What's the deal with the Zatara family's magic?
S'ti yllaretil tsuj cigam! Tup ruoy Caasi Vomisa setouq yawa, on yltneiciffus decnavda ygolonhcet ot eb dnuof ereh, tsuj doog dlo deniohsaf gnitsaclleps. Yretsam fo eht citsym stra! T'nia attog nialpxe tihs ot enoyna. A draziw did ti, srekcufrehtom.
Sorry, something in my throat there. More precisely, Merlin. It's Merlinian magic.
Taking a rarely-adapted aspect from older Arthurian tales, Merlin lived his whole life backwards. He aged backwards. He even experienced everything backwards. He wasn't actually traditionally precognitive. He just remembered things that had already happened to him, which happens to be everything yet-to-come from the point of view of the rest of the world, but this also means he never held any memory of the "past", he would never be able to tell you what the conversation you just had with him was about, because to him, that's the future. He's about to have that conversation. Everything was backwards.
So, of course, when he learned to speak as a child, he learned to speak backwards. Not from our perspective. He sounds like he's speaking normally to everyone else. But, everything happens in reverse to him, so to sound like that, he is forming the sounds in reverse. This isn't difficult to him, because just like the words he says are reversed for us to sound correct, everyone else's words that he was hearing when he was learning language were reversed to sound backwards! It's how he learned it in the first place. That's just what the language has always been for him.
So if he's speaking the way he hears everyone else speak... and if everyone else is hearing him speak the same way they speak, then why does it matter that he's actually saying things in reverse, within his own personal flow of time?
Well... because he was an absolutely brilliant sorceror who invented a lot of spells and entire schools and fields of magic. And in order to cast Merlinian spells... you need to say the words the way he did.
So that brings us to the story of Arataz, Merlin's last student, and first teacher.
Arataz was the man who found and raised the child (and later, infant) Merlin in the final years of Merlin's life before his birth.
From Merlin's perspective he got a surprisingly normal upbringing of mother Zatara (because he heard the name backwards) teaching him to speak and write and walk and all those things, and then once his magic began manifesting in his teen years, he naturally taught some of it to Zatara too, until his quest finally took him elsewhere and he left.
From Arataz' perspective he met the legendary Merlin whose power was waning and learned magic from him (including how to transform his own body, becoming more genderfuid over time) shortly before Merlin lost it altogether, and then spent the next decade caring for the baby Merlin (while Merlin was learning to speak from her from Merlin's point of view).
As Merlin got younger and younger, Arataz started needing to fight off cultist assassins who wanted to prevent the infant from being born in the days to come.
But the baby was indeed "born", to an unmarried elf woman who Arataz stoppd to help on the road. However, a few weeks into her pregnancy, Arataz discovers this elf is actually a form that Loki had taken in order to steal the baby Merlin for his own ends, not knowing that she would turn out to be Merlin's mother and become stuck in this form for 10 months. Arataz continues to protect Loki from the cultists who still think they can prevent the conception, but it comes to light that one of the cultists in particular has been working against the rest in secret to help them stay alive.
Near the end of Loki's pregnancy, they happen across the Fae king Oberon (himself the son of Morgan le Fey, Merlin's "future" rival who reformed and moved to Avalon centuries ago). Unknown to either of them, Oberon is currently being posessed and controlled by Dormammu, the timeless demon of the Dark Dimension.
Knowing that she's nearing the "end" of her reverse pregnancy, Loki has been quick to bed basically everyone they meet in travels in hopes of finally ridding herself of this pesky time-inverted fetus and being able to change shape again, and "Oberon" is no exception to this pattern.
In secret, the traitor cultist (actually a banished Atlantean whose lineage includes the eldritch blood of Icthultu) who'd been protecting them has prepared a ritual grounds for the union, and magically introduces herself and an extradimensional fourth (or sixth?) parent to the conception. Dahak, The Dark One. Arataz discovered this scheme and attempted to stop it, but failed. However, the cultist's planned alteration of the timeline with Merlin as a new Deliverer never came.
Everything had happened as it always would. Merlin had always been the child of Dahak, the Atlantean cultist (and by extension, Icthultu), Dormammu, Oberon, Loki (by himself a multi-paragraph lineage but that has to be its own post), and the elf woman Loki had taken the form of. All the evil schemes were already foiled years ago by the excellent parenting Arataz had given Merlin to overcome any darker impulse of his genetic origins.
