fic: Dragonscape - part 8
Dragonscape - part 8
master list
The first touch against the clear crystal surface felt electric. Merlin closed his eyes to eliminate superfluous information from his unnecessary senses, and focussed all his concentration on the Dragon. The first impression he had of the unborn Dragon's being was that of the same distant unfamiliarity which he remembered from his attempts to establish a rapport with the Great Dragon. But then a part of it began to shift and mould against Merlin's mind until they aligned perfectly. Merlin was recognised and accepted. The connection was made.
It had happened so swiftly and painlessly. Merlin had expected to have to fight for it, to force his will on the Dragon and to taste bitter rejection over and over, to have his overstrained consciousness snap under the weight of foreign thoughts and ideas, pain whipping along his raw nerve endings and sweat gliding down his back.
But what happened instead had been so beautifully simple, and Merlin now knew what it was like to be a Dragonlord - a true Dragonlord, adored by his Dragon with the easy adulation that came with an innate and harmonious connection which served to benefit both parties.
Merlin felt wonderful. He forgot about the world outside his own mind. He forgot about the dangers they were in, forgot about Ealdor falling into a planet, forgot about his mother, forgot even Arthur. In that moment, nothing existed. All the questions of the universe were answered and the answers lay at his feet, he only needed to pick them up and whatever the nature of his problems, they would be solved.
But there was something that did not fit. Something felt off. The universe ought to be infinite and still expanding, not be locked into an immutable shape. And that was where he came in, Merlin suddenly remembered. It was his task to change that: the only problem Merlin needed to solve, and then he would be free. But how?
Balinor had told him he needed to call the Dragon to life, to know its name and use it to command it. But Merlin knew instinctively that simply commanding the Dragon would not work. This Dragon was not a Dragon like all the others that came before it. It had never known any other Dragon. It had not been nurtured by other Dragons, had not been taught, and thus, had been denied the beginning of its life for too long. Even though the Great Dragon's presence had woken it from its deep sleep and coaxed it to begin the long, gruelling process of preparing itself for life, Kilgarrah proved not much of a help otherwise. The Great Dragon, too, had been on its own for so long, it had closed off its mind to protect itself and no longer knew how to open up, how to share the knowledge buried in it. The little one could only depend on itself. And on Merlin.
Merlin's eyes snapped open. Around him, the world was falling apart.
His previously-muted senses were being assaulted by the roar of rock tearing and crumbling to pieces as his surroundings shook and shuddered. Heat licked along his skin and baked his flesh through the leather of his soles; sweat prickled his scalp and under his arms. Some time must have passed since he had closed his senses to the outside world, and Merlin knew instinctively that this was the end, or very near to it.
The ground jumped and he almost fell, but Arthur caught him. He saw none of the others around: Balinor and Morgana had disappeared somewhere; all he could see was the living wall of the unmoving Dorocha surrounding them and the egg.
Merlin looked at Arthur and saw overwhelming terror in his eyes. It warred with a glimmer of hope. Arthur had put all his hopes into Merlin, and if nothing else, Merlin was not about to fail him. He did not know if he was capable of saving anyone at all, but he sure was going to try.
He turned to Arthur. "Give me your sword," he shouted over the din of the world collapsing around them.
For a moment, Arthur regarded him with surprise, then withdrew Excalibur from its sheet and laid the blade carefully into Merlin's hands. Its sharp edge nicked his skin but Merlin did not care. He gripped the hilt with both hands, his palm tingling when it made contact with the crystals inlaid in the black leather.
The crystal was right in front of him, brilliant and terrifying. What Merlin was going to do would either save the Dragon or destroy it.
Merlin took a step backward and lifted Excalibur over his head. He breathed in, forgot the chaos around him. And then he called out a name never before heard, and struck down with all his might.
At first, it seemed nothing would happen. The point of the blade clinked against hard, smooth surface - and was stopped. Merlin pushed harder. A crack appeared under the sharp steel, it ran away from it in two directions, ever deepening. Underneath the crack, the crystal darkened as small fractures spread inside it, ever deeper, multiplying. And then the sword's tip sank into that very first crack it had made, dug deeper, split the crystal clear down the middle until the entire blade disappeared and Merlin fell forward from the sudden loss of resistance.
Arthur caught him again and they watched together as the egg broke and splintered into smaller and smaller pieces. But even so, it somehow managed to stay mostly in one piece.
The space filled with howls and growls, and at first Merlin thought that it was the cry of the tortured rock, but he was wrong. For in the next second, white bodies from all around the cave sprang into motion and started running and jumping with speeds nearly untraceable to the eye. And they all had one target: Merlin.
There was only enough time for him to glimpse the inhuman snarl twisting the features of the nearest creature into the face of a horrific nightmare, and then it was on him. But Arthur was there as well, Excalibur somehow already in his hand; he pushed Merlin aside and took the creature on the point of his blade. But the next one was there right behind it, flying at Arthur in a sinuous dance of limbs. Arthur was fast and wielded Excalibur with an almost inhuman agility, slaying his opponents with one strike, chopping off limbs and parting flesh, not letting anything reach Merlin. He fought like the ancient God of War, Tsacnoryth, but in the end, he was still only one man.
