Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 6th January, 2023

"When will they be back?" Claire managed to ask as Merlin hopped onto his airship.

He looked down at her, where she stood on the roof of the bookstore. "I have no idea."

"Alas, Master Jim and Master Douxie, lost in time!" lamented Blinky.

"Will they be back?" Archie pressed, ignoring Blinky.

A snort. "Were you sleeping during all my lectures, Archibald? Of course they will return to the present. Time does not like having misplaced items in it. It is untidy, and causes indigestion."

With that, Merlin stalked over to the ship's controls, and smartly popped his staff into the control port.

"Wait!" Strickler landed on the roof. "Barbara says there has been a goblin incursion at the hospital."

"Goblins?" Claire asked. "But Douxie–"

"Douxie cast an anti-goblin ward on the building," Archie finished for her.

A flash of concern, and then one of irritation, crossed Merlin's face. "What has that boy done now? Well, I suppose I'd best go clean up his messes. As usual." The ship rose into the sky and took off.

"That guy really grinds my gears," Toby growled, twisting his hands around the handle of his warhammer.

Archie sighed. "He never has had the best bedside manner."

"Or any bedside manner," Claire muttered.

"Come on," said Strickler to Archie. "You and I had best go with him and survey the damage." The winged pair took to the air.

"So I guess the rest of us just gotta wait." Toby shrugged, and made his hammer vanish.

"That and we gotta do PR," Claire said, glancing over the edge of the roof to where her mother was clearly glad-handing the crowd, and trolls and humans and aliens were making tentative introductions to one another. Some of the trolls were leaning up against Gumm-Gumm rubble, flashing "V" signs, and having their pictures taken. Across the park, she was pretty sure the Quagawumps were doing unspeakable things to the nyarlagroth's corpse.

Well, Claire thought, that much less for us and the city to take care of.

"Treat ya to dinner at Stuart's?" Toby offered.

Claire flashed him a thin smile. "You're on."


"All right," Douxie said, turning around after the tree-cave had shrunk to non-existence and no sign remained of it save the knot he'd created it from, "I've got good news and bad news."

"What's the bad news?" Jim asked warily.

"It's spring, but it's early spring, which is going to make foraging a bit harder," Douxie replied.

"And the good news?"

"I'm pretty sure we're in Europe somewhere."

Jim side-eyed him. "That's good news?"

Douxie shrugged. "Well, Arch and I have tramped across pretty much the entire continent and most of the associated islands over the centuries. So even though I don't know precisely where we are yet, there's a good chance I'll figure it out eventually." Jim must have looked dubious, because he added, "I need you to trust me, all right?"

"I do," Jim said instantly. And he did. Implicitly. He just didn't see how knowing where they were would help anything.

"All right!" Douxie clapped his hands, then rubbed them together. "Let's start looking for something to eat."

Jim was dubious, but he had to agree with Douxie's assessment that instead of eating the entire pan of brownies (which Jim was pretty sure they could have done, easily, and still been hungry), they should save their only certain supply of food until they knew they could find something else to eat.

Jim did not like the implications that it might be a long time until they had any other supplies.

He sighed. "Lay on, MacDuff."


Slipping back into hunter-gatherer mode took a few minutes. Douxie used them to his advantage, guiding Jim back to check on the river.

Which was now within three feet of the top of the ridge they'd clambered up in the dark last night. On the opposite bank, the smoldering lightning-struck tree still sent up wisps of smoke.

Jim looked at the churning brown water, pale. "So when you said flash flood…" he started.

"Ugly way to die," Douxie told him quietly. He was trying not to smash Jim's face in just how dangerous their situation could be. Let the lesson speak for itself.

Jim swallowed. "You're in charge," he said, blue eyes meeting Douxie's. "What you say, goes. I'm following your lead here, Doux."

He gave Jim a small smile. "I don't think it's that dire," Douxie told him. "Just… be sensible, okay?"

Jim snorted. "By which you mean, listen to you."

"Well, yeah." Douxie shrugged. "What use is having a 900-year-old magical advisor if you don't listen to them?"

"Think Merlin ever pulled that line on Arthur?" asked Jim.

"Oh, indubitably," Douxie told him. "I just wish he'd done it more often. Come on, let's see if there're any mushrooms or fiddleheads in this forest."

"What are fiddleheads?" Jim asked warily.

Douxie snorted, and started walking. "And you call yourself a gourmand. They're ferns, Jim."

