The command was simple, even without words: go find Arthur and make witness of the greatness of fate.
For ten years that had been my sole purpose—to set into motion the events of the future that the gods desired and complete the task that they had placed before me when they formed me out of their own essence so long ago.
I could not remember my birth or anything that happened afterward. My life began the moment I stepped out of the mist with the gods’ voices whispering on the wind, urging me to keep walking until I met my fate.
It was only when I met a dirty, golden-haired little boy who was chopping wood behind his foster father’s house that things began to click into place.
That same buzzing had spurred me forward then just as it had made me glower and push my food away before standing.
“Merlin,” Mistress Morris called from where she was standing before a great cauldron over the fire, stirring what looked to be dinner for the entire castle. “Ye’eve hardly touched yer food.”
I waved her off, hoping that her propensity to chase people with a wooden spoon when they didn’t finish their meals had also faded over the past ten years.
“I’ve lost my appetite,” I told her with a grimace. “And I also need to check on his majesty before bed.”
Mistress Norris’s blue eyes narrowed and she puffed out her already round, ruddy cheeks before pointing her steaming spoonat me. “Ye get a pass tonight, young man, but I expect ye to eat a full breakfast come mornin’.”
“Your wish is, as ever, my command,” I told her with a flourishing bow and turned to leave.
“And Merlin?”
I stopped, looking over my shoulder at the woman who now stared at me with affectionate eyes.
“Welcome home, we missed ye something fierce for all these years.”
My chest tightened with a feeling wholly separate from the incessant buzzing from the gods.
It had been a long time since I had seen the people of this castle and to know that they had missed me made me feel…
Well, I wasn’t quite sure how it had made me feel.
My time in the cave had not felt like ten years, but as soon as I stepped foot outside of it the time between then and the present day had come crashing down like a weight.
If I could go back, I would have waited that night and explained everything properly.
Which would have been much easier to do if not for the damned buzzing in my chest. It had been painful that night, urging me out of the castle and into my cave as flashes of a future not yet come to fruition filled my mind.
“I have missed you too,” I told Mistress Morris honestly, offering her a smile before finally giving into the push from the gods and ducking into the corridor.
Dinner for the rest of the castle would be served in the next hour, everyone coming together in the great hall to eat, drink, and be merry, all the while not knowing that their king suffered from a nasty wound on his side.
Normally, I would have healed such a wound long before he made it back to the castle. A king was meant to seem invincible to his people, so such wounds were kept with a strict secrecy thattypically required me to heal the wound fast before anyone saw it.
But when he had shown me his gash late in the evening last night I could barely muster a spark from my fingers let alone conjure actual healing magic.
That was the most frustrating part of all of this. I could pull stubborn alphas and an equally stubborn omega together easily. Hells, they seemed to already want each other based off of the instinct that had ruled humans for centuries. I could even cut through Morgana’s mind magic that she was attempting to sprinkle around the castle and Arthur’s men, though to what end I wasn’t sure.
I could do all of that, and yet my magical stores which had always felt endless before, now sat empty deep in my soul.
Before my self-isolation in the cave all I used to need was a good meal and a long sleep to restore them if they ever became depleted—usually after a long battle or a particularly long day of helping out in the fields making the soil more fertile for the people’s crops—but now it was as if whatever receptacle held my magic before had a crack in it.
Over the past few days I had tried to support Arthur and his men as they battled through the countryside, engaging in skirmishes with small groups of Saxons who had razed through the villages on the way to Cameliard, but past the most basic of spells I could not do much but get in the way. Even still, I ended every single day completely exhausted, as if mustering the strength just to get onto my horse was too much for my body.
None of it sat right with me and I had a sneaking suspicion that the spell to pull an individual through time, the one the gods had taught me in my dreams, was to blame.
I was certain that doing that spell once would drain even the best of sorcerers and I had done it three times—four if youcounted the poor omega I had yanked through time along with Guinevere.
I had no connection to that unfortunate soul and I just hoped she was managing fine on her own, whoever she was.
