Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 17th February, 2023

Jim stood on the stone edge of the well, looking down. He'd never seen an actual well other than at Disneyland. And given that Snow White's voice sang up out of that one, he was pretty sure it wasn't a functioning well. So, really, what did he know about medieval wells? Regardless, though, this was definitely a deep well. So deep that it swallowed all the light and ended in an inky blackness below.

"So, um. How do we get down there?"

Douxie, also standing on the blocky stones of the well, tapped the toe of his shoe against them. "This is a lot more stable than it is in our time," he said.

Jim made an inquiring sound.

Douxie gave a half-hearted laugh. "I, um, fell in the first time. The stone crumbled right out from under me."

"And the second time?"

"Arch flew me down."

"Hmm." Jim looked down into the darkness. "Well, we haven't got a flier with us right now. Jump?"

Douxie cocked his head to the side, eyes narrowed in consideration. "Actually, I think we can do a bit better than that." He sat down on the well edge, feet dangling inside, and reached into one of his hoodie pockets. He pulled out a length of string.

"Isn't that your bowstring?" Jim asked, also sitting down.

"Well, it is now," Douxie said, uncoiling it. "Yesterday it was spider silk."

"What's it going to be tomorrow?" asked Jim, playing along.

Douxie gave a toothy grin. "Rope." Blue wraithed around his hands as he started working the string the exact same way he did their hoodies to transform them into a bed.

Jim watched for a few minutes as the string grew thicker and longer, spilling over Douxie's lap and onto the grass outside of the stone well. "I'm pretty sure in another life, you were a Swiss army knife."

Douxie flashed him a grin. "I aim to please, my liege."

Jim rolled his eyes. After a few minutes, he spoke again, more quietly. "Would you have really burned down all of Britain to get Herne off our tail?"

Douxie's hands stilled. His mouth was in a line, his eyes looking across the well. Not at Jim. "I... don't know," he said.

"Hey." Jim's hand found his shoulder. "I'm not blaming you. Especially for something you haven't even done."

"Not me, no." Douxie looked down at his hands, then at Jim. "It's been done before."

"Burning down England's forests?"

"No." Douxie shook his head. "Iceland's. It was before my time, but Merlin told me about it." A dry smile quirked his mouth. "Guess I've kept that story in the back of my head for quite a while, to use it as inspiration now."

"Huh." Jim turned that idea over in his head. "Who did it?"

Douxie shrugged, his hands resuming their work. "Not Merlin, if that's what you're asking. Some Norse sorcerer I never met. Merlin was trying to use it as a cautionary tale about me minding my temper. Though," he added, frowning, "keeping my temper is a lot easier when a homicidal deity isn't trying to rules-lawyer his way into murdering me. I expect that kind of thing from the Gentry, not from gods."

"The Gentry?" Jim asked.

Douxie flashed him a smile. "The Good Neighbors. The Ones Who Live Under the Hill." His smile dropped. "It's best not to speak their actual name. They like attention, and things seldom ends well for those who have attracted them."

"Oh." Jim considered that. "More reading for when we get home?"

Douxie nodded. The pile of rope in his lap steadily grew and grew as Jim watched, spilling over onto the grass behind them. Finally, Douxie reached the end of his bowstring. He sighed, magic glow fading from his hands. "Well, that's our lot."

Jim blinked. "Wait, you can't make more? Is there some kind of ratio of spiderweb to string to rope going on here?"

Douxie shrugged. "With me sans staff at the moment? Definitely." He held up the end of it and began tying it back onto itself. "Let's hope it's long enough."

"Great. Climbing the rope in gym class all over again," Jim groused as Douxie tightened his loop and hooked it around a protrusion on the outside of the well. The wizard tossed the rest of the rope into the well, where it fell, disappearing down into the darkness.

"You can run up a Titan but you complain about going down a rope?" Douxie arched an eyebrow, clear amusement on his face.

"A certain wizard," Jim pointed out, "made it more or less impossible for all of us to fall off said Titan, remember?"

"True. Not sure that spell would help us here, though. There's quite a drop into the cave at the bottom."

"Fair enough." Jim sighed, considered his armor-clad hands, then banished the armor. He tucked the amulet into his jacket pocket, and grabbed the rope.

"I should go first-"

"You're the one with an injured arm," Jim pointed out. "If you lose your grip, at least there's a chance of me catching you, if I go first."

Douxie cast his eyes to the heavens, but acquiesced.

Down they went, into the dragon's lair.