It happened within the space of a heartbeat. One of the Dorocha came at him with a long, thin sliver of crystal clutched in his feeler. Arthur pushed Excalibur into the parry but he was just a fragment of a second too late. The spike of dark crystal, thin, hard and rigid, slipped between two loose links of his armour, pierced flesh, and then broke into two. In that moment, time seemed to come to a halt.
Merlin was still close enough to catch Arthur as he fell, his face registering surprise. His body was heavy, muscles slackened and failing at keeping him standing, and under its weight Merlin slowly sank down, his knees knocking hard into the shaking ground.
"No!" Merlin cried, his vision blurring with tears. He rubbed them away, annoyed.
"It's all right, Merlin," Arthur's hand patted Merlin's arm in an attempt of reassurance. "I can get up."
But Merlin heard the hitch in his voice and saw that the white linen shirt under Arthur's chainmail was stained dark already, and the colour was spreading as the material became soaked in Arthur's blood.
"Help me stand," Arthur asked. Merlin looked around, at the messy of dead bodies piled up in a half-circle around them, and then a little further away at their world which was slowly disintegrating, turning into a molten mass, and nodded. He had tried to save them, and failed. They were going to die, there was no way back now. The least he could give Arthur was to help him stand during their last moments.
Slowly, laboriously, Merlin lifted Arthur to his feet. Arthur swayed and stumbled. Merlin propped him up against the cracked egg. But the crystal was so fractured inside that it could not bear even the smallest weight, and this proved its undoing. It shattered into million little pieces.
But not only shattered; it exploded, spraying the air with a host of tiny glittering splinters. They flew through the air, reaching into the farthest parts of the cavern -somehow avoiding Merlin and Arthur altogether, even though, as close as they were, their bodies ought to have been shot full with the tiny, sharp needles.
The crystal looked nothing but white dust, but it seemed to be everywhere. It stuck to the rock, mixed with the lava inside the cavern. And then it took on a life of its own, beginning to grow and thicken and take form. In a matter of seconds, all the surfaces were covered with a thin, transparent layer of mineral: the walls, the ceilings and even the softened rock under their smoking boots. The heat did not seem to affect the crystal adversely - it only seemed to help it grow faster, separating the necessary minerals out of the surrounding rock.
Within a short time, crystal was covering every surface. Then it began to grow inwards, its shape becoming more and more symmetrical. As the crystal thickened, from the flat surfaces long, thin spikes sprouted with incredible speeds. The temperature rose higher as the rock which had not melted until then became liquid as well. The churning, red lava covered everything behind the crystal; it flowed in darker and brighter currents, forming patterns behind the clear barrier. But when Merlin thought they were going to get cooked alive, the heat lessened. Mist rose from the walls, all the liquid which had been contained in the air, even the moisture from spilled blood gathered within a cloud over their heads. And as it cooled, the dew did not fall down but drew together, forming larger drops and then those drops coming together in slowly floating jets of water, dancing around in beautiful, chaotic patterns between elegant fingers of crystal.
Merlin recognised what was happening before their eyes: the thin trickles of water were far from the roaring rivers within the Great Dragon's core, but that was exactly where they were: a newly formed crystal cave: the delicate centre of a newborn Dragon.
"Oh," Arthur sighed in wonder and then collapsed into Merlin's arms.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Later, Merlin could not recall much of the following events. The birth of the Dragon did not end with the forming of the crystal cave; it had only begun then. That had only been the first step of a lengthier process, and those who were present, were witness to everything, but Merlin was blind to whatever wonderful sights unfolded before him. It did not even register that the Dorocha had halted their attack and were stumbling and swaying around the cave in insensate, mindless daze. He only had eyes for Arthur, who lay unconscious within his arms.
The molten lava behind the crystal cooled and hardened, expanded and built up more as the Dragon sucked up gasses from the planet's surrounding atmosphere. Its fall had halted soon after the core had formed and the water began to circulate, its patterns evolving from the simple towards the more and more complicated with dizzying speeds. Soon, the Dragon possessed all the rudimentary senses of its kind, and that was when the crystal of the walls turned from merely translucent to perfectly reproducing the images of the Dragon's surroundings. It was not a necessary step in the Dragon's evolution. Aithusa wanted them to see.
It showed them the turbulent swirl of the gas giant's atmosphere, the slow expansion of rock as the Dragon built its body, the first glimpse of the star-splattered darkness as Aithusa emerged from the planet's atmosphere and took its place next to its older and far larger companion.
It knew Merlin was in distress but it could not help. It tried to accommodate him as well as it could nonetheless, by speeding up the process of its maturing. Merlin should not have encouraged it. He should have felt its distress as it stunted its growth in order to evolve its structure faster, so that Merlin could get Arthur help. For Gaius was in Camelot and he was the only one who could save Arthur's life.
Soon after the stars, they saw the sunlight again for the first time since the Dragon's birth. It rose over the planet, sparkled the rings and woke Arthur briefly. He smiled at all the beauty with which they were surrounded. But then he looked at Merlin to share his delight, he glimpsed his tear-stained cheeks, and his mouth twisted into that unsightly halfway-grimace of his which he got whenever he thought that something - most often Merlin - was being ridiculous.
"Don't be a girl, Merlin," he said and patted the back of Merlin's head none-too gently. "Everything will be all right. You'll see." And then he fell back into unconsciousness.
As the day slipped by, Arthur seemed to fall deeper and deeper into fevered dreams, but during his brief lucid moments, he repeated the same thing.
