Tales of the Once and Future King

by Anthony Marchetta

  Merlin’s steps faltered. Perhaps the sand had shifted under his feet once more. Perhaps he was surprised by Arthur’s knowledge. Whatever the reason, he chose that moment to stop and lower himself onto a toppled column. “Let us rest a moment.”

  “But if this place is failing—”

  “We have time, Wart. Rest, and we’ll speak of Avalon.”

  “In the beginning,” Merlin said, “God created existence. For all things; he alone existed before then. It was a sea of mud, without life, but it was something where there had once been nothing. It was good, but it was not finished, so he separated the mud into dirt and water, fashioned the stars, plants, animals, and lastly human beings.

  “For a time, human beings dwelt in a garden of God’s making, but in their weakness, they betrayed God and brought chaos to the garden. God exiled them to live out their lives whilst he worked his plan of redemption.”

  “The Garden of Eden,” Arthur said, “and the redemption brought by Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection. What does all this have to do with Avalon?”

  Merlin drew aimless patterns in the sand with his staff. “Many sought Eden’s gates after our exile, Wart, but they were never found. The reason for that is complex, but consider the glass blower: he takes a lump of molten glass and from it fashions a pitcher or a vase many times larger. Were you to write upon that glass, as the the artisan blew into it to make it larger, the message would stretch and eventually become unreadable. Eden was there in the beginning, but the universe is like that lump of glass and Eden the message. All creation has been expanding since God spoke it into being, but because of our ancestor’s betrayal, Eden did not grow with the rest of creation. The knowledge that made up the parts of Eden became diffuse, and the garden vanished.

  “But nothing moves forever, Wart. In the same way that a fortress collapses without repair, the universe began to collapse. It is this end that you saw. Dead stars, planets, and galaxies-”

  “Galaxies?”

  “A collection of stars.”

  “And stars die,” Arthur said. He could not imagine how such a thing could happen. Merlin had told him once that they were enormous bonfires in the heavens with enough fuel to burn for more years than a man could ever count.

  “They do, by age or by design. They can grow old and run out of fuel, or they can be sabotaged by the enemy. Morgana’s masters sabotaged many stars.

  “But in the end, it did not matter how they died. Everything in the universe collapsed in on itself—”

  “The sphere of corpse-fire.”

  “The green star. Yes. That was all that was left of creation. But as creation collapsed, the constituent parts of Eden drew close enough to read once more. The universe approached a state that the sages of your future and my past called the Omega Point, and Eden became whole once more. In the moments before the universe collapsed beyond the Bekenstein Bound—”

  “The what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. In the instant before the end of all creation, Eden became real again, and an eternal moment began for Eden.

  “Avalon is that moment. Eden at the end of all things.”

  A gust of wind all but erased Merlin’s scrawlings from the sand.

  “The Avalon that I remember was full of life,” Arthur said. “Strange creatures called the Sisters. Trees. Grass. Birds and squirrels and fish in its ponds.”

  “It is an eternity only inside Avalon. Outside, in the rest of creation, it was only a moment. Where we are now is after even Avalon. It is more closely akin to the sea of mud at the beginning of time. Eventually it will be a sea of mud once more, if we cannot find the key to defeating Morgana and her masters.”

  Arthur stood and stared at the ruins in the distance. If it was true, then it was no surprise that they looked familiar. He had seen them as he rested and recuperated in Avalon. “How do you know all this, Merlin?”

  “I told you long ago,” the wizard said with a smile, “I was born in the future and have aged backwards.”

  “A ridiculous tale.”

  “It was,” Merlin agreed, “but if I told you that I was the final child of all Creation, and that I witnessed the birth of the Omega Point and Avalon, and thus learned how to step in and out of mortal time, you would have called that a ridiculous tale as well—had you even understood it. Some truths are best conveyed with fictions.”

  Arthur did not how to respond. He did not comprehend everything that Merlin spoke of, but it was plain to see that Merlin knew of things beyond the reach of mortal men. It had always been plain, in fact. The wizard had known of things before they’d happened, healed wounds and illnesses in strange ways, and performed various wonders.

