#merlin 01

Marble can repair itself, given enough time. Hairline cracks and crumbling fissures seal over with mineral discoloration, woven calcite lattices stitching over like a second skin. Tabard Alon is foliated down to his core, layer after layer of injury and repair, white to grey to pink to green and back again, all laid out under brown skin.

Enough time is not something Tabard has right now, however. He has a hole in his heart showing white-grey-pink-green and even though it has not killed him, somehow, it is making him shiver and slip. And maybe he is desperate. Maybe he is confused and incensed all at once and grasping at anything but he has decided that if he can fit marble to marble the wound will repair itself.

First, it was quiet. Very quiet without the Lifestream constantly whispering in Aerith’s ears. It was both lonely and not lonely at all. The whispers had always made Aerith weird, different, and that had made her lonely, but now they were gone. But, they were gone. And she was truly alone in a strange, new place. She was determined not to be terrified. It would be fine, she was used to things like this, ever since he crashed down into her church. 

Were they all okay? They had to be right? She couldn’t ask the Lifestream. This wasn’t where she belonged. She felt odd, weird, alone, but not alone at all. Maybe that’s why she had begun to wander around. Maybe in hopes of finding someone, but there was this deep sense in her gut that no one followed her. None of her fire-forged friends who promised her heritage didn’t make her separate from them had followed her here. Was this true loneliness?

This place she found herself felt like the embodiment of her loneliness. She felt dread in her stomach, she felt it bouncing off her skin. Everything felt chaotic. Chaos... she missed Chaos... The proper noun not the regular noun. She hoped he was alright and not freaking out at her sudden departure. There was a tiny voice that sounded nothing like the Lifestream begging for everyone to miss her. She kicked a stray piece of rusted metal with her boot. It landed on a clump of flowers pathetically.

Ah? Flowers? Here? Aerith quickly leaned down to examine them, and of course gingerly pick up the piece of metal she had cruelly kicked into the poor flowers. The small patch of flowers didn’t seem to be alone. It was a trial of flowers, vivid among the decay and ruin of this so called Sea.

Was this the Lifestream leading her somewhere? Leading her back home? She stood up once again. Well, she was never one to lose the chance at following flowers. 

With a renewed bounce in her step she followed the path of flowers. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting at the end of them but it certainly wasn’t a person but there they were, a person at the end of the flowers. 

“You’re here? Really?”

Honestly, Cath Palug felt this would have been a meeting best avoided. However, it seemed as though the Mage of Flowers was here in this place in his entirety, somehow spirited away from Avalon. That in itself was a mystery worth looking into, though if it could have been attributed to someone else, that would have been perfectly fine.

“Cobwebs. I don’t have any.” Disappointed, she glanced up and spotted a boy nearby. It was a strange question to ask, surely, but she doubted she could find any on her own. 

“Excuse me! Do you know where I could find some cobwebs?”

“You don’t have to be afraid here,” he says, and turns from the nowhere to the somewhere, blinking into visibility where he’s watching on the wall. “Burning flesh in my nostrils, screams in my ears, pulse pounding in my chest as my throat tightens with fear - what if they find out, what if he finds out?”

It hurts his chest, twists it more than usual, to follow the echoes of pain and burdens and cold responsibility, and so it’s urgent that Merlin-Emrys-Dragoon-The-Great, warlock-sorcerer-born-of-magic, hears and understands.