Hey guys! New chapter!

Guess what? Last week was the one-year anniversary since I published the first chapter of this story! Hurray! To celebrate, I actually updated in a timely manner! And I've been meaning to ask: What are people's thoughts on what is going to happen next in this story? I'm curious.

Enjoy!

~Ra1n

Previously...

Glancing at the sky again, he realized that it would soon be impossible to see anything. Halting his horse, he spied a large boulder with a shallow alcove. Not the best camp, he thought, but he'd certainly slept in worse. Dismounting his horse, and tying her to a nearby tree, he settled in for the night, laying his bedroll on the damp earth beneath the alcove and shimmying under it. The rock face was a few inches from his nose, but it was dry enough, and Gwaine found his thoughts wandering to Merlin again.

He wondered if he was alright. He thought that maybe he would feel if he wasn't, but then the only thing worse for Merlin right now would be if he stopped breathing, and Gwaine refused to think about that.

With his mind still turning, Gwaine fell asleep listening to the rain pounding on the rock above him.

The next time Gwaine opened his eyes, it was to the sound of his horse snorting outside his stone shelter. The initial confusion of waking up somewhere unfamiliar was more of a comfort than a fear; he was used to it. What he did not like, however, was the trapped feeling that came with being disadvantaged. And here, lying under a rock with his horse excited outside, he was just about as disadvantaged as he could be.

Turning his head slowly, the knight could see his horse's hooves as they stamped at the muddy ground. It was still raining, and Gwaine grimly noted that some of it was starting to breach his small shelter, running in rivulets only to be absorbed by his bedroll. Perhaps it was the storm that had caused his horse to react in such a way- wasn't that thunder rumbling in the distance? Nevertheless, he pressed his hands against the rock, twisted his body out of the alcove, and knelt in the mud, his hand hovering over his blade.

The morning was as gray as twilight, the sky glowing faintly as dark clouds shifted overhead and poured their contents into the forest. His horse was still tied to the same tree as she had been the night before.

It was, surprisingly, empty. There was nothing that could have spooked the horse so thoroughly, yet she was still snorting and stamping, tossing her wet mane and flicking her tail. Gwaine approached her slowly and gave a short whistle to get her attention, and her eyes rolled to look at him through the rain. Her movements slowed, but she still stamped her front hoof against the ground and stared into the forest, nickering softly. Gwaine stroked her nose and glanced in the direction she was looking, but still saw nothing.

"What's gotten into you?" He asked, gazing into the darkened forest, "you seein' something?"

The horse just snorted and nudged more forcefully into his hand. Gwaine sighed and stroked her nose again. Weather and agitated horse aside, Merlin was still in Camelot, and Gwaine still needed to find a Druidian leader in this blasted forest before it was too late. He wondered if there was a time limit, or just a vague deadline- had Gaius told anybody how long Merlin could last with that collar? Gwaine didn't want to entertain the thought, but what if he couldn't find Iseldir? Would Merlin survive? Would the collar be locked around his neck forever? Surely, they'd find a solution, with or without Iseldir- Gwaine just couldn't think of one at the moment.

But he was wasting his time. The longer he stood in this clearing, the further Iseldir could have gone-if he hadn't already magicked himself across the kingdom, which, Gwaine knew, was an entirely plausible scenario.

Shaking his bedroll out in a fruitless attempt to rid it of the mud, he packed and mounted his horse, heading further into the forest with Camelot at his back.

He'd barely made it to the other end of the clearing before the rain grew harder, pounding almost painfully against his shoulders. It bounced from the leaves of the trees into his eyes and beat against the flanks of his horse, which was still throwing its head in occasional agitation. Gwaine shook the water out of his eyes, but the trees blurred through the curtain of rain. He slid off his horse and lead it back to the boulder, where the rain was at least cut down by its bulk, and resolved to wait until the rain had slowed to continue his search.

Arthur was becoming desperate. He had given the knights their speeches, told them of the oncoming attack. He had told them about the sorcerers and although he hadn't given them their odds of winning a war like this, he could tell they knew they weren't good. He hoped they would train hard and fight hard, but a small part of him hoped they would spend time with their loved ones, if only a little, before the attack came.

In the meantime, he was somewhat at a loss of what he should do. He had visited Geoffrey in the library and pored over records detailing battles between sorcerers and men, and had even found an odd volume filled with the teachings of the high priestesses, but everything was coming to the same conclusion: without a sorcerer on their side, Camelot was doomed. And without a warlock's magic, Morgana would not be defeated.

He seemed to be stuck. His thoughts kept travelling back to Gaius's quarters, to Merlin on the bed, to that night Arthur's stupidity and fear had ruined everything. He wished he had never made that damn collar. He wished he had never seen Merlin call that dragon. He wished he had thought things through. Why hadn't he even given Merlin a chance before assigning him something that could really only be considered a death sentence?

He wanted to go back in time and plead with himself. He wanted to seize the collar from his own hands and shatter it against the floors of his chambers.

Most of all, he wanted Merlin to be alright.

"Gwen, could I use you over here for a moment?" Gaius's voice was tired. Gwen, who had been stoking the fire, looked up from her kneel and surveyed the physician. His hair was messy and his hands were slightly shaky with fatigue as he poured a few crushed herbs into a vial of water, corked it, and shook it violently. "There is a leak by the window. Is it possible you could place a bucket beneath it? We don't want people to be slipping." He motioned towards the window, where water was steadily seeping from the ceiling and dripping onto the floor. Gwen abandoned the fire and retrieved a bucket from the other side of the room, maneuvering it beneath the stream of water.