  What could he say to any of this? “This explains everything”, or “It is as I suspected all along”? “You are a mad man, Merlin”?

  Perhaps Merlin was mad, but his eyes were very calm, not at all like the eyes of a madman, and Arthur himself had seen things since Camlann that had no other ready explanation.

  When Arthur said nothing, Merlin sighed and hauled himself to his feet. “We should go, Wart. The center of Avalon is not far now.”

  The ruins did indeed grow more numerous as they walked, columns and walls rising from the sand until eventually they formed nearly intact hallways and walkways. Merlin navigated the ruins as though he had lived his whole life there—and perhaps he had—Arthur followed at his heels as though he would be lost forever if he strayed—and perhaps he would. The ruins might not have been a labyrinth, but they certainly felt like one.

  But soon enough Merlin turned a corner and Arthur followed him into a vast, open space ringed by a ruined wall and fallen columns. The far wall was half a league or more in the distance, more a hazy suggestion than anything that Arthur felt he could reach.

  At the center lay two low hills; atop each peak sat a single ruined, rotten stump. Debris surrounded each stump. Merlin sighed, and when Arthur met the wizard’s eyes, he saw an immense sadness there.

  “The heart of Avalon,” Merlin said. “Here was the Tree of Life, from which all creation drew strength and from which the waters of life came; there was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which all creation took its shape and from which all prophecy sprung. But those were the warm days of creation’s youth. Now they are dead and rotten, as are all things.”

  “Then we are too late?” Arthur asked. “If these are the trees you sought…”

  “It may be that some part of them lingers. That I might yet be able to extract a prophecy.”

  “You’re a fool, Merlin Ambrosius.” A woman’s voice rang out through the air. It was harsh and familiar to Arthur’s ears, and he was unsurprised when he saw Morgana le Fay crest one of the hills. “We are at the end of all things. Prophecy itself has died and ended.”

  Morgana was not alone; behind her stood an array of horrors. There were things like the feathered dragons from the stars, but dead and decaying; things that might have been decaying wolves, covered in maggots and mold; and, front and center, a skeletal figure wearing familiar armor.

  Mordred’s armor. His son’s armor. His son and Morgana’s. Arthur’s heart wrenched in his chest. One skull looked the same as any other skull, and the shreds of flesh clinging to the skull above the armored shoulders did little to set it apart, but the armor was clearly Mordred’s. Water, filthy and putrid, trickled from the joints in his armor. It was only when the stench of it hit him that Arthur realized that he had departed Merlin’s side. The wizard was a hundred feet or more behind him, yelling at Arthur to come back, that it wasn’t safe, that he could die even here….

  Arthur did not care. That was his son, violated by his mother’s foul magic.

  Mud pooled around the feet of all Morgana’s horrors. Not the healthy mud of a river bank, but something dull and lifeless. Merlin’s tale claimed that all creation began with a sea of mud; here, he saw it returning to that mud. The stinking water leaking from Mordred and the other horrors turned whatever it touched t
o lifeless slop, be it sand, stone, or ruined tree.

  Morgana and her horrors stood at the top of a hill of stinking mud; Arthur stood at its base. Morgana looked down on him and smiled a cruel smile. “It could’ve been you in our son’s place, Arthur. But Merlin spirited you away to the end of time so that he could use you as a weapon against my master. Look at our son, Arthur. Look what’s become of him. Doesn’t that fill you with hate?”

  Arthur studied his son and the other horrors, then turned his gaze to Morgana. She’d seduced him with sorcery, and Arthur remembered thinking her the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen that night. Looking on her now he saw that her face was thin, skin pulled tight across her skull; she was scarcely more alive than Mordred. She fought not for her own cause, but for the cause of something that wished the destruction of all things, and even she would not escape its wrath.

