Note: so sorry for the delay in getting this chapter out! I've been in hospital :( Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed, followed or favourited - it means so much to me! Hope you enjoy this chapter. I don't own anything.

Morgana blinks soot from the edges of her eyes. Her body aches and her mind feels drained and empty from the effort of such huge magic. She looks up to see Merlin standing awkwardly over her, his blue eyes brimming with concern and hesitancy.

"Are you okay? That must have taken a lot of energy."

The thin blue veins snaking through his arms pulse fast with barely concealed anxiety and he reaches one hand down to help her up. Morgana reaches for it, groaning slightly as she unfolds herself and stands upright on the hard packed floor of the empty entrance hall. His hand feels electric and warm and alive. She doesn't want to let go of his comforting fingertips, but she does, almost too quickly to remember how they felt.

Almost.

"I'm a lot stronger than you think, obviously," she sasses, feeling energy sink again into her limbs.

Then she grins, remembering Merlin's words - spoken in no language that she recognised - which ordered the dragon to protect them. Surely nobody non-magical would know such an enchanted, dragonish language. She tucks the piece of knowledge into her mind, savouring to be used later, and turns her attention to the echoing chamber which surrounds them. Merlin follows her gaze and they look around them.

Orange, burnt light splinters messily in through the door which Morgana's dragon has torn open. The brightness spills only a few inches into the room, however, looking as though it is forbidden to illuminate further into the chamber. High ceilinged and a hundred paces long, the room is rimmed with black shadows which twist and leer out of the corners. The building seems to hum with a dark, malignant energy which makes them both shiver.

"Hurry," Morgana murmurs urgently to herself in response to the dangerous, dark energy. She isn't sure what they're looking for, has no idea where to find the Wolf King, but the absence of light tricks time into a gaping absence. The moon could be beginning to rise already.

Looking about her for some source of light, Morgana murmurs "fyr?" Immediately several unseen torches placed in brackets along the far wall ignite. Their brilliance scatters the shadow, sending it scurrying into further corners. Morgana glances at Merlin from under her eyelashes. Good. He looks impressed. She strides across the room, grasping two torches and shoving one into her companion's hand without allowing their fingertips to touch or their eye shadow to meet. She doesn't have time for the crackling tension between them, like the static in a thunderstorm.

"Walk fast," she instructs, and at a half walk, half jog, the two make their way down the long, long room and disappear through the tunnel-like doorway gaping at them from the far side.

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"What exactly is our plan here?" Morgana pants, twisting her elegant neck downwards to peer at Merlin's face as they laboriously ascend a black, dust covered spiral staircase.

"Don't you have one?" Merlin asks, half seriously, half joking, "You outrank me! That means you give the orders."

"It's not often you'll hear me say this, Merlin, but I'm quite happy to be the one following orders today. Given that you're the one who knows slightly more about this Wolf King," Morgana doesn't look at him as she says this, afraid he'll see something in her eyes which betrayed that despite the seriousness of the situation, she is still managing to enjoy bantering with Arthur's serving boy. Which is not an appropriate thought at all.

"Gains gave me a bit of a run down," Merlin admits, "the Wolf King's been here for centuries, as long as anyone can ever remember, basically. People don't see him, he stays in here all the time and they say nobody gets past the entrance without being turned into a wolf."

"Lucky us."

"There's an old rhyme about the Wolf King, then that's about all Gauis knew. It's a sort of children's song, it goes "King of wolves is king of shadows, lives inside his house of shadows, in you go then out you come, a wolf must never see the sun."

They are silent after this, and Morgana, lost in thought, almost trips in empty air before she realises they've reached the top of the staircase. High mullioned windows reach down a long passageway wide as four men laid end to end. The windows are so caked with dirt, dust and dead things that only a minuscule portion of reddish light filters through from outside. Something inside this room seems to hum and beat with malicious, greedy intent. She can feel magic, feel the bubble and push, feel it calling towards her, 'Morgana! Morgana! Run into the shadows and play! Morgana! Morgana! Everything you ever wanted...'

Merlin's light touch on her shoulder make sure her jump.

"You okay?" he asks gently, his hand gripping her fragile shoulder bones firmly, as though to steady her. His other hand weaves the torch through the room, illuminating huge double doors at the far end cunningly engraved with a wolf pack. At the centre of the doors, spanning both sides, is a giant engraving of a wolf with a crown settled betweeen its alert ears, howling to the disc of the moon off to the left. Although now grey with dust, the doors must have been gold once, for the colour can still be glimpsed through the sticky black residue.