That day, Merlin saw Balinor and Morgana again. Balinor was much in the same state as the Dorocha; he walked by Merlin but did not see him, for his eyes were directed upwards, at the whirling maze of streams. Morgana came and sat by Merlin. She stayed with him for half the day, then she suddenly cried out her sister's name and disappeared. Sir Leon found them soon afterwards. He had seen Arthur fall, had thought him already dead and was relieved to learn he still lived.
"You must take him to the Great Dragon," Leon insisted. "Into the crystal cave. The Great Dragon always liked Arthur better than anyone else."
And that was what Merlin was going to do.
In the next moment, there were arms holding Merlin in a tight embrace and fingers smoothing through his hair. Merlin looked up and saw his mother's tear-drenched face smiling at him but he could not make sense of her appearance. Hunith did not try to talk to him. She took one glance at Arthur's unconscious, fever-hot body and understood that Merlin was not in the right mind to talk.
Later, he learnt that when the rock melted, and Aithusa was born, the sun domes sealed up and all the available crystal, and everything it contained, was drawn towards the core. Thus the village of Ealdor was destroyed, its corridors and chambers melted down and their material mixed into the matter out of which the new Dragon's organs formed, but the people survived.
And then, when the first day died, the tunnel between the two Dragons was re-formed, and it was finally time to give Arthur his chance at survival.
Merlin knew not how he got Arthur through the tunnel or down into the Cave. From there he took a boat, laid Arthur into its bottom and tipped it over the ledge. Merlin did not know how to steer over the streams, and the usual way would not have been fast enough to carry him to the Lake. He knew where he wanted to go and demanded Kilgarrah's help. The Dragon's consciousness was a heavy, abrasive mass against his own, but Merlin did not care about the pain. He set his will against it until it yielded.
The boat's fall changed directions midway down, and it shot sideways until the force pulling them in that direction faded. Then the boat drifted until it slipped into another field of gravity and was dragged into another fall, which pulled them yet again closer to their goal, and this continued until they reached the Lake without the bottom of the boat ever becoming wet.
Arthur was barely breathing by the time they reached the lake. The corners of his mouth caked with pink; the crystal had punctured his lung from his body being moved around so much on the way to the cave. Merlin lifted him out of the boat as carefully as he could, but the pain still woke him. They were already in the shallows, but Arthur put a hand on Merlin's arm and stopped him.
"Not yet," he said, and tried to look at Merlin, but his vision must have already been going from blood loss.
"We must go," Merlin sobbed. Arthur bestowed on him a warm smile.
"Just… just hold me for a bit." And Merlin did, and then watched Arthur's eyes roll back and listened to air whistling through Arthur's pierced lung one last time.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As Geoffrey of Moonmoth writes in his Historia Dracones, the Dragons were once a proud and numerous species. They are by far the oldest sentient species which exists in our Universe. But Geoffrey erred in his assessment that their species is of the same age as the Universe itself. He is also in error saying that their disappearance and near-extinction was caused by a natural catastrophe or the process of natural selection - however, the latter statement is very close to the truth.
To understand our argument, one must know beforehand that the species Draconis had evolved into symbiosis with the organic life forms by which they had been implanted after colliding with asteroids. In the beginning, this organic life was bacterial, but within the Dragon, the lifeforms found an environment which benefitted their development, and so they had evolved into more complicated forms of life.
Evolution drove them to influence their environment through influencing the Dragon. When they succeeded, the dynamics of their symbiosis with the Dragon turned from mutually beneficial to parasitic. But the last nail in the Dragons' coffin as a species was when some of the higher life forms to which the Dragons had provided a home developed an intellect…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Arthur opened his eyes and found himself surrounded by water.
He felt wonderfully calm and well-rested; there was none of the pain he remembered from the last moments of his life. He knew the wound was no longer there on his chest; though he was not yet breathing, he knew his lungs were healthy, his body entirely remade, even his memories were intact. They seemed to be, at any rate, for he did remember the pain all too clearly. Next time he would perhaps ask the Dragon to change that.
Along with memories of pain came the memories of Merlin's sadness as he had lowered Arthur's body into the water. Even though his heart had been filled with hope until no place remained for any other feelings, Merlin had not been certain he would get to see Arthur again if he let him go. Arthur had not been able to reassure him without telling him that he remembered dying once before - and being brought back to life the same way. And even if he had told him, it might not have changed Merlin's distrust in the Dragon - not then.
But later. Arthur only vaguely remembered the time that had passed since Merlin had brought him back here, but he could remember feeling Merlin close to him all during that time very clearly: not just being in his thoughts but physically close, and mentally. Merlin had not only waited for him to come back, but had been waiting with him.
While Arthur had slept, Merlin had talked to him about the Lady of the Lake. Nimueh had been teaching him to understand the Great Dragon better, and though Arthur still mistrusted her - a remnant of his upbringing, no doubt - he had been grateful to her for providing Merlin with a reason to stay close to him.
Suddenly, all this thinking of Merlin made Arthur anxious to see him again.
He rose from the lake, his feet barely touching the soft sand of the bottom.
The first thing he heard was a voice, speaking. "Gaius said another Dragon lives there, and there might be other people in it," it said. It was too young to belong to Merlin - unless Merlin had emerged from the wait changed in ways which Arthur was unwilling to contemplate. "Do Dragons eat people?"