"Look," Gil said wearily, "I'm not saying you have to know exactly where he is, or tell me whatever mystic quest bullshit he's up to, but could you at least give me an estimate for when Douxie will be back? We've got practice, and there's the Battle of the Bands coming up, and if he's not gonna be here for that, we need to either reconfigure things or find a replacement. You know that, Zoe!"

She gave him a thousand-yard stare. "I don't know where the fuck he is, Gil. The best educated guess we've got is that he and Jim got blasted back in time like fifteen hundred years or something. And given that Dumbass Casperan hasn't showed back up yet, I have no idea when he will." When, not if. She had to have faith in that. Douxie was like a cockroach. For as long as she'd known him, he had survived everything the world had thrown at him. Including some instances when Zoe had really, truly, believed he was dead.

Gil groaned and buried his face in his hands, elbows on the counter. "We're screwed, then. So much for defending our title at the Battle."

"You worry too much." Marti wandered up to the counter, LP in hand. "When has Douxie ever let us down? For music," they added, seeing Zoe open her mouth to begin giving the two of them a long, detailed list of Douxie's failings.

Zoe shut her mouth. She looked at the record Marti had picked out. "Crescendolls? Seriously?"

"They've got some good beats," Marti defended their taste.

"Whatever." Zoe rang up the record, adding in her employee discount. "Besides," she added, "until the square's cleaned up? It's doubtful there's going to be a Battle."

"Ugh." Gil buried his head again. "That would suck."

"Preach," Marti agreed, holding out their fist. Without looking up, Gil unerringly bumped it with his own.


The rope seemed to go on forever. It, and the walls of the well. A slow downward progress into infinity, Jim thought. The darkness swallowed everything. It wasn't long until even the small circle at the top of the well, the dim light provided by overcast skies, vanished.

Douxie, somewhere above Jim, gave a low chuckle. "Feels like we're in a Greek myth or something," he said.

"Orpheus and his wife, I always forget how to say her name-"

"Eurydice," Douxie provided, saying it slightly differently than Jim's middle school English teacher had. Was that his accent coming in to play, or was that how the name was supposed to be pronounced? "How about a little light?" Douxie offered.

"Please," said Jim.

Douxie obliged, a trio of small glowing balls appearing in the well, drifting aimlessly downward with the two of them. Revealing only endless stone. But it was better than being in the dark.

Finally, Jim's feet reached open air. Right before the rope ran out. "Um," he said, looking down.

"Fuzzbuckets," Douxie swore from above him. Jim glanced up; Douxie was also looking down. "Well, I've survived that drop before."

"I haven't," Jim retorted, trying to figure out if he could summon his armor to protect him from the fall, before he hit the ground. He squinted down at the distant ground. Maybe...?

Douxie snorted and somehow wrapped his right arm around the taut rope, shifting the bulk of his weight onto where he had the line clamped between his thighs and also his feet. He dialed through his bracer. "Get ready to let go," he said.

"Wait, what?"

Douxie cast a lopsided grin. "Last time I used this spell was when we were all falling from Camelot."

"The last time you fell from Camelot, you died," Jim pointed out.

"The time before that," Douxie retorted. "The one with the time rift, while you were still in that bloody great crystal."

"Oh."

"Ready, set... release!" Douxie cast a spell beneath them, and let go of the rope, together with Jim.

Falling onto the spell felt like faceplanting onto a bouncy castle. And then falling through it.

"Ow," Jim managed, a minute after hitting the rock floor of the cavern.

Douxie had landed on his back, reflexively shielding himself with his arms, as if expecting something to fall on top of him. Now, he uncurled and groaned. "Agreed on the 'ow'."

Jim levered himself up. He felt like one giant bruise. Not the first time. But at least nothing seemed to be broken, and his teeth, when he tongued at them, were all intact. "So what now?"

"Well." Douxie pushed to his feet, dusted himself off. "Do we go hunt for a dragon, or do we wait for him to come find us?"

"Which one's going to get us into less trouble?" Jim accepted the hand Douxie offered, and was pulled to his feet.

The answer, it turned out, was neither, as the darkness of the cavern was suddenly lit up, and so were they, by dragon's flame.


"So, y'know, I was thinking we could maybe ease up on the training a little bit?" Toby suggested, rolling to avoid one of Blinky's sadistic spinning death blades and ending up neatly on his feet. Just in time to dodge the gout of fire that the Forge spat at him. "I mean, now that Gunmar's gone and all?"

Draal harrumphed. Seriously, he harrumphed, like he was a grandpa or something instead of an awesome warrior. "According to all that I have heard, we have many enemies yet to come before us."

