A walk in the woods (Patreon)

Merlin was lost. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone though, not even himself. He’d eventually get to his destination, so he couldn’t be lost. In the interim, he was merely meandering.

It was such a lovely day for meandering through the woods, too. Autumn had only started to put its mark on the verdant vegetation: patches of rust among the leaves, slowly overtaking the green like spreading corrosion. The weather, however, was sweet and fair: warm, but not suffocatingly so. A stray breeze passed through with a sigh of trees every now and then, crisp and invigorating.

He’d traveled from morning to dusk the other day before raising a small camp of one, shielded by magical circles and runes traced in the dry, clay-like earth, and recommended on his journey at the first shafts of light came through the foliage.

This he could admit: it had been too long since he’d taken a stroll through the woods, or anywhere green really, cooped up for weeks on end in his castle tower, juggling the duties of his dual role of Royal Sorcerer and Royal Advisor. Though what he was doing now was an extension of the former, only more hands-on, a side of research that should not be discounted if one wished to be thorough. After all, how best to learn about magic than by investigating its source? Besides, it gave him repose from the latter responsibility. Uther had yet to become unbearable, but he was treading – no, stomping – on Merlin’s nerves at times. With the war over and the Continent peacefully rebuilding itself, blooming from the ashes into something stronger, better, prettier, Uther grew restless. All he had to do was lean back and bask in his success. That’s what Merlin did – and for him, it was all the more deserved – before he went back to work. The King, however, had caught the taste of blood – and now he craved more.

Merlin looked upon the map with a dubious eye, then turned left as the worn-out, dotted line suggested he should, weaving between bushes, away from any marked path. The place he searched for was far from any well-trodden road, forgotten and forsaken. As he advanced, pushing his way through low boughs extending to him like greedy, bony fingers, and high grass lurking with little critters, the trees grew sparse, opening into a sunny clearing.

That’s where he saw her. It was the first time seeing her with his eyes, but she’d haunted his visions before, hazy, fleeting glimpses like wisps of smoke, flashes of images like pieces of a puzzle. Eyes as green as the mountain lakes, smirking lips, fingers twining with his. They all came rushing back to him, accompanied by a strange feeling of tenderness that he hardly felt belonged to him. Familiar though was the prickle of magic that jolted up his spine, and the keen curiosity she kindled. His step slowed and softened as he drew closer. She stood amid a small lake, jutting out of its glimmering, emerald depths like a proud rock. One might truly mistake her for a sculpture, as still as she was, submerged up to her waist, eyes closed in an expression of serenity suggestive of deep prayer and meditation. Her hands, however, moved lazily about herself, fingers breaking the calm, mirror-like surface of the water as they grazed it. Clothed in Avalonian garb, which only the Priests donned so far away from the Island. As if to confirm that suspicion, a wink of silver at her breast – the sun catching on her brooch, indicating her status among the Temple.

Her eye snapped open. “Sneaking up on unsuspecting women, are we?” Her lips quirked into that teasing smile he knew all so well, despite never seeing it in person.

“I was merely trying not to spook any unsuspecting women with my sudden intrusion,” Merlin returned, voice mellow and smooth. “Pardon the interruption. Were you praying?”

“Yes; and meditating, though I think I’ve done enough of both.”

She came out of the waters, dress soaked through and dragging heavily about her. Not for long though; running her palms along it as it to smooth it down, lips moving silently, the cloth was dry as if it’d been laying in the summer sun for days.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” Merlin graciously inclined his head. “I am Lord Merlin Wyllt, Royal Sorcerer and Advisor of King Uther.”

Upon this revelation, most would rush into a courteous bow and affect an air of affable respect or fearful esteem. The woman tilted her head, eyeing him curiously, and said: “That explains the fancy clothes. Not the best garment for a trek in the woods, don’t you think?”

Merlin placed a hand over the chestnut-brown brocade of his jerkin; he always chose his garbs carefully, keeping both fashion and practicality in mind. The Royal Sorcerer couldn’t be expected to be seen in shabby clothes, even if he were out on a trek in the woods. No, he would not compromise for either style or coziness – but make both meet harmoniously, as this outfit so achieved.

“It’s perfectly suitable for the activity, in fact.”

She nodded downwards. “The pointy boots too?”

Merlin kept on smiling that patient, soothing smile he’d started mastering the day he decided he needed to get far. “Those too.”

Her smile had a mocking edge, but she made no further disapproving remark. Her gaze slipped from his face to his hands. Then she struck – quick as lightning and just as dazzling, leaving a perplexed Merlin to watch as she unfurled his map and scanned it thoughtfully. She’s snatched it before he even had time to process what was happening, with such recklessness that he’d even call it more impressive than her swiftness if it weren’t so damn outrageous.