"No, Mordred, they do not. And you're not supposed to be here."
The voice that answered, though… throaty and deep and suffused with shallow annoyance, which made Arthur smile, because he could just imagine Merlin's expression that went with it, and the familiarity of that beloved voice hit Arthur with an intensity which he had not expected.
He started swimming in the direction from which it had come. Avalon was on its own this time, no rivers connected to it, and there was no land at its shores, but it was floating near the cave wall; within the crystals, Arthur saw the lake's deep green ovoid reflected back at him from multiple angles and in varied sizes.
There was one crystal which did not show the lake, but it showed the face of a young boy, magnified to the size of Camelot's castle. Merlin was sitting in a boat in front of the strange crystal. He looked frustrated.
Arthur swam to him but remained unnoticed. He gave Merlin a fright when he pulled himself up over the gunwale and rolled into the bottom, and then laughed and laughed at the ridiculous face Merlin made in surprise, and then he laughed because Merlin decided to take revenge, and tickled Arthur's naked sides until he could barely breathe from laughing so hard. They ended up in a tangled heap, only avoiding tipping the boat over by a hairsbreadth, with the eerily blank face of a giant observing them from above.
The large, pale eyes blinked, and Arthur became aware of his lack of clothes. He quickly covered himself with Merlin's cloak, and then wondered why Merlin was wearing a cloak belonging to a knight of Camelot.
"Who are you?" the face inquired.
"I'm Arthur," Arthur said, feeling oddly unmanned by the unblinking gaze. "And who are you?"
"This is Mordred, your…" Merlin hesitated.
Arthur noticed that the boy had dark hair like Merlin's, an angular jaw with an otherwise heart-shaped face, and large, pale blue eyes. Arthur tried to look for his own likeliness in that face, but he only saw the barest resemblance.
"Well, it depends on the person you ask," Merlin said and shrugged. "Either he is your brother or your nephew."
"And what is this…" Arthur waved a hand to indicate the boy, or rather, the way his image was projected by the crystal.
"Oh, this is the way we communicate with Ealdor," Merlin told him. "On the other side is Aithusa's core. Mordred is not supposed to be there, are you?" The last one had been directed at Mordred, but it failed to make any impression on him because the boy's face remained impassive.
"I'm your brother," Mordred declared after several heartbeats of silence.
"Are you now?" Merlin said.
"Yes. Because I'm not supposed to be here, and whenever I'm naughty, Mama tells Father I'm his son and he has to deal with me."
"My father remarried?" Arthur asked as the meaning of the word brother finally hit home. The very idea seemed bewildering.
The boy grimaced and looked Arthur up and down. "Why are you naked?" he asked.
Merlin coughed, the corners of his mouth trembling as though he were trying not to laugh, and waved his palm in front of the crystal. "Go home, Mordred," he said. "Your parents must be looking for you. You are going to get into trouble."
And then the boy's image disappeared.
"By the way, Merlin? Why am I naked?" Arthur asked after the crystal's surface went blank. He could see no clothes prepared for him inside the boat.
Merlin winked at him. "Because I like you that way."
Arthur raised his eyebrows. "You forgot, did you not?"
Merlin shrugged and then unbuckled his cloak and gave it to Arthur, along with his belt so he could fasten it around his waist.
"So my father lives in Ealdor, now." Arthur said while he dressed. "With Morgana. And they have a child?"
Merlin nodded. Arthur felt his eyes on his body but he was more than happy to allow it. "Yes, Mordred. He's a pest but he makes your father happy - according to my mother. He says you grew up too fast. And Morgana likes being near to Aithusa, so they moved there. I'm not sure there had been a wedding ceremony, though."
As Arthur listened to Merlin's chatter, he felt his heart become lighter. He felt as though he had arrived home. Then he took a fortifying breath and asked, "And who is king of Camelot?"
"You are," Merlin said, as though it had been the only possible answer to give to that question. Arthur's heart skipped a beat.
"But I was dead," Arthur said.
Merlin sighed, making light of the subject. "After we got back, your new knights all sang your praises - no, I'm not joking, they actually made songs which exalted your virtue in battle - none of them can sing, save Lancelot - and Gwen told them how heroic you looked with Excalibur in your hand, and then Leon foretold your return. After that, Camelot would not accept anyone else as their king."
He indicated to Arthur that he should brace himself as they were about to depart. But Arthur saw no rivers to take them back to Camelot. And then he remembered something similar from the way here.
"Oh, let me guess, this is the trick again where you don't need paddles?" he said.
"I never have learnt how to steer a boat over a river." Merlin grinned. Arthur nodded and did his best to swallow down his nervousness. "Come and sit next to me," Merlin said and Arthur was quick to comply.
"So what is this I hear? We are going to find another Dragon?"
"We might. It's there, but very far away."
"So not in my lifetime."
"Likely not in this one." Merlin shrugged. "Might not even be the next, but perhaps third time is the charm. If you can unlearn this annoying habit of dying too soon." Merlin's tone may have sounded teasing, but Arthur could see in his eyes that it was something which bothered him quite a lot. Arthur sighed and pressed a kiss to his cheek in apology.
"Fair enough," he said.
"Well," Merlin said, slipping his left hand into Arthur's and gripping the gunwale with the other. "Let us go, Sire. Your kingdom awaits."
