Written some time ago (long before I was introduced to the joys of FF, and, hence, I never thought to have a platform upon which to launch it), this story recently grabbed back the light of day and demanded its time in the sun. I hope y'all enjoy it! Do I really have to specify that I don't own anything remotely related to Arthurian mythology? C'mon, I'm not that old!
The witch finished casting the final incantation just as Merlin's eyelids fluttered open. He dashed himself against the magical bars, frantically pawing for the freedom on the other side. His gray eyes showed his hurt as he beheld his faithless wife.
"Why, Nimue?" he asked, voice tight with betrayal.
The blonde woman laughed cruelly. "I thought you lived backwards, old man. You know already."
"I want to hear it from your own lips," the wizard told her. "You owe me that much, at least."
She laughed at him. "I owe you no such thing. You're going to be here for eternity, Merlin. You see this tree planted here? I've cast such spells on it that this sapling will grow up around the entrance to the cave where we are now. Slowly, year by year as it grows, the sunlight will be choked off, first by shade, then by branches, then, finally, by the trunk itself. All water will dry up, until the only moisture left will be in your skinny body. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, the air itself will become stifling, unfit to breathe. No company but your own thoughts. How long before it drives you mad, do you suppose? Oh, but I've forgotten; you already know just how long it will take you to lose your mind completely. Maybe the knowledge will make it happen faster, eh? I've often wondered how your foreknowledge works in that respect. Does it ever aggravate you, knowing what will happen, but unable to prevent it? This, for example. You knew that I would take your spells, your magic, and use them to lock you in here. But since, to you, it already happened, you couldn't stop it from happening. Is that how it is, love?" and she planted a mocking kiss on his bearded cheek through the magical bars.
Merlin accepted the taunting silently. At the touch of her lips, his eyes closed, a brief moment of painful ecstasy.
"Nimue." His quiet, deliberate pronunciation of her name sobered the witch instantly. Merlin continued. "You do not answer me because you do not know yourself why you do this. It is fate that you and I should part here, not any freely-made decision on your part."
She bristled. "I chose this. It wasn't fate!"
But Merlin replied with a sad smile, heavy with the weight of centuries-worth of knowledge behind it. "Nimue. What is choice, when I already know what will happen? You cannot change your future any more than I can change my past. When I am younger, I will escape this prison. One of my first acts will be to find out your fate.
"I am sorry, my love, but it is not pleasant. You will be beheaded for treachery against the Crown. Arthur will do the deed himself, and your body will be fed to the carrion crows. All except your head, which will be displayed above the battlements of Camelot as a warning to others. That is where it shall remain, until your hair has been used in the nests of the castle sparrows and all the flesh has been picked from your bones and your skull hangs whitely in the sun. I am sorry, Nimue," he told her with pain in his voice and his eyes. "I would spare you your fate if I could."
The witch had unconsciously clutched her throat as he spoke, horrified by his words. "You – you lie!" she spat at him, recoiling from the cave as though physically struck. "No more words! You can't get to me that easily! Tuhsu oydnam moci!" she cried, and the living stone of the cave entrance flowed together, sealing the wizard inside.
Merlin sighed as the sunlight suddenly ceased to shine. He settled back in the darkness to sleep the next several centuries away.
He'd lied to her. Fate was not so cut and dried as all that. He knew his pasts – pasts, plural, since those memories were constantly in flux depending on the choices people made in the present. In all of the pasts that made a difference, he'd had to spend a full millennia, and more, in this very cave waiting for his wife's magic to wear down to the point that he could break out, which was why he'd allowed her to lock him in. But she was right to ask how long the slow loss of sunlight would spare his senses. He'd revealed her fate to make her angry enough to spare him that torture at least.
But he'd hated having to do so. For in revealing her fate, he condemned her to it. Since the dawning of time, all members of the race of men have been fascinated by their individual futures. But woe to those who are given knowledge of a possible future, for they fix their eyes on it and are blind to all else. That future may have been avoided, but knowing the possibility sets off a chain of reactions that, inevitably, bring about the realization of the prediction. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say, and it was one more sin to lay upon his guilty conscience.
He covered his eyes with his hand, pushing away the tears that threatened to spill from them. He had known that this would come to pass, knew that he had to betray his beloved so that he would still be sane when Arthur returned to the living world in the distant future. But his heart ached still. He'd chosen Nimue because she alone had had the aptitude to learn the magic that would seal him away for that distant time. But though he had known what she would do to him, and what he would do to her, he had loved her, deeply, purely loved her. That, he reflected, was strangest of all. That he could love.
Nimue spoke the words that spirited her away from the cave, back to the coast where she'd grown up. "Stupid fool," she muttered under her breath, unsure of whether she meant Merlin or herself. She was angry that she'd allowed him to goad her into shutting up the cave that suddenly. He was supposed to have been tortured with the slow passing of time and creeping darkness.
The words of his prediction rung in her ears, try as she might to banish them. The images of her dead, decaying flesh haunted her dreams, and spectral High Kings bearing bloody swords stalked her nightmares. In fear, she avoided the capital and anyone associated with it. The magics for which she had married Merlin withered from lack of use, for she dared not invite King Arthur's wrath upon her head by revealing herself to be the one who had sealed away his most trusted adviser.
And then came the day when she was walking in the woods and nearly ran over a young boy who was playing at swords with a wooden stick.
"Why, hello," she told him, squatting down so that she was on eye level with him. "What's your name?"
"Mordred," the little seven year-old replied. "You're pretty," he told her, unashamed of his bluntness.
Something about the boy stroked her woman's intuition, and she spoke a small spell, one to tell her the identity of the father of the boy standing before her.
Arthur Pendragon.
King Arthur's son? Well, well, well. So the king had a wild side after all.
A plan began to form in Nimue's nimble brain. If she could raise up this boy, train him to be a knight, a true prince, fit to rule the realm – it was common knowledge that Gwenefayr was barren – then maybe Arthur would feel too indebted to her to execute her for imprisoning Merlin!
She spoke to the boy. "Mordred, have you ever thought about being a knight?"