Title: A Progression of a Man with Death.
Author: Lixi-Des
Universe: Merlin (BBC Wales 2008 Version)
Theme/Topic: A progression of Death and the Meaning.
Rating: T. Themes of questionable intent.
Characters: Arthur, Uther, references to Merlin.
Warnings/Spoilers: The entire series to be sure, but nothing specific.
Word Count: 3454 words
Time: Two hours.
Summary: Realisation, Understanding, Recognition and the Fulfilment of Action. Four birthdays, four gifts, four memories of hell.
Dedication: Err...I don't know....Cirrus for prodding me to actually do something....even if it's not what she asked for....
A/N: I just found the urge to write something really dark. For no apparent reason. Meh, what can you do?
Distribution: Warn me please but then you'll be free to take. Just a word of warning; please don't try and pass it off for your own work. It's unfair and it's not going to help you or me. I don't mind if you stick on the moon if you credit me somewhere even if it's really small at the end. Rant over...
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Wrapped up against the cold of the castle's winter chill, Arthur hurries from his chambers to the sparring ground, his boots clicking on the stone floor, his servant's shoes making only a muffled thump against the flagstones. He doesn't look at the servant, his attention focused on his new sword clutched in his hand. It's his first real sword, his birthday present from his father, and he loves it with all his heart. No more wooden swords for him, now he has steel at his disposal like his father.
Sweeping onto a connection corridor, Arthur is sidetracked by a commotion outside the window. Leaping onto a chest, he watches through the window, his sword lain on the ledge before him, temporarily forgotten in his intrigued curiosity. Outside there is a crowd gathering around a platform, and a man standing on the platform, twirling a sword, warming his sword arm in the cold air. Arthur is pleased because he thinks there will a sword demonstration for the crowd. He cannot see the man's face because it's obstructed by a mask of black cloth, but Arthur knows it's Reuben who works down at with the knights as a trainer ever since he lost his left eye to a stray arrow in a skirmish. Arthur recognises the twirling of the sword, and he waves the servant quiet because he wants to say and watch.
Another person is being walked up the stairs and it's a woman. Arthur frowns, but he thinks maybe the woman is to give a speech or something. How boring, he thinks, and he waits for the woman to get on with it. But she doesn't. His father, Uther Pendragon, high on the balcony, says, "You have been charged with the crime of practising magic within the boundaries of Camelot, and you refuse to plead either way. What say you, Lady Martin-Moor?"
"I seek nothing from you nor your Justice that is a mockery of all that once was and will be." Arthur gets the fleeting feeling of sorrow and a mysterious ache starts in his chest, as he watches his father's face contort for a second before slipping back into a mask of impassiveness.
"I have no choice then, than to pronounce the sentence of death." A maid servant comes and places a blindfold upon her head, and the woman is blinded like a falcon before being taken out from the cages, to be released to hunt. "Ready your sword." Pushed to her knees, the woman, kneels on the ground as he suddenly, belatedly recognises as the woman who gave Arthur the treasure box for his fifth birthday, a woman he hoped he might one day grow to love as maybe...a mother...With her long black hair, and pale skin, with her musical voice and books with pictures in that she had shown to Arthur one dark and stormy night, he had thought blindly, naively that he might grow to love her because she was a woman who he did not mind being with his father, one he didn't think was a woman after the crown. It was she, she was the woman on the blocks outside, her proud shoulders and upturned head seeming to defy his father through even her blinded state and the threat of her impending death.
"Let it be done."
With that sentence, time seemed to slow, and the sword fell slowly and Arthur realised that there was no demonstration of sword play, only a deathly meeting of flesh and bone and steel and then the sword was out the other side of her neck with a arc of beautifully cruel scarlet blood that steamed as it passed though the air, and the sword swept on, stained red as it carried on its cutting journey and there was a space where the woman's head should be and there was a thud of impossible sounding, as the head of the woman he had thought he might have loved as a mother met the wooden platform.
He backs away from the window, his eyes filling with the tears of grief for a woman and a future that could never have been. His hands feel the bite of steel and he looks down to see the sword of his Birthday, the one he had been so proud of get, sitting in his palms, clutched in his childlike hands. Suddenly all he can see is a blade stained with the blood of a woman, and the blood of injustice and wrongness and the cruelty of a man's ill-borne anger and rage.
Throwing the sword to the floor, he turns and runs away. Leaving behind the sword, the Birthday gift that he had no comprehension of, the metal that is a killing machine, and he cannot understand anymore why a man would want to carry it, when it can kill people and it leaves nobody behind and it's a killing machine that looks like the one that took away his future, a possibility that was stripped from him before it began. He runs and hides in a room full of cloth and drapes and smells like he remembers his mother smells like, only he realises that there is no escaping, because the memory of the woman who might have been his mother follows him and he can smell the lily smell that followed her, from the blossoms tucked in her bodice. He cannot stop the tears, the great heaving sobs that follow him, and he wants to leave it all behind because he knows his father wants him to be there next time.
Weeping from a realisation of what will be his part in the killings to come, he retches, once, twice, and third time before he passes out.
