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It was a perfectly average afternoon in Camelot, and the Knights of the Round Table were, as was often the case, not doing anything remotely knightly. Instead, they were in the tavern engaged in the arduous task of drinking ale and discussing the finer points of recreational violence.

They were three tankards in and halfway through a serious debate about whether or not a jousting tournament could be improved by replacing the lances with extremely large breadsticks (Leon said no, Gwaine insisted yes, and Percival was wondering if breadsticks could be sharpened) when they were interrupted by two off-duty castle guards at the next table talking in low, conspiratorial voices.

"I'm telling you," one whispered in the universal “not actually a whisper” tone, "the castle ghost is at it again. Last week, all the barrels in the courtyard rolled out of their stacks and stood themselves upright. It was utterly bizarre."

Gwaine's ears, which had been previously dedicated to the tavern's bard, tuned in instantly. "Did you say… a ghost?" he swivelled round in his chair, nearly taking out Elyan’s drink with his elbow. “What ghost?”

The guards, startled by the sudden appearance of a knight in their midst, fumbled for a response. "Well, that's what everyone says, Sir Knight," one stammered, his eyes wide. "Strange things have been happening for years. Dice rolling away on their own, chandeliers falling without warning, rumbling voices from the dungeons, vases spontaneously exploding. I haven't had a quiet patrol in weeks!"

Elyan, who had always harboured a secret fondness for a good mystery, leaned forward. "Fallen chandeliers and broken vases? Sounds rather dramatic for a spirit, doesn't it?"

Leon, who had been listening to this entire exchange with the weary patience of a man who had heard every ridiculous story under the sun, finally interjected. "Nonsense. The castle's been a perfectly mundane, ghost-free establishment for all the years I've lived in it. There's a logical explanation for everything." He had, in his time, seen a great many things, but a ghost was not one of them. He was, in a word, a sceptic. And in another, a total buzzkill.

"But the dice rolling away on their own!" Elyan protested.

"Clearly an uneven table," Leon stated with a finality that suggested he had personally cross-referenced the die and table legs.

"And the rumbling voice?" Gwaine pressed.

"The wind howling through a loose stone in the dungeons," Leon sniffed. "The castle is old. Things howl."

"Well, if you're so certain that it's all just howling wind," Elyan scoffed, "I say we put that theory to the test."

"Yes," Gwaine agreed with the absolute conviction of a man two ales past sober, "Tonight we’ll go ghost hunting! A proper investigation! It's our duty as knights, isn't it? To protect the castle from... supernatural draughts."

“We should not go ghost hunting,” Percival said quickly, then followed it up with, “I mean, because ghosts aren’t real. Obviously.” He sat back and tried to look casual, which would have been more convincing if he hadn’t been gripping his tankard with enough force to dent the handle.

Gwaine slapped him on the back. "What's the matter? Scared of a little ghost?"

"Of course not!" Percival insisted. "I'm simply… concerned for the structural integrity of the castle."

Leon sighed the long-suffering sigh of a man who had once again found himself in a particularly absurd day in his life. "We are knights, not paranormal investigators," he said, exasperated. "And tomorrow is a training day!"

"Training can wait," Gwaine declared grandly, a wild glint in his eye. "Tonight we hunt the ghost of Camelot!"

And so, with that drunken proclamation, the Knights of the Round Table embarked on a quest of a rather peculiar nature. They would, they decided, meet in the council chamber at midnight to begin their investigation, completely oblivious to the fact that their ghost was not a disembodied spirit but was, in fact, a very much embodied idiot with a penchant for setting things on fire and a singular lack of grace.

At around midnight, said embodied idiot—also known in some circles as the most powerful sorcerer to ever walk the Earth, in other circles as that lanky servant who’s always late and in yet more circles as just Merlin—was creeping through the castle kitchens. His quarry: a magically enlarged rat, roughly the size of a badger and twice as aggressive.

To the casual observer, the scene might have looked like a man carrying a worn sack and wearing an even more worn expression playing hide-and-seek with a rodent. To Merlin, it was yet another Tuesday, except it was a Wednesday, and he hadn’t slept in what felt like six years.