Toby sighed, slumping. "Yeah, Morando." The he yelped as the first of a volley of arrows hit his armor. The Daylight blade batted away the next. "Hey, have you changed the settings on this thing?" he called.

"And do not forget the Arcane Order!" Blinky yelled from by the controls.

"I like Douxie's idea for how to deal with them!" Toby yelled back.

"A fine idea, but one we are not yet able to implement!" Blinky retorted. "Until we are, we must assume that we are to meet them in battle, as before."

"What do you mean 'we'?" Toby demanded. "I don't remember you taking them on hand-to-hand!"

"I was the driver!" Blinky bellowed indignantly.


Fuzzbuckets! Douxie barely had time to catch the flames and divert them, his arm aching, away from himself and Jim. The fire ringed them, even as Charlemagne stalked forward, looming.

"So," the dragon growled, the natural acoustics of the cave amplifying his voice, "a wizard. Come to steal my treasure, have you?"

Douxie stared up at his best friend's father. "Oh, come off it, Charlie!"

The dragon's eyes narrowed. "Only my friends call me Charlie," he announced, inhaling to blow more fire at them.

"But we are your friends!" Jim protested. "Or, or we will be," he added, suddenly looking less certain of himself. "In the future."

Charlie visibly choked on his flames. He coughed and blinked for a second, waving a paw in front of his muzzle. "In the future?" he demanded, leaning in to peer more closely at them.

"Fifteen hundred years in the future," Douxie said, stepping in front of Jim, who wasn't armored up. Not that Douxie was, either, but of the two of them, he was the more likely to survive a blast of dragon's fire direct to the face. He had before, after all.

"Fifteen hundred years?" Charlemagne repeated. His eyes widened, as if in sudden illumination. "Do you mean to tell me you are time travelers?"

"Um." Douxie glanced at Jim, then back at Charlie. "Yes? Is that a problem?"

Charlie roared with delighted laughter, rocking back on his heels. "Oh, I've been expecting you! Come, come, into my dragon's den. The old mage left something for you, when you showed up. I've been holding onto it for ages. Now where did I put it...?"

"'The old mage'?" Jim asked.

Douxie shook his head and shrugged, probably looking as blank as Jim did.

"Why, yes." Charlie was smiling and genial as he walked. "Master Taliesin. Knew him as a cub, I did. He was one of the last survivors of Atlantis, you know."

"I... didn't know," Douxie said, jogging to catch up. "Wait - Taliesin?"

"Heard of him, have you?" Charlie asked.

"Well, of course I'd heard of Taliesin!" Douxie replied. "He taught my own master. But he left something... for us? With you?"

"Wait, we're talking Merlin's master here?" Jim demanded.

"Can't say I've ever heard of any Merlin," Charlie said. "But, yes."

"You said Atlantis fell eight thousand years ago!" Jim accused Douxie.

"Well," he said, thinking, "six and a half thousand, right now. But yes."

Jim's eyes went wide. "Wizards live that long?"

"We can," Douxie informed him. "But... when did you last see him?" he asked Charlie.

"Two, maybe three thousand years ago?" Charlie wrinkled his brow. "It all starts to blur a bit. So many human wars coming around and disrupting things. And Taliesin was always a bit peripatetic, you know. But in any case, my young time travelers, might I have your names?"

"Of course," Douxie replied, reflexively giving a half bow, lesser power to greater, stranger being welcomed into a dragon's lair. "I'm Hisirdoux Casperan, and this is my brother, James Lake, Junior."

The wrinkle on Charlie's brow grew more pronounced as he paused and looked back and forth between the two of them. "Brothers by choice, I assume...?" he asked with the tone of a delicate question.

"And you said we looked enough alike that people would assume it was by birth," Douxie jibed at Jim. "But, yes, brothers by choice," he informed the dragon.

"How wonderful, to find a sibling later in life," Charlie assured them.

"How do we not look alike?" Jim demanded. "We both have black hair! White skin! Skinny bodies!"

Douxie smirked, exchanging a glance with Charlie. "Do you want to tell him, or shall I?"

"Dragons have rather more senses than most humans possess," Charlie told Jim. "So, to our eyes, no, the two of you don't look terribly alike, I'm afraid to say."

Jim drooped.

"Don't worry about it," Douxie advised him, putting an arm around Jim's shoulders. "We're alike where it counts."

"Yeah, right in the self-sacrificial tendencies," Jim muttered.

Douxie laughed, and drew him onward.


"Okay," Toby said, "here's the thing. Blinky, um, Blinkous Galadrigal, who's the one who's been teaching me and Jim and Steve, and a bunch of other people, combat, thinks he can drive."

