Innocence

Summary: Alone in the darkness, Kilgharrah descends into madness.

(An study of the Dragon's little freak-out during the end of the second season—why did he go from encouraging Merlin to save Arthur's life and promising a golden age for Camelot to suddenly deciding to kill them all?)

Disclaimer: I own a deranged fire-breathing dragon and I keep him in my closet. He's not Kilgharrah, though, so I guess I must not own the show. Oh, and if you want your own dragon there's this pet shop owned by a Count D that has a sale going…

"You killed innocent people!" the boy shouts, and I want to laugh, but I know if I start laughing I won't be able to stop. Innocent? What does he know of innocence, this pure, kind, just dispenser of murder? I have lived longer than his father's father's father, and if there is one thing I know, it is that only the dead are innocent.

I am actually young, for a dragon. I was mated for but a decade, and had only welcomed one hatchling into the world, the day the humans decided to kill us all.

We had a girl who lived with us, a young witch who helped us tend our child while we taught her magic. I came back to find her body spread over my infant daughter's—she took one of them down with a fire spell, and died defending her charge. She was but a child of fourteen summers herself. I did not hate humans then.

I swear that my first thought upon experiencing freedom after decades being locked alone in a cave was not revenge. No, it was just the joy of flight beneath my wings. I refused to promise Merlin because I owed him nothing after his broken oath, but after all my efforts to create a country that welcomed magic turned to naught I had ceased to care about Camelot one way or the other. All I wanted was to be away from this place.

Then I saw him. His face, wide eyes and coarse black hair, furrowed brow, I knew him. I had seen him feeling before me as I chased after the killers leaving my cave, had sent a gust a fire that he dodged by running into a cave. The opening was too small for me to peruse him then, but here he is, right in front of me now, jaw gaping in terror as my daughter must have looked at his blade in terror. This time he does not run fast enough.

The human lies smoking at my clawed feet, the smell of burned meat rising from him, face twisted in a horrible grimace. Suddenly I realize that he is too young to be the soldier I remember, that in the decades I have been imprisoned that man would be long grey, if he still lives (for peasants have even shorter lifespans than kings, often only a fistful of decades). But the resemblance is unmistakable. He must be blood kin, most likely a son.

I remember my daughter's hacked off head, and a horrible feeling rises within me. It isn't peace, isn't satisfaction, isn't joy. It is the desire to kill again.

It wasn't always like this. Once I dreamed of building instead of destroying, of taking back the land for the forces of magic. These visions of a peaceful future that I saw in my dreams were all that sustained me. My kind can sometimes see the future, so I knew it was destined to be. Arthur would be king of the land and Merlin would be king of magic and all would be as it was. Except the dead, of course. Nothing brings back the dead.

We did not realize they were anything other than animals at first, these hairless bipedals who migrated across the mountains to our land. For a long time, they went about their business and we went about ours. We lived in the mountains and they in the valleys. We had the courtesy to keep away from their sheep and they were (usually) smart enough not to try and hunt a flaming lizard fifty times their size.

Then one day a human male tripped and fell while climbing after a lost sheep, and he cried for help. And we heard him.

The bond a dragonlord has with a dragon is a sacred bond of brotherhood. So why does it involve the dragon bowing to the human's every whim, even obeying him if it is effective suicide? Not very brotherly, is that?

Of course, we are bigger, more powerful. So at first it seemed natural that we would race to their tiny little aid, instead of the other way around. There were, admittedly, dragonlords who tried to help us in return. They just weren't particularly effective about it. After all, my entire race is dead.

Why did we go down so easily, before a bunch of human with swords? The sad fact of the matter is that we didn't fight back very hard. The murder of one dragon by another is completely unknown to my kind. By the time Uther turned on all with magic, we had started to think of humans as people too, so we could not kill them. My mate tried to fly away from them, but when her wings accidentally bashed a soldier against a rock, she was so shocked with guilt and grief she just sat there as they pierced her with their swords. She was trying to explain to them that if she moved she might hurt them.

If we had banded together and attacked, we could have turned Uther's entire army into tinder before he had a chance to crown himself king. The human sorcerers and sorceresses fought for themselves and us as well with deadly force, while we tried to negotiate, tried to run away, and eventually tried to hide. To all the people with magic, I truly apologize. Our innocence cost you your lives.