The END
master list
The first touch against the clear crystal surface felt electric. Merlin closed his eyes to eliminate superfluous information from his unnecessary senses, and focussed all his concentration on the Dragon. The first impression he had of the unborn Dragon's being was that of the same distant unfamiliarity which he remembered from his attempts to establish a rapport with the Great Dragon. But then a part of it began to shift and mould against Merlin's mind until they aligned perfectly. Merlin was recognised and accepted. The connection was made.
It had happened so swiftly and painlessly. Merlin had expected to have to fight for it, to force his will on the Dragon and to taste bitter rejection over and over, to have his overstrained consciousness snap under the weight of foreign thoughts and ideas, pain whipping along his raw nerve endings and sweat gliding down his back.
But what happened instead had been so beautifully simple, and Merlin now knew what it was like to be a Dragonlord - a true Dragonlord, adored by his Dragon with the easy adulation that came with an innate and harmonious connection which served to benefit both parties.
Merlin felt wonderful. He forgot about the world outside his own mind. He forgot about the dangers they were in, forgot about Ealdor falling into a planet, forgot about his mother, forgot even Arthur. In that moment, nothing existed. All the questions of the universe were answered and the answers lay at his feet, he only needed to pick them up and whatever the nature of his problems, they would be solved.
But there was something that did not fit. Something felt off. The universe ought to be infinite and still expanding, not be locked into an immutable shape. And that was where he came in, Merlin suddenly remembered. It was his task to change that: the only problem Merlin needed to solve, and then he would be free. But how?
Balinor had told him he needed to call the Dragon to life, to know its name and use it to command it. But Merlin knew instinctively that simply commanding the Dragon would not work. This Dragon was not a Dragon like all the others that came before it. It had never known any other Dragon. It had not been nurtured by other Dragons, had not been taught, and thus, had been denied the beginning of its life for too long. Even though the Great Dragon's presence had woken it from its deep sleep and coaxed it to begin the long, gruelling process of preparing itself for life, Kilgarrah proved not much of a help otherwise. The Great Dragon, too, had been on its own for so long, it had closed off its mind to protect itself and no longer knew how to open up, how to share the knowledge buried in it. The little one could only depend on itself. And on Merlin.
Merlin's eyes snapped open. Around him, the world was falling apart.
His previously-muted senses were being assaulted by the roar of rock tearing and crumbling to pieces as his surroundings shook and shuddered. Heat licked along his skin and baked his flesh through the leather of his soles; sweat prickled his scalp and under his arms. Some time must have passed since he had closed his senses to the outside world, and Merlin knew instinctively that this was the end, or very near to it.
The ground jumped and he almost fell, but Arthur caught him. He saw none of the others around: Balinor and Morgana had disappeared somewhere; all he could see was the living wall of the unmoving Dorocha surrounding them and the egg.
Merlin looked at Arthur and saw overwhelming terror in his eyes. It warred with a glimmer of hope. Arthur had put all his hopes into Merlin, and if nothing else, Merlin was not about to fail him. He did not know if he was capable of saving anyone at all, but he sure was going to try.
He turned to Arthur. "Give me your sword," he shouted over the din of the world collapsing around them.
For a moment, Arthur regarded him with surprise, then withdrew Excalibur from its sheet and laid the blade carefully into Merlin's hands. Its sharp edge nicked his skin but Merlin did not care. He gripped the hilt with both hands, his palm tingling when it made contact with the crystals inlaid in the black leather.
The crystal was right in front of him, brilliant and terrifying. What Merlin was going to do would either save the Dragon or destroy it.
Merlin took a step backward and lifted Excalibur over his head. He breathed in, forgot the chaos around him. And then he called out a name never before heard, and struck down with all his might.
At first, it seemed nothing would happen. The point of the blade clinked against hard, smooth surface - and was stopped. Merlin pushed harder. A crack appeared under the sharp steel, it ran away from it in two directions, ever deepening. Underneath the crack, the crystal darkened as small fractures spread inside it, ever deeper, multiplying. And then the sword's tip sank into that very first crack it had made, dug deeper, split the crystal clear down the middle until the entire blade disappeared and Merlin fell forward from the sudden loss of resistance.
Arthur caught him again and they watched together as the egg broke and splintered into smaller and smaller pieces. But even so, it somehow managed to stay mostly in one piece.
The space filled with howls and growls, and at first Merlin thought that it was the cry of the tortured rock, but he was wrong. For in the next second, white bodies from all around the cave sprang into motion and started running and jumping with speeds nearly untraceable to the eye. And they all had one target: Merlin.
There was only enough time for him to glimpse the inhuman snarl twisting the features of the nearest creature into the face of a horrific nightmare, and then it was on him. But Arthur was there as well, Excalibur somehow already in his hand; he pushed Merlin aside and took the creature on the point of his blade. But the next one was there right behind it, flying at Arthur in a sinuous dance of limbs. Arthur was fast and wielded Excalibur with an almost inhuman agility, slaying his opponents with one strike, chopping off limbs and parting flesh, not letting anything reach Merlin. He fought like the ancient God of War, Tsacnoryth, but in the end, he was still only one man.
