This is the opening chapter for a story that I haven't quite decided if I will continue or not, so feedback is much appreciated.

It's set after series 2, if you pretend that Morgana never got kidnapped, I didn't really know how to address that problem – I suppose I could just erase her from the story, but anyway, this is what I came up with...

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I own nothing...

After Before

Chapter One - Blue Fire

She stood against that familiar water bowl with the same golden fire in her eyes. The clear liquid swirling in the grasp of the rock that upwards climbed from the stained silver floor. Pure water to the tongue, and touch, but not to the eye. Its colours changed, morphing into shapes - the shapes of people, and of flowers, and of fire.

Always fire.

As if it drew upon the very essence of their destiny and shaped its self into their minds, folding around conscious thought and manipulating nerves to fear it. It would weave through the muscles that controlled you, without so much as moving, and intoxicate rationality. Until fire was your only choice. And the same people who would extinguish its magic, would, no doubt, call upon it when they needed it.

When a body needed to be burnt.

So many things would finish with flames. This magic would never have come about without the flames, and the punishment for it, would be flames also. But then again, Nimueh never got caught.

The flames that brought about death would be the ones that made it certain that the dead would be summoned back to life. As life had been taken unnaturally, it would be brought back unnaturally. With callous and greed. Without thought.

The incantations slipped from her mouth as if she were breathing, each flowing word forming invisible stars in the water. And she could feel it. The power that these words were causing swarmed like flies, tight in the air around them. Like acid through her veins, she felt it move from her seething core to the cool tips of her fingers and the soft skin of her lips. This, she knew, was what bringing life should feel like. What bringing life where it should not exist should feel like. And she relished it. The slow numbness that slithered up her spine until the only senses she needed were her sight and her speech, she poured her completeness into the bowl, without flailing, she felt the energy leave her and she gasped. She was capable - That made her feel like God.

There were no toads or rats or pointy hats when Nimueh cast her magic, no clichés that insulted everything that sorcerers stood for. Just her and the earth beneath her feet. The smooth rock that seemed to channel and reflect everything her mind had into the spell. And then back into her again, so when she nearly collapsed through lack of breath, it would tip itself back into her and she would carry on. Repeating herself until there was nothing left in the world that could undo what she was doing, nothing that could stop the air from filling the dissolved, charred lungs of her subject, or the fire forming those magnificent and defined shapes of her body. Nothing that would stop the life swimming into those invisible veins and pumping through the solid, stone heart.

Even when the magic was done, her eyes never broke contact with the water as it moved and splashed as if it were living. She didn't look around her as the icy chill blew through a small opening in the thick stone walls of the cave behind her, or as the shrill yell of a Raven pierced the thickening air. Nimueh breathed deeply, inhaling the stench that came with death as if it were pure oxygen.

Then, behind her, someone opened their eyes.

―

"Well, it is true that if you had listened to me in the first place, you would never have been delayed,"

"Shut up, Merlin," Arthur snapped, deliberately quickening his pace so his manservant had a job to keep up, "Anyway, I don't know why you're looking so smug," he glanced back at the dark-haired boy, a smirk spread across his lips that was just asking for trouble, "you're the one who's going to end up in the stocks."

"What are you talking about?" Merlin stopped walking, staring incredulously at his master. The question, of course, was a waste of breath. He knew exactly what Arthur had been talking about.

"Well, in the end, it doesn't really matter what I'm talking about. As long as you know what you're talking about when spinning your excuse to my father, we'll be fine,"

"But that's not fair!" he protested, aware of how childlike he sounded, but quite content with trying his luck anyway,

"Oh, I know, Merlin. It was simply evil of you to drag me down that 'shortcut'," he mimicked quotation marks in the air with two fingers on each hand, and then pushed hard on the Council chamber's heavy oak door. Winking as he did so, he couldn't suppress that strange unbidden feeling that rose in his chest when he saw Merlin angry or upset, but he would do his best to hide it.

Merlin sighed and put both hands by his shoulders in defeat, before being shoved into the presence of the King by an all-of-a-sudden-supposedly-angry Arthur.

"You're late." Uther announced, swishing his cloak out behind him - that, in its self, told everyone in the room that he was in charge... And that he was angry.

"Yes, well," Merlin piped up and walked a step further into the room, gulping under the scolding eyes of the knights and other courtiers, "that would be my fault..."

―

"That went rather well," Arthur laughed as Merlin walked through the door, wiping the rotten apple, lettuce and carrot from his forehead,

"Open for debate,"

Arthur ignored the bitter comment and continued his jibes, "Seeing as you're no longer occupied, I have some jobs for you. And you can start with my stables,"

"Actually, I think Gaius said he had some things for me to sort out. I've done enough for you this morning," he spat, fighting the tears as if his life depended on it.

Arthur frowned and walked forwards, cautiously, but with an undeniable sense of power, "I don't think that's for you to decide,"

Merlin just shrugged. To be perfectly frank, he was more than a little bit miffed about having to take the blame - again. But as he turned to the door and went to leave, he had to pause as Arthur spoke again. That voice had that affect on him - when he heard it, he had to listen. And he'd begun to think that it wasn't just Arthur's status that made it so.

