[fic] [Tales of Arcadia] Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet 165/?
Your Future Hasn’t Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 10th February, 2024
Camelot castle, frankly, smelled slightly of mold, so Claire was just as glad to step out of a portal into the green midnight sanctuary of the Wild Wood.
Or at least she was until she realized Jim wasn't the only troll there, and one of the others (huge, red, no one she knew) was charging her, yelling about dinner.
This was so discordant with what she expected that Claire actually froze for a second, her brain blanking out just long enough for the troll to reach her.
Her brain kicked back into drive as a huge stone hand circled her rib cage, surely intending to crush--
"Back off!" Claire snapped, and slipped into the Shadow Realm.
She took a moment to breathe, heart hammering.
The shadows surrounded her, whispering, soothing.
As the sudden kick of adrenaline crested and ebbed, anger started to grow. And with anger, planning.
Her hand wrapped around the amethyst ring that hung on a chain around her neck.
"Revertere ad me," she growled, barely waiting for her armor to form around her before opening a portal back to the woods.
Jim breathed a sigh of relief as Claire slipped into shadows.
Next to him, Callista was staring. "What the heck--?!" she demanded.
Her lack of profanity made him want to chuckle. "I think you mean 'what the hrgzfeld'?" he offered. The red troll who had been trying to grab and eat Claire, meanwhile, was looking at his empty hand dumbfounded. He kind of reminded Jim of a video Toby had once shown him, about a raccoon who had tried washing cotton candy before eating it.
Mister Red got blasted by a shot of shadow magic from behind, ending up faceplanting into the ground at Jim's feet, revealing a pissed-off sorceress in blackberry armor behind him. She spat a word at the fallen troll. Jim was very sure Señor Uhl would not be including it in a pop quiz for Spanish class.
Jim loved his girlfriend so, so much.
"Whoa," said Callista, sounding impressed.
Claire looked up from her felled (still breathing, though) enemy. "Jim!" she said, and with a gesture and her expression indicated what the hell?!
He grimaced. "Gumm-Gumms," he said simply, hoping and knowing that would be explanation enough.
Claire's eyes widened.
Which was when, with a howl, the other Gumm-Gumms set upon her.
Growling, Jim darted forward, hitting and punching and throwing until he reached Claire. Who, stood atop the red body, was holding her own. (Never underestimate a battle trained wizard, Jim thought as he reached her.)
Between blasts of purple-black magic, Claire scaled the crystal spikes that made up his mane in this form. She clung to him easily, balanced even as he picked up enemies and threw them. It felt like a maneuver they'd practiced a hundred times before, covering one another's blind spots.
They'd never done this, but it felt so familiar somehow. So right.
What did surprise Jim was Callista by his side, throwing hits of her own. He noted a tendency toward kicks in the gronk-nuts, and had the fleeting question of if Rule Three had been handed down from the first Trollhunter.
It went on that way for what seemed like forever, but might have been only a few minutes, until a bellowed roar cut over all the noise.
The Gumm-Gumms, those still on their feet, paused. As did Jim, chest heaving.
"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gunmar the Black, stalking out from the darkness beneath two trees. Bular flanked his father, fingers twitching, clearly wanting to draw his sword.
Jim could feel the moment the penny dropped for Claire, because her fingers tightened on the crystal she was using for balance.
But Claire, wonderful Claire, rallied. "They attacked me," she spat.
Gunmar's eye narrowed. "A human."
"A wizard," Jim corrected.
"And you stand with her," Gunmar growled with a voice like gravel.
"Hey, she's the one who got us out of that dungeon," Callista snapped. Gunmar's glower shifted to her. "We owe her."
"Father," said Bular.
Gunmar held his hand up, stilling his son as he considered. "So. A wizard who does not bow to that human king."
Claire snorted. "I wouldn't spit on Arthur if he was on fire."
"Interesting," the warlord rumbled. His head tilted to one side, considering. "Perhaps we can come to some... arrangement."
"I wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire either," Claire clarified.
Oddly, that seemed to please Gunmar, because he smiled. Jim tensed, because that was a lot of teeth, but all Gunmar said was, "I like your spirit, little wizard." He gave a rumbling chuckle. "Leave her alone," he directed his troops, and turned to go. "Unlike that fool Merlin, she may yet see the error of her ways."
