Disclaimer: I own nothing here you recognise (and depending on what fandom drew your interest to this fic, I may not own some things you don't recognise); you know how it goes.

Feedback: Always appreciated

AN: Just to clarify, I still intend to only start this in depth once I've finished a couple of current projects, but I was aiming for a mass update for my birthday and decided to do a bit of work on this as well. I've still got a few other things I want to finish before I can devote more full-time attention to this, but I hope you enjoy this update as the new team starts to come together...

The Guardians of Magic

The more Merlin saw of this strange new world, the more he wondered what had happened to him and what he was even doing here.

He could just about accept that he was somewhere he'd never been before, considering that Albion was a large island and he hadn't exactly had the opportunity to accompany Arthur anywhere particularly far afield, but the sheer scale of this place was another matter. He wasn't sure how long he'd been wandering, but this place had more side-alleys than Camelot had main streets, and he was sure he hadn't even seen all of it yet. Without knowing anything about those mysterious guards or even where this was, he couldn't even talk to someone to find out more about what had just happened.

In a strange way, he wished that Arthur was here. Even if it would have put him in the awkward position of revealing his magic to the prince of Camelot, at least he would have been able to rely on Arthur's tactical experience to work out what he should do next. His current strategy of staying on the move should hopefully prevent these people from finding him, but it wasn't exactly a long-term solution; he didn't even know where Camelot was in relation to his current location, never mind how he had come to be here.

"Goddess…" he groaned, slumping against a wall in frustration after his latest walk down another alley had failed to lead him anywhere more interesting than another empty street. "This is getting ridiculous…"

He suddenly had a new sense of sympathy for how Arthur had been such a prat when they first met. If this was the kind of stress Arthur had to deal with when some of Camelot's past military campaigns had taken him to unfamiliar territory, he could almost understand Arthur venting when he was back at Camelot and in full control of the situation…

Merlin…

His head jerked up as he heard that unfamiliar voice in a very familiar manner. He knew that it couldn't be the same voice he was used to hearing like that, as it sounded a lot younger than the Great Dragon had when initially calling out to him, but there was still something in that voice that made it clear Merlin had to respond to it.

"Hello?" he said, keeping his voice low as he stood up and called out. "Is someone there?"

Merlin…

Looking around, Merlin glimpsed a figure in a red cloak walking around a corner, but by the time he'd run after the figure there was no sign of it on the other side of the street. A quick glance around revealed that there was no sign of any doors on either side of the street that the person might have gone into, but the end of the alley led towards a larger street with an even larger building opposite it. For a moment Merlin hesitated, but then he caught a glimpse of that same figure in the red cloak walking through a door to the side of the large building and decided to risk it. Recalling some of Arthur's advice about being 'stealthy' in public (the prince didn't like more subtle spying missions but he had become better at them over time), Merlin took care to be casual when walking across the street from the alley to the building, hoping that anyone seeing him would assume he was just a local with an eccentric dress sense.

The door turned out to be open, and he could feel the same strange lure he'd sensed on his first visit to the dragon's cavern underneath Camelot, but when Merlin walked inside, the only thing he found were what looked like metal boxes of various sizes. Merlin briefly wondered at the blacksmiths that could create such large metal structures, to say nothing of the society that could just leave them like this, but decided to focus on exploring rather than ponder questions he couldn't immediately answer. He tried to follow that strange sense that had drawn him here in the first place, but after a few moments wandering around inside the building, finding nothing but more empty boxes, Merlin could only conclude that whatever had drawn him here had done its work. The sensation that had drawn him here at least didn't feel hostile, but unlike when he first visited the dragon's cavern, there was clearly nowhere in his building for a creature that size to be hiding-

"Whoa!"

Spinning around at that sudden sound, Merlin instinctively raised his hands in a defensive manner, only to find himself facing a young man who seemed about his age, accompanied by two women, who had apparently just walked out from behind another of the large metal boxes. The three appeared strangely dressed, with one woman wearing a particularly short 'dress' and the other wearing very tight trousers while the man was wearing a loose assortment of clothing like nothing Merlin had ever seen.

"Who are you?" Merlin asked, hands raised defensively even as he stopped himself doing any obvious magic.

"Uh… that's a bit of a long story," the young man said, looking cautiously back at the two women before he turned his attention back to Merlin. "Could we start with-?"

