At the far extreme of cosmic time, when darkness tunes the loom of the Blind Weaver, the natural world shall exist as an unreckonable immensity of space. There reside the Realized.
They dwell in the thermal oceans that billow around evaporating black holes 2 x 10100 years in our future. Among the spilled insides of ruptured event horizons, the Realized will learn to see information the way we see light. They will know the deepest secrets of time. And they will reach out across lightless epochs to the stelliferous universe we inhabit, questing for new complexities of information.
Our oldest stars, white dwarves, burn for trillions of years before dimming to cold iron60 cores. The Realized use them as antennas and probes to influence the luminous worlds. That was how Merlin first connected with the Realized – in the rock of iron60 that had once held Excalibur.
This came to pass two centuries after Camelot, when Merlin had grown much younger and his powers had dimmed. He had lost his skill at shapeshifting. Fading to invisible had become impossible. Well over a century had passed since he could summon darkness. How long before the ability to foretell blurred? Or spellcasting faltered?
Before that happened, he was determined to atone for having failed King Arthur. Could any punishing labor or self-abasement make up for the deception and adultery he had contrived for Arthur’s parents? Or for manipulating Excalibur to seat their bastard on the throne? Incest and more adultery had followed – and war.
The wizard had lost Camelot and the chance for a thousand years of peace. There would be no atonement. Instead of guiding valor with reason in the court of Arthur, he had let magic speak for valor. And the disaster of his magic slumped atop the world in anno Domini 751 like a gorged sphinx bloated with Rome’s dying. Centuries of war, plague, and famine would follow.
Those dark ages he could not avert. Instead, he had resolved to remove from the world all the magical objects he had conjured as the king’s wizard. Excalibur, the Round Table, the Grail, even Camelot would have to be dispatched to a dimension perpendicular to time. He was determined that their magic would not distort history again.
A grave jest mocked this resolution. Magic had happened upon him, Lailoken, Dark Dweller from the House of Fog. What is magic? Might as well ask, what are the Sun and the Moon? They happen. Like magic. Like him happening, a Dark Dweller, incubus, despoiler of nuns – until that gruesome and inglorious night squatting atop the Christian mystic, far-famed Saint Optima of Uxacona.
The gentle nun had shone with silence. She had effortlessly thrown off his possession and had possessed him! Her invincible attention had held him in thrall and forced him to pray with her!
Disconnected from his willful mania, the incubus had shrunk. He had dwindled eventually to a pointillist seed, and the saint had determined then, for the sake of his salvation, to receive his seed and grow from her flesh, from her blood, a human body to house his unclean spirit.
A hemorrhaging labor nearly cost her life on the night that, alone, unattended, she birthed a wee, withered old man cocooned in silver whiskers. Through gentle care and illuminating faith, the good woman convincingly acquainted the demon with virtue.
As he grew younger over the years, his preternatural vitality convinced him that his malevolent identity as a Dark Dweller had been transfigured by all that is holy. Seduced into biology by the saint’s parable of love, Lailoken’s demonic powers had armed a warrior of kindness.
Or so he had believed – until the battle of Camlann.
Yet, even after Mordred and the fall of Camelot had unmasked the saint’s miracle for the demonic ruse it always was… Even then, he chose to believe Merlin’s desperate good will could somehow undo Lailoken’s evil.
He returned to the high and rugged country far to the west, to remove from spacetime the rock that had once held Excalibur. On the summit paths, the countryside folded into snug horizons of valleys and glens. The wizard’s skill for peering ahead through drifting time identified routes free of brigands and bound to opportunity.
He located a stray, balding donkey to ease his wayfaring. Two nights later, under a cottonball moon, a war party gloating in their fire-circle succumbed to his spellcasting. They outfitted him with provisions and their camp slave, a smutched Irish girl of lank red hair and skeletal mien huddled in a ragged frock.
Blancherre, the warriors called the pale child, her native name unknown. Afflicted beyond speech, she offered no other. She rode astride the mule, darkly downcast, sullen as the condemned.