His seventh birthday comes and goes, heralded by the death of a woman who might have been his mother.
His seventh birthday was the day he lost his innocence of life and death.
His seventh birthday was where he leant the truth of his father's actions.
His seventh birthday was when he realised what being a king meant.
His seventh birthday was the first time he saw death.
It was not the last time.
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Arthur watches the man climb the platform. The man's knees shake, his eyes are wild with fear and Arthur can feel the dread and terror seeping from the man from his position at his father's side, forty yards up and across the man.
"You have been found guilty of the crime of practising magic, in the boundaries of the Kingdom of Camelot, which is prohibited by the laws of Camelot. What say you?" His father's voice, so loud and clear, rings out across the courtyard.
"I tell you and your son, I'm innocent! I never practised no magic! I couldn't-"
"Silence him." Arthur watches dispassionately when the closest guard wraps a strip of cloth around the man's mouth, and reduces the man's screaming for innocence to nothing but muffled sounds.
"I can deliver but one sentence. Death. Executioner, ready your axe."
The man's eyes go wide, his mouth still screaming his innocence as he's thrust to his knees, his head forced by one of the guards onto the wooden block. The howls are still heard and the desperate writhing by the man to get free is all the more pitiful because the guards could never allow him to go free. He would be captured and put to death a second time. It was just pro-longing the evitable.
Uther's hand drops and with it, the axe falls and the man's muffled screams are silenced by the thud of the axe, its terrible finality cold and cruel in the warm summer's air. The silence in the courtyard is heavy and oppressive. The weight of death lingers even as the crowd departs, the entertainment from a death gone for today. But a small group of people remain; they stand firm in the tide against the crowds departing. Arthur resists his father's powerful hand urging him to move and watches them a little longer.
A woman, clad in blue, clutches a child to her chest, her face proud despite her tears of grief shining in the light from the sun. The child clutched to her chest has her same bouncing curls which coil tightly around her, head and the two identical children by her side do as well. The colour is a dull sandy colour, a less bright version of Arthur's own. Turning his sight from the group when a flurry of movement distracts his eyes, he sees the guards loading the body carelessly onto a cart. And Arthur's heart stops in his chest, because the dead man has the same colour sandy blonde hair on his head, spilling across the bloody straw covering the gap between the severed head and neck like a parody of flesh.
Suddenly Arthur runs from his father's side, ignoring his father's shouted commands to return, the heavy footsteps signalling the coming of a servant chasing him. He runs harder, swerves up the stairs, and sprints from one end of the castle to another. Dodging through the maze of rooms, he's soon lost the servant but the tears fall faster, and he's all but blind as he runs. Skidding to a halt outside a door leading to the town, Arthur runs through it, and he stands there, in front of the opened door, looking out onto the town.
Sinking to his knees before the view, in the wide open door, he grieves for the man who lost his family, and the family who lost their father, the woman who lost her husband. He realises how easy it is condemn a man for the sake of a simple act, when it leaves behind everyone who ever cared about the man. He realises just how cruel the system is and just how unfair and cold it is. He knows now the repercussions of his actions, and those of his father.
And suddenly his father is no longer such a great and magnificent man because Arthur can see that maybe sometimes, there isn't a reason to break a family apart, and to destroy all things inside that family just because a man used magic to help an ailing woman. There is sometimes a right choice and a wrong choice and sometimes it's right to actually forgive someone and it's wrong to hurt them.
Weeping from an understanding of what will be his part in the killings to come, he retches, once, twice, and third time before he passes out.
His eleventh birthday comes and goes, heralded by the death of a man who lost his family and his family lost him, with the downstroke of an axe.
His eleventh birthday was the day he lost his faith in the law of Magic, because he saw it for what it was.
His eleventh birthday was where he learnt what it meant to kill a man, unjustly.
His eleventh birthday was when he realised what his father's actions wrought on a community.
His eleventh birthday was the second time he saw death, but it was the first time he understood what repercussions came from such an action.
It was not the last time, he would gain such insight.
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Standing on a parapet, high above the people of Camelot, he stands at his father's side, the Great Crowned Prince Arthur Pendragon, his circlet upon his head one step below an angel, described by the court painters. He's a study of grace, elegance, and the taught arrogance of a Prince. He watches and doesn't move as a woman is strapped to a post in the centre of the court yard. He watches impassively as she wails and shrieks as the guards surrounding her look away and are shamed into staring at their boots.
Arthur stares down at her, but suddenly is overcome with the same shame because he knows what he is looking at. The woman's belly is swollen with unborn child, her dress tight showing off her belly full of promised life. He looks away because he knows the child will never be born, that the promise of life shall never be fulfilled now. That the red haired woman will lose her child and her life in the same breath. He can feel the shame of standing beside the man who would spare a man from murder if the man had a wife with a similar swollen belly, but he would condemn a woman of the same state because she dared to use the gift given to her, in order to aid herself in the final weeks of her labour.
High on the pyre of wood, thick boughs in dispersed with bundles of twigs, she looks as alive as anyone else who he cares to look at, but she will soon be a burnt body and they will not.