“This,” he muttered under his breath as the rat scuttled behind a sack of grain with all the speed and subtlety of a landslide, “is my life. Rats. Big rats. Magical rats.” He kicked the sack. It squeaked in a tone that suggested insult. “I hope you know you’re making me late for the one thing I wanted to do today, which was to be horizontal and unconscious.” The rat did not appear to care, probably because had more pressing concerns, like cheese.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the castle, the self-appointed paranormal investigators were creeping down the corridor in a tableau of hushed whispers and clanking chainmail, that was far less stealthy than they believed themselves to be.

"Did you hear that?" Percival breathed, clutching his sword hilt in the kind of white-knuckled grip more typically reserved for clinging to plunging cliff edges.

“No,” Gwaine whispered. “Now remember, stick together, no one wanders off, and if we find the ghost, I’ll do the talking.”

“What makes you think the ghost wants to talk to you?” Elyan muttered.

"Because I'm charming," Gwaine said, his voice brimming with the kind of confidence that suggested he had never, in his own mind, been wrong.

Leon, who was walking with the grim determination of a man who was very much not in the mood for any of this, hissed; "Can we just hurry this along? I still need to finish counting my chainmail links before—"

Before what, they never found out. A deafening crash from somewhere downwards and to their left cut him off, followed by the kind of metallic clatter that suggested a rather significant number of things had just gone spectacularly wrong.

And indeed, they had, as down in the kitchens Merlin finally achieved his goal of being horizontal. Though it was less a tranquil repose and more the result of being flattened by a small avalanche of flour. The rat, having just narrowly dodged a magically-propelled serving platter, scampered past Merlin’s powder-caked spluttering form.

Upstairs, Elyan was also spluttering, but instead of in flour it was in fear. Next to him Leon stopped dead, straightening his shoulders, a deep look of satisfaction on his face. “Ah! Nothing to worry about! A classic case of poor stacking. I’m sure it’s just that some servant, probably not thinking, placed a crate too close to an edge, the slightest vibration would be enough to dislodge it. Absolutely nothing supernatural.”

Gwaine flinched so hard his shoulders practically met his ears. “It… it was a very large bang.”

“Yes, well, maybe it was a very large thing that fell,” Leon countered, as though this was an entirely reasonable and conclusive argument. “Come along.”

They continued their silent, clanking patrol. Percival, his mind already contemplating the blissful simplicity of his bed, was about to suggest they give up for the night, when a door behind them slammed with a profoundly rude bang. The knights jumped, hastily drawing their swords in a desperate attempt to look brave. 

The rude bang, as it so happened, was caused by Merlin, who had just spent the last five minutes at his wit's end, attempting to chase the rat down a corridor. With a series of short, sharp magical motions, he sealed all the doors with a resounding series of thuds, trapping the enlarged beast. The rat, now cornered, turned to face him with an uncertain squeak.

Further down that same corridor, Percival, who was experiencing a similar state of affairs, gave an even higher-pitched squeak of his own.

“Ha! See?” Leon cried triumphantly. “A draught! A terribly strong draught. The castle is full of them. It must be coming from… well, from somewhere. But it is, I can assure you, entirely meteorological.”

“Draughts don’t slam doors like that, Leon,” Elyan whispered, his eyes wide. 

“It was air movement,” Leon insisted with far too much conviction, “if you understand physics.”

Gwaine squinted at him. “Do you?”

“No,” Leon admitted, “but I know ghosts don’t exist, so it must be physics.”

Percival clutched his cloak, not for warmth, but as a shield against the malevolent forces of the universe. “I think… I think this investigation is going very well. Perhaps we should conclude it for the night?”

“Nonsense,” Leon snapped. “We are not leaving until you all believe the perfectly logical explanation for all this perfectly explainable business.”

Just as he finished this bold claim, the sound of a deep, resonant voice echoed through the corridor. It was a voice that seemed to vibrate through the very stone of the walls, a voice that was not of this earth. Or it was the voice of Merlin, magically enhanced to give his command a bit more… gravitas and startle the rat into submission; “I’ve had just about enough of you, you overgrown pest!” he cried. 

It did not work on the rat, but it did work brilliantly on the knights further up the corridor. They all froze, a collective intake of breath the only sound in the sudden silence. As one, they slowly turned to face the direction the voice had come from. 

