Long ago, before there was time, there was Faery. Not just a race, not just a moment, but a dream of magic and mist and legend.
Out of the promise of Faery rose Merlin. Merlin the Wizard, who before he was Arthur's Merlin was just another boy who traveled and dreamed and hoped and loved.
Then Merlin grew older, the world changed, and war found its way to Faery. Desperate for a Hero, Faery turned to Merlin. Merlin created Arthur.
Arthur changed Faery forever.
Oh, certainly he didn't mean to change anything. He wasn't even truly aware that Faery existed, and Merlin had become too concerned with other things to properly educate his King. But Arthur, with his Knights of the Round Table and his Holy Quests and his belief that light was always synonymous with truth and justice while darkness meant fear and death and evil, caused a rift in Faery. Where once light and dark, life and death, had coexisted as two halves of one whole, they now splintered. The Court of Light and Life, the Seelie Court, and the Court of Darkness and Death, the Unseelie Court, were born. The Seelie Court took a King, and the Unseelie Court a Queen.
Faery, once the home of myths and legends and dreams, now broken in twain, began a slow, inevitable slide into decay.
The line of Merlin, however, flourished. Wand magic, connected but somehow separated from Faery's magic of life and death and the elements, became the magic of the people. Schools sprang up, life moved on. Somehow, a line was drawn slowly and painfully between the world of Merlin's magical and the world of Arthur's non-magical kinsmen. Magic was lost to some, and cherished by others.
Somewhere, an ailing Faery wept.
The world, however, had not forgotten her first children. As always seems the way in tragedy, there was a prophecy.
Century by century have you abided
Broken and jagged, torn in two.
Wept, have you, for the line in the sand.
The line is blurring, now, and while more time will pass
She will come.
The Darkness will know her name.
The Light will whisper to her its secrets.
Merlin and Arthur will be her kin.
She will be the Beginning.
She will be Sidhe.
No one in Faery knew what it meant, but for the first time in millenia, they felt Hope.
More years passed, and someone, somewhere, remembered Faery. Emissaries from the wand users came, and Faery was reunited with Merlin and his kin. Though no children of Faery and Merlin could do wand magic, the number who could access the magic of Faery grew. There was rejoicing, but still the rift between Seelie and Unseelie did not heal. Faery despaired of their prophecy, and it was lost.
The world would turn a thousand more times before something wondrous would happen: Arthur's long, unbroken line of nonmagical children would fracture. Wand magic had spread into the nonmagical world, crossing the barrier erected so long ago. The whisper spread through Faery like wildfire, "The line in the sand! It is disappearing!"
The prophecy was remembered.
She was coming.
Faery danced.
Evil woke.