She stares up at them, her face twisted with the hatred that only a person who is to die by the hands of another can give, she screams at them, cursing them even as Uther tells the court her crime and her sentence. Her voice rings through out the courtyard, and Arthur is mesmerised by the high voice, shrieking curses of a thousand years at them.
But then she shrieks something at them, the two of them standing on the parapet and he feels the magic of the promise ringing over his flesh, "You and your spawn of the Evil One shall be cast into the Pits before Magic is stripped from these lands! Beware thine self Uther Pendragon, for when the time comes, it will be you who falls not magic!-"
"SILENCE!" Uther's face is colouring and his hand is shaking as he points to the closest guard to the fires and commands them to light the pyre.
Standing high on the parapet, Arthur feels the remorse of someone connected to a killer, the shame of knowing someone who kills someone innocent. He cannot bring himself to run away as he had as a child, but he cannot hide the tears that the knowledge of shame and remorse and grief for a life lost before it began brings to his eyes.
Standing upon a parapet, far above the woman who burns and screams, Arthur hears the screams of the woman and the cries of a child who is born into the flames and who lives but a moment. He hears the screams of a life unlived and a life not yet lived enough. And he cries silent for them, his tears leaking down his face and he grieves for those that have come before in the woman that burns before him.
Weeping from an recognition of the consequences of what will be his part in the killings to come, and though he doesn't throw up again, he feels the bile come rushing up to meet his throat. He doesn't allow it because he's too old to throw now, but he wants to so much.
His sixteenth birthday comes and goes, heralded by the death of a woman and her child of possibilities, gone in a flash of flame and whisper of smoke.
His sixteenth birthday was the day he found out what it was like to watch a person die, and hear them hate you.
His sixteenth birthday was where he learnt what his father actually did.
His sixteenth birthday was when he realised why he shouldn't ever look at the eyes of a dying person.
His sixteenth birthday was that there is no such thing as a right thing sometimes, and sometimes there is only one choice and it's even a choice.
It was not the last time, he reached that level of understanding.
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Standing beside his father's side, he wonders where his life became such a farce when he looks out into the courtyard and watches a man climb onto the pyre, his father's guards leading him one to step at a time because of the blindfold and the chains and the manacles. The man is considered one of the more dangerous sorcerers in the land, he is the most powerful so he is bound and under twenty four hour guard and there was a constant watch on him while he was in the dungeons so he couldn't use his gifts to escape.
"Gag him." Arthur can feel the fear emanating from his father and he laughs sourly when he thinks of the lack of understanding. The man below needs no words to kill all the people here. He needs no words to slay the guards holding him and he could use those wordless thoughts to summon himself far from here and into a land of the free and the rich and where there is no magical ban. He knows that as sure as he knows the day is light and that snow is cold and fire is hot.
The dark haired man, more a boy than a man, is strapped onto the pyre, his hands chained above his head, his feet fastened to a heavy bough to stop him kicking out. The guards move slowly and do not look the boy in the eye. They cannot understand why magic is so bad if this boy, the one who saved them all, is put to death for saving a life. Arthur reached that understanding many years ago but he knows the feelings of shame they carry all too well.
The king does not put fire in the blood of the beast by reciting the now well known sayings of sentencing. He just casts a semi-fearful and semi-fury-filled look at the man-child strapped to a post in the centre of the courtyard, his blinded face seeming to find no hindrance in the cold.
Arthur might be forty feet up and away from the boy, but he knows behind that rough cloth blindfold, ice blue eyes are wide and tear filled, that the hands, so elegantly cast skyward are shaking and the white knees are shivering beneath the trousers of rough cotton. He knows that the mind of beneath that mop of longish dark hair and between those two foolishly large yet sometimes endearing ears is screaming to escape. And he knows that the boy won't. Because he knows there can be no escape.
As the fire lights, the blindfold, from a wind of fate or just an accident, is stripped from those eyes and he looks deep into them, trying to convey his hope, his awkward friendship, his tentative love only a few seconds old and yet as deep and complete as a love of a thousand years.
As he watches his first and only friend burn because of a old man's pathetic fear of what he cannot understand, he understands why people hate their own lives and their own family.
Turning away, he whispers a name as the final howls of his burning friend are extinguished by the consuming fire and he whispers the name for some ill-borne hope that one day...perhaps the man might return. But he won't. The man is dead. And he won't be coming back.
"Merlin." Is a man killed on the pyres of irrational hatred.
His twenty-first birthday comes and goes, heralded by the death of a man-child who died too early and lived too little.
His twenty-first birthday was the day he found out what it meant to loose someone through someone's else's actions.
His twenty-first birthday was where he learnt what the Ban on Magic meant to him.
His twenty-first birthday was when he realised why he shouldn't ever fall in love because his heart is too broken now to hold it.
His twenty-first birthday was that there is no such thing honour when the dead are only so when it's the irrational hatred that does so.
On his twenty-first birthday, Arthur learns what it is to hate a father, and loose a lover who was only a friend until the end.
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