There, at the end of the corridor, stood a figure. A tall, shambling figure, pale as death (or, more specifically, flour), muttering darkly to itself.

“That’s—that’s a ghost!” Elyan yelped.

“It’s not,” Leon protested, though his voice was trembling slightly. “It’s got a sack. Why would a ghost carry a sack?”

“Maybe it’s collecting souls,” Percival whimpered, already backing away slowly. Gwaine just nodded frantically, his face pale.

The figure moved towards them, lumbering forward with the sort of weary gait that suggested it had been haunting the castle since before its foundations were laid, or that it was simply very, very tired.

Percival let out a high-pitched shriek, dropped his sword with a clatter and bolted. Elyan and Gwaine followed, the latter laughing a little too loudly for someone not running in sheer panic. They dragged Leon, still spouting “plausible explanations,” along with them.

Unaware that his audience had fled in the opposite direction, the “apparition” stopped, peered down at the flagstones, and with surprising speed lunged at a blur of movement. Merlin straightened, squinting at the furious, squeaking sack wriggling under his arm. He sighed the sigh of the truly exhausted… and spotted Arthur.

Arthur, who was creeping towards the kitchens on a mission of vital, snack-related importance, was so focused on avoiding detection he barely registered the strange thuds echoing through the castle, Percival’s magnificent shriek or indeed Merlin standing right in front of him covered head-to-toe in flour.

Merlin’s eyes narrowed. "I swear, Arthur, if you're sneaking down here for midnight snacks and you don't eat the breakfast I make you, I'm going to fill all your boots with tiny stones and shrink your breeches by half an inch.”

Arthur jumped, a reflexive action that he attempted to pass off as a sudden, contemplative shift in royal posture. "Kings don't snack, Merlin!" he insisted, with all the conviction of a king who was very much about to snack. "And even if I did, it's entirely my own business. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some… late-night business to attend to." With that, he swept off with a great deal of purposeful urgency, suspiciously in the direction of the kitchens.

With a weary roll of his eyes, Merlin trudged off muttering darkly under his breath about rats, about royalty, and about why no one in Camelot could just go to bed like a normal human being.

By the next morning the knights, fuelled by a collective night of not sleeping, had reached a unanimous conclusion: the ghost was real. Well… almost unanimous. Leon, of course, remained firmly in the “no it isn’t” camp, largely because if he admitted otherwise, it would undermine a lifetime of joyless scepticism. 

“There is absolutely no need for further investigation." he scoffed, polishing a belt buckle with an unhealthy vigour. “There is no ghost.”

"No ghost? No need?" Gwaine exclaimed, looking scandalised. "Leon, this is the most exciting thing that has happened in Camelot since Arthur got stuck in his own armour and Merlin had to grease him out! We have to study it!"

"Study it?" Percival said, already backing away slowly. "Maybe it's already gotten bored and left?"

"Unlikely," Elyan stated with the solemn certainty of a man operating on a complete lack of information. “I say, we find it again, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do. Besides, what's the worst that could happen?”

Leon pinched the bridge of his nose. "Well, we could die. Or get horribly cursed. Or, worse, Arthur might find out you said that."

Elyan looked at Gwaine, then back at Leon, an expression of truly profound disbelief on his face. “Honestly, Leon, you need to sort out your priorities.” 

Gwaine clapped his hands together. “The ghost hunt is officially on!”

And so the Supernatural Haunting Investigation Team (as Gwaine had now officially christened them, a title everyone else thought an unfortunate acronym, but no one had the energy to argue with) began a week of intense paranormal study, which mostly consisted of them sneaking about the castle at ungodly hours, and calling it "research." 

At the same time, Merlin began what could only be described as the most exhausting week of his life, this also primarily consisted of sneaking about the castle at ungodly hours, but instead of research he called it destiny.

The first night of “The Plan" began with Elyan’s masterwork: a system of twine, bells, and three entirely unnecessary cooking pots strung across the corridor. It was designed to detect the faintest supernatural presence. It was also, though Elyan would never admit it, a remarkably effective system for detecting anyone with legs. 

At a minute before midnight, the contraption detected its first and indeed only presence. It was, of course, Merlin, who was racing down the hall after a goblin with a sock obsession, yawning so widely he may have dislocated his jaw. He never even saw the tripwire.