In the aftermath of the conception and the conflict surrounding it, with Merlin now... gone, Arataz just... left, leaving the gaggle of once-and-future parents to bicker amongst themselves. The schemes, the stakes, the reason for all of them being there was gone. But Arataz just missed his child.
She continued travelling, helping people wherever she found them, for many years before finally settling down in Italy to start another family. When Arataz became pregnant, his husband demanded that the baby take the mother's name. But Arataz asked that the baby be named according to how her first child, Merlin, would have heard his name.
Zacharias Zatara was born, and the Zatara family line officially began.
As the generations of Zataras passed, each child being taught Merlinian magic from a very early age, their full lifetimes from birth to death saturated with it... pecular things started to happen.
Every Zatara is just a little unfastened from the normal passage of time, in some way or another.
"The Picture of Dorian Grey" was inspired by a Zatara family member who was frozen unaging, but unable to mature or learn as a person either, for decades.
Another family member could rewind time to try things over again, but once she caught up to the present, would disappear and skip over just as much time as she'd spent looping.
Another family member spent every other day as an old man, alternating between youth and old age, only aging further on the young days, until they caught up with the old days and he died.
Luigi Zatara would involuntarily slip into trances, astral projecting centuries into the past or future, or even alternate timelines.
His son, John Zatara, could temporarily send other people or objects into reverse time for a few seconds or minutes.
His son, Giovanni Zatara, will sometimes, every few weeks, receive long-term memories in the wrong order. He'll wake up, not remembering yesterday at all, but remembering just as clearly some day 6 years from now instead. Then 6 years later he catches up with getting that first day back and finally remembers it as if it just happened.
Giovanni's first son, Zachery, mysteriously vanished on his 13th birthday, only to reappear again 26 years later to the day. Zachery's 26th birthday won't come for a while, but the family assumption is that he will disappear again in a cycle, 13 years on, 26 gone, and likely outlive all his current relatives.
Which of course brings us to Zatanna Zatara, for whom all her experienced memories are in the right order, but, her age, including maturity, is all scrambled up. One day she'll be with the Titans in her teens or early 20s, the next day she'll be with the Justice League Dark in her mid-to-late 40s. Some days she's just spending at home and doesn't need to move a lot or fight, maybe she's in her 90s, then back again when the Titans call.
It's not just changing her body. It's shuffling the chronology of her life and development as a person. All her textual memories remain "in order" according to the outside world, but, she also aged faster because she would one day spend the majority of her teens and young adulthood with the Titans. When Giovanni was raising her, she nearly skipped from 14 to 26 in just about seven months. Neither of them knew it yet, but there was a more important time in her life for all those youthful seconds to go, when she would be able to spend them with friends and peers.
Aside from some mildly awkward moments of hanging out with Batman and involuntarily de-aging 15 years a few seconds before his sons walk in, she's happy with how the family magic manifested for her. It often (but not always) tends to match her with the general age range of the people she's with who are, or will be, most important to her. So it works out. Even if the Teen Titans and Justice League are in the same room at the same time... Who'd she walk in with? Who's she gonna leave with? Who's she gonna spend the most time talking to? Who does she need to be close to, or to take her seriously? She might not know, but her magic does.
Magic does not always come with a price. That's a myth written into fairy tales to shame people into relying on the church for their miracles. Magic is rarely exactly what it seems, and can rarely be totally controlled, but it's not malicious. It's not even uncaring. And if you trust the mystic tides, they may just carry you through time itself to find friends, lovers, parents...
Trusting the mystic tides of time to connect you with the people you need, that's what Merlinian magic, the magic of the Zatara family, is.
Ho, dna I sseug s'ereht a tol fo gniklat sdrawkcab oot. ...Ni thgisdnih s'taht ylbaborp tahw eht niotseuq saw yllanigiro tuoba, thgir? Parc, siht tsop ev'dluoc neeb a tol retrohs. Ho llew. Evah a doog Gnivigsknaht enoyreve (ro revetahw tnelaviuqe lanosaes yadiloh ruoy noiger setarbelec)!
