Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 24th February, 2023

Douxie woke with a groan, holding his head. He must've overdone it last night, either magically or with a bit too much to drink. Either way, Archie was sure to scold him.

He opened his eyes and snapped them back shut, wincing against the midday sun overhead. "Fuzzbuckets," he groaned, pressing the cool surface of his vambrace against his forehead. "What'd I do to deserve this?"

A chuckle answered him. "Either a good deal, or perhaps nothing at all, depending on which philosophical school you adhere to," said a voice Douxie did not recognize at all.

Douxie tensed reflexively, and scrambled to sit up, blinking his way to sight, the bracer still shading his eyes.

A dark-skinned man who couldn't have been more than twenty-five stood before him, smiling amiably. Douxie could not, for the life of him, identify the origin culture of the brightly embroidered gray robe the man wore. And his hairstyle, consisting of thick rows of braids, with beads in the plies, gave little hint either.

But what mattered most was the staff the man held. It had the distinctive subtle iridescence of dragon's-tooth iron, was so delicately wrought that it might have been lace, and held in its rippling curve a fiery opal almost the size of Douxie's head.

Douxie might not know who this man was, but he certainly knew what he was. "You're a master wizard," he breathed.

"If that's what your people call it, then yes." The man stepped forward and offered him a hand up. Douxie accepted it, and was hauled to his feet. "Hisirdoux Casperan. I am called Taliesin, and I have been waiting a very long time to meet you, grandson."


Jim did not like Douxie being stuck in a magic bubble in a magic coma while he got Taliesin's "message."

But there also wasn't much he could do about it.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry," Charlie assured him, settled back down to the ground and watching. His mannerisms were so like some of Archie's that it almost made Jim smile despite his worry. "Taliesin had a great deal of sorrow in him, but no rage. I can't imagine he'd do anything to hurt your brother."

"I just... I just worry." Jim gave Douxie's still, shimmering form another glance, then made himself look away. Fretting wouldn't do any good, right. "So. Um. Good pie," he offered, picking up his pot and gesturing with it.

Charlie beamed. "Do you really think so? I so seldom get guests these days."

"You used a water crust, right?" Jim asked. He couldn't help it, it was... well, not professional curiosity, but something related. The curiosity of a dedicated amateur.

Charlie cocked his head to his side. "A water crust...?" he asked, as though he didn't know there was any other kind.

"Well, yeah. In our time, they're usually used on meat pies," Jim said with a tilt of his head toward Douxie. "Sweet things, though... we usually make flaky pastry crusts."

"So pie has changed over time. Fascinating."

Jim bit his lower lip, then went for broke. An unknown dragon, he wouldn't dare ask this of, but this was Charlie... "Do you take critiques?"

Charlie beamed even brighter. "I would be delighted! Come, come along to my kitchen. Let us talk chef to chef."

Jim cast a look at Douxie.

"He'll be safe enough here," Charlie assured him. "The fire is warm and well contained, and those few who have tried to intrude... well."

"Yeah." Jim had seen the armored skeletons around the edges of the entrance to Charlie's lair. It made him doubly glad he hadn't been wearing his own armor at that point. No need to test the dragon. "So, about this kitchen...?" He followed Charlie from the den.


Douxie blinked, sure he must have misheard. "Grandson?" he asked, unbelieving. Granted, he had no memory of his grandparents, all of them having died by the time he was very little, but he was completely sure that the only point of commonality of appearance he held with Taliesin was having black hair.

The man gave him a sly grin. "Well, not a grandson of body," he confessed, "though who can be sure, as fast as humans have come to breed and die in this misfortunate age?"

Douxie blinked.

"It is not out of the realm of possibility that you and I are related by blood and birth," the other wizard said gently. "But perhaps more importantly, young wizard, we are related by our talent."

"I'm not young," Douxie said stupidly. For just a second he'd felt hope flutter up in his ribcage. That perhaps he had a blood family after all-

The hope smashing itself against his bones and dying hurt.

Because, like Merlin, all Taliesin saw in him was the potential of his magic.

"But you are young," Taliesin said. He tilted his head to the side. "Magic came early to you, didn't it?"