"Who are you people?" another voice said. Trying to adjust his position without taking his eyes off the first three, Merlin cautiously turned around until he saw a boy, probably not much older than thirteen, wearing clothes similar to the young man Merlin had already met. "And… where are we?"

"Where are we?" the other young man said, looking at the boy in surprise. "You mean you don't know either?"

"Dude, I literally just… found myself here; how should I know where it is?" the boy said.

"You got teleported too?" the shorter of the girls looked at the boy in surprise.

"Did that happen to you too?" the other woman looked at Merlin inquiringly, displaying a tall, beautiful face with long dark hair around it that made Merlin think of Morgana.

"…That depends," Merlin said cautiously. "What do you mean by 'teleported'?"

The woman was about to answer when there was a strange glow of white light in the middle of the room that faded to reveal three new people. Two of them were red-haired women, one in some kind of dark blue top over a pink shirt while the other wore a velvet blue top that exposed her arms, while the third was a man in dark clothes who was for some reason holding his jacket over his head.

"Basically that," the woman who reminded Merlin of Morgana said, indicating the new arrivals as the trio looked anxiously around themselves.

"Then… essentially, yes," Merlin nodded at the Morgana-esque woman. "I mean, I was walking down a dark corridor and then I found myself in a street somewhere here, but if you mean I just appeared here…"

"I do," the woman nodded before she turned to look at the others. "So who are you?"

"Paige Matthews," the older redhead said, nodding briefly at the woman before she indicated the other two. "Willow Rosenberg, and Angel."

"Angel?" the boy looked at the man in black in surprise.

"It's just a name," the man in black said before he looked at the boy inquiringly. "And who are you?"

"Uh… Billy Batson," the boy said, his tone cautious but still tentatively open in some way Merlin couldn't define.

"Dave Stutler," the first young man put in, raising his hand and giving a small wave.

"I'm Bo, and this is Kenzi," the Morgana-like woman in trousers said, indicating her short friend. Merlin was about to introduce himself when the sound of something breaking reached his ears from somewhere else in this building. A quick glance around confirmed that everyone else was just as surprised by this new sound as he was, and Merlin was privately relieved when everyone joined him in running to investigate it. The empty containers scattered around revealed nothing at first, but the group soon found an open window close to a couple of containers positioned on top of each other. There were small shards of glass lying on the ground, indicating that the window had been broken inwards, and lying on the ground in the middle of that glass was a young man in a sleeveless green top with long dark hair.

"Are you OK?" Paige asked, running over to crouch down beside the man, Angel and Bo close behind her.

"I… think so," the young man said, looking back up at the window with a shaky smile before he turned back to the others. "Sorry about that; I'm… not used to doing that kind of thing on my own…"

"On your own?" Kenzi asked.

"…Long story," the man said, looking around the room uncertainly. "So… from what I've seen of the clothes everyone's wearing here, I take it you're not from this city either?"

"Another person got teleported here?" Dave rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Seriously, what are we all doing here?"

"Hi," Willow waved cautiously at the new arrival. "I'm Willow; who are you?"

"Tommy Oliver," the man in green replied, looking uncertainly around at the rest of the group. "Who… are you all?"

"You can call me Bo, but in terms of what we're all doing here, we're still working that out," Bo shrugged. "For what it's worth, none of us seem to know what brought us here in the first place."

"I can't decide if that should be more comforting or less," Kenzi put in.

"There's a good thing about none of us knowing what we're doing here?" Billy looked at the dark girl in surprise.

"Well, at least it suggests nobody here had some enemy who wanted us all dead or trapped here for some reason."

"Yeah, but that still leaves us with-" Paige began, before they heard an unusual sound coming from another part of the building. The closest thing Merlin could compare it to was the sound of metal being crushed against something, as had occasionally happened when one of the knights was training or fighting close to Camelot's walls and ended up striking the wall with their sword, but this… in a strange way, it sounded like the opposite of that.

Once again, the small group hurried in the direction of the noise, which this time led them deeper into the strange building. At what seemed like the centre of this unusual structure, Merlin was surprised to find some kind of metal carriage, standing in an open space with no sign of any horses that might have drawn it here. A man was standing in front of the carriage door with a strange object in his hand, protectively positioned in front of a young girl in a dark dress who was holding a grey-and-black cat. Following the man's gaze, Merlin was surprised to see a blonde woman in a red jacket holding a sword while two more children, a dark-haired boy and a red-headed girl, were positioned behind her while holding some kind of… they were too short to be staffs, but they did remind him of shorter versions of the staff he'd taken from the sidhe who nearly sacrificed Arthur...