For the next thirty seconds, the hall was filled with a cacophonous symphony of bells and pots, punctuated by the frantic flapping of two dozen freshly liberated socks. By the time Merlin stopped moving, he resembled a festive maypole designed by lunatics.

Muttering very unghostly curses, Merlin detangled himself from the mess of bells and twine just as Arthur, half-asleep and carrying a plate piled high with more grapes than any human should reasonably consume, happened across the S.H.I.T. knights.

The king took in the chaos with a single, bleary-eyed glance. Then, in a moment of royal clarity, decided that whatever was happening was secondary to the need to keep his nocturnal foraging a secret from his manservant, and quietly retreated back down the corridor. The knights, for their part, did not even notice Arthur’s presence; they were too busy recording the exact pitch of Merlin’s muffled swearing for further analysis.

The next morning, Arthur pushed away his untouched breakfast and found himself face-to-face with a twine-tangled, exhausted Merlin, who fixed the king with a furious stare as he slowly poured Arthur’s favourite red wine into a used chamber pot.

Meanwhile, in the castle corridors, the ghost hunting team were utterly bewildered by the state of their alarm. It had been torn to shreds, its twine and bells ripped apart, and the entire length of the hall was festooned with a truly spectacular number of socks.

“It destroyed the entire system,” Elyan whispered, in awe. ”It must be enormous.”

“And have at least twenty feet,” Gwaine said solemnly, “or maybe it's scared of socks.”

Behind them, Percival nodded in agreement and quietly slipped a sprig of thyme into his gauntlet for protection. Leon, meanwhile, just sighed, removed his helmet, and began fanning the air with it in a weary attempt to prove that a rogue draught was the cause of all the destruction.

“You know what this means?” Gwaine asked. 

“Yes, we must complete more research!” Elyan proclaimed, his eyes shining with fevered purpose.

And so, over the next two nights, the castle was reduced to a booby-trapped ruin of strings, mirrors, and half-collapsed ghost-sensing contraptions that served mainly to trip servants and confuse visiting nobility. Gwaine, began leaving tankards out “to test if the ghost drank,” which proceeded to vanish at a suspiciously similar rate to the increasing frequency of his own hiccups. Percival covered himself entirely in “ghost repellent herbs”, until he resembled a mobile allotment. And Leon spent the whole time on his hands and knees, meticulously drawing maps of the castle, in the hopes of proving the “hauntings” were a misidentified draught. 

Their research, however, yielded a staggeringly large amount of absolutely nothing. It was obvious, then, that their next step was to engage the great unknown in conversation. They grandly titled their new plan “The Communion with the Great Beyond”, though Leon simply called it "Pointless Yelling at the Rafters."

On Saturday night Percival sat very still at the Round Table prepared to repel the ghost by sheer vegetal density. Around him the other knights covered the table in a display of dripping candles, Gwaine’s best stolen goblets, and a half-eaten loaf of suspiciously green bread. Then they all held hands and prepared to yell into the void in a profoundly pointless and unsolicited attempt at communication.

"We are here, O spirit of… this place!" Elyan chanted, swaying slightly on the spot. "Use our energy, manifest for us to see!"

The spirit of the castle did not manifest. The king, however, did. Arthur, performing the vital midnight kingly duty of rectifying the overabundance of herb-crusted caper in the larders, wandered in, chewing very loudly. He took in the candles and the profound, expectant silence, and without a moment's hesitation, promptly thrust a caper into Gwaine's gaping mouth. He then shoved another into Percival's, who was too rigid with terror to protest.

“There,” he whispered conspiratorially, his eyes darting to the door. “As far as Merlin's concerned, you never saw me here. Right?” He fixed them with an overly earnest look and, without another word, turned and ambled back down the hall, leaving his knights to their ghost hunt and a sudden mouthful of savoury carbohydrates.

“Great beyond,” Gwaine tried again, his words muffled by a mouthful of caper, “give us a sign of your presence.”

The universe, shockingly, obliged. At that very moment, in the servants' corridor, Merlin was locked in a violent duel with an assassin. The sounds of the fight—a great deal of clanging, thuds, and what sounded suspiciously like "oh, come on!"—filtered into the profound silence of the séance chamber with uncanny timing.

