everyone who was around to see him.
"Hello," the image said. He was dressed in full armor, freshly shaved, and without a single hair out of place. On his head rested a small, understated circlet that only the most observant of people would recognize as being carved from marble. "I'm Arthur Pendragon. A long time ago, I fought and died to keep people free from tyrants who wanted to rule their lives. I was a king, but I dreamed of a time when the world wouldn't need kings or royalty, when people would be able to decide for themselves how they wanted to live and what they wanted to do with their lives. That was the ideal that I lived for, and it was the one I died for as well.
"It's also the ideal that I came back to fulfill.
"The government you have now, the Department of Magic and Sorcery, the ministers and the prime minister that you have no say in electing or even legally debating, the labyrinthian bureaucracy that dictates every aspect of your lives, doesn't work. Not the way a government should. Not the way you deserve. You have no freedom; no choice that isn't made for you, no future that isn't given to you. You have no rights, you own no property, there is nothing in your lives that cannot be taken away from you at the whim of a faceless official who you may not have ever even met. You have no recourse to address grievances made against you by anyone in power; in fact, even making a complaint is suitable justification for further oppression. An entire group of people are made to live like second-class citizens just because they're born without the ability to control their magic naturally. These people are your friends and neighbors; your family. You call them wizards. I'd call them human. No different from sorcerers in any way that matters, no different from the men and women who sit in the White House and tell you to be afraid of each other instead of what they should be telling you; that nobody deserves to be treated as less than human for an accident of birth."
Deep in a cave in the wilds of eastern Ohio, a wizard squeezed the hand of a sorcerer as he watched Arthur speak. He stared in awe as the man who teased his lover over the color of his wardrobe became a man who could change the world.
"They're also no different from me. None of you are. I did what I did two thousand years ago because I was the only one who could, and I did it all without magic. I did it with steel and blood and training and hours upon hours spent perfecting my skills. And after all that training and all the battles I've fought, I wake up to a world where I couldn't defeat a teenager.
"You have magic. Wonderful, amazing magic. You can perform marvels without thinking, wonderous marvels that kings would have once given their entire kingdoms to see just once in their lives. Magic is power. And power can be change. All of you have that power inside of you. The magic to make things better.
"All you have to do is want it."
The image of Arthur paused and there wasn't a single person watching around the country who didn't feel that Arthur was looking at them personally.
"I want it. I want it for you. But that means nothing if you don't want it, too. I can't force change on you any more than your government should be able to force you to live the lives you lead. So, you have a choice. A real choice, probably for the first time in your lives. If you don't want anything to change, if you're happy with people you've never met planning your life out for you, if you're okay with people being killed and tortured because they said something wrong or made the wrong person angry, if you can support a government that kills children because they don't want to hunt their own kind, if you think that's a price worth paying for the life you have, then nothing will happen. Everything will stay the same and that will have been your choice.
"But if you want things to be different, if you want to decide for yourself how to live your life, if you want to have a government that protects you without ruling you, and if you're willing to fight, and kill, and maybe die for it, then you can join me. Because I spent my first life fighting for freedom, and I see no reason not to spend my second doing the exact same thing. If that's what you want too, then come to Ohio. Sorcerer or wizard, young or old, it doesn't matter. Head towards the east when you get here, make yourselves known, and I'll find you. You don't need to make your decision now, either. If you're unsure, or scared, or think that fighting the government is impossible, then wait. Live your life the way you always have. Go to work, go to school, take vacations, raise your family; but pay attention to the world around you. Ask questions, even if they're uncomfortable. Even if you only ask yourself."
Arthur paused, then, and even on the smallest of crystals few people missed the way his eyes hardened.
"But most of all, pay attention to what I do next. Because I'm going to show you that nothing is untouchable, and no one is invincible. Not a government, and certainly not a prime minister. You outnumber them. And it's long past time they were afraid of you."
Suddenly, the image grinned, and this time no one missed its sharpness or the way his eyes flashed with challenge and malice. There was a sword in his hand now, seemingly pulled out of thin air, and more than a few people gasped and stepped back when he held it up in front of his face before they remembered this was just an image.
"And to anyone from the government who wants to silence me: I haven't hidden where I am. You're more than welcome to come to Ohio as well. Go east, just like everyone else." He paused, and nearly everyone watching around the country held their breath in nervous anticipation. "I'll find you, too."
He lowered the sword swiftly and his expression lightened. He smiled.
"I hope to see you all soon."
The image disappeared.
◆◆◆
"So," Arthur said as the glowing crystal floating in front of him disintegrated. He took off the small crown Lee had carved out of the top of the sarcophagus with a look of relief and placed it on the floor along with Excalibur. "What did you think?"
/> There were so many things Aidan wanted to say. It was every single Arthur fantasy he'd ever had rolled up into one. He was honored Arthur was asking him instead of Lee. He was proud Arthur had mentioned the children, even though they'd decided mentioning siphons would hurt more than help at this point. That he was optimistic for the future, even though every nerve in his body was telling him he shouldn't be.
He kept all of it inside though. It was all true, but none of it was what Arthur wanted to know.
Instead, what he said was, "It's a good start."
Lee chuckled under his breath and gave Aidan's hand a squeeze. Arthur raised an eyebrow, a grin that looked disturbingly like the ones Lee flashed before doing something crazy slowly spread across his face.
"A good start," he said. "I can work with that."
◆◆◆
That night, Aidan dreamed.
He dreamed of death and war, of towers of gleaming glass, and red mountains collapsing. He dreamed of rivers meeting in the night as a sword hovered overhead. He dreamed of a shrouded man casting a poisonous shadow across the land, and the blinding lights that fought to snuff it out. He dreamed of a room filled with doors made of starlight, and he caught glimpses of the strange and sometimes familiar places on the other side. He dreamed of a fallen palace full of laughing, happy, carefree children. He dreamed of life and death, of chances taken and battles won. He dreamed of possibility.
He dreamed of the future.
And for once, in longer than he could remember, he woke peacefully from his dreams.
Epilogue