  Perhaps she could read his thoughts the way Merlin seemed to, for she said to Arthur, “What is existence but suffering? I have suffered for trillions of years, Arthur, while you slept away at the end of time. I am tired, Arthur. I welcome my destruction. It is my reward for completing my master’s work. Is it not better than the hell that awaits me otherwise? I will trade away my existence to escape an eternity of torment that the Creator condemns his enemies to, and I will do so cheerfully!

  “If the Creator had not created, Arthur, none of us would have to worry about pain and suffering. There would have been no betrayal at Eden, no flood needed to wipe out the Nephilim! No first born dying en masse in Egypt! No battle of Camlann, no Somme, no Ypres, no Iwo Jima, no Auschwitz! The dregs of humanity would not have spent their lives in fear, huddled in a fortress for millions of years! The stray sprout of humanity that brought forth Merlin would not have spent the remaining trillions of years fighting the pointless fight against Entropy himself!”

  She extended a hand to him, palm up. “Join me, Arthur. Help me unmake the misery of trillions of years of history.”

  “Wart!” Merlin’s cry echoed in through the ruins. “She is everything we have ever fought against!”

  Morgana rolled her eyes. The moldy wolf-things tore down the hill and past Arthur. Unearthly snarls and the sounds of combat sounded behind him, but he could not tear his gaze from Morgana’s bony hand.

  It was tempting. To end the despair. The pain at his son’s betrayal. Of Lancelot and Guinevere’s betrayals. The pain of—what was it Merlin had said? Thirty-four attempts to change history? Of failing in forgotten pasts. Of waking up in the ruins of creation, knowing that he had failed to return during Britannia’s darkest hour? To undo all the suffering he had glimpsed in the Ocean at the End of All Things, the places Morgana had identified as Somme and Ypres and still other battles.

  To end even his traitorous son’s torment as an undead thing.

  But it would end his son. A traitor, an illegitimate child born of sorcery and incest, but his son nonetheless. And Arthur could not bear to lose his son forever.

  “No,” he told his half-sister. “I will not undo our son.”

  Morgana sighed and turned her back to him. “No matter. You’ll end as everything else ends: drowning in mud.”

  Mordred leapt from the hill’s crest. Arthur was twenty or thirty feet away, but his dead son leapt higher than Arthur would have believed and farther; a single bound brought him down at Arthur’s feet, fully armored or no. Before Arthur could react, the skeletal knight seized him by the throat with one hand, lifted him from the ground, and slammed him back first into the ground.

  Arthur sank. Mud enveloped him, filling his nose and mouth and lungs. Mordred’s fingers left Arthur’s throat, and still he sank, suffocating and unable even to thrash about. The mud pressed too heavily on his limbs and chest.

  The end had come. There would be no return in Britannia’s darkest hour. All was lost.

  The end of all things.

  Arthur could not move, could not see, could not hear. He tasted nothing and felt only the press of mud on every part of his body.

  The press of mud and the grief in his heart.

  This is where the Summer Kingdom had led: death, for all people and all things. It would have been better for him—and perhaps for the world—if he had never pulled that sword from the stone. If England had never known her true king. Perhaps then, this chain of events would have been averted. Certainly, and at the very least, Arthur would have never known about it.

  And still his son would not have existed.

  It was an odd thing, Arthur reflected, a parent’s love for their children. It defied reason; Arthur recalled his only child with Guinevere, a daughter stillborn, and his grief could not have been greater if she had been cut down in play. Mordred, conceived in treachery, but loved by his father still. Even after Mordred attempted to usurp Arthur’s throne, even after the battle of Camlann, even as he himself lay dying, Arthur loved his son. When word came of Mordred’s death, he grieved for his son, as he grieved for the stillborn daughter.

  No. Suffering did not mean life was not worth living. Suffering was simply another enemy with which one contended, and Arthur had contended with enemies all his life.

  Arthur’s fingers brushed against something hard, or perhaps something had brushed against him. He could not tell if he was moving or not, but whatever had touched him disturbed the mud around his hand enough that his fingers could move. He felt something rough gliding past his fingertips, and rejoiced in the sensation-in any sensation-for a moment before he realized that it was something that he could grab.