Morgana clears her throats and steps quickly away from Merlin's distracting, intoxicating touch. He flinches slightly, as though he has hurt her. "Sorry," he mutters, eyes darting deep into hers and then gliding away, his hand still in the air as though it is remembering the shape of her skeleton.

She shakes her head. "It's fine. Merlin - don't step into the shadows. Don't touch them. Something about them feels -"

Hungry, thinks Morgana, starving, aching for more and more and more of whatever it is that shadow eats. Secrets and power and gold. And dangerous, thinks Morgana, like monsters under a child's bed, evil in plain sight that nobody else seems to notice.

"Wrong," she finishes lamely. Merlin accepts this without question, his mind in other places, with the prince and Gwen lying still on the hut floor. With the red light through the windows which indicate that outside the sun is setting. They don't have very long left.

"Can you hear it?" Morgana pushes as they step forward cautiously into the light shed by their flickering torches. "The voices, can you hear them, Merlin?" She has allowed too much fear into her voice, she criticises herself harshly, too much vulnerability. Too much of herself, when other people lie sick and sleeping and close to death. But her companion responds to the fear in her voice.

"I can't hear anything," he says gently, "But you do have very strong magical powers, we know that, maybe that's why?"

Morgana looks suspiciously at him. Can he really not hear them? Their call is so strong. She can feel hungry desire crawling at the edges of her vision, a cool rush of pleasure that would ensue if she would just step into the shadows. Great. Now she really is losing it. She brushes her long dark hair away from her face with a determined gesture and takes a deep breath as she continues to step forward cautiously. The hallway is long, and they dance through it with caution, in stops and starts, avoiding the shadows scattered over the floor. Broken edges of walls and bent torch holders mean that there is no consistent pathway of light. The further down they walk, the longer the room seems to stretch, and however close they come it never seems to be close enough to touch the door.

Morgana, aside from being a born strategist, has spent enough time with her father to know that walking into the camp of the enemy without a solid plan is the battle strategy most likely to get you and all your knights killed as quickly as possible. She also knows that no solid plan can be made without knowing the strengths of yourself and your army. She looks at Merlin, who is peering ahead of them, trying to estimate the distance to the door. "Merlin?" she says.

He turns his head immediately, attention drawn by the melody of her mouth, the notes in her lips. His name between her hands.

"How did you know what to say to my dragon? Do you speak her language? Can you do that without magic?" the words tumble out of Morgana's mouth, she is so eager for an answer, so sure that this is the one thing he cannot deny. The final brick in the wall that will cement them together. A rough ache snaps through the ward's middle as she remembers how lonely she is.

The tips of Merlin's ears turn red as he turns his face quickly away from her. "Umm...Gauis gave me a rabbit foot? It's good luck? I was...I was...lucky...?"

Morgana almost laughs aloud with annoyance and relief at the transparency of his excuse. "Oh come on, Merlin, you can do better than that. At the very least are you sure it wasn't an old children's song you learned from your mother? Or you could try your favourite excuse, 'I understand better than you know, but there's nothing to tell." She's teasing but there is a edge to her voice. Morgana is a king's ward and she is used to getting what she wants.

The voices in the shadows seem to whisper again: Morgana. Morgana. You know you want to...step into the shadows...

Merlin laughs in giddy relief as he realises he is saved from having to answer by the fact that they have reached the door. "Can we argue later? We have a werewolf to fight right now."

Morgana is grateful to have finally reached the door and a pang of fear hits her centre as she remembers the faces of her handmaiden and brother lying on the dirt floor, barely breathing. She unrolls her long fingers and allows her torch to clatter to the ground as she uses both hands to push at the sticky, ancient golden door which slides open with surprising swiftness. "Oh, we'll be arguing about this later, believe me," she shoots at her companion as he grasps the door handle and steps into the room behind her.

Morgana fights an urge to tiptoe as they enter the circular chamber. She'd been expecting to see a throne of some sort, some terrible half-human, half-animal seated upon on it with a crown. Instead, the room is eerily empty, a twilight darkness enveloping them and darkening until it reaches the centre of the room where a dark, shifting mass of shadow sways, long tendrils of blackness reaching out for the feet of the humans. Morgana grasps Merlin's arm and roughly shoves them both backwards, trying not register the curve of his muscle beneath the rough red linen of his shirt.