It happened within the space of a heartbeat. One of the Dorocha came at him with a long, thin sliver of crystal clutched in his feeler. Arthur pushed Excalibur into the parry but he was just a fragment of a second too late. The spike of dark crystal, thin, hard and rigid, slipped between two loose links of his armour, pierced flesh, and then broke into two. In that moment, time seemed to come to a halt.
Merlin was still close enough to catch Arthur as he fell, his face registering surprise. His body was heavy, muscles slackened and failing at keeping him standing, and under its weight Merlin slowly sank down, his knees knocking hard into the shaking ground.
"No!" Merlin cried, his vision blurring with tears. He rubbed them away, annoyed.
"It's all right, Merlin," Arthur's hand patted Merlin's arm in an attempt of reassurance. "I can get up."
But Merlin heard the hitch in his voice and saw that the white linen shirt under Arthur's chainmail was stained dark already, and the colour was spreading as the material became soaked in Arthur's blood.
"Help me stand," Arthur asked. Merlin looked around, at the messy of dead bodies piled up in a half-circle around them, and then a little further away at their world which was slowly disintegrating, turning into a molten mass, and nodded. He had tried to save them, and failed. They were going to die, there was no way back now. The least he could give Arthur was to help him stand during their last moments.
Slowly, laboriously, Merlin lifted Arthur to his feet. Arthur swayed and stumbled. Merlin propped him up against the cracked egg. But the crystal was so fractured inside that it could not bear even the smallest weight, and this proved its undoing. It shattered into million little pieces.
But not only shattered; it exploded, spraying the air with a host of tiny glittering splinters. They flew through the air, reaching into the farthest parts of the cavern -somehow avoiding Merlin and Arthur altogether, even though, as close as they were, their bodies ought to have been shot full with the tiny, sharp needles.
The crystal looked nothing but white dust, but it seemed to be everywhere. It stuck to the rock, mixed with the lava inside the cavern. And then it took on a life of its own, beginning to grow and thicken and take form. In a matter of seconds, all the surfaces were covered with a thin, transparent layer of mineral: the walls, the ceilings and even the softened rock under their smoking boots. The heat did not seem to affect the crystal adversely - it only seemed to help it grow faster, separating the necessary minerals out of the surrounding rock.
Within a short time, crystal was covering every surface. Then it began to grow inwards, its shape becoming more and more symmetrical. As the crystal thickened, from the flat surfaces long, thin spikes sprouted with incredible speeds. The temperature rose higher as the rock which had not melted until then became liquid as well. The churning, red lava covered everything behind the crystal; it flowed in darker and brighter currents, forming patterns behind the clear barrier. But when Merlin thought they were going to get cooked alive, the heat lessened. Mist rose from the walls, all the liquid which had been contained in the air, even the moisture from spilled blood gathered within a cloud over their heads. And as it cooled, the dew did not fall down but drew together, forming larger drops and then those drops coming together in slowly floating jets of water, dancing around in beautiful, chaotic patterns between elegant fingers of crystal.
Merlin recognised what was happening before their eyes: the thin trickles of water were far from the roaring rivers within the Great Dragon's core, but that was exactly where they were: a newly formed crystal cave: the delicate centre of a newborn Dragon.
"Oh," Arthur sighed in wonder and then collapsed into Merlin's arms.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Later, Merlin could not recall much of the following events. The birth of the Dragon did not end with the forming of the crystal cave; it had only begun then. That had only been the first step of a lengthier process, and those who were present, were witness to everything, but Merlin was blind to whatever wonderful sights unfolded before him. It did not even register that the Dorocha had halted their attack and were stumbling and swaying around the cave in insensate, mindless daze. He only had eyes for Arthur, who lay unconscious within his arms.
The molten lava behind the crystal cooled and hardened, expanded and built up more as the Dragon sucked up gasses from the planet's surrounding atmosphere. Its fall had halted soon after the core had formed and the water began to circulate, its patterns evolving from the simple towards the more and more complicated with dizzying speeds. Soon, the Dragon possessed all the rudimentary senses of its kind, and that was when the crystal of the walls turned from merely translucent to perfectly reproducing the images of the Dragon's surroundings. It was not a necessary step in the Dragon's evolution. Aithusa wanted them to see.
It showed them the turbulent swirl of the gas giant's atmosphere, the slow expansion of rock as the Dragon built its body, the first glimpse of the star-splattered darkness as Aithusa emerged from the planet's atmosphere and took its place next to its older and far larger companion.
It knew Merlin was in distress but it could not help. It tried to accommodate him as well as it could nonetheless, by speeding up the process of its maturing. Merlin should not have encouraged it. He should have felt its distress as it stunted its growth in order to evolve its structure faster, so that Merlin could get Arthur help. For Gaius was in Camelot and he was the only one who could save Arthur's life.
Soon after the stars, they saw the sunlight again for the first time since the Dragon's birth. It rose over the planet, sparkled the rings and woke Arthur briefly. He smiled at all the beauty with which they were surrounded. But then he looked at Merlin to share his delight, he glimpsed his tear-stained cheeks, and his mouth twisted into that unsightly halfway-grimace of his which he got whenever he thought that something - most often Merlin - was being ridiculous.
"Don't be a girl, Merlin," he said and patted the back of Merlin's head none-too gently. "Everything will be all right. You'll see." And then he fell back into unconsciousness.
As the day slipped by, Arthur seemed to fall deeper and deeper into fevered dreams, but during his brief lucid moments, he repeated the same thing.