Grumbling, the Gumm-Gumms obeyed their lord, most of them following him. A few picked up the trolls that lay unconscious on the ground. But most were left where they lay.
Jim hefted a sigh when it was just him, Callista, and Claire left. "Anyone ever tell you you have cast iron gronk-nuts?" he asked his girlfriend as she jumped back down to the ground.
"Someone's got to," Claire bantered back. She sighed, wilting. "I don't have to guess what happened, do I?"
"Nope." He shook his head. "How's things back in the castle?"
"It's a mess," Claire reported. "Arthur's trying to court Aja--"
"What?!"
Claire ignored his interjection and continued, "And the timeline's all out of whack, so Douxie's as stressed as I've ever seen him."
Which was a statement that had some serious competition.
"Timeline?" asked Callista.
"Uh." Jim exchanged a look with Claire.
"Douxie's another wizard, and right now he's trying to make all this," Claire gave a wave at the woods, and, by extension, the war, "come to a positive outcome."
She was so much better at improv than Jim.
Callista snorted. "A good outcome'll be when Arthur's dead and all his knights with him."
Jim bit his tongue on that. Because he couldn't exactly disagree. But at the same time, saying he agreed with someone whose justifiably formed opinions were being enhanced by gravesand? Not a great thought either.
"Anything else?" he asked Claire instead.
She looked thoughtful. "Mary and I are Morgana's handmaidens, and she's found a way for Mary to generate electricity."
Jim's eyes widened. "Whoa." He'd known Morgana wasn't stupid, but electricity in what Douxie called the Dark Ages? That was impressive.
"What's electricity?" asked Callista.
"Lightning," said Claire.
Callista's eyes widened. As they should. Trolls, Jim knew from intimate experience, weren't any more likely than humans to survive a direct lightning strike.
Though at least this time around he'd missed out on getting struck by lightning and then plummeting to his doom.
"Hey," Claire said to him, "you wanna get out of this place for a while?"
Jim wanted nothing more. "Sure," he said, trying to sound casual.
Claire's gaze slid to Callista. After a second, she offered, "Want to come with us?"
Callista paused. Narrowed her gaze. "Are you two gonna be mushy?"
"Uh, probably?" Claire offered.
Callista made a face. "No thanks. Mushy stuff grosses me out."
Jim had to laugh even as Claire opened a portal. "You know," he said, "there's a wizard you might want to talk with about that. I think you two have things in common." And then he was through Claire's portal and gone before Callista could come up with a parting shot.
Claire's portal let out, as he'd half thought it might, in what would be Jim's backyard, nine hundred years from now. He sighed, his shoulders relaxing, and let himself slip back into half-troll form, even as Claire came out of the shadows, her portal closing to a point and vanishing behind her. "Probably just as well Callista didn't come with," he said. It was close to sunset, but if he hadn't had the sun stone in his amulet, he would have been in trouble.
"Eh, I could manage it," Claire said, a small swirl of darkness over her hand reminding him that his girlfriend was, in fact, the mistress of shadows.
"You are amazing," Jim told her, and meant it.
"Come on," Claire said, gesturing at the ground by the boulders. "I want to take a good look at that." Her gaze was locked on the shard of Gaylen's Core that was stuck in his chest.
"It doesn't hurt," Jim reported, but sat nonetheless.
She scoffed. "The last one didn't hurt either, until it got shoved deeper." Claire perched on his lap. Violet magic sparkled through the air, her armor vanishing, returning to the ring that held it. Purple skirts pooled around her instead as she reached out careful, delicate fingers, touching the shard carefully, tracing around it on the amulet.
Jim held still, wondering what she saw. Wondering what Douxie had taught her.
"I have no idea what I'm looking at," Claire confessed eventually.
That made Jim laugh. He leaned his head back, horns tapping against the boulder.
"Stop laughing!" Claire smacked his shoulder.
"If you wanted cuddle time, all you needed to do was ask," he informed her.
Claire glowered. Then slumped against him, her head leaning on the side of his chest that didn't currently have a crystal sticking out of it. "Officially," she said. "Officially, the last twenty-four hours suck and I'd like a refund."
"Hey, it's not that bad," Jim tried to soothe, his arms wrapping around her.