"Ferns." Jim's voice was flat. "You're pulling my leg, right?"

Douxie laughed. "Ye of little faith…."


By the time half an hour had gone by, Jim had concluded that whatever the hell Douxie was seeing in the forest, it had to be with something like his aura-vision. Because he was magically pulling dry moss off soggy branches and cheerfully stuffing it into his hoodie pockets, or producing a knife out of nowhere and using it to slice through the stems of mushrooms that Jim would swear hadn't been there a moment before. "Good eating, these," Douxie said cheerfully.

Jim blinked and looked around for more mushrooms and spotted another patch not too far away. "What about those?" he asked, figuring the least he could do was help.

Douxie glanced at them, then shook his head. "Those're poisonous."

"What?" They looked identical! "How can you tell?"

"The gills are darker, and more widely spaced." Douxie stood, hands full of wood mushrooms.

"They look the same to me," Jim said dubiously.

Douxie grinned at him. "That's why I'm here. To keep you from killing yourself in flash floods or by eating toxic 'shrooms."

"The smugness," Jim informed him, "isn't attractive."

"Good thing I'm pretty enough to make up for it," Douxie sassed back, and dumped half his haul into Jim's hands. "Here, something to snack on."

Of course, that was before Douxie got downright creepy.

He froze in place, head snapping up. "Shh," he breathed, his right hand making a gesture that Jim interpreted with no difficulty as keep still and keep quiet.

The knife in his left hand vanished, replaced almost immediately by a smaller one that looked extremely sharp. Douxie shifted his wrist a couple times, as if testing its weight. His eyes were locked on something else Jim couldn't see. They were nearly pinpricks with how focused he was.

Then Douxie threw the knife, almost faster than Jim could see, and something twenty yards away died with a small squeak.

"What the…?"

Douxie's shoulders relaxed. He flashed Jim a grin. "Come on," he said, and trotted over toward whatever it was he'd killed.

It wasn't a goblin or a gnome or anything Jim had ever had to deal with.

It was a bunny.

Soft brown and gray fur, eyes frozen wide, a knife protruding from the side of its throat.

Jim's own throat tightened.

Douxie, unbothered, picked up the dead animal by the scruff and pulled his knife out. He shifted his grasp to hold the rabbit by the heels, its blood running down its chin and dripping onto the forest floor. "I'm a bit out of practice," he mused. "I was aiming for the eye."

Jim found his voice. "Douxie, what the hell?!"

Douxie's fingers tightened on the rabbit. After a moment, he turned to look at Jim, and there was an expression in his eyes that almost made Jim take a step back. It looked somewhere between anger and this is for your own good.

But Douxie swallowed and looked away before he ever gave voice to whatever he was feeling. "Jim," he said instead, very softly, "you're old enough to know that meat doesn't come from the supermarket."

Which… what? Of course it did!

Jim's protest died in his throat as he realized what Douxie meant. That meat came from animals. That every steak or hamburger he'd ever had, had once been a living, breathing creature.

He'd known that. It just hadn't ever sunk in quite like now.

"Some times and places," Douxie said softly, "vegetarianism is an option. Right now, for you and me? It's probably not."

And it wasn't like Jim didn't eat meat at home. It wasn't like he wasn't painfully aware that trolls ate cats and whatever other stray animals they could get their hands on.

It wasn't even like he'd never killed anything before.

But somehow, killing something to eat it felt different than killing rogue trolls or evil gods.

Swallowing, Jim nodded.

"You don't have to hunt, if you don't want to," said Douxie. "I'll take care of that. But I need you to understand that it is a fact of life. It has always been a fact of life."

"No, I…." Jim breathed. He shook his head, made a decision. "Teach me," he said. "You never know when you'll need a skill, right?"

"Okay." Douxie nodded. "But maybe we'll wait on that first lesson until after I've got another of these, yeah? You're good at fighting, but hunting's a bit of a different beast and I want to secure our dinner first."

"Sure." Jim glanced at the rabbit. "Um. Do you want me to hold that?"

"If you wouldn't mind." Douxie passed it over. It was still warm to the touch. "Keep it upside down so the blood keeps draining." He pulled a handful of his moss out of his pocket and used it to clean his blade. "We'll want to vary things a bit, though. Did you know you can starve to death on a diet of rabbit?"

"You can not," Jim protested.

"You can," Douxie responded, smiling. "It's a very lean meat, so you're only getting protein, with no fat or carbs. Uncomfortable symptoms, less comfortable death."