"But he really can't," Claire butted up, supporting him. "And you're like the best driving teacher in all of Arcadia Oaks, Coach." Which was, actual-facts, truth. Claire had asked Miss Janeth about the statistics of it, and apparently out of all new drivers in the town, those who had taken Drivers' Ed from Coach Lawrence first had a drastically lower rate of getting into accidents.

Coach Lawrence scratched the side of his baseball cap. "So, uh. You want me to give him some lessons?"

Toby exchanged a look with Claire. "Please," he begged.

"Huh." Coach stared into the mid-distance, clearly thinking it over. Toby waited. There was no rushing some things, including trolls and teachers.

"Well. Uh. I guess that'd be a novelty," Coach finally admitted.

"Thank you," Toby said, feeling like he could kiss the ground at his gym teacher's feet. "Thank you, thank you, thank you..."

"Don't be getting all mushy on me, Domzalski." Coach pointed at him. "I'm gonna want to talk with him about what kind of training regiment he's got you all on."

"No worries, Coach!" Claire said brightly. "We'll have Blinky waiting for you under the bridge at just after sunset."

"Good. You do that. Now, gimme three laps around the gym!"

"Thanks, Coach!" Toby said again, and jogged off to join the rest of the class.


"Please, make yourselves at home," Charlie invited, serving up slices of pie the size of a bicycle and cups of tea the size of a school desk. The pie glistened with red berries - The infamous bloodberry pie, Jim guessed - and the fragrance wafting up from the hot tea made his stomach rumble. "I'll go find that box Taliesin left for you. Back in two shakes of a wyvern's tail!" He disappeared from the firelit room, presumably going somewhere else in his lair.

"Well," Douxie said with a fond smile, "seems Charlie hasn't changed that much after all." He had his head tilted to one side, studying a nearby stack of books.

"I think we need to get him and Blinky together to compare notes," Jim said, turning slowly. "Because this is strongly reminding me of Blinky's library at its worst."

"Mm. Does Blinky have a written inventory?" Douxie asked, kneeling by a stack. "Or is it all kept in his head? Because dragons have absolutely eidetic memories for things that interest them. Like, say, the contents of their libraries. Or their 'sacred stones and treasures'." His smile was sly, fondly mocking.

"...I feel like there's a joke I'm not getting."

Douxie grinned up at him. "'S what Arch used to call Charlie's rock collection. Which, come to think of, Toby might appreciate a gander at sometime. Both of them being rockhounds and all."

"Huh," said Jim, right before his stomach rumbled. It had been a long time since breakfast. "I feel like we need forks," he said, returning his attention to the tea and pie. "Or, like, a bucket to drink out of or something."

"Mmm." Douxie selected one of the books and sat cross-legged before the hearth, opening it.

"Food, Douxie," Jim stressed.

He got an absent flappy handwave.

Jim sighed, rolled his eyes, and contemplated how he wanted to go about this. The pie was too big to eat as it was, and he didn't have any plates, but he did have the cooking pot, so that could be used kind of as a bowl. He also lacked a fork, but Douxie had carved a pair of spoons for them to use for squirrel stew the other night, so that could work.

All he needed was a knife. Which was easy enough to come by. He summoned his armor, pulled out one of his glaives, and used it to slice off a slice of pie into the pot. Satisfied, he sat down near the fire, turning over in his mind the lack of a human-sized cup.

Douxie turned a page with his injured left arm, his eyes intent on the words, his lips moving silently as he translated the book to himself. His right hand reached over and scooped up glistening red pie filling. He leaned back, careful to have it nowhere near the book, as he ate pie out of his bare hand.

Jim stared.

Then he very deliberately turned his attention back to his own food, ignoring the heathen he'd adopted as his brother, and began eating like a civilized person.


The problem, of course, Charlemagne thought, was that the box Taliesin had left for the time travelers was so small. Well, small for a dragon anyway. Actually, thinking about it, it wasn't terribly big for a human either. And it had been quite some time since Charlie had even thought about it. Even longer since he'd accepted the thing! But he had, because, as his old friend had sensibly pointed out to him, there really was no safer place to put something for long-term storage than in a dragon's hoard.

"Now, if only I could remember where I placed the blasted thing," Charlie muttered to himself. His darling beloved had asked him about it once, and he'd given her an answer, the lovely tale behind being entrusted by the last Atlantean wizard to deliver the item when the time came... "Oh!" Charlie's head shot up. They'd been in the hoard room at the time of that discussion. "Of course. No wonder I couldn't find it in here," he said aloud to himself, and bustled off from his library down the tunnel.