“Knock once for yes,” Elyan demanded. A loud crash echoed from Merlin’s scuffle. 

“Knock twice for no!” Gwaine cried. Another crash sounded. 

“What does that mean? Was that a 'yes I’ll knock twice for no'?” Percival whimpered, while ensconcing himself in a salt circle so complete it resembled a sandpit. 

“It’s clearly just loose masonry!” Leon stated, furiously scribbling onto a clean sheet of parchment until it was a frantic battlefield of circles, arrows, and footnotes of “plausible explanations.”

“Ghost! We’re here to help you move on!” Gwaine bellowed, his voice an operatic vibrato. “Give us a sign! What do you need?”

The sound of a thud followed by the clatter of a small metal object, and a long, drawn-out groan echoed through the room. On the other side of the wall, Merlin successfully disarmed the assassin, only to have his moment of victory ruined by a swift and wholly unchivalrous kick to his groin.

“It’s… it's a message!” Elyan whispered, his face glowing with a sudden, zealous light. “It wants… a spoon.”

“A spoon?” Leon said, his voice flat. “Why would a ghost want a spoon?”

“It's a metaphor!” Gwaine exclaimed. “For… for something it can’t get in the afterlife! Like… like a good cup of tea!”

At this, Leon produced a small, carved wooden model of the castle from his pocket. Tracing a path with a frantic finger, he explained, "If the sound of the 'knocks' is coming from the west wing, and the previous incident was in the kitchens, and we factor in the lunar cycle… the most logical conclusion is that the ghost doesn’t exist, and you are all going mad.” This argument was, of course, entirely ignored by his fellow knights. 

“Do you wish us harm?” Elyan asked the ghost cheerfully.

From the hallway came a loud, resounding; bang, bang, bang. The knights collectively froze.

“Three knocks,” Percival squeaked, his body rigid inside his salt circle. “That’s never good.” 

Unfortunately, before the knights could establish anything else, the communion came to an abrupt end, as their unwitting “great unknown” suddenly stopped responding. Instead, out in the corridor Merlin staggered back towards Gaius’ chambers, bleeding slightly, missing a boot, and muttering darkly about the probable loss of his ability to have children. 

Over the next couple of days, Elyan and Gwaine, in a bold new approach to communication, started randomly shouting invitations to the ghost. This provoked no supernatural responses, but did startle several servants and convince at least three cooks that the castle was, in fact, cursed. 

Meanwhile, Percival maintained an air of profound innocence as Gaius repeatedly sent Merlin out for herbs, which vanished the moment they were hung up, and the kitchens started producing food so bland it was considered treasonous due to a chronic lack of salt.

Outside in the courtyard, in a desperate and frankly futile attempt to prove that draughts were causing all the "supernatural" phenomena, Leon meticulously constructed a weather station out of buckets and string. After a full day of painstaking observation, it proved absolutely nothing other than the fact that the wind "blows." This was hailed as a scientific breakthrough by Leon and as a waste of perfectly good buckets by everyone else.

Elsewhere, in the midst of the chaos, Arthur was furious. Not at the state of his kingdom, which had slid from "functional" into "mildly cursed carnival," but at Merlin, who had failed to make him breakfast. Whether this neglect was a passive-aggressive act of protest against Arthur's nocturnal scavenging habits, or simply due to Merlin's newfound ability to fall asleep mid-sentence, inside laundry baskets, and against remarkably still horses, was unclear to everyone—including Merlin himself.

On Tuesday night, when the universe typically scheduled its worst ideas, an exhausted Merlin found himself swatting at a swarm of pixies with all the force of someone trying to swipe crumbs off a table. The creatures had escaped from somewhere, Merlin was too tired to remember where, and were now apparently engaged in a guerrilla campaign against his sanity. They were also intent on stealing Arthur's soul, though Merlin suspected they'd happily settle for his underwear if given half a chance.

That same Tuesday night Camelot’s ghost-hunting elite decided on a definitive course of action: a banishment ritual, which, in essence, consisted of drawing chalk on the floor, lighting too many candles, and wearing whatever they thought looked most ceremonial. Elyan had a blanket, Gwaine the kitchen tablecloth, and Percival a curtain topped with five cloves of garlic. Leon had refused "robes" on principle and had instead taped a mobile wind meter to his chest.