"Why did you save Uther's life?" I asked Merlin, when I was still locked up under the castle. Or something like that. I might have phrased it a tad less politely—his promises aside I was still chained up in a freaking cave.

"I couldn't let him die," the boy says, so self-righteous. "That would make me a murderer."

And what are you now? I want to ask him. You killed six men to save Uther Pendragon's life. Yes, those men were killers, but so is Uther. Moreover, by saving his murderous life you have sacrificed countless more to die, human sorcerers, nonhumans of every kind, and every pitiful human who accidentally does something that makes Uther slightly suspicious of magic. You have washed your hands of Uther's blood, and covered them with the blood of your own kin. You must have seen Uther execute a dozen men, women, and even children, since you came to Camelot—and I know you suffered to watch. Yet you agonize over Uther's fate more than you did for any of them—how can that be?

Familiarity, that must be it. We dragons take a long view of time, so it never ceases to astonish me how humans value those of their kind they have personally met so much more than strangers. Even to the extent of casually murdering humans whose names they don't even know, while weeping over familiar faces they held in contempt.

It strikes me, that to the boy Merlin, Uther is a familiar figure in his life. He may not be liked, but his is someone who has great influence over his life, who will become an important figure in shaping who he becomes. Merlin's own father, who I once loved dearly—him, the boy does not have even one memory of. He could unknowingly watch the father he never met be executed by Uther and flinch no more than he does for any of the other deaths. And yet he would kill a few strangers to protect Uther.

Merlin is lost to me. It does not matter if he was born one of us—we are all dead, and that makes him one of them by default. I don't even blame him for it. It was Uther who killed all those who should have been his friends and kin, who made all of Camelot complicit in this madness, who left nothing untainted.

The boy will use his magic to protect Camelot and make it strong. Turn it into a land full of vibrant humans, where dragons are no longer remembered. There is no joy to teaching him anymore. I feel nothing, except for weariness.

The truth is, it is far too late to take anything back from Uther. Even if I kill him, it will mean nothing. He will still be remembered as a great king, and my people will not be remembered at all. It will still be his son who rules, and the descendants of his followers who live on while the humans who stood up to him (humans I once loved) are all dead.

But if I can't bring back what I love, I can at least leave Uther with no one to remember him either.

There is nothing left to save. Camelot must burn.

"You killed innocent people!"

I know they are innocent. I don't need you to tell me that, boy. It is easy for a humanity to regain it innocence; humans live such short lives. Less than a century, a blink of an eye, and they are gone, leaving behind even more humans. The guilty vanish beyond the reach of any justice, and their descendants frolic about on their stolen land while the victims rot underneath the ground. Every human alive is descended from a murderer. (Even the kind humans I once knew, their ancestors slaughtered the tribe who first lived here.) To live, all humans must kill, in the end. Perhaps this is but the law of nature, and we dragons doomed ourselves with our incapacity for murder.

My people are dead. I am the last, and with no mate I can have no children. In just a few short generations, humans will forget that we ever existed. They will not even have the courtesy of remembering us as monsters.

They will know nothing about our demise, and thus be innocent of it.

And I feel myself begin to hate them.

The End

Author's notes: Kilgharrah's behavior throughout the series is frankly hard to understand. In the first season, he clearly wants Uther dead. But he helps Merlin create Excalibur knowing full well this will save Uther's life just because Merlin tells him Arthur will die too—so he clearly cares greatly about Arthur and Camelot. Then in the second season he's willing to burn both to the ground without a second thought. Sure, he's mad at Merlin, but he also gave up on the rest of humanity. His revenge doesn't even seem that focused on Uther anymore, or he would have gone straight for Uther from the beginning and probably succeeded. Then by season three he's started to care about Camelot again; he wouldn't encourage Merlin to kill Morgana if he didn't care, since Morgana is out to fulfill his own revenge and destroy Camelot. So the mood swings are kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, being locked up in a dark cave with no one to talk to for years could make anyone a little mentally unstable.

As for why he gets mostly better after this fic…well, it wasn't due to TLC from Merlin so I can only speculate that he found a decent therapist. (See TV Tropes: There Are No Therapists).