"I was five."

The other wizard nodded. "And you are now, what? Seventeen? Eighteen?"

"Nineteen. And nine centuries," Douxie added on.

Taliesin hissed though his teeth. "Did your teachers not slow you down? Give you time to grow into your power, before letting eternity take hold of you?"

Douxie opened his mouth, unsure whether he was about to be defending or lamenting Merlin, but then he-

-stopped.

It was like the world suddenly stood on its head. Everything about his apprenticeship slid into different places, giving him a new view of things.

"Oh," said Douxie, his mind reeling. All his years with Merlin, all the menial tasks, the way Merlin had treated giving him any real magic to perform with all the parsimony of a miser...

"That was meant to help me?" Douxie asked, eyes wide at the realization. He stared at Taliesin's dark brown eyes. "It wasn't just because I was...?"

"Was what?" the man asked.

"Useless," Douxie whispered.

"Oh, child. Grandson." Taliesin's hand curled around the back of Douxie's neck. "You are the furthest thing from useless. You are a miracle, and the stars themselves delight in you." He leaned forward, touching his forehead to Douxie's just as Archie did.

The sensation, the sheer affection in the voice of a master wizard that Douxie hadn't even known five minutes before had him swallowing against all the pain that welled up in him.

He shoved the pain down, ruthless. "Taliesin," he managed, "why am I here?" Because five minutes ago, he had been in Charlie's den, five hundred years before his own birth, holding Merlin's time map. Which Taliesin had left for him. And now... now Douxie stood in a sunny meadow, being comforted by a wizard that Charlie had thought was dead.

Taliesin drew back. "To learn the beginnings of things," he said. "So that you may decide how best to mend them."

Douxie studied the ancient mage for a moment, looking deep into his eyes for any hint of... what, he didn't know. Deceit. Anger. Disappointment.

What he didn't find, convinced him. "All right," Douxie said, and took the hand Taliesin held out to him.

"Come," said the master, and the world blurred around them.


Douxie stared. He couldn't help it. He'd never seen anything like this before. "What... what is this place?" he asked. A giant spiky crystal, easily the size of Trollmarket's, perhaps even larger, grew out of the ground up into the sky. Around it, for miles, were dwellings that were positively dwarfed by the glowing blue... well, it was obviously a heartstone. It couldn't be anything else.

Beside him, Taliesin smiled. "Can't you guess?"

The buildings were low and almost mushroom-shaped, painted every color under the sun. Bright kites flew in the sky, white clouds scuttled by, and laundry lay out across familiar purple-blossomed bushes, drying. And the garments of those people Douxie could see going about their business, reminded him strongly of Taliesin's.

Douxie swallowed. "Atlantis," he said, and wasn't surprised to hear his voice come out hoarse.

"Very good." Taliesin started walking and Douxie followed. "What do you know of it?"

"This was... the heart of wizardry on Earth," Douxie answered, looking right and left, wanting to take everything in. This was a place no one living had ever seen. They passed an open door where a young woman stood before a complex loom, weaving without touching it. In the yard of that house, another young woman sang to a persimmon tree; it visibly strengthened and grew because of her song. "Beings of all races and species came here to study and took what they learned home to their own people."

"And...?" The question was very gentle.

"And it was lost in a day," Douxie whispered.

"So it was." Before them a large gray building loomed. "This was one of our... mm, I believe you would call it a 'university'." The large double doors opened at a gesture, revealing an interior as colorful as the exterior was drab. Mosaics covered every wall. But they were secondary to the crowd within the revealed courtyard. There must have been a thousand people standing there, of differing races and species. Some looked to be in ecstasy; others, concentrating. And a few, just trying to keep up. Many of them were playing instruments, many of which Douxie didn't even recognize.

And music... music filled the air, their thousand voices or more singing as one. It was like any of a million concerts Douxie had been to, where the whole audience knew a song and belted it out as one passionate crowd.

If there was a leader to this song, though, Douxie couldn't see them. "What are they...?" he whispered, because he could feel the power in the working. The rhythm was raising something, causing magic to form, and to reform the world.

