Chapter Text
There are silences which echo like cathedral bells—spreading outward, concentric and unceasing, shaking the air not by force but by absence—and the silence that filled the morning after Arthur Pendragon died was one of these. It did not merely hush the world; it hollowed it.
The lake did not stir.
Even the birds, those small custodians of continuity, seemed to have agreed—without argument and with no sense of occasion—that nothing ought to sing today. Not in this place. Not near this shoreline, where the moss lay wet and gleaming as if it too had wept in the night.
Merlin sat still, as though motion had become a stranger to his limbs. The stillness was not fatigue, nor paralysis, but something older—a kind of reverence that even he, with all his years of magic and grief and sorrow-etched love, could not quite name. He had not moved since the Lady of the Lake had vanished, bearing Arthur's body into the grey heart of the water. Nor had he spoken. Even thought had been slow to return, arriving in fragments like mist creeping in from the edge of a ruined field.
His hands rested limply upon his thighs, palms open to the morning as if to catch it, though there was nothing to receive. Not warmth. Not clarity. Not hope.
In his lap, balanced with a reverence he had never thought to afford a mere object, lay the empty scabbard. Black leather soft with wear, the gilded trim dulled to the colour of old harvest moonlight. It was longer than it ought to be now. Without Excalibur within it, it looked hollowed—unresolved—like a question no longer worth asking but still present in the room.
Merlin had known death before. He had watched men fall—brave and foolish and some both at once. He had buried dreams with his own hands, burnt pyres alone in the woods, held fading lives close to his heart until their last breath rattled out into the dawn. But Arthur's death was not a flame or a sword-thrust or even a storm. It was a door closing behind him with quiet finality, and the realisation that there would be no footsteps returning from the other side. Not for a long, long time.
And yet—not final.
That was the agony of it. That peculiar cruelty of prophecy: a promise, yes, but stretched like goldleaf over centuries. He shall rise again, Kilgharrah had said, with that maddening calm only dragons could maintain in the face of all mortal suffering. When Albion’s need is greatest, the Once and Future King shall return.
Merlin, who had spent so many years wondering if he would survive long enough to see it, now faced the unthinkable: he had. Or would. If he endured. And endurance had never before seemed so much like punishment.
The scabbard felt heavier than any sword.
He looked not at the lake, though he sat before it as a mourner sits before the grave of a lover, but at the thin curl of smoke that rose from the edge of the horizon, where distant hearths had already accepted the turning of the year. Samhain had passed with no fires lit in Camelot. No feast. No rites. The solstice would come soon. The world would shift and turn, and winter would lay its first breath on the earth—and Arthur would not feel it.
There was no wind. Only the slow, invisible hands of time smoothing the air.
Merlin exhaled, though he had not realised he’d been holding breath, and the sound it made was small. Not a sigh. Not grief. A release of something much older—like dust escaping from a book long unopened.
In that moment, the land felt like it belonged to someone else. Albion was not his anymore. It was a place on loan. A field he had tilled with magic and mourning, only to find the crop would not rise for centuries yet.
He turned his gaze downward.
The ground was soft with dew, but the moss beneath him bore the pattern of his boots and knees. An imprint. Proof that he had been here. That he had waited.
He thought of Gwen. Of her hand, trembling around the hilt of Arthur’s sword once, years ago, in the training yard when she had defied expectation. He thought of Leon, still upright no doubt, still loyal, still standing like the last tower in a fallen keep. He thought of Gaius, whose voice sometimes came to him in dreams—not as comfort, but as memory made sound.
He thought of Morgana. Not with hatred. That had long burned out. He thought of her like one thinks of winter: terrible, inevitable, and once—just once—beautiful before the frost came.
But most of all, he thought of the boy with the golden hair and terrible table manners who had grown, by increments too painful to notice until it was too late, into the king who had called him friend.
Arthur.
The name was a wound. It opened without blood, without heat. A slow unmaking.
And still—no tears.
What were tears, after all, but water given shape? And there was too much water here already.
He stood.
The movement was not elegant. His legs had numbed beneath him, and his back complained like an old door in a forgotten house. But the body obeyed, eventually. He gathered his cloak, drew it over his shoulders as if it were armour, and secured the scabbard to his belt.
It did not fit right. Nothing did anymore.
He took one last look—not at the lake, but at the trees beyond it. The path would lead east, through the stony woods and into the hills where the old road still lingered beneath root and bramble. Ealdor lay that way, though it was not the home it had once been.
There were no roads now that led to home.
He stepped forward, and the moss yielded beneath him with a soft sound like a whisper. The silence was not broken. Only shifted. The kind of silence that follows behind, walking at your back, pressing you forward even when you long to stay.
And somewhere, far beneath the lake, where neither time nor sun could reach, the king slept in the arms of water.
The wizard would wait.