“O foul spirit,” Gwaine intoned, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and theatrics, “we command you, in the name of all that is knightly… depart from this mortal realm!” He flung his arms wide, in a pose reminiscent of someone trying to explain the size of a very large fish.

The universe, in what was becoming a profound and existential act of trolling, responded. At that exact moment, the pixies, now aflame, thanks to a misguided spell, burst through the ceiling like drunken stars, scattering salt, chalk, and knightly dignity in all directions. 

"It's here!" Percival shrieked, clambering onto a chair apparently working on the misguided belief that ghosts could travel through walls but not furniture.

"Yes!" Gwaine cackled. "It's working!"

"Are you sure?" Elyan cried, desperately clutching a candle.

From somewhere behind a diagram, Leon bellowed, "There's nothing to make work!" in direct, and frankly foolish, contradiction to the chaos unfolding around him.

It was at this precise moment that Kilgharrah chose to get involved. The dragon had been bribed by Merlin to sit in the cavern beneath the castle and provide "occasional bursts of combustion" to kill pixies. Kilgharrah, however, had a rather fluid interpretation of the word "occasional," and instead opted to produce a subtle, solid wall of incandescent dragonfire, which poured up the stairs and directly across the knights' ritual circle. The dragon’s voice boomed through the inferno: "Do not worry, I shall not leave until my task is done!"

Kilgharrah meant the pixies. The knights, of course, heard only the ghost declaring tenancy rights. Percival, balanced on his chair, toppled backward into the salt. Elyan’s candle exploded.

Gwaine declared loudly that this was “all part of the ritual” and promptly passed out.

"It's not working!" Elyan cried, shaking Gwaine violently by the tablecloth.

“Of course not!” Leon shrieked, openly sobbing into his wind meter, “it’s not real!”

A violent gust of wind extinguished the candles with a series of quiet, final puffs. Plunged into sudden darkness, everyone who was still conscious screamed. The voice boomed again, echoing like a death knell in the oppressive black: “I grow weary of this Pendragon and his pathetic attempts at self-preservation! He needs to be taken care of.”

Kilgharrah meant this as an act of profound, resentful care. The knights, however, heard a clear and unambiguous threat of supernatural assassination, entirely missing the faint, utterly exhausted voice from the other side of the fire, which simply said, "Oh for the love of... can you please just stop monologuing and stick to the plan?"

There was one final, climactic burst of dragonfire, which Leon spent curled into the fetal position, whispering, "No such thing as ghosts, no such thing as ghosts," and then a profound and frankly terrified silence fell.

Merlin staggered in through the smoke; hair aflame, face blackened and muttering to himself with all the weary resignation of a man whose week surely couldn’t get any worse. He caught sight of the knights huddled in assorted linens, unconsciousness and terror and simply said, "I won't ask if you don't," before collapsing.

The knights stared at the smouldering ruins of their chalk circle, at the lingering stench of sulphur and garlic, and finally at each other.

“It wants the king.” Elyan whispered hoarsely. 

There was a pause so heavy it could have dented the Round Table. Then Leon, abandoning draughts forever, finally said; “We have to save him from it.” 

And so a week after the overheard tavern conversation that had started this whole mess, the knights gathered at the Round Table. Collectively, they looked like an advertisement for insomnia. Gwaine’s chin was propped dangerously on his fist, Percival kept pinching himself with increasing violence, and Elyan was attempting to sleep with his eyes open, an art form he had not yet mastered.

“Right,” Leon said, rubbing his temples as though authority might leak out if he pressed hard enough. “We need a plan. A plan to… trap it. The ghost.”

“But how do we get it into one place?” Elyan asked, through a yawn. “We need something to bait—”

He was cut off by the sound of Gwaine reaching a critical mass of drool and tipping sideways off his chair. From beneath the table came a muffled curse, then an excitable cry: “Oi, lads—you’ll never believe this. I’ve just found our bait!”

From beneath the Round Table, Gwaine triumphantly hoisted the remains of no fewer than three roast chickens, a piece of divine, plot-convenient fortune if ever there was one. Their bones were scattered like the relics of a small, greasy battlefield.

