And the moment he’d realized he was truly stuck on repeat. Arthur 6. Merlin had been so existentially seasick that he’d tried to sit that one out. He found the nearest monastery and argued with the monks until they decided he must have a demon for a mother. Arthur hadn’t made it far without Merlin’s help, dying with a thatch of arrows in his gut before he set foot near a throne.
“Merlin!” Ari shouted again as she crossed the courtyard, Excalibur held high.
“Stay away!” Merlin cried in a horribly soft voice. He tried to use magic to write it in the sky, but the sparks left his fingers and fizzled out.
“You’ve failed Arthur so many times,” Morgana said, appearing over him, crouching until she was all he could see. The torn ribbons of her hair, the vicious mercy in her eyes. “Now it’s time for this to end. My way.”
“And what is that?” Merlin rasped.
“King Arthur needs to die,” she said sweetly. “Once and for all.”
Merlin tried to get up one more time but couldn’t. Back to the black-and-white tiles of the courtyard he went. He couldn’t see Ari, but he could hear the persistent pounding of her feet in the otherwise silenced city. “Maybe I’m weak, but Ari is stronger than the others,” he said, conviction pushing the words out. “Your old tricks won’t be enough this time, Morgana.”
“Really?” she asked. “How about a new trick, then?”
Morgana vanished from her place at Merlin’s side right before Ari reached him.
Ari fell to her knees, touching his face. “Merlin, what happened?”
Morgana reappeared with a cold smile, placing one finger against Ari’s temple, and one against Merlin’s. She sent them spinning into darkness and pain—together.
“Where am I?” Ari asked, the words silvery and unattached to anything.
She had no body, no hands, no voice—only a view. She was in a shimmering cave lined in earth that smelled of ancient water. Reflected light formed a shimmering blue net on the walls.
“We are inside my worst memory,” Merlin said, his voice beside her, and yet also far away. “Morgana has truly outdone herself. She wants you to see my deepest shame.”
“I’m angry, bitter. Hungry,” Ari said, confused.
“You aren’t. I am… or I was. Once upon a time.” Merlin’s voice pointed toward two figures in the ethereal cave. One was a woman. Kind of. She was liquid grace and glowing edges, beautiful and terrifying.
“That’s not Morgana,” Ari said. Morgana felt vile. Evil. Although really those were the same words in a different arrangement. Either way, this felt deeper, like old rot or the roots of an ancient mountain, or perhaps the unfathomable darkness of space.
“That is not Morgana,” Merlin agreed. “That is the Lady of the Lake. Nimue. To me, she called herself Nin. I have not seen her since this moment. Perhaps she is dead and gone. It was she who gave Arthur Excalibur.”
“Does that make her good?”
Merlin’s tone was so cold. Defeated. “It makes her a supplier of weapons.”
“What about the other person?” Ari asked, squinting at the weathered, gnarled figure.
“You don’t recognize him?” Merlin said, a splash of hope in his voice. “That is me. At my earliest. At my worst.”
Ari took in the bold stars and moons on the cuffs and trim of his robe, unfaded. Old Merlin was the same height and weight as the Merlin she loved, and yet everything about this one was different. White, furious hair, beard, and eyebrows. A hooked nose and wrinkled lips.
And most of all, an insatiable, cold hunger that seemed to permeate Ari’s heart.
“This interruption of yours is the worst yet, Nin,” Old Merlin said with a dash of entitled impatience. Ari barely recognized the voice, Merlin’s voice. It was so much older, the creases sharp. “I am needed by the king. He is in the midst of battle.”
“If you go to Arthur now, you’ll die,” Nin said, her words flooding the cave and Ari’s senses. “I can’t have that.”
“How can you be so sure I’ll die?” Old Merlin asked. “Is there a prophecy?”
“Prophecies are for amateurs,” Nin said, her watery voice freezing over. “You’re not going anywhere, all apologies.”
Old Merlin pushed up his sleeves, crooked, knobby fingers pointed at the Lady of the Lake. “Arthur needs me!” His voice cracked with desperation, and love, which overtook the anger of this memory. “Free me!”
