Author's note: Warnings for some gore and horrible situations, and some language.

The End Times

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1348

It came in summer.

He'd lived ten times as long as Gaius by then, the bones of his first friends long since turned to dust, but nothing in that long life had prepared him for what came to Albion that fateful year.

Rumours of the horror had made their slow way from the continent for some months. Some said Avignon, the heart of what Merlin still thought of as the new religion, had been decimated, that thousands of houses lay empty save for the bodies of the dead. Others cried that the Pope had perished and God was scouring the Earth.

They were not far wrong.

-x-

He was in the fishing village of Flodwilm, a place populated by no more than three small clans, when the pestilence finally reached Albion's shores. The peddler from Bristol who told them of the horror said it had been as if the hand of God had touched the entire population of the town, carrying them away all at once, "for few kept to their beds past a day or two, many not even that."

The men folk gathered looked grim. Jeanne the cobbler's wife crossed herself and prayed under her breath, while Mary the brewer clutched her children close and hustled them away from the peddler, dragging the oldest boy Charles by the collar.

"You come now, William," she told Merlin. "I'll not have any what stays near that man taking a room in my house!"

"I'll put the man up," Big Richard the miller told her. "Shouldn'a been staying with a widow anyhow. You go home and keep yer young'uns safe."

"And wot are you all so afeared of me for?" the peddler demanded. "Ain't I always brung you lot things worth far more than the few farthings ye throw me?"

"A time like this ain't a good one for strangers," Big Richard said, and, as one, all but Merlin turned their backs on him and went to lock themselves in their homes.

"I'm sorry," Merlin said. "It's just that they're very afraid."

"Of me? Wot they afeared of me for?" the peddler begged of him, snappishness not quite hiding a sudden fear behind his eyes. "Wot'm I going to do fer business? Won't survive the winter, will I? Not if none'll buy from me!"

Merlin looked over the man's stock. "Here, give me that pot. I've got four pennies."

"It's t'ieving from a poor man on the road, is that. Thing's worth seven pennies if it's worth a groat."

"I'm afraid it's all I've got."

The peddler grudgingly took the coins, but uttered a soft, 'Thank'ee, lad, you're a kind one,' under his breath.

"Have you got somewhere to go?" Merlin asked.

"Think I'll push on. Don't fret none about my staying where I'm not welcome."

Merlin was about to caution him not to tell the next village about the pestilence for his own sake, but then realized that would be unfair to those who lived there. In the end, he simply nodded sadly and made his way towards the miller's house.

"Oi!" the peddler called after him. "You… you don't really tink I brung it wit' me, do ye?"

Merlin couldn't find anything to say.

"I haven't got it, ye know! I'm not sick! "

"No, of course not," Merlin said.

"Won't get it, neither! You'll see! To Hell wit' you, you weedy little sod! To Hell wit' all of you! You'll be sorry you've seen the back of me!" the peddler yelled.

"I'm already sorry," Merlin told him.

"I'm not sick, you little bastard! You hear me? I'm not sick!" the man began to rant, growing hysteria threading its way through his louder and louder denial. "I'm not going to die!"

Merlin stood in the muddy lane even after the old man sobbed and feebly threw a rotten, half-eaten parsnip at him. He watched as the peddler got behind his cart and left the village.

That night the cobbler's daughter came down with a fever.

-x-

The peddler had been the first of those shunned and turned away, but hardly the last. Fever burned its way through the villagers, followed by vomiting and black blotches on the skin that to Merlin's eyes looked like internal hemorrhaging under the skin. The most frightening were the hideous pus-filled swellings that grew on the neck, under the armpits and around the groin.

At least until the panic of being unable to breathe through flooded lungs set in.

Half the village was struck in a matter of days. One person would get sick and then poison the rest of their family. Merlin fought tirelessly, going from house to house even when their own family members began to shun the sick, but nothing he did worked. There seemed to be no cure. Not even his magic helped.

Richard finally turned him out one day. "You're a good man, William lad, but you've been too close to them what's sick for my liking. I've got my little ones to consider."

Merlin couldn't tell him that he wouldn't fall ill so he nodded and walked away. For a day or two he lived in the forest, until he saw John and his family passing by in the woods.

"What news, John?" he asked.

The proud fisherman could not look at him and his wife's eyes were red with tears. "We're coming into the woods, William. Reckon we're best away from others till this 'ere passes."

"But where's Marian?"

"Left'er at the house," John said hoarsely. "Tweren't nothing more we could do fer her."

"She's gone then?"

John turned away without answering and pushed his family forward.