“The ghost,” Leon breathed, voice trembling with both awe and terror. “It ate the chickens.”

“Of course,” Elyan said firmly. “Who else would eat three entire chickens under a table in the dead of night?”

The answer was, of course, was not a ghost but was their king. The previous night Arthur had launched what he believed to be a highly covert, anti-Merlin operation: a midnight snack-raid beneath the Round Table. Unfortunately, being royal, Arthur laboured under the cheerful delusion that rubbish ceased to exist once he stopped looking at it. Thus, having gnawed his way through three chickens, he abandoned the bones where they fell, no doubt expecting them to vanish into the ether by sheer force of entitlement.

Blissfully unaware of this, the knights determined that the ghost’s suspicious fondness for cooked poultry would be its undoing. In what was less a planning session and more an exercise in collective delusion, they determined the ghost was; possibly twenty-footed, or else mortally afraid of socks, desperate for either a spoon or a cup of tea, capable of spontaneous combustion, fond of smashing pots and slamming doors, and, oddly enough, quite chatty.

With this encyclopedia of nonsense established, they began trap construction in a whirlwind of earnest, utterly misguided activity. The Great Hall was quickly transformed into a monument to both human ingenuity and utter lunacy. Salt covered the floor in vast, erratic spirals like a drunk snowstorm. A carnivorous cairn of pilfered roast chickens rose proudly in the centre of the room, ringed with spoons—wooden, silver, and one ladle so bent it looked actively traumatised—which were laid with all the gravity of sacred relics.

From the balcony, a single rope dangled, the linchpin of the entire apparatus. Nets, pulleys, and a stolen washing line radiated from it in what could charitably be described as a “system,” and uncharitably described as “suicidal knitting.” Rows of socks were strung between chairs like a bizarre clothing-based cattle drive, intended to funnel the ghost toward the chicken altar, while overturned benches and tables created barricades that would stump neither man nor mouse but looked impressive in a tragic sort of way.

When, by some arbitrary standard, the trap was deemed complete, the knights stood back to admire their masterpiece.

“It’s perfect,” Elyan breathed. Next to him Gwaine wiped away a tear, overcome by his own brilliance and Percival clutched his garlic like a holy relic.

"It's insane," Leon muttered, privately convinced the ship of his sanity had sailed sometime around the first chicken.

That night, Camelot’s bravest warriors positioned themselves beneath chairs, under tables, and behind barricades of salt with all the subtlety of boulders hiding in a vegetable patch. Hearts pounded, hands sweated, and ankles cramped in what was less “daring midnight stakeout” and more “grown men playing hide-and-seek in chainmail.”

Meanwhile, Arthur, blissfully unaware of the elaborate deathtrap currently occupying his hall, pursued his own noble mission: a midnight snack. The faintest whiff of roast chicken reached his nose. He sniffed once, twice, and like a bloodhound with a crown, followed it straight into the trap.

There was a sound like a thousand tiny bells falling down a flight of stairs, followed by a series of increasingly violent thumps. The clothesline snapped taut, sending socks flying through the air like startled birds. The net rose in a great swoosh, catching Arthur in a spectacularly ungraceful cascade of salt, spoons, and roasted chicken. The last thing the king saw before the darkness took him was a stray drumstick bouncing off his forehead.

The knights burst from hiding, swords raised, eyes blazing—only to find their monarch hanging unconscious from the ceiling, slicked in chicken grease, sprinkled with salt, and crowned with a silver spoon perched on his nose, like the centrepiece of the saddest buffet in history.

“Oh, bollocks,” Gwaine stated flatly.

“Oh, God,” Elyan whispered simultaneously.

Leon's voice came out as a panicked squeak. “That’s… not a ghost.”

“It’s the King,” Percival whispered, his face a mask of dawning horror.

“Maybe the ghost possessed him?” Gwaine suggested hopefully.

But Leon was already hyperventilating, his face as pale as parchment. “We’ve killed the king,” he hissed. “We’ve actually killed the king. This is treason by poultry!”

“We didn’t kill him,” Percival said firmly, though he was sweating garlic. “He’s still breathing.”

