“If you need me to stop, say the word.” Merlin raised his hands and carefully positioned them on Vera’s head. His palms sealed over her ears firmly enough that they created a suction, making a surreal growling white noise. His middle and index fingers pressed into each of her temples, the next finger right on her cheekbones, his pinkies along her jaw, holding it tightly in place. Vera trembled under the pressure of the mage’s surprising strength.
“Ready?” he murmured.
She tried to nod, but Merlin’s hands held her skull in place.
“Close your eyes, Guinevere.”
She took a deep breath and shut her eyes as she exhaled.
“Let’s begin.”
The dark behind Vera’s eyelids swelled to an abnormal vastness that she intuitively understood to be some part of her mind. Everything beyond her mind, even her physical body, felt more like a dream.
“What are you looking for?” She asked it silently, testing her sense that Merlin couldn’t hear her active thoughts. He didn’t answer.
She felt his presence meandering through her memories, but there was no image of him, nothing to see. He wasn’t in her active, thinking mind. His foreign presence was solely in her memories. Merlin moved like he knew where he was going. There was a distinct tug toward one sensation: affection.
He pulled it forth like taking a book from a shelf. Then, images flipped past in quick succession, slides of memory scrolling past until the Rolodex slowed. The first thing that came into focus replayed as Vera remembered it: Arthur holding her as they danced before the crowd and laughing as he called out the moves to her—God, how had that just been yesterday? She thought Merlin might stop there. That seemed a good place to begin, but he flipped past it.
Next was Lancelot. Short scenes in quick succession: him kissing her on the forehead in the throne room, nudging her with his shoulder on the hillside, laughing with her while on a run. Not all her memories with him went by, but there were so many: throwing his hands in the air in glee that first night, running toward the woods the day they went to the sacred grove … Vera deliberately moved away from this one, realizing that she had some control if Merlin was aimlessly flipping through. Instead, she pulled forth one when they’d played tic-tac-toe and saw the adoration on his face in her memory.
“Guinevere,” Merlin said disapprovingly. His physical voice sounded like it came from the farthest point of a jet-dark pit. “You need to be careful.”
“It’s not like that,” she said, but he’d already moved on before she could offer more of a rebuttal. She chuckled despite her discomfort. What would he have said if he saw them half-naked in the cave together?
Merlin blazed onward, further back in her memories, back to university. This couldn’t be right. This was too long ago. It was the beginning of Vera’s third year, and she remembered this day in particular. The stormy day when she’d met Vincent in the library. It all played out as she remembered. It hurt to look at him in this memory, so full of life and light. He had no idea … no trace of fear at what was to come for him and what would be his end.
Vera’s immersion in the memory broke. It lay open in front of her, but the focus shifted. Darkness fell like the power to her mind was cut, and a loud ring in the obscurity of the black shook her as if she stood inside a church bell being struck. The tone made her seize up. Merlin had promised there’d be pain, and that was the first sign of it.
“Keep breathing,” he said, his steady voice easing Vera some.
An incision sliced into the darkness, and a memory was born into her mind through it, but it wasn’t hers. She was seeing it from someone else’s perspective. The emotions that came with it were foreign. They had to be Merlin’s. They had no home in her and experiencing them stung. The new memory shimmered into focus, and Vera saw Guinevere from Merlin’s perspective.
Something of Merlin’s context mystically transferred to Vera, and she knew she was watching Guinevere and Arthur’s first meeting. She radiated nervous joy as she curtsied in front of him. There was her father not two steps behind Guinevere, severe even as he smiled, looking on as she passed Arthur a gift. She couldn’t tell what the gift was from her vantage point—from Merlin’s vantage point, she corrected herself. Guinevere and Arthur shifted, and Vera couldn’t see her face well, only his. Beaming, he passed the gift straight to Lancelot and took both of Guinevere’s hands in his. He kissed the top of one.
Merlin’s emotions flooded Vera in full force. Relief and joy. Guinevere and Arthur—the hope for the kingdom.
It wasn’t so bad now that she was used to this memory. Merlin maneuvered the whole of it to nestle against the one of Vincent. They fit nicely there together. A bit of what Vera felt that first day for Vincent leaked into the new memory, spilling over and recoloring her affection for Arthur.
Then, there were emotions that weren’t Merlin’s nor Vera’s own, but they, too, came crashing into her mind. It was Merlin’s understanding of what Guinevere felt: affection and attraction. He inserted it with the rest, making one misshapen package. That part hurt a little more. Vera gripped the arms of her seat and exhaled a stiff, shaking breath. The lumpy memory settled in with the rest, and Merlin backed away from it. She unclenched her muscles as the pain eased.
They were on the move again in Vera’s memories, shuttling past them in a blur. They flashed by as the scenes with Lancelot had: Vincent’s fingers on hers under the table at a bar—this one from right before they officially started dating, dancing at Vincent’s sister’s wedding, and finally one of her last memories of him. Merlin stopped.
Vera and Vincent lay in their bed in Bristol. His hand traced swirls across her bare stomach in a way that made her back arch, half tickled, half stirred into a gleeful lust. It was too intimate. She didn’t want to remember this, and she sure as hell didn’t want anyone else seeing it. And Vera couldn’t forget that this was her last night with Vincent before he died—just last June. Barely half a year ago. She’d deliberately not thought of this, and while she could savor its goodness forever, it was tainted by the story’s ending.
She tried to put it away the way she had with the sacred grove, but Merlin was laser-focused as if he’d been looking for it, and it didn’t budge.
In the memory, she rolled into Vincent, and he buried his face into her neck. “I can’t believe I get to love you,” he’d murmured, raising goosebumps that raced over her skin.
She’d laughed. She’d gazed into his warm brown eyes, rich with earnestness and delight, and before she could say a word, his lips were on hers in no need of any verbal reply. The way Vera’s hips curved into him, the depth of her kiss, and the joy that emanated from her movements were enough.
A tear squeezed past her closed eyelid and rolled down her cheek in the murky pit of the world outside Vera’s mind. Merlin mercifully set the memory aside, present but no longer the focus.
Darkness fell before the sting of a new incision scorched through. Light shone in, unwelcome. The image shimmered like before and sharpened into focus. Guinevere and Arthur again, but it was wrong. Immediately, she could sense it was wrong. It was a private moment.
They stood atop the castle wall where Vera had only ever seen guards. She’d never thought to try to access it, but she saw it all through Merlin’s eyes from where he stood, concealed in the nearest guard tower. Vera could feel his guilt at watching them in secret.
Guinevere’s arms were spread wide along the wall’s stone rail, her head bowed between them. Her hair hung loose and tangled. She was in an off-white shift dress, the kind Vera had been wearing as a nightgown. Arthur stood next to her. He reached a hesitant hand to her shoulder, and she yanked away at his touch.
