Critiques and comments always welcome.

"and I will cut off sorceries from your hand,
and you shall have no more tellers of fortunes"

- Michah 5:12

Men fall on all sides, knights and saxons alike dying at his mere glance. Small figures run from corpse to corpse, now beautiful children picking at their jeweled swords, now glossy crows picking at their torn flesh. He sweeps on. Ahead of him, alone in the carnage, stands a solitary figure, wreathed in dust. He lifts his sword, steps through the mist of blood, and slides his blade through the man's chain mail. He twists it, opening the wound even further. Blood spurts out blinding him. By the time he wipes the blood from his eyes the features of his victim are no longer veiled by the haze.

"Arthur."

His king smiles sadly as if Merlin is nothing but an errant child. "You can't kill me Merlin."

"Arthur."

Merlin stares in horror at his hands as the flesh withers and blows away like dust, leaving nothing but skeletal palms. Those too crumble into nothing and Merlin is falling. The stars reach out like daggers to grab him and pin him to the rotting corpses littering the battlefield of Camlan.

"Arthur!"

"Uh-uh, Merlin. We're all dead. Even me. But I'm waiting for you. You know what you have to do."

"Arthur!"

The pale walls of his room leap out at him promising him life with their sterile gleam. He fumbles at his wrists. They're free. He's been good for so long. He promised he'd be good. That he wouldn't hurt anyone.

"But you killed us all. Don't you remember Merlin?"

"Nnnoo. I didn't kill anyone. I didn't. Really."

The voices laugh. "But of course you did Merlin. Why wouldn't you?"

"No." He presses his hands to his ears digging his nails into the tender flesh at their tips trying to drive out the accusations with pain.

"You, warlock, are a monster."

"No. No I'm not. I'll prove it to you."

The loose bedspring, the one he's been working on all month, is suddenly in his hand. He stares at it in fascination. It gleams dully in the florescent light filtering its way in from the hallway. He smiles beatifically. "I know what to do Arthur."

Almost gently he runs the sharp spring down his arm. They'd stopped him last time, but not this time. He'd been such a good boy. He hadn't listened to his King in ages. He'd been patient. Sneaky.

"Liar. Traitor. Monster."

With each title whispered in his mind a new line of red swells and bursts, pouring over the pale skin.

"Fool. Trickster. Murderer."

So entranced is he by the red rivulets pooling on the concrete floor that he doesn't notice the blackness encroaching on his vision or the chill invading his limbs.

"Demon. Idiot."

He doesn't hear the alarms or see the flashing lights that invade his room like a circus. He doesn't feel the impact as his head hits the concrete with a wet crack. By the time the door opens admitting a swarm of paramedics and nurses the boy with no name is far far away, floating in a sea of nothingness.

Arthur's voice hisses in his mind's ear. "Well done Merlin. They're safe now. From you."

Ten Years Ago

"He just appeared on your doorstep? No sign of where he came from? He hasn't said anything?"

The boy in question is little more than a sack of bones. His skin stretches tautly over his ribs and cheekbones. His eyes are overly bright, flicking from social worker to business tycoon as if assessing them as threats.

Or targets, the worker shudders. The boy seems more dead than alive. The silence he'd surrounded himself with since the moment she'd laid eyes on him merely serves to increase her unease. There is some thing unearthly about this child. "A changeling, left on the full moon, as payment for an unbaptized child." Her grandmother's voice echoes through her memory and she shakes her head to clear her thoughts. Don't be ridiculous. she scolds herself. Fairies don't exist. Certainty not half-starved fairies with dead eyes that shudder when she meets them. Certaintly.

Minutes later she bundles him into her car and pulls out of the Pendragon estate. In the back seat the raven boy, the fey child, hardly older than five, stares backwards with glittering eyes. He will return.