  Cool water poured over his fingers as they wrapped around it, and then over his arm and chest. Down his legs. Across his face, carrying the mud away from his eyes. He retched, and the water carried the mud from his mouth and lungs away from him. Though it was dark, he could just make out the shape of tree roots hanging in front of him, and the roof of a cavern a few feet above his head. He pulled himself up the root system, hoping that perhaps he could find a pocket of air for his burning lungs.

  It was only then that Arthur realized that the waters came from the tree. He felt the current moving in all directions away from it, streaming away from the roots as if the tree itself was a spring.

  Arthur’s fingers brushed something that was not a root; it felt like the hilt of a sword. Arthur gripped it in both hands, bracing his feet against the roof of the flooded cavern, and tugged.

  Brilliant light flooded from the blade, illuminating Arthur’s surroundings. It was indeed a flooded cavern, and the water was clear as the air on a winter night. He could see no bottom to the cavern, only an abyss, but he felt no panic. Even as his lungs burned for air, he felt calm descend on him, and a weight lift from his shoulders.

  A normal sword would have been useless, but this was a weapon he had pulled from the roots of a tree as he had once pulled another sword from a stone. Its blade shone with heavenly light; perhaps it would cut through stone. He swung the sword at the roof of the cavern, opening a jagged gash in the rock. Sand poured in, and then Avalon’s grey light. The gash grew with every second, and Arthur kicked his way to the surface.

  Air had never tasted so sweet.

  Little had changed. Morgana and her horrors still stood atop a hill; Merlin was still pinned underneath the moldy wolf-creatures. But where the cavern’s waters lapped at the hill’s base, the mud solidified and green things sprouted from it. Life.

  “The Tree of Life,” Merlin had said, “from which all creation drew strength and from which the waters of life came.”

  From the ruined stump at its crown, he saw leaves unfold.

  Grass spread across the hills like fire; at the feet of Morgana’s horrors, it died and rotted and sprouted again. Arthur pulled himself up out of the water, reveling in the cool grass under his fingers and the sweet air in his lungs. When he looked down at the sword in his hand, he saw that the shining blade was that of Excalibur.

  The hills were no longer hills, but islands in a placid and infinitely deep lake of crystal clear water. It was
full of brightly colored fish, darting about with a joy that made Arthur’s heart sing; far above, Avalon’s sky was fading from grey to the brightest blue Arthur had ever seen.

  Morgana would undo all of this? If this was once Eden, then this was the beauty that human beings had once been made for; that they had been exiled was their fault and theirs alone, not the fault of their Creator.

  “We brought suffering on ourselves, because we listened to your masters” Arthur said to Morgana, taking Excalibur in a two-handed grip, ready for battle, “And the Creator has always been working to restore it. Now, in the last hours of Creation, I choose to fight for that restoration. For what hour can be darker for Britannia, than the hour in which all things were nearly snuffed out? Unleash your minions. Let us end this war.”

  CHAPTER 40

  When the story ended, there was a reverent silence; not even the wind had deigned to interrupt the beauty of Fox’s words.

  From behind Maddie, clapping began, and the rest of the audience soon followed. Maddie turned around to see who had started it, but before she figured it out a voice made her jump.

  “You saved our lives, Gavin Erewood.” Fox, as always, had showed up behind them without anybody noticing. “For that, I will always be grateful.” He held out his hand, and Gavin shook it. “And Gavin.” said Fox hesitantly, “Be sure to remember that your past is your past. You don’t need to live there forever.”

  Gavin nodded gravely. “Thank you, Fox.”

  Maddie turned to hug Fox, careful not to hurt him. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “In part thanks to you,” Fox answered, “Thank you, Maddie, for helping Isabella save my life. I would offer a dance to show my thanks but,” he looked down at himself, “I won’t be doing that for a good while.”

  Maddie smiled. “It’s okay,” she said, moving closer, “I’m not much of a dancer anyway.”

  “Leaving soon?”

  “Very.”

  “Good,” Fox answered. “You have important work to do.”