At a placid steady pace, they traversed breezy grasslands. Now and then, the wizard sang Goidelic lays he dredged from the mute girl’s memory and played her heart for harp.
During their meal on the third night, fortifying themselves on the last of the warriors’ cheese, parsnips, and ale bread, she spoke. Her self-reckoning presented an existence as tattered and emaciate as she looked.
The Dark Dweller turned away disinterested, having borne witness across eons to the eternal recurrence of her deprivations and depravities. The boy wizard, however, leaned into the firelight with the attention she needed.
The fire’s red shadows caressed them, and they lay back upon a bed of leaves, the empty hemp sack their scant blanket. He soothed her with his tawny, adolescent voice, singing an old Druid adoration for the hidden everywhere of God in clouds, trees, and the road ahead. Her caved eyes closed, and the girl and wizard slept peacefully with the mule in a sheltering grove of hawthorn through a drizzly night.
Morning opened brightly. Mists unveiled diamond acres of dewy grass. After breakfast of quail eggs, hazel cobs, and berries, they watered the mule at a lively stream and followed the rivulet up rocky shelves. By noon, they came into an ancient forest of titanic yews. Aloft among high vaults and galleries of the green day, owls swept.
The wizard’s destination loomed in a radiant glade beyond the forest walls: a prominent knoll that local farmers called Arthur’s Rise. Blancherre saw a black, flat-topped boulder of ferric slag set massively among hackberry shrubs on a scalloped hill.
The boy dropped the reins and advanced at a reverential pace through broad slants of sunlight. As an older man, centuries before, he had worked magic with Excalibur and this monumental rock. The sword had wielded magic, but the rock had never seemed other than rock. Now, however…
In brusque daylight, the air around the fabled boulder looked shadowed and dented like an apple in autumn. Breath brimming, the wizard laid hands on the cleft surface and pushed away alarmed. The stone incandesced with dreaming!
Through this shard of iron60, the Realized reached back from the farthest future. They were drawn out of their fathomless abyss by the wizard’s unique information: an amalgam of biology and nontemporal sentience – man and demon.
In a voice pulled from a well, Blancherre spoke at Merlin’s back, “Listen carefully to me, wizard.”
The boy whipped about. The wasted girl had dismounted. She stood rigid, a spindly corpse in tattered cerement gazing intently at him out of her ghosted face. The intelligence of the Realized had entered her, and a new distance unfolded between them.
Not squinting from the peeving sunrays or the gnats peppering her, Blancherre spoke for the Realized with the saturated authority of hypnotic command, in Latin, and through a voice from before she was born:
“All time is eternally present. You know this, Dark Dweller. Forget what has been. Remember what will be. Voice the voiceless and know me. I am the Realized. I speak our story. Give yourself to the telling. Make it the truth we share. But not the wizard’s truth. Not Merlin’s truth. Ours, Lailoken. Remember. Magic is not a story. The story is magic.”
The voice of the Realized entered the boy’s brain as a bubble of nothing that burst out of sideways time with stunning force. The wizard staggered back a pace and sat down. To keep from passing out, he held hard onto the final tangible connection to his world’s lost destiny, the matter of Britain come to naught and dark ages ascending.
A jetty that stood against a sea, his heart broke the flow of emotion from his loss. The blow unspooled the spell binding the demon within. The Dark Dweller pulled away from the stunned flesh that wore him. His captivity had begun centuries before, falling out of everywhere into the dream of one creature, this wizard.
Momentarily detached by the boy’s grief, the demon slid into the darkness where he could see better, looking for release. He was seeking a lost key when he had yet to find the lock: What bound him to the wizard in the first place?
The demon would never understand spellbinding. In the higher realm of Dark Dwellers, knots did not exist. The incubus foolishly imagined he had lived long enough as human meat to unravel the sacred knot binding him.
He began shaping possible ways ahead, even as the boy slid to the ground, knocked senseless by the Realized. They wanted Lailoken. And with the wizard subtracted, the way to elsewhere became clearer.
All those suns dusting the night beckoned, numberless and far from this mucilaginous planet. Free flung across the dark between stars, he would unearth himself and awake disembodied, at one with the cold, empty and vast.