Merlin's thoughts were interrupted when a brilliant red-and-orange bird flew down and landed in the middle of the now assembled group. Merlin registered his new acquaintances look down at the bird in surprise, but thoughts of actually doing something ended when the bird tilted back its head and began to sing. For a few moments, the room around them was filled with a sense of peace and joy and hope that Merlin could never recall having experienced before, before the song faded and the bird flew over to perch on the shoulder of the dark-haired boy behind the blonde woman. It was only as the bird landed that Merlin realised everyone else in the room had relaxed, their initial tension apparently lost in those moments when the bird's song had filled the room.

"Whoa…" Dave looked at the bird in awe. "What… was… that?"

"Phoenix song," the dark-haired boy replied, reaching up to carefully stroke the bird's chest. "Phoenixes… one of their powers is a song that gives comfort to anyone good who hears it."

"That's a phoenix?" the girl with the cat looked past her apparent guardian to stare at the bird in awe.

"His name's Fawkes," the boy explained with a smile. "He's… well, he helped me and Ginny recently."

"So… you're Ginny?" Paige looked curiously at the young redhead, who had gone from her feet to her knees as she looked around the room with gleaming tears in her eyes. "And… you are?"

"Harry Potter," the boy replied.

"Emma Swan," the blonde woman in red leather added. "I found Harry and Ginny earlier, and decided to keep an eye on them."

"That's… Nick did the same for me," the girl with the cat put in, giving the group a cautious smile.

"Nick Burkhardt," the man with her said with a brief nod at the rest of the group. "This is Mildred Hubble; I… saved her… and we found our way here… and I still don't know what this is doing here."

"You know this trailer?" Bo asked.

"It's… well, it's mine," Nick nodded at the dark-haired woman. "I have no idea how it got here, but I was hoping… well, when I found it, I was hoping some of the things I keep there might help…"

"OK, something to consider, but could we focus on working out what happened to bring us all here?" Kenzi raised her hand. "I mean, great if we've got this trailer here so we've got a bit more than everything we're standing up in, but that doesn't explain what's happening here… and on that topic-"

Merlin was saved from what he anticipated would be an awkward 'conversation' as Kenzi turned to glare at him when two new figures suddenly flew in from the side (a part of him wondered if they had used the same window Tommy had broken earlier) and literally landed in the middle of their group. The woman in the red jacket and short black dress put Merlin in mind of some of the more hostile witches he'd read about when going over Camelot's records of past witchcraft trials during a quiet period, but the man with her…

The only consolation Merlin had was that a quick glance at the others confirmed that they were just as confused as he was. The man's clothes alone were a bizarre mix of green and yellow, but his face was also completely red apart from a strange yellow object in his forehead, and the face was far too mobile to be some kind of mask.

"Good," the red-faced man said, releasing his grip on the young woman. "You're all here."

"We're- you brought us here?" Paige asked, giving the strange man a sharp glare.

"No," the man shook his head. "I did not bring you here; I just intercepted and deflected any reports to the Empirikul Guard that might have led others to finding you in this place."

"The who?" Dave asked.

"The Empirikul Guard," the strange man repeated. "According to the transmissions I have been able to intercept, we are in the capital city of the Empirikul Empire-"

"Which was established on the vow of destroying all magic."

Merlin didn't know what had just happened, but his only consolation was that nobody else here seemed to know how to explain it either. Where Fawkes had been moments ago, there was now the transparent form of an older man wearing blue robes underneath a red cloak, looking around the room with a measured smile before his gaze settled on the new arrivals. "Greetings, Vision, Wanda Maximoff."

"You… know us?" the now-named Wanda said, an interesting accent to her voice that Merlin couldn't recognise.

"Naturally," the man nodded at her, his red cloak affirming that he was the figure Merlin had glimpsed earlier. "My name is Doctor Stephen Strange, and I have assembled you all together-"

"Hold on; you brought us here?" Kenzi cut in. "Why the fae would you do that?"

"Because you must become the Guardians of Magic and defeat the Empirikul."