“How about some more power, Merlin? To make up for your impending loss.” Nin sighed. “You’re not going to take this well. I haven’t been looking forward to it. But I’m not so cruel as to send you spinning through eternity without a few perks.”
The ancient magician’s hands drooped. “What kind of power?”
“The ability to sense the future? To see forward a bit, the rough edges of events, anyway. It might help, given your… condition.”
“Condition?” Ari found herself murmuring.
“My backward aging,” Merlin elaborated from beside her. His presence had fractured as if the memory was breaking him into pieces. “I return to this moment often. So often. I want to crawl back through time and change everything. Stop it. Prevent it. Save Arthur… instead of treating myself.”
“I accept your gift,” Old Merlin grumbled, sounding bored.
Ari watched Nin press a kiss that beamed with light onto Old Merlin’s head. Almost instantly, Old Merlin fell to his knees, sobbing, holding his brittle chest.
“What happened?” Ari asked.
“That was the first time I saw the future,” Merlin said. “The end of that battle I’d just been stolen from.”
“What did you see?” Ari asked, fear shimmering. Merlin didn’t answer, and she wished she could hold his hand, frustrated that they were both simply wisps of consciousness tied to each other inside this trauma. “I’m here, Merlin. Tell me what you saw.”
“I don’t have to,” Merlin finally said.
Old Merlin disappeared as the entire cave faded into a blackness that became night. The moon took forever to glow, and the stars were hidden. All around, Ari smelled death. Now she was relieved that she didn’t have a body as her mind glided over countless corpses, following Old Merlin across the remains of a field washed with blood and death.
Thousands of soldiers, knights, and flags littered the field.
Broken and fallen. Without hope.
Old Merlin moved toward the heart of the misery, where one lone figure sat, clutching a body to their chest. Ari’s shock almost overpowered Old Merlin’s sadness in that moment. Almost. The person holding the fallen body was Morgana. Not the ethereal, bluish Morgana, but a woman of flesh and sorrow. The dead man in her arms was wearing a perfect suit of armor, his golden crown dimly glinting in the grass beside him.
“Merlin, is that…”
“My Arthur. The first.”
Old Merlin’s voice shook as sadness turned to anger. “So Mordred has murdered his own father. Stolen the kingdom of peace for his unrighteous purpose. I will find him and train him to do what is right.” But even as he said the words, his eyes trailed to the body beside Arthur’s—the one speared through by Excalibur.
“That’s Arthur’s son, Mordred,” Merlin whispered to Ari. “They killed each other.”
“Why?” Ari asked, shocked.
“Greed. Power,” Merlin said. “What other answers are there?”
Morgana’s voice pitched high and broken. “Camelot is as dead as the Pendragon line, you damned fool. There is no king. There is no kingdom. Already the remains of these armies torture every village and kill anyone loyal to your cursed crown. Your entire life is wasted. And I will punish you for eternity.”
The night faded all around them. Ari felt nothing but Merlin’s presence beside her as the darkness ached with depth.
“Well. She made good on that promise,” Merlin finally said, a forced joke that fell like a stone through the nothingness.
“Why was Morgana so attached to Arthur?”
“They were sister and brother,” he said, his voice faint, weak. The blackness around them became dizzying. “The anger that flows through her magic keeps the cycles in motion and tethers me to life, so she can give me yet more pain. At least that has been my best guess for a few thousand years.”
“So we have to convince her to stop this,” Ari said. “I can do it. I’ll get through to her. I’m not afraid. We just have to get out of this memory, and then I’ll convince her to help us.”
Merlin laughed as though he loved Ari for her foolhardiness. “Ari, she’s not to be trusted. And I fear I should warn you about Gweneviere before I lose my nerve.”
“Gwen? What does Gwen have to do with any of this?”
“She is part of Arthur’s story. A very important part. A rather… sad part. She will hurt you in the end, I’m afraid. So very badly.”
“Bullshit,” Ari said, sure of herself. “Maybe that’s how it was with Arthur and his Gweneviere, but that’s not how it is with Gwen and me.”