"You're making that up," Jim accused.

"I am not. Look it up." Douxie tucked his knife away into nowhere, tossing the bloody moss to the side. "Actually," he said thoughtfully. "We should turn our phones off."

"Ooh, yeah, no satellites in the sixth century," Jim agreed, fishing his own out single-handed and powering it off.

"Might be useful for taking some photos," Douxie agreed, following suit. "But that's about it."


The Emergency Room reception was mostly clean by the time the doors slid open and a wizard, a dragon, and a changeling strode in.

"Lady Lake," Merlin greeted her.

"Merlin," she icily replied. "Come to lock anyone else up?"

He snorted, surveying the room like he was a lord and it was a peasant's hovel. "Hardly. You seem to have things well in hand here."

"Why did the goblins show up, and will it happen again?" she bit out. She must not strike the wizard, she must not strike the wizard….

"My idiot apprentice," he began, and Barbara's anger burned bright, her hands curling into fists, "has completely failed to remember any of his lessons on runic recombination. What repels a troll may attract another pest."

It took a second. "You mean he cast a goblin-attracting spell on the hospital?" Barbara gritted.

"Apparently."

Archie looked contrite. "I am assuming," he apologized, "that these were lessons given while I was away from Camelot…."

"You were visiting your father, yes," Merlin said. "But it is not your job to act as his prosthetic memory, Archibald."

"Given that hole in his memories of that time, it most certainly is!" Archie snapped. Emily and Eduardo, Barbara noted, were staring at the talking cat. At least Walter had had the good sense to shift back to his human form.

Merlin paused. "Hole in his memories…?" he asked, sounding like he had never heard of such a thing.

Archie buttoned up.

"Archibald…" Merlin said warningly.

"Time. Travel. Shenanigans," was all Archie would tell him.

Barbara sighed, pressing fingers to her forehead. "Can you remove the spell?" she asked Merlin.

"It will only last a month or so," Merlin said, which wasn't a yes.

"Oh, for the love of–"

Just then, an emergency code transmitted over the hospital speakers. Barbara easily decoded it: intruder in the post-natal care section.

Walter also apparently understood the first part. "An intruder in the…?"

"Maternity ward," Barbara informed him, knowing the hospital's layout as he didn't.

His eyes flew wide. "In a facility with a 'goblins, welcome' sign?"

"Oh–" Barbara said a word she wouldn't have allowed Jim to, and turned to run.


"Descate," Douxie murmured. He let the stick in his hands steam dry, then tossed it onto the flickering fire.

He usually let Archie manage their campfires; the dragon was far more efficient about it. But Archie wasn't here, and the candle flame that was all Douxie could really manage had managed to feed on dry moss long enough for the bigger pieces of wood to catch, so he was feeling quite pleased with himself at the moment. On the other side of the fire, Jim had finished skinning and gutting the last of the four coneys, his technique improving with each one, and skewered the rabbit on a peeled branch to join its brethren over the flames.

Eating them raw, Douxie reminded himself and his whining stomach, was a bad idea.

"Welcome to the first annual Casperan-Lake camping trip," he told Jim. "Sorry I forgot to pack the marshmallows."

Jim snorted in amusement, scrubbing his hands in the makeshift sink Douxie had magicked up from a beech leaf downed by the rain. Then, "Wait, why's your name go first?"

"One, I'm older. Two, it's alphabetical," Douxie told him, grinning. "Three, 'Lake-Casperan' would make it sound like we're going to a Lake Casperan, and so far as I know, there's no such place."

"That… is actually fair enough," Jim decided. He hunkered down on a tree root near Douxie. He sighed. "Doux, what are we doing here?"

Douxie shrugged. "Surviving. And wandering around until we bump into whatever knotty little problem requires a Trollhunter from fifteen centuries in the future to resolve it."

"You seem pretty sure this is a me-thing, not a you-thing."

Douxie shrugged again. "I'm not the one with my portrait in Strickler's book. So I'm pretty sure I'm just here to keep you alive."

"If you say so." Jim looked dubious.

"Anyhow." Douxie cast about, located an acceptable tree about fifty feet away. "Whilst we're waiting for dinner to cook, let's get in some target practice with your blades, so you can start pulling your weight in regards to getting future dinners."

Jim rolled his eyes but stood, pulling out his amulet.