He thought of the girl singing to the tree, and realization dropped, cold and breathless, into his gut.

Bardic magic. It exists. It really existed...!

Because it had to be. It couldn't be anything else.

Douxie stared, open mouthed, at the wizards - because that's what they surely were - singing together to change the world. Overhead, seen through the clear dome roof, the sky blue heartstone pulsed with the beat of their song.

"When Atlantis was lost," Taliesin said quietly, and somehow Douxie heard him clearly over the song, "this magic was lost with it. Stolen from the world."

He followed the master wizard as he turned to go. Even a dunce would have been able to see the sadness on Taliesin's face. "These are your memories, aren't they?" Douxie asked softly.

"Yes." Taliesin's free hand, the one that did not hold his staff, came up to curl around a pendant he wore. Opal, like his staff. He drew a breath; seemed about to speak; did not.

Even that, though, wasn't enough to distract Douxie from the wonder about them. They passed more groups of singers, smaller than the thousand-voiced choir behind them. These were less solemn, joking, laughing.

Having jam sessions.

Douxie paused, his attention caught. A dark-skinned girl played a fife; a seated boy a pair of hand drums. A handful of singers joined them, forming a rough circle, though it was obvious some didn't know the melody in its entirety. In the center of the circle, a selkie girl danced barefoot, her sealskin cape catching the air as she whirled.

The air practically glowed with magic.

So did the selkie girl's feet as she stamped and shuffled sideways.

"She, too, is a bard," Taliesin murmured. "Not all the expressions of our magic are through song alone." His smile was broad, teaching as Douxie looked back at him. "To step on stage, or to tell a tale. To set needle or paint to canvas, or to sculpt from any of myriad mediums... all these are bardic, grandson."

Douxie nodded, understanding. "To give voice to your feelings, and use them to build something."

"To share," Taliesin corrected. "To share your soul through your art. That is bardic magic." His hand tightened on Douxie's shoulder. "It has become a rare gift, since Gaylen ripped it away from the world."

That name caught Douxie's attention. "Gaylen?" he asked. He knew that name, but Taliesin couldn't possibly mean the same Gaylen who'd created Krel and Aja's planet, could he? The odds were astronomical.

Taliesin sighed, and the world blurred around them again.

They stood inside a house now. Douxie glanced outside the window. Judging by the visible giant crystals and the local architecture, they were still in Atlantis. The house felt modest but comfortable, probably about the size of the Lake home in Arcadia. A dark-haired boy, perhaps twelve years old, lounged across a beanbag, strumming at a stringed instrument. With his pale skin and lanky build, he could have been another brother in the Jim-and-Douxie order. Red light wisped around his long fingers as he played. He played very well for someone his age, an unfamiliar melody spilling from his instrument with ease.

"Gaylen," Taliesin said with a nod at the boy. "He became my pupil, my star student." His gaze slid sideways to Douxie. "He had such facility with music and magic. Just as you do."

Douxie scoffed. "I have nine hundred years' experience to draw on," he rebutted.

Taliesin nodded. He suddenly looked old, drawn. "Great art requires experience," he agreed, nodding. His eyes returned to Gaylen, lingered. "Great magic, however, only requires power. And ambition."

The world slid again. They were back in the university, but the crowded hall stood almost empty now, only a few small groups lingering, talking. Gaylen, an older version of him, stood in the center, looking up through the dome at the great branch of blue crystal that reached above it. His eyes were narrowed as he studied it.

The great crystal wasn't the blue of his own magic, Douxie realized, also looking up. It was a few shades off. It was...

...It's Krel-colored. His eyes widened. The Atlantean heartstone is Akiridion blue.

Douxie drew a breath as his heart thundered in his chest at the realization. He drew another, trembling. Another, as the pieces slotted themselves together.

"Gaylen had a special interest in crystals," Taliesin said quietly by his side. "And also a fervent streak of nationalism. He loved his city, his people. He wanted them to be the best. To live forever."

"What did he do?" Douxie grated out, nearly shaking with it.