They then hastily agreed on a plan: release Arthur before he woke up, pretend nothing had happened, and never, ever speak of this again. With a single, frantic thought—the rope—they sprinted for the balcony.

That was when the bang came. It rattled through the hall, a bone-deep slam that sent every knight scrambling flat against the floorboards, limbs tangling into one large, terrified knot.

“It’s the ghost,” Leon squeaked, voice breaking. “It’s here to finish Arthur off.”

But what staggered through the doors was not a ghost. It was Merlin, looking as though he had fought a kitchen fire, lost to a laundry basket, and then been lightly reheated for garnish. His hair defied description, his clothes were smoking in patches, and his eyes blazed with the kind of fury only reserved for the chronically knackered.

Behind him swept an evil sorcerer, cloaked, cackling, and reciting the sort of dialogue that strongly suggested he had recently attended an “Intro to Villainy” seminar.

“It is over, Emrys!” the sorcerer boomed, his voice the sort of deep rumble that came free with every villain cape. “Your foolish attempts to protect King Arthur end here! At last, I will have my revenge!”

Merlin, who had very clearly run out of patience somewhere around sunrise on Saturday, replied, “Could you just… not?”

As the two began flinging spells at each other with all the grace and finesse of a particularly aggressive bar brawl, the knights stared on in shock. “Merlin has magic?” they squeaked in unison, somehow hitting the exact pitch of startled guinea pigs.

The fight tore through the hall—doors slammed, pots shattered, furniture took flight—producing a painfully familiar cacophony of horrors. 

“Wait… ” Elyan whispered, his eyes wide. 

Then, in a move of truly villainous cunning, the sorcerer went below the belt. Merlin’s answering groan was so piercing, so alarming, so horribly familiar that every knight froze.

“That—” Gwaine croaked. “That was the seance noise. The ghost… it doesn’t want spoons.”

Before they could collect themselves, Merlin’s voice deepened, twisted, and thundered across the hall in the uncanny tones they all knew and feared: “Do you know the week I’ve had?” the voice bellowed, rattling the rafters. “I’ve been covered in flour, set on fire, stabbed, forced to listen to that blasted dragon, and kicked in the balls—twice! Do you see why I’m just a little bit homicidal?”

The knights froze, swords drooping uselessly, as the truth finally dawned in all its illogical, devastating simplicity: the ghost was not a ghost at all. 

“Merlin’s the ghost,” they breathed unanimously, in an inharmonious harmony of realisation.

Meanwhile, Merlin the oblivious ghost, in a final act of furious practicality, dropped a chandelier on the sorcerer. He then swayed and turned his bleary eyes toward Arthur—still unconscious, covered in chicken and salt with a spoon on his nose—and muttered, “I don’t even want to know. Eat breakfast and don’t die. That’s the deal. As long as you do that, I don’t care.” 

Then, with the grand dignity of a man entirely out of dignity, he collapsed face-first onto a pile of socks and began snoring. On the balcony floor the knights just looked at each other, their faces a mixture of stupefied awe and profound embarrassment. 

Leon, unwilling to relinquish the one scrap of being almost right he had ever known, broke the silence. “I told you,” he said quietly, “that there was a perfectly reasonable, non-supernatural explanation for this.”

Gwaine stared at him, incredulous. “Mate. There’s a difference between rogue draughts and a secret protector-slash-vigilante warlock.”

“No there isn't,” Leon said primly, clinging to his half-correctness like a drowning man.

After they released Arthur from his poultry prison, the S.H.I.T. knights stood over their unconscious king and their lightly singed warlock the knights swore an oath: they would keep Merlin's secret.

“But… Do we keep Arthur’s midnight snacks a secret from Merlin?” Elyan asked at last. 

There was a long silence, the kind that was punctuated by the distant, echoing memory of what happened the last time Arthur had tried to lie to Merlin, which had involved a very loud flock of ducks and a single, very confused squirrel appearing in Arthur’s chambers at bath time.

Then, Gwaine broke into a slow, mischievous grin. “Nah,” he said. “I want a front-row seat when Merlin murders him with toast.”

And so, with a shared nod, the knights of the Round Table solved the mystery of Camelot’s haunting, which was, in fact, not a haunting at all—just one profoundly tired warlock having an unreasonably bad week.