"I want you back here when you're cleaned up. You can do the stables tomorrow, my armour needs a polish,"

Merlin left without turning around, therefore, leaving without seeing the concern and guilt on the prince's face. He thought he'd overdone it this time. True, if it were him in Merlin's shoes, he wouldn't stand for this treatment. But Merlin just... Took it. Time and time again, he wouldn't be surprised if now was when Merlin snapped.

―

It was glorious.

'It' being the only appropriate word. 'She' would not have been accurate. This was no longer a girl, but a thing. A glorious, burning thing. Like blue fire, woven to take the form of a young girl, a dead young girl. But, to stir the havoc Nimueh wanted to stir, one alive would just not do.

Twisting blue flames turned crisp around her arms, creasing at the elbow, and stretching as the girl awoke. Convulsing momentarily as they relaxed into their form, relaxed into the corpse they had been given. Her eyes flashed open, revealing a golden swimming mess of amber sap, so bright that Nimueh doubted anyone would be able to hold its gaze. Claw-like nails sprouted from her slender blue fingers, and, within her moving chest, a deep red stone sat and throbbed. Her heart. Of course. The thing that propelled her onwards. As Nimueh's mind would do to her.

The new life hovered above the sticky-wet cave floor, brown hair falling and floating like snakes around her small and delicate face. He didn't look like the girl she had once been - except those eyes. They told a different story. She hoped they would be remembered. For that one spark of a memory was all it would take to set her plan into action.

Although the Sapphire glow this girl was emitting gave her an explosion of joy, or power, and self-wonderment, Nimueh would have preferred her to look more human. But the laws of life and death had not allowed her to bring back the form, the person, so entirely. This being was fuelled by revenge, the desire to draw the blood of the one who drew hers and the need for the disgraceful downfall of anyone that stood between her and her prize. A prize that, Nimueh pondered, she had not proposed. The prize would have to be the death of her killer. Something that both women inevitably wanted. But for two completely different reasons.

Nimueh - because her life had been taken in a less direct sense, because she had been cast aside for something that had not been her fault, and because a mere young boy had stolen away her chances of being a part of Albion. His action had not been written.

And her creation - because she had been taken from the one she loved.

―

Morgana was always having premonitions, and Gaius no longer got as worried when he heard she'd had a nightmare. Of late, they had been frequently so trivial that none should really have cared.

But this was something different.

This went against his hopes; this went against his prayer that the darkness had passed.

And his thoughts were with Merlin,

"A girl," she'd started, and Gaius had sighed - it was always a girl, "rose from the lake."

He'd frozen now,

"A woman was there as well, someone I recognised, but cannot think from where."

It was the lake that had caught Gaius' attention; he knew the story far too well,

"Something happened, Gaius. The younger girl burned, and then she drowned, I heard her heart explode as if it was inside my head, but she is not dead... Not properly,"

He lead the King's ward over to a splintering wooden chair, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder in an attempt to calm her tears, and trying, in vain, to steady the irregularity of her short sharp breaths. "Morgana, tell me, this girl, what did she look like?"

"Well... Well, I don't know," she pleaded, leaning forwards across the table to look him dead in the eye, presenting Gaius with the full beauty of her tear-stained face. A chill crept up Morgana's spine as the face returned to the forefront of her mind, "she didn't look like she had, before she'd died. She was pale before, now she is made of blue fire, and her hair falls about her face as if it were submerged in water. And her eyes, Gaius..." she whimpered, letting her head fall onto the table as she wept,

Gaius returned to patting her back, the only act of sympathy he felt confident enough to show, the fear taking over his mind like a blanket, making it hard to keep his eyes from rolling back into their sockets and his consciousness from evading him. He knew who this 'girl' was, and he knew who the woman had been. He knew what this meant,

"Arthur..." Morgana's head snapped up once more, and Gaius pretended he hadn't seen the flash of gold in her fright, "They always come for Arthur..." she trailed off, and collapsed, once more, into a fit of hysteria,

Gaius was left shell-shocked, unable to form a rational thought or plan. This was beyond his medical answers. This girl was back from the dead. He knew, as much as it pained him, this should be left to Merlin. He turned and looked towards the closed door that lead to the said boy's small room, keeping down the bile that raised in his throat as he thought of the pain this would put him in.

"Gaius, there's more," Morgana uttered, from under her splayed out hair,

Gaius shivered as she spoke, the words meaning not finding any reason and his heart leaping into his mouth,

"...It's not time, she was not ready..."

―

Merlin slept through the talking, submerged in dreams of idle banter with Arthur - dreams he'd been getting a lot recently.

But when he awoke, next morning, there was one word that was on his lips, one word that he needed to say before he could even think about getting up. As a frightful blue face had entered his subconscious, a face that he did not recognise, yet knew who it belonged to. The distorted features merely pretending to be her, pretending that they knew all of her. When really, he had seen, they only knew the pain, the anger, and the revenge.

A cry in the same shrill voice. A voice he remembered all too well, a voice he should never want to forget.

"Freya,"

As always, please review – I really appreciate them - and tell me if you think I should continue,

Thanks x