Taliesin's eyes closed in his peripheral vision. "I foresaw it, too late. Neither the Council nor the other Masters would heed me. Scrying across time was a chancy business, they said. Every moment cast ripples of change on the visions. Or perhaps," he said, "deep in their hearts, they agreed with him. For we were not immune to our pride."

Douxie barked a laugh. "So you're Jor-El as well as Obi-Wan. Taliesin, what did Gaylen do?"

A quivering breath. Taliesin's eyes closed. "He found a way to kill a god, absorb their essence, and become, to his mind, more."

Silence filled the space between them.

It stretched.

It broke.

"He murdered a god, and he used the power to steal Atlantis," Douxie said.

Taliesin nodded. He was hunched now, his posture showing the weight of millennia. And grief. "The explosion... it ripped a hole in time, drowned what was left of our land. It ripped magic from humans beyond our shores, reducing them to short-lived squabbling and magicless lives. Beyond that, I do not know."

Douxie felt like he should have been shuddering with rage. Instead, it now all felt walled off, like he'd taken an anxiety attack pill. "I can tell you the rest."

Taliesin looked up.

"He took Atlantis, its people, and its heartstone, through that hole in time with him. He made them into his paradise, a world of crystalline beings called Akiridions." Which meant, Douxie thought, that Aja and Krel were Atlanteans. Or the descendants of Atlanteans, anyway. As was Douxie, in a very different fashion. "He destroyed stars and made worlds. The cosmos was his plaything."

Pain etched lines on Taliesin's face. He closed his eyes. "I walked the world for centuries, observing, teaching. There were so few wizards born, afterward." He opened his eyes again, shook his head. "And none with the bardic gift we had so prized."

None until, presumably, Douxie. He wasn't sure how to feel about being a throwback. "And so the knowledge was lost," he guessed. "Fact became legend. Legend became myth."

Taliesin nodded. "What... what became of Gaylen?"

"He reigned as a god," Douxie said, "until one of his own people, named Seklos, rose up and sacrificed herself to end him."

Taliesin closed his eyes again, his fist tightening around his staff. It was clear that however complicated his feelings were about Gaylen, he had loved his student. Douxie could sympathize. "So he is dead, then."

For a certain value of dead. Gaylen's core lay in the Deep. If Krel and Aja's parents could be returned to life from their cores, so, presumably, could Gaylen. Fortunately, no one thinks that's a good idea.

Because Gaylen, apparently, was the reason humans alone lived a bare eighty years. Gaylen was why so few wizards were born, and why humans had turned against magic.

Gaylen had caused the Arcane Order's war.

Douxie swallowed. "Gaylen is why Herne wants to off me." And somehow that seemed funny.

Funny, in the long line of things that had never been funny. Funny, in the sense of surviving nine hundred and nineteen years of the world wanting to kill him. Funny, in the sense of never having known the shape of his own magic, because Gaylen had ripped that from the world. Funny, in the sense of having this life, this city, the way he should have been raised and taught all along, taken from him seven millennia before he'd ever been born...

Being born with magic had always marked him as a sport, an oddity. A rarity like an albino animal.

Now Douxie knew why.

To preserve what he had thought was perfect, Gaylen had ruined the world for everyone else.

"If he wasn't dead already," Douxie said, with glass-clear calm, "I would cheerfully murder him myself."

Taliesin swayed at his words, as though physically struck by them, but only nodded, accepting.


They ended up by the base of the crystal as the sun went down over Atlantis. Devoid of the modern pollution that leant the sky such vibrant colors, the sunset seemed oddly pallid to Douxie's eyes.

But the air... oh, the air was rich with music, with voices and instruments playing at least a dozen songs, none of which he had ever heard before. Were the circumstances better, Douxie would eagerly have drank in each melody, memorized it, made it part of his repertoire forever.

As it was, the songs of Atlantis only made his melancholy deepen. "Taliesin," Douxie said lowly, "why bring me here?"

The mage sighed and seated himself on a low outcropping of glowing blue. "I knew the beginning of things; I knew that Charlemagne would one day encounter a mage who knew the ending of them. I had hoped that, perhaps, you and I together might be able to devise a mending."

"'Mending'," Douxie said morosely. Taliesin had used that word before. He looked at the senior wizard. "You're dead, aren't you? In the real world."