"You're injured. We're stuck in the past. The timeline is broken so we can't go home. And Callista is siding with Gunmar," Claire listed out. "I don't see how it can get much worse."
"Okay, it is that bad," Jim had to admit. He sighed. He didn't want to think they were screwed, because they'd only been in the past less than a day, but... yeah. Claire was right. "There has to be some way for us to fix it all. We always do," he told her.
Her fingers whispered around the shard again. "And every time we do, you get hurt more."
He wanted to tell her he'd had worse, but Jim was pretty sure that would not help Claire's worries at all. So he sighed and relaxed back against the sun-warmed rock. He could feel it even through the armor, and it was slowly making things unknot. "If we can't," he said, "we'll leave Camelot. All of us. And we'll come back here, and build ourselves some houses, and live in Arcadia until it becomes Arcadia." He smiled. "One of the benefits of possible immortality," he pointed out.
"Do you really want Steve as a next door neighbor forever?" Claire groused.
Jim shrugged. "He's not so bad." But then he sighed again. "Douxie wouldn't come," he admitted. "He knows too much about how the world's going to get screwed up. He'll want to be in the thick of it for nine hundred years, trying to fix things."
Claire snorted, sounding amused. "So you're saying that we have to fix the timeline so our resident master wizard doesn't have to spend the next nine hundred years doing it?"
"Nah." He closed his eyes, trying to relax and force his tension to leave. But there was so much to do. "We have to fix it so we can all go home. And I don't mean just this clearing, with these rocks."
Home wasn't a home, without the people who made it one.
Claire was silent for a minute. Then she straightened up. "Do you think, if we took Callista back to her home village... do you think that would be enough to neutralize the gravesand for her?"
Jim's lips formed a line. "I don't know. I mean, it helped her find her name last time, but... is that enough good feelings to break her out of the bad?" He shook his head and breathed out through the nose. "I think," he said, "that if we could just get her and the other gravesanded trolls to a big enough heartstone, that might work to break the gravesand."
"Dwoza has a heartstone," Claire said speculatively.
Jim shook his head. "Not big enough. It's like the size of New Jersey's. We need a real big one, like the one here." His hand patted the ground. "Or the one in Camelot."
"Camelot...?" Claire's eyes widened. "Wait. You mean the Heart of Avalon is a heartstone?!"
Jim nodded.
Claire considered it.
Then she said another one of those words that Señor Uhl would definitely not be grading on. "So we have to get the gravesanded trolls back into Camelot, sight unseen, close enough to the heartstone that it'll take care of the gravesand." She cast her eyes to heaven. "Why can't I just portal them to the one here? It would be easier. And safer."
Jim blinked. "I don't know. You could, I guess. Can you get close enough?"
"Um." Claire held out her hands before herself. A small portal swirled into existence, then vanished. She tried again, to the same result.
"I can't get through," she said slowly.
Jim straightened. "You're being blocked?"
She shook her head. "It doesn't feel like Hong Kong did." Claire bit her bottom lip. "I think... I think there isn't a cave yet."
"Great," said Jim, head knocking back against the boulder. "The trolls dug it out after they moved here. The Heart of Avalon it has to be, I guess."
She slugged Jim in the uninjured shoulder. "You never make things easy, do you?"
"Hey, I didn't dose them with gravesand!" Jim protested.
"No, you just broke them out," Claire retorted.
Jim stared. "You can't seriously be blaming me for what I did while I hopped up on troll cocaine."
Claire hesitated, then exhaled, slumping back against him. "I don't. I'm sorry. It's just...."
"It's just been a rough day," Jim agreed softly. He closed his eyes. "I wish we didn't have to go back. That we could just stay here forever."
"Yeah," said Claire, voice soft. "Me too."
Douxie slept poorly, plagued by half-realized dreams of just how wrong things might go. He kept half-waking to find his fingers clutched on the closed Time Map.
As a result, it was almost a relief when he was fully woken a couple hours later by a shadow portal forming in the storage room, disgorging Jim and Claire.
Douxie winced as moving figures caused the enchanted torches to suddenly flare to life, searing red and black shapes into his retinas as he blinked, trying to adjust. "What--" His voice sounded like gravel as he levered himself up. He coughed into his sleeve and tried again. "What brings you here?" he asked. His fingers twitched on the Time Map. He should check it, see if anything new had happened to further skew the timeline--
Jim and Claire looked at each other, impossibly soft. And concerned.
