I gotta warn you, readers, this will get totally ridiculous from this point on. I'm sorry that I'm not even remotely sorry on the ridiculousness.
I fixed up the typos that were really irking me in the first couple chapters, so now you may all read this with limited commercial interruptions and typo-free.
As always, I only own the identity crisis-ed Arian/Analise, and all other characters belong to who the heck ever created them.
Leave your feedback! I do so enjoy hearing - er, reading it. :)
Without very many pieces of this puzzle, it was up to him to fill all the missing blanks and cover anything that may be amiss; to find out what was wrong, and to fix it before something truly awful happened. His mind refused to relinquish the memory of the day he helped her escape from Camelot. Aside from his magic, it was the secret he'd take to the grave, an action that he had no regrets in taking.
On a hunt outside the castle walls, a knight or two caught her using magic, and Uther, blind to all reason and justice where magic concerned itself, had sentenced her to burn at the stake. Very unwilling to let that happen, he had gone to see Kilgharrah, the Great Dragon, imprisoned far below the castle, for one of his pearls of wisdom. When Merlin asked the Dragon for help in saving Analise, instead of answering in one of his trademark riddles, he gave him a rather straightforward answer – if he helped Analise escape, she would aid in the downfall of Camelot.
The very refusal to believe such an outrageous claim was what fueled his desire to save her.
Once removing her from the castle, they stayed with Gwen, who, despite Merlin's various arguments against it, had willingly helped him. After narrowly avoiding guards in both the courtyard of the castle and in the lower village, he saddled a horse and brought her to Ealdor, his hometown and a village in one of the outlying kingdoms. He asked his mother to watch over her, keep her as safe as possible, kissed her goodbye and rode back to Camelot. Nobody was any the wiser; nobody expected a simple servant to be able to evade guards and help a powerful sorceress out of the castle.
That had been two years ago.
A lot had happened since then; Merlin had watched people he loved die, or almost die; he had seen attempts to take over the kingdom, and nearly killed a close friend hoping to prevent just that; he had released the Dragon that had nearly destroyed Camelot in revenge; he had seen good people turn evil.
He wondered what happened in Ealdor, wondered what could have happened that made her recoil back from him when mentioned. Surely if something had happened to her, or his hometown, his mother would have made a mention of it.
Then something hit him that caused him to shoot straight up in his bed; maybe she hadn't been in Ealdor all this time.
But if not, where could she possibly have been?
He remembered that darkness in her eyes, and that strange tone of her voice when she recounted her story to Uther. Something had changed inside Analise, something that robbed her of her kindly nature, replaced instead with something...something that resembled the very change that occurred in Morgana. On that much, Merlin was certain. He wasn't sure how, and he wasn't sure why.
But it had.