Taliesin nodded. "I am. I knew my time was short, when I gave the map to Charlemagne."

"Herne?" Douxie guessed.

Another nod. "The hunter. I had thought my death would be an end of it, slake his bloodlust. From your words... it did not."

A laugh bubbled up in Douxie's throat. "No. Far from it," he agreed. He sighed, and sat down next to Taliesin's memory. "In my time, eight thousand years from this," he said, with a gesture at their surroundings, "men think magic is no more than a myth. They've driven other species into hiding, or extinction. And the Arcane Order has grown... impatient with mankind's war on magic." He didn't know how to explain three apocalypses in two years, each worse than the last, to the Atlantean wizard. Though, Douxie supposed, Taliesin had lived through an apocalypse of his own...

"So." Taliesin nodded, the sorrow on his face making him seem far older than his mid-twenties. "There is no hope."

Hope.

Douxie thought about that. Thought about Pandora's Box. About a film called A New Hope. About a poet railing against the dying of the light.

He thought about Jim.

He'd told Barbara once that Jim was hope. That Jim might be able to change the world.

It was a lot to set on one pair of shoulders, even a divine king's. Jim was only sixteen. (Or eighteen, depending on how you counted it.)

He wet his mouth, not sure what he was about to say.

"There... is hope," Douxie declared, trying to feel his way through things. "There's a divine king - my brother - who is a champion of the magic folk. Hope remains."

A dark eyebrow raised. "Oh? You have a lynchpin?"

History would swing one way or another around Jim. "Yes." Douxie nodded, the world spinning faster and faster in his mind, revving up like a record. Like a CD. Singing possibilities, unfolding before him. Was this what it was like for Merlin, watching the paths of time? Was this what it had been like for Taliesin?

One thought caught, crystallized: Gaylen's Core lay within the Deep. Within striking distance, once he and Jim got home to Arcadia.

If Gaylen destroying a god had enabled him to /become/ a god...

Akiridions had crystal cores, storing their life energy in the most stable of forms. Their cores were like miniature heartstones.

Morgana, using geomantic magic, and the resonance that nine hundred years of imprisonment in it had built up within her, had somehow drawn all the energy out of Trollmarket's heartstone and /used/ it.

If Gaylen's magic, stolen from the world, could be /returned/ to it somehow...

"I need to do a lot of reading," Douxie thought aloud.

"I would offer you our libraries," Taliesin said, "but unfortunately..." He shrugged mirthlessly, his hands spread wide.

"Some part of them got blown forward in time," Douxie said without thinking about it. "I've got one book, and copies of another." His tome, and the Voynich Manuscript, he was suddenly sure, were Atlantean texts. They were like driftwood found floating on the seas of time.

There might be others; he would have to search.

"Can you read them?"

"No," Douxie had to admit. Though Merlin's words about the book resonating with his magic now made a lot more sense. If Atlantean magic was bardic magic, and so was his... then, yes, there might well be a resonance there. Even if he couldn't understand it yet.

Taliesin hummed, his thumb stroking across his opal pendant. Then he pulled it over his head, the beads in his hair clattering against one another. "Take this. It will be of use."

Douxie accepted the gift. "Opal for transformation?"

He got a nod. "Transformation of one language to another. Among other things."

Two books, to learn an entire forgotten style of magic. It wasn't a lot.

Well, I've always been good at improvising.

So. He had the beginning of a plan. He had a necklace to translate his book and give him a clue about how to use his own magic. All he needed was...

Jim. Douxie's brow furrowed. But I can't make him the heart of this plan and not tell him. I will not be like Merlin. There was a certain amount of humor to be found in the fact that he was pinning all his hopes, his plans, his dreams, on a boy who hadn't even seen two decades yet.

Suddenly, he wondered if this was what Merlin had felt like, when Arthur was young. Considering how badly that had gone, the notion unnerved Douxie.

If it comes down to it... Douxie swallowed. Perhaps in this, he was like Merlin after all. Jim is my priority. Sod the world, sod saving my kind. We're already lost.

