The horizon is grey and endless. Clouds roll through the sky and into the waves; white foam crashes over black rocks, their surfaces smoothed from centuries of violent company with the sea.
The wind whips against him, through him, burning his skin raw and dry and filling his lungs with ice, making every breath the scrape of a knife in his throat. Each crash of thunder on the rocks feels more and more like a shattering of his ribs, and the earth an overwhelming heaviness supported only by the wearied and creaking bones of his spine. He is tired, and perhaps the next tide is the one that will finally bring him peace.
There is something about this place that makes him feel as though his chest is hollow. There is a heart beating there, but it's not his own — like it belongs to something bigger than himself.
Merlin is alone. In the vastness of it all, he is nothing, and he is everything.
I've lost something here, he thinks. But I don't know what it is.
The landscape is desolate and unbroken, with nothing in sight for miles and miles. The pounding of the heart that's not his becomes unbearably loud, unnatural and painful. His panicked breaths are deafened only by the tempest he's witness to.
Once upon a time, Merlin was happy. In his mind's eye he sees magic and candlelit corridors and meadows; he breathes in lavender and elder and yarrow; his hands are roughened from working and healing and helping.
He had walked with kings, with physicians, with dragons. He walked with friends; with lovers.
I had a home, once, he realizes.
But the more he thinks of home, the more he thinks not of stone and heavy beams and windows rattling in a gale, but of the sky and the earth and the sea; a man: happiness and mischief and only a fleeting moment, a whisper on the wind and a teasing hand on his thigh.
He was like the sun. He was like the moon. Coming and going and coming and going; sometimes he brought with him the rush of the rising tide. Sometimes he brought the tender touch of starlight.
He was warm and he was kind and he was home, and Merlin can't remember when he saw him last.
Where is he now, he asks the waves.
Why is he not here with me, he asks the sky.
Why do I have to be alone, he asks the earth.
But no one answers him.
Merlin closes his eyes and exhales slowly; he feels another piece of him break away and be carried off with the wind.