That day, Merlin saw Balinor and Morgana again. Balinor was much in the same state as the Dorocha; he walked by Merlin but did not see him, for his eyes were directed upwards, at the whirling maze of streams. Morgana came and sat by Merlin. She stayed with him for half the day, then she suddenly cried out her sister's name and disappeared. Sir Leon found them soon afterwards. He had seen Arthur fall, had thought him already dead and was relieved to learn he still lived.
"You must take him to the Great Dragon," Leon insisted. "Into the crystal cave. The Great Dragon always liked Arthur better than anyone else."
And that was what Merlin was going to do.
In the next moment, there were arms holding Merlin in a tight embrace and fingers smoothing through his hair. Merlin looked up and saw his mother's tear-drenched face smiling at him but he could not make sense of her appearance. Hunith did not try to talk to him. She took one glance at Arthur's unconscious, fever-hot body and understood that Merlin was not in the right mind to talk.
Later, he learnt that when the rock melted, and Aithusa was born, the sun domes sealed up and all the available crystal, and everything it contained, was drawn towards the core. Thus the village of Ealdor was destroyed, its corridors and chambers melted down and their material mixed into the matter out of which the new Dragon's organs formed, but the people survived.
And then, when the first day died, the tunnel between the two Dragons was re-formed, and it was finally time to give Arthur his chance at survival.
Merlin knew not how he got Arthur through the tunnel or down into the Cave. From there he took a boat, laid Arthur into its bottom and tipped it over the ledge. Merlin did not know how to steer over the streams, and the usual way would not have been fast enough to carry him to the Lake. He knew where he wanted to go and demanded Kilgarrah's help. The Dragon's consciousness was a heavy, abrasive mass against his own, but Merlin did not care about the pain. He set his will against it until it yielded.
The boat's fall changed directions midway down, and it shot sideways until the force pulling them in that direction faded. Then the boat drifted until it slipped into another field of gravity and was dragged into another fall, which pulled them yet again closer to their goal, and this continued until they reached the Lake without the bottom of the boat ever becoming wet.
Arthur was barely breathing by the time they reached the lake. The corners of his mouth caked with pink; the crystal had punctured his lung from his body being moved around so much on the way to the cave. Merlin lifted him out of the boat as carefully as he could, but the pain still woke him. They were already in the shallows, but Arthur put a hand on Merlin's arm and stopped him.
"Not yet," he said, and tried to look at Merlin, but his vision must have already been going from blood loss.
"We must go," Merlin sobbed. Arthur bestowed on him a warm smile.
"Just… just hold me for a bit." And Merlin did, and then watched Arthur's eyes roll back and listened to air whistling through Arthur's pierced lung one last time.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As Geoffrey of Moonmoth writes in his Historia Dracones, the Dragons were once a proud and numerous species. They are by far the oldest sentient species which exists in our Universe. But Geoffrey erred in his assessment that their species is of the same age as the Universe itself. He is also in error saying that their disappearance and near-extinction was caused by a natural catastrophe or the process of natural selection - however, the latter statement is very close to the truth.
To understand our argument, one must know beforehand that the species Draconis had evolved into symbiosis with the organic life forms by which they had been implanted after colliding with asteroids. In the beginning, this organic life was bacterial, but within the Dragon, the lifeforms found an environment which benefitted their development, and so they had evolved into more complicated forms of life.
Evolution drove them to influence their environment through influencing the Dragon. When they succeeded, the dynamics of their symbiosis with the Dragon turned from mutually beneficial to parasitic. But the last nail in the Dragons' coffin as a species was when some of the higher life forms to which the Dragons had provided a home developed an intellect…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Arthur opened his eyes and found himself surrounded by water.
He felt wonderfully calm and well-rested; there was none of the pain he remembered from the last moments of his life. He knew the wound was no longer there on his chest; though he was not yet breathing, he knew his lungs were healthy, his body entirely remade, even his memories were intact. They seemed to be, at any rate, for he did remember the pain all too clearly. Next time he would perhaps ask the Dragon to change that.
Along with memories of pain came the memories of Merlin's sadness as he had lowered Arthur's body into the water. Even though his heart had been filled with hope until no place remained for any other feelings, Merlin had not been certain he would get to see Arthur again if he let him go. Arthur had not been able to reassure him without telling him that he remembered dying once before - and being brought back to life the same way. And even if he had told him, it might not have changed Merlin's distrust in the Dragon - not then.
But later. Arthur only vaguely remembered the time that had passed since Merlin had brought him back here, but he could remember feeling Merlin close to him all during that time very clearly: not just being in his thoughts but physically close, and mentally. Merlin had not only waited for him to come back, but had been waiting with him.
While Arthur had slept, Merlin had talked to him about the Lady of the Lake. Nimueh had been teaching him to understand the Great Dragon better, and though Arthur still mistrusted her - a remnant of his upbringing, no doubt - he had been grateful to her for providing Merlin with a reason to stay close to him.
Suddenly, all this thinking of Merlin made Arthur anxious to see him again.
He rose from the lake, his feet barely touching the soft sand of the bottom.
The first thing he heard was a voice, speaking. "Gaius said another Dragon lives there, and there might be other people in it," it said. It was too young to belong to Merlin - unless Merlin had emerged from the wait changed in ways which Arthur was unwilling to contemplate. "Do Dragons eat people?"