"Have you ever seen rain quite like this, Gaius?" she asked, listening to it howling outside and pounding against the walls. Gaius listened for a moment, cocking his head to the side.

"Indeed," he said after a moment, "I have. But it has not been for a long time."

"How long?" She was just talking now; anything to fill the oppressive silence that seemed to constantly hang over the room. She didn't think she could stand Merlin's wheezing anymore. To make matters worse, since Owain had come in and left, Merlin had started occasionally making pained noises in his sleep, and nobody knew if it was a good sign or a bad one.

"Decades," Gaius stated simply, "Since before the Purge."

"What does it mean?"

"Nothing. It's just the rain. We were due for another storm. Though I hope this doesn't put a damper on Gwaine's mission." He glanced at Merlin, who had made another whimpering gasp. "He needs to hurry."

Gwen shuffled over to Merlin and knelt beside him. The fever caused by the iron dust had broken long ago, but with the removal of some of the jewels, his body had begun to try to heal itself, leaving Merlin with another fever as his body finally began to recognize infection again. His hair was matted to his brow with sweat and his cheeks were flushed, though Gaius said that the fever posed no danger to him at the moment. It was a natural reaction while his body tried to sort itself out.

At least, that's what they hoped. Gwen placed her hand on his forehead. The fever wasn't particularly high, and it hadn't changed in hours, so she simply lay a damp cloth on the section of his chest that was not bandaged and another on his forehead before standing again and checking on the bucket below the leak. It was already a quarter of the way full, and Gwen resolved to continue to check it every few minutes as long as the rain continued.

Merlin whimpered again, and this time it happened to line up with the sound of thunder in the distance. It made him seem like a child frightened in his sleep, and Gwen knew if she had any more energy, she would have teared up at the sight. As it was, she just shook her head and went back to the fire.

Nearly three hours later, and Gwaine was once again leading his horse back to the boulder with a scowl. He had lost count of the amount of times the rain had slowed enough for him to remount and head off, only for it to suddenly pick up at an alarming rate when he was nearly out of the clearing. He was never going to make it anywhere with all of this stopping and starting, and he had long ago grown sick of the patch of muddy ground mother nature had seemingly chosen to banish him to. What kind of ridiculousness had lead him to standing in the same damn clearing for three hours, sopping wet and with a disobedient horse tethered to his wrist? He was simply not having it. Iseldir was probably hundreds of miles away, in another damn kingdom with his blasted magic and dry shoes (did Druids wear shoes? He didn't know.), living his life happily, totally unaware of the bloody rainstorm that was trapping a single knight in a clearing in a forest in the middle of Camelot.

Sighing, he sat down in the mud, too wet to care. The horse snorted and moved closer to the boulder, nuzzling Gwaine's hair. Gwaine pushed it away gently, his thoughts drifting to Merlin again. The horse nickered and nudged him in the shoulder. Gwaine ignored it, crossing his arms in front of his chest and drawing his knees up closer to his chin. The horse then gave another, much louder, snort and moved a little away from the boulder. Lightning flashed faintly, and the horse whinnied and stamped backwards, tossing its head upwards into the rain. Gwaine rolled his eyes. It had been thundering and lightning for the better part of the day, and he had thought the horse was used to it by now.

A clap of thunder, louder than any other, suddenly shook the clearing, and Gwaine gasped and placed his hands against the ground to study himself just as the horse reared,the whites of its eyes visible as another blinding bolt of lightning lit the forest. Gwaine jumped up to grab its reins, but only managed to slip in the mud as the horse let out an animalistic shriek and bolted into the forest.

"No!" Gwaine shouted, standing and sliding, chasing the horse in the dim grey. Another clap of thunder rolled through the rain and was almost immediately followed by a flash that lit up every blade of grass between the horse and the knight. Gwaine had only a moment to glimpse the muddy tail of his steed before it faded into the darkness again, disappearing into the gloom of the trees.

For a moment, he just stood there in shock. Then the reality hit him and he fell to the ground again, grasping fistfuls of mud from below him in anguish. He looked at the sky and shouted, cursing the rain and his horse and God, cursing Arthur and sorcery and Camelot. He cursed Iseldir and he cursed Merlin and he cursed himself, and then he slumped down, his energy spent. He stared into the storm and distantly wondered if he'd truly expected anything different.

There was another clap of thunder, quieter now, so Gwaine dejectedly scooted back to his rock and rested his shoulders against it. All of his supplies were on that horse. All of his food and equipment and clothes were bundled up and strapped to a beast that was now bolting through the forest, yet he was still in the same clearing, dripping with rain and mud. And he was no closer to finding Iseldir.

It felt like hours before the rain finally slowed enough for Gwaine to even consider getting up and looking for his horse. He was hoping that the rain had softened the ground enough by now to make tracking it easy. It was going to get dark very soon and he did not want to spend a night in his current state.

The rain was still falling softly as he reached the edge of the clearing. In spite of himself, he slowed as he got to it, expecting the rain to miraculously begin again, but it stayed steady. Laughing half-heartedly at his own paranoia, he looked down to see the prominent imprints of hooves sunk deep into the mud. No sooner had he started to follow them, however, when he heard a familiar whinny come from behind. Rolling his eyes, he spun towards the clearing-

Only to come face-to-face with a band of hooded strangers.