No one would dare do such a thing to him – not at Court, not in the conquered village he started his journey where animosity still simmered and festered in the air. Merlin only enjoyed defiance in as much as he could thoroughly stomp it. Right now, he felt disinclined to do so.

“You’re trying to find the Deer King’s old hall,” she said.

She must have had a good eye; the ink on the map - almost as old as the hall it led to itself - was washed out to the point one could barely distinguish between the colors, all some shade of dull brown and beige, the words so wan one had to squint and guess at missing letters. Merlin had had to retrace the way, or at least what he hope he’d correctly identified as the way towards the hall.

“Indeed,” Merlin said. “The one long abandoned.”

She nodded decisively and handed back the map. “I’m coming with you.”

That was how it started – how their fates intertwined. Merlin was intrigued to follow the threads.

“Far be it from me to deny such an eager companion. But may I ask why you wish to accompany me?”

“You look lost.”

Had he not trained himself into utter control over attitude and expression, Merlin would have balked at the blunt reply. Instead, his countenance remained even and pleasant. “Pardon me, I can assure you I am not lost.”

The woman looked pityingly at him, as if he were a man standing amidst the ruin of his castle, vehemently denying anything was amiss, and she mercifully allowing him to continue in his foolish notion.

“I am merely treading paths unknown to me. It is natural to appear lost, for my steps may be careful, but I do know where I’m headed.”

“Do you?” she challenged.

His fingers tightened around his map. His expression didn’t budge. “Yes.”

“Well then, you won’t mind showing me the way, will you?”

“It would be my absolute pleasure.”

She clasped her hands with a sharp clap, picked up her satchel and cloak – her sole other belongings, except the clothes on her back – and gestured for him to lead the way.

Merlin took a moment to consult his map – not too long, though, lest she accused him of being lost again – then instructed for them to proceed north.

“I’ll admit,” she said, “there’s selfish motivation for my self-invitation. I’d like to see the hall for myself.”

“Do you subscribe to the Deer King yourself, perchance?”

“Oh no!” She tapped a nail against her silver brooch and winked. “The Goddess might get jealous.”

“The Lady of the Lake doesn’t strike me as so fickle.”

“Do you claim to know her will better than a Priest?” Her tone and lips were grave; her eyes, however, gleamed.

“I’d never dare.”

“But the fae can be fickle,” she conceded, pulling gently at a bush bough that bend over her head. It sprang and shook, rustling with a fretful murmur of leaves. “Though I don’t think they’d think of themselves as such.”

“Do you know much of the fae?”

“I’ve encountered quite a few.”

His brow rose with genuine surprise. “How come?”

She smiled, a small devious smile as if harboring a secret she greatly relished. “I spend so much time in the woods. You learn where to go and when and then – you find them.”

Indeed, there were those who wished to find and to be found by the fae – who traveled leisurely through the depths of the forest at night, away from well-trodden paths, while others would hasten their step and stick to the established road, walking as if already chased by some terrible apparition. Usually, the former sought the fae for a reason – mere curiosity, favors they chance a faerie may fulfill for them, or to be laid by one of them in hopes of bearing a child. He wondered whichever drove her to the woods. Someone like her, confidently traversing dangerous territory, would quickly garner the attention of a faerie.

“Is this why you came here, so deep in the forest?” he asks, a playful smile tugging at his lips. “To meet more of the fae?”

“And find a quiet place by a body of water to pray. Which I found, until you came stomping in.”

“I did not come stomping in,” he calmly corrected.

“No, indeed,” she agreed, combing fingers through her long hair, which fell around her shoulders in a sheet of cinnamon brown. “You sneaked around, like a thief in the night, which is arguably worst. I’ll let you know I have nothing of value to steal, besides the silver brooch on me.”

“Good to know – if I were to rob you, which I’m not.”

She smiled as she started braiding her hair with expert ease.

“May I know how to address my newfound travel companion?” The name had eluded him throughout all visions she featured in, and it continued to evade him as it struck him that she had yet to make a proper introduction. She was such an odd, compelling mixture of strange and familiar that he almost expected he might dreg up her name from some crevice of his mind, lit now upon seeing her countenance in flesh and blood – but he came up empty and desolate.

She looked up as her fingers deftly continued to braid her hair. “Niniane.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Niniane.”

“Just Niniane,” she said as she produced a tattered ribbon from her satchel to tie up the end of her braid.

Just Niniane couldn’t be older than twenty-five summers, Merlin decided upon considering her. Her Avalonian garbs – dyed green linen – looked clean beyond the dust and grime one would acquire by traipsing through the woods, and while not ragged, they bore the marks of wear of a frequently worn garment. It well supported her claim of destitution.

“Are you an adept at the local Temple back in the village?” he asked.