"You okay?" his brother asked, dropping to sit cross-legged in front of Douxie.
He waved off the concern. "I just need a few weeks of solid unconsciousness, don't worry about me. What's up?" And a look at the Map.
Claire sat down beside Jim. Her eyes were fast on his fingers, holding the sleek ivory box. "Have you been checking that all day?" she asked.
"Not... all day," Douxie hedged.
Claire's lips tightened into a line. "I know you weren't there to see it, Douxie, but... Zong-Shi couldn't stop looking into the Chronosphere," she said. "It got him killed in the end."
Douxie knew what she was saying. "If I don't keep looking," he replied, his voice equally soft, "all of us might get killed too, Claire."
Her hand rested on top of his on top of the Time Map. "I know," Claire said simply. "But you have to know when to step away, Douxie. It may be our only guide to getting home, but checking the Map every time something happens isn't going to fix things. And it's not good for you."
She was right. He knew she was right. She knew that he knew that she was right.
Some master wizard he was, when his apprentice needed to point out the obvious to him.
(Merlin had never listened when Douxie had pointed something out to him. Of course, Claire saw things much clearer than a young Hisirdoux Casperan ever had. When she grew fully into her powers, she was going to be a terrifying force to be reckoned with.)
"You're right," Douxie said, and slid the Time Map into his subspace pocket. He took a deep breath, then met Claire's eyes again. He managed a smile. "So. What brings you to my humble abode?" His gesture indicated Merlin's storage room.
"I need you to take a look at the shard and tell me it's not going to kill Jim by accident," she said.
Jim rolled his eyes.
Douxie sighed. "All right," he said. He drew a few breaths, trying to focus. The low-grade headache right behind the center of his forehead made that difficult. Clearly once they got back to the future he need to start stashing painkillers in his storage pocket, because willow bark tea always tasted bitter even if there was honey to spare and it never seemed to work half as well as it ought. And Merlin was stingy with the painkilling possets. But for now, he was going to have to power through.
Finally, he felt centered enough to take a look at the extra layer of shrimp colors that the Sight laid upon the world.
He took one look at the shard of Gaylen's Core and winced away, shielding his eyes from the concentrated magic that only he could see.
"Teach?" asked Claire.
"Odin's beard, that's bright," Douxie muttered. "It's like looking at the sun." Suddenly he was very grateful he hadn't tried looking at the Core this way while it was still intact. The entire thing might well have blinded him. He forced himself to look back at it. At the edges around the shard, where it stabbed into Jim's amulet. He breathed out through his nose, examining. "It's stable," he reported. He wasn't seeing any leakage, any mixing of the impossible colors of either shard or amulet. "No bleeding of magic."
Jim and Claire exchanged a look. "Any bleeding of blood?" she asked.
Douxie shook his head. "Not that I can see either." His fingernail tapped against the very edge of the silver circle. "When it's removed, you should be fine. The original amulet," he said, looking up at Jim's face, "as you well know, had the unique property of healing its bearer. Possibly the only magical device I've ever seen do so. At the time, I thought it was because of some healing magic Merlin had pulled out of the ether that he hadn't shared with me. Or that he maybe didn't even fully realize."
"And now?" asked Jim.
Douxie shrugged. "Now I'm in the unique position of being about to forge it for the second time. And this time I do know healing magic. So who knows how time echoes and reverberations are going to collapse in on one another."
"So you think this amulet can heal too, even though you didn't know how to heal when you and Krel made it?" asked Jim.
Douxie shrugged. "Jim, I know I'm your go-to expert on this sort of thing, but honestly?" He splayed his hands, an I-don't-know gesture. "Sometimes I've got no bloody clue how timelines work, and this is one of them. It might do-- no, rephrase. I am quite certain that this amulet will also heal you. Why exactly it does that? That's the matter I've got no idea on."
Jim was silent for a moment. Then he laid his hand atop Douxie's. "I appreciate the honesty."
Douxie snorted, hearing clearly what Jim wasn't vocalizing: an aspect in which you are entirely unlike Merlin.