“Ari…” Merlin said, as the endless darkness around them clarified with bursts of starlight. Constellations.
“Where are we now?” Ari asked.
“I believe you’re meant to tell me that.”
The view before Ari crystallized as a silver spaceship tore through the dark, coming straight at them, fleeing a red soiled planet that Ari’s heart recognized even if her mind could not paint it. Ketch. The spaceship sped closer, and Ari could not stop a scream in the moment it overtook them and trapped them inside a control room full of warning lights and screeching alarms.
Ari stared at her mother: dark, straight hair hanging over one arm as her hands flew over the controls. “What is this, Merlin?”
“Your worst memory, I imagine.”
Ari’s father was there, too, at her mother’s side. “We’re marked. We only have minutes.”
“We have to get beyond the static. Then the signal will reach the rest of the galaxy. And everyone will know. That barrier is going to make it hard to—”
“We’re not going to make it. They’re going to shoot us down,” Ari’s father said, and Ari started crying; the terror that came with this memory was too much. Her mind had blocked it for so many good reasons.
“They have to know the truth!” Ari’s mother yelled.
“Ari,” Merlin’s voice pleaded from beside her. “Where are you? If this is your memory, you must be here.”
Ari didn’t have to answer because at that moment, her father heard small sobs and pulled a tiny Ari from beneath the control panel. Before little Ari could fit into his arms, she ran, out of the room, down the hall, nothing but her parents’ strained shouts behind her.
Little Ari kept running, looking over her shoulder.
“You’re so scared,” Merlin said, as if he’d never felt such fear in all of his many lives.
“I was,” Ari admitted. At that moment, the skinny girl stopped running. She halted in the hallway to look out the porthole at what seemed like solar flares headed straight for them. “But a voice in my head told me where to go. He said I was going to be all right. That was Arthur,” she realized.
Merlin and Ari watched as the tiny girl ducked through the doorway of the hydration circuit just as the airlock clapped tight. A blast sent her across the room with a bone-dislodging shake before the gravity was gone.
Seven-year-old Ari floated, legs tucked in, arms sealed around her tiny body.
Alone.
“Stop this,” Ari begged aloud. “Stop the memory.” She could handle her parents’ last moment. Even the blasts of fire streaking toward them.
But not this part.
The thirst came first, and tiny Ari fought to propel herself into a huge water barrel to swallow the last liquid bubbles floating inside it—but then she could not get back out. The walls were covered in coils of red-hot wires. She tried to push off, the heat so great she flailed and crashed into the other side. And blacked out from the pain. Every few days she tried again, her body stung all over, etched with hundreds of razor-fine circle burns across her back, her arms, her chest.
“Ow,” Merlin mouthed each time she was burned, feeling the agony that came with the memory. “Ari—”
“Quiet,” Ari whispered. “He’s coming.”
A boy’s round face peered over the edge of the barrel. Nine-year-old Kay’s reddish hair was already turning gray, and he cried when he saw Ari’s clothes burned to tatters, her frame frozen in pain, her eyes as wild and glassed as a dying animal’s. He cried so hard he could not help her, but the women who were with him floated in and down, one tethered to the other. The woman closest had a young, kind face and silver hair.
She reached a hand to little Ari, and Ari took it.
The memory began to fade to black, but Ari fought it. Her past misery was a blade, but she would not let go until she’d grasped the handle of her hope. She found herself reaching for the two women, even as they turned translucent. “They spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand, and yet I knew they were saying I would be okay. I couldn’t believe them at first, and when they took me on board their strange, tiny spaceship, I found a podlike bed that swung like my mother’s arms. I never wanted to move. I wanted to die there. But I didn’t.”
Merlin and Ari were in the black nothingness again. He was silent beside her for a long moment. Too long.
“When will we escape these memories?” she asked.
“When Morgana’s magic has worn off.” Merlin sounded distant as if he were busy tucking his feelings into his deep robe pockets, trying to hide them from her.
“Why did she want us to share this, do you think?”