"John?" Merlin called after him, confused. "John, she's not still alive, is she?"

"Tweren't nothing more to do," John repeated without looking back.

"John! She's only three years old! How could you leave her to die!"

There was no answer.

Without a thought, Merlin returned to the village and went to John's house. There he found Simon nailing the door closed. "Get away!" Merlin shouted and chased the boy off.

"Is orders!" Simon protested. "Big Richard said!"

"Go on with you!" Merlin yelled back. He pulled the door open and found little Marian still breathing. He nursed her through the night and through the next day, even after he heard pounding coming from outside and the room went dark as the two souls were shut in again to die.

When Marian died two days later, Merlin pushed open the door and found an empty village.

-x-

That summer and fall he wandered as forlorn as the itinerant peddler and saw many horrors. Ghostly villages, empty but for a few haunted survivors; piles of bodies in various stages of putrefaction as those who were well grew unable to keep up with the burying of the dead; livestock left untended to die in ditches and rot in hedges. Rats were everywhere and feeding on the dead - one day he saw a giant one dragging what looked like a child's hand through the mud. Sheep lay fallen in the fields from some murrain, the stench so awful not even birds were coming near. And bells rang for the dead until there was no one left to play them.

Famine hit as there were few left strong enough to take in the harvests. Village, town or city, life came to a stop. Civil courts closed as local leaders died. Building projects were left to ruins. Food wasn't being made. Bread wasn't being baked. Sanitation - such that it was - was ignored. Those who lived deserted their homes or ran lawless in the streets, convinced they'd been abandoned by their God. Not expecting to live past tomorrow, instead they drank themselves senseless and went about trying to satisfy every bestial urge. Merlin tried to stop a man from raping his nine-year-old daughter in the street but was struck on the head by the poor child's mother.

Broken and stunned, people wailed for answers. Wild theories abounded; some thought the pestilence was spread by sight, others thought that it would come by merely thinking about it. Poisoned fish, poisoned wells, bad winds - all were claimed as the source. Most physicians were convinced it was a miasma in the air and so people made bundles of thyme, tansy and wormwood hoping to ward off the sickness, but all that did was mask the putrid stench of death for a little while. Meanwhile reports of the dead from clerics spreading the news continued to come out, forming a droning drumbeat in Merlin's head: St. Leonard's, 380; Holy Cross, 400; St. Margaret's, 700; and so on and so on in every parish he passed through.

And, as solutions failed, people turned to harsher extremes.

In one place, Merlin was almost relieved to stumble onto a crowd; he'd passed through so many abandoned towns he'd started to believe there was no one left in the world. He wondered why they were gathered, and so stood with them to watch what looked to be a procession, only to bear witness to a truly nightmarish spectacle. Fear had driven the survivors to horrifying penitent rituals and this is where he first saw the Flagellants - men and women either half-naked or with holes cut into the backs of their tunics, barefoot and smeared with ashes and wearing hoods with red crosses front and back - who flayed themselves and others with three-pronged whips, each throng bearing a knot with something sharp tied in it. The crowd, desperate for redemption worked themselves into a frenzy, chanting litanies and letting forth lamentations that rang fearfully through the air which smoked with a hundred torches.

When a large flick of blood from one spectre's swinging whip splattered against his face, Merlin ran.

But that was not the worst of it.

When cures and penitence didn't work, people turned the blame to others. On the continent it was said hundreds of cities slaughtered those of the Jewish faith and while that didn't happen in England Merlin knew it was only because the King had banished the Jews back in 1290. For England wasn't spared from the carnage; heretics and outsiders were dragged from their homes and burnt at the stake. Accusations went wild, neighbours turned on neighbours, some out of fear and some out of opportunity; those who were owed money were often condemned by those wishing to free themselves from debt.

Merlin recognized what was happening - it was another Purge, only this time vastly greater in scope.

As mindless violence ruled the cities and dead in the thousands filled huge trenches (some of the sick even buried alive with boulders lain on their chests to hold them down), and villages all over remained desolate except for a few haunted stragglers so ragged and emaciated and addled by horror they barely seemed human, Merlin began to wonder if it was the end of days.

And so he went to the Lake of Avalon.

The world is ending, Arthur. Why haven't you come?

He staggered out into the water, past his knees, past his thighs, stopping finally as the freezing water circled his waist. "Am I to be left all alone?" he cried out loud in fury, raising his fists to the sky. "Have I been made immortal only to haunt a world of the dead?"

He broke down and wept with great wracking sobs.

Arthur, why haven't you come?

Why haven't you come?