He loved his chosen king too well to choose the world over him. Just as Merlin had.

The idea of the greater good burned within him, like acid. Gaylen must have thought he'd been doing the greater good, after all, in preserving Atlantis forever.

Except that saving one particular thing led to everything else burning.

Douxie's dark thoughts shifted, going another direction before he could get sucked down into the whirling morass of ethics and responsibility that lay beneath comparisons to Merlin or Gaylen.

Fuzzbuckets. I'm going to have to tell Aja and Krel - and Varvatos! - what Gaylen did. And what I'm planning to do to Gaylen's core. He's their god; they deserve to know.

Better I use the core than Morando.

At least... I hope so.

A hand unexpectedly cupped his cheek, distracting him.. "I wish we could have met in life, grandson," Taliesin told him, expression gentle but his eyes filled with sorrow as they met Douxie's.

Douxie gave a soft laugh, underlined with tears. "We'd have butted heads sooner or later," he said. "Three wizards will go four paths, and all that."

Taliesin shrugged, unbothered. "Those of strong heart have strong opinions," he agreed. "It does not make them enemies."

"Maybe not in your time." There was a reason that Douxie had found the idea of seven wizards working in tandem to shift Killahead Bridge so unlikely.

Taliesin sighed. "I would have taught you everything I know," he said, returning to his line of thought. "As it is, all I can give you is scraps."

The bitterness in Taliesin's voice almost made Douxie laugh, it was so familiar. "Scraps," he offered in return, "and roots." Because roots were important.

That made Taliesin stop, and look at him. "In Atlantis, we had a saying: we are the children of the stars," he said quietly, his gaze never leaving Douxie's, "and we shine brightest when we rise."

Douxie nodded, understanding what Taliesin was trying to tell him. A thousand thoughts crowded his mind at that moment: did Taliesin know that all matter was actually created in the hearts of stars? That men, and the world, all the worlds, were literally made out of stardust? Even a puppet in a movie knew that, saying Luminous beings we are-. That the great stories all contained truth, and that were never lost, only reinvented by new generations?

Atlantis was not lost, only transformed. And what had been lost, would be reinvented.

We are the children of the stars, and we shine brightest when we rise. Douxie took that, tucked it and Taliesin's voice deep inside him, right next to Merlin saying A wizard does not make mistakes; he makes unexpected possibilities.

Something firm to stand on, when times got tough and he had to attempt the impossible.

Archimedes had said that with a long enough lever and a solid enough place to stand, he could move the world.

That was exactly what Douxie was going to attempt, and it would be the hardest thing he ever had, or would, do.

Before, he had only aimed to show the world that magic was real, to let them feel the wonder of it, in order to stop the Arcane Order's murderous quest. But now that he knew what had happened, the cause of the problems facing him and the world, Douxie's objective had to change as a consequence. His understanding grew, and so did his goal.

"I will restore the magic," he promised Taliesin, "or die trying."

"Do not die," Taliesin told him. "Live."

And the world faded away into rainbow-touched white.


Author's Notes: In choosing to present Taliesin as a dark-skinned Atlantean, which I have placed in Doggerland (now under the English Channel), I took inspiration from the reconstructions of Cheddar Man (England) and Lola (Denmark). Europe has never been lily-white and anyone who thinks so is tragically ill-read. Douxie compares Taliesin to Obi-Wan Kenobi in having been Gaylen's master (Star Wars: A New Hope), and Jor-El in being, essentially, a recording left behind telling of being unable to prevent the destruction of his civilization (the Christopher Reeves Superman movies). Douxie also references Galadriel's opening speech from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Yoda (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back). The line about Archimedes is taken from the book Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, because it was the best phrasing of that principle that I knew. And one final note: the stained glass windows in Merlin's study in Camelot are the sun, the moon, and the star. I'm pretty sure that they're supposed to represent Arthur, Morgana, and Merlin, and by correlation, their modern counterparts: Jim, Claire, and Douxie. Given that exact star motif is repeated on the mat right inside GDT Arcane Books' front door... Douxie is supposed to be The Star. Which ended up tying in rather neatly to Atlantis, their fate, and their apparent astrotheology.