"Wait," Douxie told him. "You can summon Excalibur without the armor. Try and see if you can call on your glaives without it."

Jim looked dubious, but obediently tucked the amulet back away. "All right." He closed his eyes. His fingers twitched. The gold-and-silver circlet on his head gleamed, its green gem catching the thin light from the overcast skies.

Douxie could see the innate magic that permeated Jim swirling, trying to form a new channel, a new path.

Jim's fingers twitched again.

And a double-edged swirling blade materialized in either of his hands.

"Yes!" Douxie cheered as Jim's eyes snapped back open. "Well done, Jim."

Jim stared at his blades. "How…?"

"You're drifting over to my side of the equation," Douxie told him. "Remember what I told you, once upon a time, about the amulets making magic run through you and Toby like water?"

"Yeah…?"

"Well." Douxie drew a breath. "When we were training, down in the arena, and you started being able to instinctively levitate your blades? I don't think it's just the amulet causing it anymore."

Jim's hand raised to Nimue's crown.

Douxie shook his head. "Not that either."

"You think I'm… what, turning into a wizard like you and Claire?" Jim was incredulous.

Douxie shook his head again. "Not a wizard."

"Then…?"

Douxie let out a long, low sigh, letting his smile fade. "I think you accepting being a divine king is making more of the magic around you, part of you. You could take the crown off, Jim. You could throw the amulet away. Yet you would still receive, and command, loyalty. You would obviously," he said with a nod at the glaives, "still command your weapons and shield. You would still be able to pull off things that no mortal man can, should you choose."

Jim stared, gape-mouthed. "I'm not sure I like that," he said after a moment.

Douxie shrugged. "Claire hates Morgana. I've got issues a mile long. Changing from a being of not-magic into a being of magic is, as you well know, far from comfortable."

He received a glare. "You're not being very helpful."

"I'm not being very comforting," Douxie corrected, standing. "Come on." He cast rings of concentric blue light on the tree. "Target practice," he invited.

Jim eyed him, then turned. He held up a glaive, ready to throw it. "How did you get so good with your aim?"

Douxie shrugged. "Nine hundred years of feeding myself and Arch."

"I guess nine hundred years of practicing anything will make you good at it," Jim said.

"If I missed, we went hungry," Douxie told him flatly. "And Arch? Turns into a bear when he's hungry. Sometimes literally."

Jim snickered. Then threw.

He wasn't off by a mile. The throw would have hit most of his opponents.

But it also wasn't inside the target ring.

"Practice," Douxie told him.

Jim practiced.


Jim practiced until his arms were sore. "I'm getting worse," he complained.

"Eh, you are," Douxie agreed. "But tomorrow you'll start to improve again." He poked at the first rabbit-on-a-stick. "I think these are about done, so take a break and eat."

"I am good with that," Jim told him, gratefully vanishing his glaives and reclaiming his root to sit on, accepting the rabbit Douxie gave him.

It threatened to burn his mouth. It was unseasoned, unflavored, and lacking any subtlety.

It was hot, filling, and one of the most delicious things Jim had ever eaten. He wanted to gobble it down whole.

"Slow down, you'll choke," Douxie teased. "More practically, slow down or you'll end up chucking it all up later."

"How is it so good?" Jim whined once he'd swallowed what was in his mouth. "Seriously, it makes no sense!" He glared at the meat-on-a-stick that offended all his ideas of culinary convention.

"Ever heard 'hunger is the best seasoning'?" Douxie asked him, between measured bites of his own rabbit. "'S not just a saying, Jim."

Jim looked at him. Douxie sucked a smear of juice off his thumb, eyes closed in apparent bliss. He looked… content. "You're different, like this," Jim couldn't help saying.

Douxie's heterochromic eyes met his. "Oh…?" the wizard asked.

"Last night, you were almost having an anxiety attack because of," Jim gestured nebulously, "well, everything. But especially the lack of Archie."

"I was," Douxie allowed.

He couldn't find the words to describe the way Douxie's very body language had changed. How he walked almost silently in the woods, which Jim couldn't manage. How he looked like he was both hyper-aware of his surroundings and simultaneously one with them. How he seemed to know what every tree was, every bush, every birdcall. Where to find food and water, when Jim wouldn't have had the first clue at any of those things.

But he tried. "Today you're like… nothing can bother you. Like this really is just a camping trip."