In the hoard room, of course, the very first thing he did was to check the egg. Aurelia would never forgive him if he didn't make their child his highest priority. Nor would Charlemagne forgive himself.

"Temperature good, humidity good," he muttered, nudging the egg gently. Within the ivory shell, their hatchling moved in response. Kicking, maybe, in his unhatched dreams. "Good morning," Charlie said gently, right by the egg. No one really knew, after all, whether or not the child could hear before hatching. And it certainly did no harm to accustom him to his father's voice. "Doing all right in there? Well, I hope so. We have some visitors today, you and I. I don't suppose you would happen to remember where I left old Taliesin's box? No? Oh well, I suppose I'll have to have a look about myself, then." He gently caressed the egg's smooth surface, earning another kick, then started moving about the room, sifting through his treasure. "Now where would I have put it...?"


"Found it!" Charlie caroled, coming back into the den. Douxie blinked, looking up from what was admittedly a very interesting treatise on the Celestial Spheres and how they correlated - or didn't - with the stars that could be seen in the night sky. He had the spare thought, as he licked at a last spill of berry juice sliding down the side of his arm, that Charlie's reading glasses were on the top of his head again.

But no. That was then, this was now, and Charlie hadn't been looking for his glasses, he saw as he stood. Instead, the dragon presented a curled paw with a flourish, and opened it.

"Wait, is that...?" Jim stood, setting down his pot and cutlery, stepping closer.

Douxie, too, blinked. "Merlin's time map," he said, accepting it from the dragon.

"Well, I don't know about any Merlin," Charlie said in a tone that meant he was pleased with himself. "That was left for you by old Taliesin, last time I saw him."

"Left for us, exactly?" Jim questioned as Douxie turned the box over in his hands. The etchings, untranslatable as ever, were familiar. It wasn't just a box similar to Merlin's; it was the exact same one.

"Well, yes." Charlie cast his eyes ceilingward, clearly searching back in memory as Douxie looked up at him. "What were his exact words... ah! 'Hold onto this for me, will you, Charlemagne? No safer place than a dragon's hoard.' And I agreed, asking him when he'd be back for it. He told me, 'I won't be. Eventually a pair of time travelers will come to you. Give this to them. It will help make things right'." The dragon shook his head. "Not sure what 'right' he was talking about, but a wizard is to be taken at their word! And here you are," he said proudly, settling down on his haunches and crossing his forearms below his chin, watching.

Douxie exchanged a glance with Jim. "'Make things right'," Douxie murmured.

"That's what Nari said," Jim agreed, following his train of thought. Jim's brow wrinkled. "But... I thought we were already doing that?"

"Unless there's more wrong than we thought," Douxie said, his mind spinning wider at the possibility. Was it just a coincidence of phrasing, or was whatever they were supposed to fix bigger than the Arcane Order?

What could be a bigger problem, he wondered, than the Arcane freaking Order?

"But... but what?" asked Jim, echoing Douxie's thoughts.

I don't know.

Douxie opened the time map.


Douxie shook his head, and opened the ivory box.

White light flared, blinding. Jim had to shield his eyes, looking away.

"I say!" Charlie rumbled, deep in his draconic throat.

There was a thump, as of something hitting the ground. Slowly the light died away, until Jim could look back, blinking away afterimages, and see.

Douxie lay on the floor, his eyes wide, a look of surprise frozen on his face, and the box clutched in his hands.

"Douxie!" Jim dropped to his knees. But there was a bubble surrounding him, encasing Douxie, repelling all Jim's attempts to touch the wizard. It shimmered white where he touched it. Hitting the shield only sent an iridescent ripple out across its surface.

A huge draconic paw pulled him back and away before Jim could resort to drawing Excalibur. "That's Taliesin's work," Charlie breathed. His eyes were wide when Jim looked up at him. "Must've been a quite powerful spell, to have lasted this long."

"What's it doing to Douxie?!" Jim demanded, fighting to get free.

What Charlie said next stopped him. Gold eyes looked down at him, compassionate. "It seems Taliesin didn't just leave a box for your wizard friend," Charlie explained. He looked back at Douxie's still form. "He left a message."


Author's Note: Another name for the Gentry is the Fae. It's generally not a good idea to attract their attention; even when they're being kind, they're really... not. Crescendolls is a band name from Interstella 5555, the Leiji Matsumoto/Daft Punk collaboration film. And Jim and Douxie's differing approaches to eating pie was very much inspired by Guy watching Eep and her family eat, in the movie The Croods.