“Because she is cruel.” There, again, Merlin seemed cracked. Ari felt resolved, more determined to defeat this reincarnation thing. This King Arthur cycle. This Mercer nightmare. Whatever it was, it was going down.
“Merlin—”
“He saved you. King Arthur saved you. He told you where to hide on that ship. Like he knew what was going to happen.”
“Yes. Does that mean something?”
“Perhaps.”
Ari felt warm. Something pressed against her, tugged and whispered. She could feel her lips again, her breath, her heartbeat. “Merlin, something’s happening to me. How do you feel?”
“Scared,” he whispered into the moment that ripped them from each other. “Alone. Like always.”
Ari felt herself shouting from the pain of their paired consciousness detaching. Her breath cut in fast and sharp, hampered by lips on her lips.
“Gwen,” she groaned, and Gwen gasped with relief, tugging Ari into a sitting position.
Ari opened her eyes. She was on Error, on Kay’s crumpled bed in the pilot’s cabin. “What happened?”
“That ghost woman attacked you,” Gwen said, smoothing Ari’s hair back and kissing her cheeks, her jaw, her neck. “You’re okay. Thank the stars, you came back.”
“Is everyone else okay?” Ari murmured, her eyes adjusting slowly and painfully to the light in the small room.
“Lam, Kay, and Val woke up days ago. They said they’d been stuck in their worst memories. You and Merlin… We were starting to worry that you wouldn’t wake up.”
Ari pulled away from Gwen to face the small body next to her. Her hand was clasped in his as if they’d been that way out of raw necessity. She squeezed his fingers. He didn’t squeeze back.
“Merlin,” Ari said, leaning over him, shaking his shoulders. “Merlin!”
When that didn’t work—when his thin, young face stayed pale and still—she leaned over and pressed her cheek against his. “Wake up, old man. We’ve got a universe to save.”
His eyes fluttered open, and Gwen let go of a huge breath. Together, the girls helped him sit up. They gave him water. When his gaze finally came back into focus, he looked at Ari—and then away, shame turning his cheeks red. “You know now. I chose more power over Arthur,” he hiccupped. “I caused his death. And the cycle. I never—”
“Merlin,” Ari said. “We’re not back there. We’re here now. Together. Gwen,” she turned toward her girl. “Can you bring the others in?”
Gwen nodded and left the room.
Ari put her hands on his shoulders. “Whatever the hell Morgana wanted to happen backfired. I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you. I want to help.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I want to help Arthur. We’re going to end the cycle. I’m so fucking fired up now, that damn blue witch has no idea. So, what do we do?”
“The steps,” Merlin murmured. “The next step in the cycle is to face the greatest evil.”
“Mercer. Wonderful. And then?”
“Unite humankind.”
“And then?”
Merlin shifted. “I’ve never gotten that far. Not even with the first King Arthur. He died before his vision of Camelot could spread and help others. Well, you saw.”
Ari blew out a huge breath. “So, defeat Mercer. Unite humankind.”
“Ari’s already on her way with that,” Kay said as the room filled with relieved faces. Her brother crossed his arms before the end of the bed. Val pounced on Merlin, smothering him in affectionate squeezes that made his pale skin bloom with the best shades of pink. Gwen came back to Ari’s side and folded herself into the corner of her arm and hip.
Lam and Jordan stood by the door, gorgeous and gloriously different sentinels, one in purple silk, one in silver armor.
“What did you say, Kay?” Ari asked.
“Ari is a damn hero. Isn’t she?” Kay looked at the others, and they nodded.
Gwen sat forward and sort of batted her eyelashes. “Don’t freak out, baby girl, but the situation with Mercer has gotten a little operatic.”
“Oh, I love where this is going.”
“Honestly, this entire situation is a damn miracle,” Val said. “We all could have been arrested by Mercer and sent to Urite.”
Urite. Ari couldn’t help going cold as she remembered the Administrator taunting her about her parents. That felt like years ago, but it had only been a few days, hadn’t it? “Tell me what happened after Morgana messed with us.”
Once & Future Page 13