Douxie sighed and lowered his rabbit-on-a-stick. "This is… well, not easy, but simple for me, Jim. The knowing how to survive part," he clarified. "It's nothing like navigating all the million things written down on my whiteboards and trying to figure out how, exactly, we're going to win over humanity and the Arcane Order. Let alone dealing with Merlin and the thouand landmines there. Survival in the forests of Europe?" He gestured at the woods around them. "This, I can handle in my sleep. Been having to do it for centuries."

"You know," Jim said slowly, "sometimes I really want to know how you know all the things you do. But sometimes I can extrapolate just enough to know that I really don't want to know why you know it."

Douxie grinned at him. "Yeah, there's large swathes of my life that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Well," he added thoughtfully, "maybe Bellroc and Skrael..."

Jim laughed.


Barbara skittered into the room, the two men and one dragon-cat hard on her heels. Inside, a tired, terrified-looking woman sat paralyzed in a hospital bed. A man Barbara assumed was her spouse or partner stood defensively between her and the window seat. One of the hospital's security guards, radio in one hand and his hand on his holster, was a third point of the triangle.

And on the cushioned window seat stood a goblin, gently holding a newborn infant.

Barbara swallowed. "All right," she said, hands out, trying to keep the situation calm, "let's no one be hasty…."

The window didn't open. But she wasn't sure that would matter to the goblin.

Walter stepped up by her side. "You do know there are no children being taken to the Nursery currently, correct?" His attention was entirely on the goblin.

It spat gobbledegook back at him.

Both Archie and Merlin's brows raised.

"He says," Walt said calmly, addressing the probably-father, "that you were holding the baby incorrectly."

"I was not!" the man protested.

The goblin looked offended and said something else, gesturing at the infant. Who was fast asleep.

"A newborn needs more neck support," Walt translated.

The goblin nodded, then sniffed. A strange expression crossed its face. Chittering something, it crawled down from the seat, skittered across the floor, and climbed up onto the bassinet, all the while holding the child like it was made of spun glass. The security guard, as well as the parents, tracked its every move.

Gently setting the child down, the goblin poked a spindly arm at the father and gestured for him to come closer. He did so, warily, as the goblin unswaddled the baby.

"It needs a change," Walter remarked. "It seems he plans to show you the proper technique."

The man swallowed. "All… all right," he said.

Carefully, the goblin undid the diaper, then grabbed a nearby cloth to suppress the arc of liquid that sprang up into the (comparatively) cold air. Barbara hid a smile, remembering Jim doing the same thing. The baby was definitely a boy.

The goblin deftly cleaned and dried the infant, changing the diaper with practiced hands, presumably explaining each step it was doing. Wide-eyed, the father nodded along.

"I think we're okay here," Barbara told the security guard, who nodded, as wide-eyed as the new parents, and backed out the door. "Walt?"

"Goblins are widely known as the finest caretakers of infants," he told her softly. "I don't wish to assume anything, Barbara… but I suspect you have as much of a pay and staffing issue here at the hospital as we do at the public schools."

"You'd be right," she told him, her mouth a line. "Walt, are you seriously suggesting…?"

"I'm suggesting that there may be some free… shall we call them au pairs?... available to assist the nurses and doctors in your maternity ward."

"They attacked the hospital!"

He shrugged. "Under Gunmar's influence. Goblins are weak minded beings, easily influenced. When Gunmar was destroyed…." His hands gave a nebulous gesture that she nonetheless understood to indicate the dissipation of that influence.

"It would help with the integration efforts," offered Archie.

She glanced back and forth between the changeling and the dragon. A part of her couldn't believe what she was hearing. Invite into her hospital a horde of the beings she'd just spent half an hour fighting off in the ER?

She looked back at the baby. Who was now being cradled correctly in his father's arms. The goblin gently patted the stocking hat, grinned at the father and gave him a thumbs-up. Then it clambered down and stalked over to Barbara, looking up at her.

The goblin was singularly ugly. But something in its big yellow eyes seemed pleading as it looked up at her. "They go home with their families, all right?" she told it.

She got a grunt, and a thumbs-up.

She sighed. "Come on. We've got to go talk to some people about this." The floor nurses. The doctors. Eventually, some of the people on the bureaucratic side of things.

The goblin followed her. As did the changeling and dragon.

"You seem to have this well in hand," Merlin said, and walked off in another direction. Barbara saw him pause to consider one of the posted hospital maps. Then he turned the corner, and disappeared out of her hospital and, hopefully, her life as well.