“No. I don’t quite belong to any Temple right now. I’m traveling the Continent and helping wherever I can – doing good and indulging my curiosity at the same time.”

“Ah,” Merlin felt no small amount of pride as he said, “a most opportune moment to explore, now that peace has settled and the Kingdom is blooming.”

Something about the notion seemed to amuse Niniane. “Blooming indeed. And so many Lady of the Lake Temples have sprung on the map! A very interesting prospect. Usually Temples don’t extend much further than where the fae is known to reside.”

Merlin couldn’t take entire credit for the venture, unfortunately; it had been Igraine Le Fay who had devised it, and he had wholeheartedly supported her, though he knew the woman had only begrudgingly accepted his help.

Niniane continued, face animated: “Do you ever wonder how the Lady of the Lake feels about it? I often do,” she adds softly, her gaze sliding away from Merlin to a thicket of trees, filled with merry, bright warbling.

Merlin had wondered, too. Most of all, he wanted to know how it made the Lady feel feel in terms of magic and power, not inane sentimentality. Did she feel the extension, somehow? Did it influence her? Increase her power, wear it thin?

“Too bad she’s such an elusive faerie,” he said.

Niniane sighed and echoed his sentiment.

They pushed on as the ground grew steeper; Niniane plowed on without issues while Merlin focused on keeping his breathing as even as possible.

“Say, what’s the Royal Sorcerer doing in the woods of the former kingdom of Ulm?”

He wondered if the last part was an attempt to sting, or just point out the gall he had to tread on conquered land – that fought viciously and relentlessly before it fell. He ignored whatever may have lurked beneath the words and answered: “Seeking to better understand magic at its source.”

That’s what his research always circled back to: discovering the arcane ways magic works, all the processes and details they do not know. How magic behaves to create sorcerers, and why it chooses to never activate in certain people, despite the potential in one’s blood.

This piqued Niniane’s interest. “By studying the fae’s magic? The magic infused in nature? In the places they touched and raised with their powers?”

Merlin smiled. This time it was genuine. “Exactly.”

They walked in silence for a brief while, upon which Merlin took advantage of her roaming gaze to check his map – he would not permit any more teasing on his sense of navigating this damn forest – and deemed they were going the right way.

Niniane peered over his shoulder. “We’re lost, aren’t we?” she said in a tone that suggested she found it more exciting than dismal.

“We are not,” Merlin insisted, and could confidently demonstrate so. “See?” He pointed at the map, at the slithering dotted line. “We’re right on track.”

“Yes, according to the map. But the map is wrong.”

His brow furrowed. Procuring the map had been an ordeal all on its own; it was sheer determination and stubbornness that carried him forward in its search, which at many points seemed hopeless. All and any trace to the hall had been done away with, for one reason or another. Merlin was convinced the Rebels – those of Ulm who took refuge in the Academy of Magic, a place they could not conquer – still held on to that knowledge, but there was no asking them nicely.

“We’re off by only a bit, but we can easily get lost at this rate,” she explained, showing the right path on the map. Anticipation made his skin tingle, gaze eagerly following her motions. With one hand, not taking his eyes off the map, he reached for a pencil and traced the way.

He studied it – it was somewhat closer now than expected, and it filled him with a pleasant buzz, as if he could already feel the magic that must be surrounding the place. Then he realized his excitement had overtaken him so strongly, he forgot one key, important query to pose:

“How did you know?”

Niniane smiled in that secretive, mysterious way that he felt will drive him up the walls the more she’d do it – and push him to only crave for more answers, for mysteries were best when unraveled. Though perhaps he was a hypocrite when he guarded his own so fiercely.

“As I said, I have faerie friends.”

“And they just…told you?”

She shrugged, letting him think whatever he wanted to think.

Merlin would have to pursue this line of questioning later. Now, he had more pressing matters. They changed course according to Niniane’s directions, climbing up and down mounds, zig-zagging through trees and bushes. He had no doubt that he would have found it eventually, with or without the woman’s help. It would have taken a lot of meandering and wandering and staring at a map with tattered edges and yellowed paper that refused to yield an easy passage, but he would have found his way regardless. Research was meant to be trial and error, after all.

“There it is!” Niniane cried; she’d run up ahead upon claiming she could see a glimpse of it, and now stood where the line of trees ended and a clearing sprawled.

Merlin caught up and drank the sight in. It was beautiful, and an utter ruin.

What once had been a proud, impressive construct was now falling apart, as if ravaged after a storm. Of the trees that had made up the hall’s walls, many have bent, toppled, or split, bringing down their branches, turning the roof, once verdant, in a strange patchwork of naked bark and green foliage still persevering. Moss had grown on their bark, a scruffy beard on a forest-secluded hermit. Merlin stepped forward slowly as if approaching a great beast, staring transfixed. All the accounts he’d gathered on the building where tales of the humans who’d seen it, danced and drank and laid with the fae, partied till their feet’s soles bled and they forgot their names. They all spoke of its beauty with almost frightful awe that oozed off the pages; but now, underneath the wonder that filled Merlin, there was an underlying pang of what it’d come to. A crumbling mess.