"Soooo..." a deep ugly voice crashes out of the darkness and the couple in the doorway instinctively take a step closer to each other. Hearts beating, arms touching. Their breath catches. The Wolf King is speaking.

"The prophesied children have arrived." The voice is strange, husky with a catch in it like a dripping jug. At the edges wave after wave of desire and hunger break along the shore of his invisible lips. "The witch. The magician. Welcome to my castle."

Morgana does not register the word magician. The voices around her have increased in frequency and are begging, begging her to walk into the shadow. She swallows hard as the King registers her compulsive distress. He laughs, a hard unforgiving sound that somehow still tastes like water at the end of a long, hot day. "Witch. You hear the voices? Darkness calls to darkness. It wants you."

Merlin's warm, heavy weight lies at her shoulder. "We're here about the boy and his mother." she calls strongly.

"The thief and the cripple? They stole. They paid the price." the darkness moves, swaying in righteous anger.

"They were hungry. They didn't understand the price they had to pay. They never entered your contract." Maybe it is the way he moves as he speaks, allowing more light to spill from the doorway, but Merlin's voice seems to drive the shadow backwards a little.

"Lift the spell," Morgana joins.

A slow funeral march wheezes out of the shadows as the mass speaks in a singsong voice. "My dear little children, you're funny. It doesn't work that way. Come into the darkness and fight and then we will see what the King can do for you."

"What will happen if one of us enters the shadow? If we come to you?" Merlin asks. Morgana flicks her eyes to him, alert for any movement towards the heart of the darkness.

"The darkness will enter you. If you can get all that shadow out of your heart, sun will hit this room and destroy me. If you can't - and, let the emptiness of this place demonstrate how many have tried and how many have failed - you will be destroyed. Another skeleton in the pile in my...heart...your dust... to become my lungs." The King laughs, a wolf's hunger embedded so deeply into his voice.

Morgana turns to her companion. One of them will have to go in. The only question is, who? Light will not destroy this thing...shadow moves when the lights comes from outside...the light has to come from its centre...to destroy it...as though a candle has been lit inside the princess's head, Morgana knows the answer. Fire. Fire, from the inside of the shadow, to destroy the shadow. Something bright and hot and overwhelming. A wolf must never see the sun.

Merlin must have come to the same conclusion, for her let's his torch fall and steps forward, touching Morgana's arm gently. "If I don't come out, take the horses and Arthur's spare sword from his saddlebag and get them out," he murmurs.

Morgana shakes her head fiercely. "Lucky you have such a good plan. You'll need it, since I'm the one going in."

"No, you're not, my lady," Merlin shoots back. Morgana hesitates. The intensity of the shadow voices doesn't bode well for her ability to fight the darkness...and then, she is sure Merlin has the magic to cast fire...doesn't he? But he still hasn't admitted it yet. And if he isn't lying, if he has no magic in the tips of his fingers, no gold in his bright eyes? She can't send him into shadow without any weapons at all. At least she knows she has her magic.

"Yes, I am. Now, get out of my way unless you want to get hurt," she twists past his body, breathing shallowly as she contemplates the darkness that rules this place. But his hand snakes out, his long fingers taking her wrist with a strength that makes her stomach flip unwittingly.

"I am a servant. It is my job to lay down my life for the King, or the King's ward. Step back, Morgana," he tells her in a low, serious voice. Morgana hesitates, a long moment passing between them.

"Fine," she breathes. His shoulders sag in relief and he squeezes her hand tightly before he lets her go. Morgana wonders if he thinks she can't feel him shaking. "Wait. Do one thing for me before you go?" she pleads suddenly.

He turns back to her, mouth half open as he breaths fast and shallow. "Anything. Quickly, now."

Morgana steps closer to him, heart hammering as her chest meets his, her head at his neck, tilted upwards at his shocked-still face. Her fingers twist around the rabbit's foot on his belt and she tugs it off, wraps it in her hand. She needs all the luck she can get.

"Just...this..." Morgana murmurs. Her hand lifts to his dark hair, brings his head down low. Tiptoe...lips meet. Everything you ever wanted. Pleasure and light dances briefly through the two figures as Merlin instinctively reaches up his hand to cup her chiselled cheek.

Then Morgana pulls away with a sad, determined smile. His hands reach after her, his face wide open and raw with their touch, unable to move for a moment with shock. Morgana lifts one hand and strokes his face, the hard bone beside his eye narrowing into a rough chin. She doesn't say anything.

And, as the magician is enchanted into stillness, the witch steps into the centre of the shadow.