Epilogue: The end is a disguise worn by a new beginning

How does this end? With a dream? Then let it be the most important one.


Morgana woke with a gasp. She looked around the room confused, putting her hands up to the moonlight to check they were still young and unlined. She felt movement beside her. A hand wrapped around her waist and a face snuggled into her hip. He did not awaken, for which she was glad. She ran through the images in her mind, seeing what she would see, feeling what she would feel. When? Where? She did not know. Only knew that at some point the future would bring death and destruction, disappointment and betrayal and pain.

She lay back down in the bed and pulled the heavy coverings over herself and Merlin, cocooning them there. In his sleep, he rolled back over, pulling himself up to the pillows. His hair lay black on the white pillowcase and his skin, so white that in the moonlight he had always looked like marble, glowed. She slid her arm underneath his, wrapping it around his torso and burying her face in his shoulder blade. He sighed and took her hand in one of his.

She thought of the dream she had just had and everything it had foretold. Arthur's body dead upon a battlefield, the pain in Merlin's eyes, the coldness of her own heart. It had not needed to show her their disintegration. It was implied in every thought, every action, every look that she had witnessed. They would end and end badly because she would do something Arthur perceived as a betrayal. And she knew where Merlin's ultimate loyalties lay, and why.

She thought briefly that the dream had been showing her that she should end it and now, before these events unfolded. But she knew that she would not. For now, they had each other and the memory of this would sustain her for the lonely years to come.

He'd been right all that time ago by a fire under some stars when she'd felt safe. No matter what the future wrought, no matter what we knew about what was to come, this was worth it.

"I love you, my lion. My beautiful unicorn," she whispered, and closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.


And that's all folks.

In case you didn't realise, Morgana's dream refers to Arthur's death at the Battle of Camlann, which in the 'original' mythology (if such a thing can be said to exist) happens when he's 35. Although Morgan Le Fay was on Mordred's side, it is said that she took his body to Avalon. It is said that he will come again. But then, it always does, doesn't it?