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How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?
Immortality, he thinks, is a strange thing. He can splay his fingers just so, and half the world unravels at his touch. A tug here, for instance, and Mordred doesn't kill Arthur. Merlin does, and Camelot is razed in dragonfire. A nudge there, and kind Guinevere becomes proud Guanhumara becomes warlord's daughter Findabair. He twitches a thread, and William of Ealdor does not exist, dies at the age of three, lives to fifty-seven, removes Uther's head with an axe, dies on a pyre, dies at nineteen with a lie on his lips, dies screaming, becomes a god of the woods and never dies at all.
Immortality is a very strange thing. Merlin has, quite by accident, erased Arthur entirely, twice. (He feels a little guilty, somehow, that those lives were peaceful.)
Hunith looks at her eight-year-old child playing an imaginary harp and thinks nothing of it. A heartbeat later, Hunith does not exist. Two heartbeats, and she is a nobleman's wife. Three, and she is a druid named Niniane. Four, and she is a red-haired girl called Myfanwy who married a demon without noticing.
He goes back. He does it again. He has to get it right, after all.
This time, his father is a bard. His father is a madman (they say that's genetic, somewhen, and he wonders if he hasn't gone a little mad). His father lives and dies and lives again. Around and around. It's like a script at this point. The grandest of theater.
He is thirty-seven and twelve and fifteen-hundred-ninety-four. He is watching the sunrise for the very last time in existence and he is trying desperately to talk to Will before he leaves and he has just been born, all at once. But right now, he is eight years old and he is sitting on the wooden horse Will's father made, and he is trying to get it right.
He is an old man, and Arthur is a child. He is old, and he never left Ealdor, and Will is sitting at his bedside begging him not to go, please don't leave me, Merlin please. He is an old man, and he wanders the empty halls of what was once Camelot like the world's most lonely ghost. Or no, that's not right, and he is twenty-four and screaming rage at no one as he curls protectively around the corpse of Sir Elyan. He is nineteen and charging towards the pyre as Gwen goes up in smoke. He is thirty-three and can talk to ghosts. He is twenty-six and half in love with Prince Gawain of Orkney. He is ten and his best friend is a werewolf named Parzival ap Effrawg.
He scowls, eyes dragon-gold, and tries again. It isn't right yet.
Launcelot has a son named Galahad who searches for the Cup of Life. The boy perishes as soon as his fingers touch the shining silver (perhaps that is why the grail is called holy: it is not meant for mortal men.) Sir Bruenor wears a mailcoat clotted and stiff with the blood of his father. Morgan's lover Accolon is slain by Arthur in what was supposed to be a friendly duel. Gwenhwyfar is the magical daughter of a foreign king. Tristan and Isolde's story never ends happily, no matter the names they bear or how many times Merlin tries. Arthur employs a jester who is knighted during a drunken Yule party. Uther's grandfather Vortigern forces a nine-year-old Merlin to give him a prophecy and names his castle Dinas Emrys in his honor. (Merlin still gets his head split open, but that's alright. Immortal, remember?) ... He is beginning to think this is why so many of the legends name him cambion, changeling, wild thing. Morgana is a druid, a healer, a prophet, a goddess, an enchanter. Morgause's name is Anna, and Mordred is her son. Gaius does not exist, and the court physician is a jovial man named Bedwyr.
His mother calls him in for dinner, only it's not his mother but her handmaid, only that's not it either and his sister is the one looking for him, only he has no sister and it's really his friend Wenneuereia. Oh. The spell, such as it is, hasn't been tied off yet. Too many possibilities, so everything is overlapping. But Merlin is eight, still, and selfish, and he wants to be happy, for his friends to be happy, for his family to be whole.
He wants to get it right, just once.
Merlin hops off the wooden horse Will's father made, and Balinor ruffles his hair as he trots into the house. Merlin's sister Ganeida is four and very opinionated, and he knows already that she will be an accomplished lutenist by the time he and Will go to Camelot. He knows that Gwen is feeling the first stirrings of magic at her fingertips, that Sir Ector is teaching Arthur to be kind, that Tristan is catching a glimpse of Iseult for the very first time, that Lancelot will be an expert swordsman but never quite know what to do with his hands, that Percival-the-werewolf has already befriended Freya-the-Bastet, that Morgause is trying desperately to convince Nimueh not to use necromancy, that Elyan will never stop demanding piggyback rides from Leon, that Morgana will learn healing magic from Finna and marry Vivian and never become a high priestess, that Uther's days are numbered and no one will save him. Merlin also knows Arthur will still die at Camlann, but it will not be as it was. That is all he can ask for, in the end: that it will not be as it was. That it will be better, or nearly so. And as for Merlin himself, he will at the age of twenty learn how to play a harp for the seventh time. Immortality, after all, is such a very strange thing.
Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.