The teen was sleeping in his cot, under the shaking song of the willow trees. He held himself in a ball, curled up like a terrified puppy as the dream came back to haunt him ceaselessly. Dark things, tenebrous thoughts, and a gate opening into the somber possibilities of nothingness. A place where nothing could exist, but he.
The larger being was in front of him, eyes blazing out of emptiness, and the voice was powerful. "You will be mine, Merlinus Aurelius Ambrosius, to make the world fall to my feet. Curse the bitch who bore you and Blaise, if you suffer. Your baptism is why you are here."
But the youth resisted, and though he looked down and way from the pools of darkness of his father, he prayed to the gods of the forest and the faeries, to keep his mind in a place of light and of goodness, to not let him be corrupted by his father.
The chains were heavy on his wrists, a torture on his young flesh, and he was put to the wall and lashed, but he would not willingly join him. Blood, hot and coppery, runs down his back, along his bare buttocks, burning almost the blisters from his previous tortures. His heels hurt badly for the lashings and the skin the demon removed, but still, he refuses, and so the tortionnaries continue, pressing him into a scavenger's daughter until pain is so harsh for the metal in his scabs, and so great for the cuts on his body, and his mind weak with blood loss, that he gives in, and promises everything his nemesis wills him to.
Merlin woke up then, to the sounds of weeping, and there was blood everywhere, not his, but those of soldiers, man and woman alike, and hands, ripped apart, dangling from trees. "Where am I?" And dying lips whisper, "Carwonnak." He murmurs something – a curse – what happened? But the soldier is dead, and more blood is soaking up the earth.
He runs, then, and finds himself in a cave, wrapping his arms around himself, horrified. Memories are crashing, of what he did – how he used the Craft to seduce the Earl of Carwonnak, and then his enemy. How he wreathed treason and treachery between them, built an intricate web of lies. How he used the Sight to turn his prophecy to his advantages. In the cavern, he rocks to himself, and mutters senseless prayers in Latin and Welsh alike. A wolf comes, and likes his blood.
"Aye, beast, I am one of you now, Myrrdin Wyllt, forlorn and condemned to live by my father's rule."
And so he remained, bard abandoned and mad, with the beasts, for a very long time, until reason, slow and steady, came to him. It flashed on him as faith does, in a flash of light, and the sight instructed him to make for Vortigern's home, where redemption, perhaps, would come.
Never again was he weak to direct supplications of his fore-bearer, though his mistakes, undoubtedly, served him greatly in the decades that followed.