"No, Mordred, they do not. And you're not supposed to be here."
The voice that answered, though… throaty and deep and suffused with shallow annoyance, which made Arthur smile, because he could just imagine Merlin's expression that went with it, and the familiarity of that beloved voice hit Arthur with an intensity which he had not expected.
He started swimming in the direction from which it had come. Avalon was on its own this time, no rivers connected to it, and there was no land at its shores, but it was floating near the cave wall; within the crystals, Arthur saw the lake's deep green ovoid reflected back at him from multiple angles and in varied sizes.
There was one crystal which did not show the lake, but it showed the face of a young boy, magnified to the size of Camelot's castle. Merlin was sitting in a boat in front of the strange crystal. He looked frustrated.
Arthur swam to him but remained unnoticed. He gave Merlin a fright when he pulled himself up over the gunwale and rolled into the bottom, and then laughed and laughed at the ridiculous face Merlin made in surprise, and then he laughed because Merlin decided to take revenge, and tickled Arthur's naked sides until he could barely breathe from laughing so hard. They ended up in a tangled heap, only avoiding tipping the boat over by a hairsbreadth, with the eerily blank face of a giant observing them from above.
The large, pale eyes blinked, and Arthur became aware of his lack of clothes. He quickly covered himself with Merlin's cloak, and then wondered why Merlin was wearing a cloak belonging to a knight of Camelot.
"Who are you?" the face inquired.
"I'm Arthur," Arthur said, feeling oddly unmanned by the unblinking gaze. "And who are you?"
"This is Mordred, your…" Merlin hesitated.
Arthur noticed that the boy had dark hair like Merlin's, an angular jaw with an otherwise heart-shaped face, and large, pale blue eyes. Arthur tried to look for his own likeliness in that face, but he only saw the barest resemblance.
"Well, it depends on the person you ask," Merlin said and shrugged. "Either he is your brother or your nephew."
"And what is this…" Arthur waved a hand to indicate the boy, or rather, the way his image was projected by the crystal.
"Oh, this is the way we communicate with Ealdor," Merlin told him. "On the other side is Aithusa's core. Mordred is not supposed to be there, are you?" The last one had been directed at Mordred, but it failed to make any impression on him because the boy's face remained impassive.
"I'm your brother," Mordred declared after several heartbeats of silence.
"Are you now?" Merlin said.
"Yes. Because I'm not supposed to be here, and whenever I'm naughty, Mama tells Father I'm his son and he has to deal with me."
"My father remarried?" Arthur asked as the meaning of the word brother finally hit home. The very idea seemed bewildering.
The boy grimaced and looked Arthur up and down. "Why are you naked?" he asked.
Merlin coughed, the corners of his mouth trembling as though he were trying not to laugh, and waved his palm in front of the crystal. "Go home, Mordred," he said. "Your parents must be looking for you. You are going to get into trouble."
And then the boy's image disappeared.
"By the way, Merlin? Why am I naked?" Arthur asked after the crystal's surface went blank. He could see no clothes prepared for him inside the boat.
Merlin winked at him. "Because I like you that way."
Arthur raised his eyebrows. "You forgot, did you not?"
Merlin shrugged and then unbuckled his cloak and gave it to Arthur, along with his belt so he could fasten it around his waist.
"So my father lives in Ealdor, now." Arthur said while he dressed. "With Morgana. And they have a child?"
Merlin nodded. Arthur felt his eyes on his body but he was more than happy to allow it. "Yes, Mordred. He's a pest but he makes your father happy - according to my mother. He says you grew up too fast. And Morgana likes being near to Aithusa, so they moved there. I'm not sure there had been a wedding ceremony, though."
As Arthur listened to Merlin's chatter, he felt his heart become lighter. He felt as though he had arrived home. Then he took a fortifying breath and asked, "And who is king of Camelot?"
"You are," Merlin said, as though it had been the only possible answer to give to that question. Arthur's heart skipped a beat.
"But I was dead," Arthur said.
Merlin sighed, making light of the subject. "After we got back, your new knights all sang your praises - no, I'm not joking, they actually made songs which exalted your virtue in battle - none of them can sing, save Lancelot - and Gwen told them how heroic you looked with Excalibur in your hand, and then Leon foretold your return. After that, Camelot would not accept anyone else as their king."
He indicated to Arthur that he should brace himself as they were about to depart. But Arthur saw no rivers to take them back to Camelot. And then he remembered something similar from the way here.
"Oh, let me guess, this is the trick again where you don't need paddles?" he said.
"I never have learnt how to steer a boat over a river." Merlin grinned. Arthur nodded and did his best to swallow down his nervousness. "Come and sit next to me," Merlin said and Arthur was quick to comply.
"So what is this I hear? We are going to find another Dragon?"
"We might. It's there, but very far away."
"So not in my lifetime."
"Likely not in this one." Merlin shrugged. "Might not even be the next, but perhaps third time is the charm. If you can unlearn this annoying habit of dying too soon." Merlin's tone may have sounded teasing, but Arthur could see in his eyes that it was something which bothered him quite a lot. Arthur sighed and pressed a kiss to his cheek in apology.
"Fair enough," he said.
"Well," Merlin said, slipping his left hand into Arthur's and gripping the gunwale with the other. "Let us go, Sire. Your kingdom awaits."
The END