As they passed through the entrance – a gaping maw, the frame of flanking trees crooked – a shiver overcame Merlin, from the crown of his head to the tip of his toes, electrifying every nerve in his body, tracing goosebumps up and down his limbs. Niniane followed, picking her way just as gingerly over the carpet of crunching, dead leaves and splintered twigs.

“Isn’t it such a sad sight?” she murmured, running her fingers across the rotten wood of the doorframe. “Forsaken, lonely, sad sight.”

Merlin pressed his hand against the rough bark and closed his eyes. He steadied and slowed his breath and shuttered himself against everything else – the distant lilting songbird, the droning of insects, the gentle patter of Niniane’s feet, the timid scurrying of hidden critters – and focused on nothing else but that which one couldn’t see. That lingering magic, extending questioning tendrils in search of it. He’d taught himself that method long years ago; a meditation technique at its base, used for one to attune to magic both within and without. To find it, identify it and try to understand it.

“Do you feel it?” she whispered as if they were standing amid a Temple, not a hall that had once been a hubbub of dancing and drinking and any other raucous activity the fae could conjure. “Do you feel the lingering magic, sizzling all over your skin?”

He did. It raised the hairs along his limb, sent shivers down his spine, sang in his blood, rattled in his bones. Even so many years after the fae had forsaken it, there was a residue of magic, clinging to the trees that the Deer King had touched and enchanted, imbued in their bark and the soil, permeating in the air along with the scents of the forest, forever marking this place as one once belonging to the faerie.

His eyes fluttered open with another tremor. Niniane was looking at him expectantly, wearing a knowing smile as she stood below an opening in the roof of branches. With the sun shining upon her face, her cool brown skin looked gilded – her whole being rendered almost ethereal in the shaft of light, among the dancing specks of dust, as if cut out from one of his visions.

“So, is this how you seek to understand magic?”

Merlin slipped a small knife, no longer than his hand, out of his satchel and cut a piece of bark. “How else?”

She watched his motions closely, then asked: “What’s that for? Experiments?”

“Precisely,” Merlin smiled, safely depositing the wood in a silk bag. “I’ve followed ways of testing and studying magic as other sorcerers have done before me, and developed a few methods of my own. This,” he raised the bag, “is vital for my experimentations.”

Merlin went about touching and collecting about as much as he could – dried leaves, dried wood, dried flowers, their petals crumbling between his fingers. This was only the start however. What came next was hours upon hours of meditating, performing helping rituals and drawing necessary runes; all to be thoroughly noted in his journal. Once he’d return back to Camelot – no sooner than a week, he calculated – he’d continue his testing on the pieces of the hall that he had claimed.

Before he could get to all that was the matter of his companion. Their fates where tied – it was no saccharine, mawkish exaggeration. Their chance meeting in the woods would not be the only one, he was sure of it.

“Where are you going from here?” he inquired. “Off to help more people? Or perhaps back to your lake meditation?”

Niniane didn’t answer. She looked up at the cracked remains of the ceiling, at the softly-rustling foliage. Then she looked down back at Merlin, a long smile curling her lips. “I was thinking of sticking around. It’s not every day one gets to see the Royal Sorcerer in action.”

So she stayed. She’d wander at times on her own and return, shoes and hem muddied but smiling as she brandished armfuls of fruit or mushroom. She’d hover by his side, asking insightful questions or making judicious remarks; whenever she wasn’t teasing him with whatever ammunition she could find. Niniane proved a far more pleasant presence that Merlin had expected.

By the time they made it back to the village, Merlin was as excited about his findings as he was about the prospect of sleeping in a proper, cozy bed. He invited Niniane to dine with him at the inn he was heading too.

She shook her head. “I’ll be on my own way. You have fun with your bark and leaves, Merlin Wyllt.”

“Do you reckon we’ll see each other again? You were quite the helpful assistant,” he said with a placid smile as they came to a crossroads. Ahead, people and carriages trotted back and forth, going about their daily machinations. Merlin was glad to see it – a sign of the Kingdom carrying forward, bloody years scrubbed clean – but now all he focused on was Niniane’s face, waiting for her reaction.

She acted as casually affable as him, shrugging one shoulder as she grasped the worn, leather strap of her satchel. “Put a letter in a bottle and send it down the river if you want to reach out,” she said, the corners of her mouth twitching. “I’ll find it eventually.” With that, she spun around and left, away from the village and away from Merlin.