Claire's gaze, though, drifted from the amulet in her boyfriend's chest to Douxie's face. "Doux," she said, and there was something soft and solemn in her tone that made him pay attention. "Can you teach me healing magic?"
"Uh."
"Claire, he's known it less than a week," Jim interjected. "I'm not sure he's good enough at it yet to teach."
"No." Douxie waved off Jim's concern. "No, Claire's right. This is absolutely something I should be teaching her and Mary. And maybe Krel, if he's far enough into his wizardry. Because right now I am literally the only person on the planet who can do it, which means... if something happens to me, the knowledge dies. Again."
"Nothing's going to happen to you," Claire insisted.
"Well, I certainly hope not," Douxie agreed. "But that's something neither you nor I control. Which reminds me." He fished Taliesin's opal pendant out from under his tunic. "If something does happen to me, this is yours. Take it and run."
"Douxie!" she cried.
He shrugged. "It'll enable you to read the Atlantean books, which is worth far more than worrying over my corpse, should Bellroc and Skrael happen to get in a lucky hit."
"Why has this conversation suddenly turned so morbid?" wondered Jim.
"You're the one who came in and woke me in the middle of the night," Douxie shot back. "You want happy cheerfulness, talk to me after I've had a good night's rest." He returned the necklace to its place. "Besides which," he told Jim, "healing magic is meant to be worked by groups of mages, remember?"
"So you don't all pass out on the kitchen table," Jim agreed. "Yeah, I remember."
"He passed out at the kitchen table?" Claire asked Jim.
Who gave her a grin. "Doux figured out to heal Mom's arm. And collapsed after doing it."
"Douxie!" she cried, eyes flashing back to him.
He cringed. "It worked! The important point is that it worked, and now I can teach you and Mary," he said. Mentally patting himself on the back for redirecting what, yes, had been a bit stupid on his part back around to what Claire wanted. "Maybe not right now, though?" he asked. "It is literally the middle of the night. And Mary's probably asleep. As should you two and I all also be."
Claire grinned up at her boyfriend. "Particularly given that half-trolls do, in fact, need more than an hour's sleep."
Jim flushed, reminded of his own experimentation with his sleep schedule.
"Lovely. Now, off to bed with you, lovebirds." Douxie waved them off like he was shooing pigeons, and lay back down on his pallet. "I'll see you in the morning."
Even through his closed eyelids he could practically feel the weight of Jim's incredulous stare. "Yeah, no. I think we're bunking in with you tonight. Well, I am, anyway."
"This isn't the sixth century, Jim," Douxie reminded him. "We don't need to cuddle for warmth here." Camelot did, in fact, have sufficient fireplaces and chimneys to warm most rooms of the keep, even on the bitterest winter nights.
Jim snorted. "If you think I am getting any kind of shuteye in the Wild Woods, surrounded by Gumm-Gumms, you're out of your mind."
"I'll stay too," Claire volunteered. "Mary will totally not mind having that bed to herself."
Douxie rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, staring up at the gray stone ceiling. "Ugh, fine." He reached for his vambrace without looking, his fingers finding the shape of the duplication spell. He cast it onto his improvised pallet once, then twice, crafting mattresses for Jim and Claire. "Now lay down and go to sleep so the torches will go out."
The pair of them obeyed, sinking down onto the beds so the three of them were arrayed in a line like peas in a pod: Douxie closest to the wall, Jim closest to the center of the room, and Claire safe between them. If Claire snuggled up to her armored boyfriend like they were alone, that was no business of anyone's. Douxie closed his eyes again, well aware that he was going to rue insufficient sleep in the morning.
After a moment, the torches guttered, then went out, returning the room to a soothing darkness.
Claire giggled. "Motion sensing lights in the twelfth century," she said. "Who knew?"
Jim shushed her.
Gradually, listening to their breathing, Douxie felt muscles he hadn't even known were tense begin to relax. If Jim and Claire were here, and they were safe, then nothing could be so bad that it couldn't be fixed.
They were safe. All Jim's people here and now were safe. And somehow, together, they'd find a way to right the things Arthur had made wrong.
Inch by inch, Douxie let go.
In a few more moments, the world darkened further.
Douxie fell asleep.
Author's Note: Posting a day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes. Sorry!