At the far extreme of cosmic time, when darkness tunes the loom of the Blind Weaver…
Blancherre woke to a blue and cloudless sky ringed by black alders thick of trunk and bough. The afternoon had nailed shingles of sunlight to the top branches, and she sat up wincing.
Before her, the boy squatted on the matted grass where he had lain. He handed her a birch-bark cup cleverly fashioned and spliced to a stalk handle. “Drink.”
The cool water eased her tight throat, and she asked in Goidelic, “How are we here?”
He didn’t know. Neither of them remembered the voice of the Realized. The boy heard himself say, “We tramped all morning – then took our rest.”
His human-made brain remembered plodding along the crest of hills, Blancherre straddling the mule, and the sun shy among thronging clouds. Fleet shadows flew across wide country.
“Where?” Blancherre’s voice croaked, and she took another sip before propping the ladle in the grass. “Where are we?”
“A long way from anywhere.” Beyond the stout black alders, the mule grazed in heather moorland. Purple leagues sprawled toward a distant dark lake. “While you rested, I snared two rabbits and gathered some elderberries and wood sorrel. We’ll eat well.”
The girl rubbed sleep from her grimed face, then held her bruised hands in a shaft of sunlight angling through the trees and across her lap. She flexed her fingers in the warmth as if summoning the light closer. “Your singing is some kind of glory,” she acknowledged, eyes attentive to her bright fingers. “And my miserable story.” She gave a rueful shrug. “You listened. Why ever? None would. And I don’t yet know your name.”
“Jack.”
“Whence?”
“Jack Yonder, because I wander.”
A hint of smile touched her cracked lips and fell away. Gaze averted, she wondered, “Where are we to go?”
“You can decide for yourself.” He pointed out to the rambling heath. “There’s a Roman road a few miles north that runs to the harbor at Deva. I’ve enough coin to book your passage back to Hibernia.”
“My family is dead.” Her pale eyes locked on his and searched from a place inside her, cold and afraid. “Sure you know. I told you. My village is gone. All dead.”
The wizard blinked and sat back on his heels, astonished at his lapse. He listened to the warble of birds. Perched on the thin edge of that instant, attentive to each sharp note of birdsong, he found himself again, the self of an older birth, the incubus.
Lailoken knew what had happened earlier that day. But he refused to share anything with this manikin of flesh. He wanted to unlock the meat cage that called itself a wizard and free himself. The Realized had offered alliance, and the demon busily considered this.
The wizard heard him through the empty spaces in the birdsongs, scheming murderous ways to liberate himself from biology. His death wish celebrated the freedom he had known as a Dark Dweller, the freedom to shatter all forms, burst through any barrier, violate every boundary until collapsing exhausted at the end of time, one with the serenity of the void.
In a way, he was sorry to let it go, the violence that augured peace. But as a wizard of diminishing powers, as a youngster of fourteen years stature and frame, he despaired that the inner spirit of his darkness had come against the radiant day of his dwindling magic.
He had to remind himself, the wizard and the incubus were not two separate beings. The Dark Dweller is me. And mine is the House of Fog.
He cupped both hands over his mouth and filled his palms with the heat of his breath. Leaping upright, he flung his lifeforce around him in seven directions and, with great force, hauled his demonic presence into the dimensional world.
The rendition of light in the treetops darkened. Daylight dulled to a spider-shade of gray. And a stink arrived, a sickly reek that ate through faces from the inside out.
The wind changed up its cry to a deepening drone, a disconsolate, pulsating chord, concentrating ceremonial force. Farther in the forest, shadows moved with intelligence. Flocks exploded from the trees, scattering across the day. Bushes thrashed, and small mammals shot out of the woods and disappeared in the moorland.
With gargantuan tread, a shapeless presence of smoldering terror slouched closer, dragging the afternoon after it.
The wizard wearily shrugged his eyebrows at this exorbitant drama, only too familiar from his epochs as a Dark Dweller. With a broad sweep of his arm, he cut through the grim semblance, and his demonic anger briskly lifted away, a trick of light among gusty branches.
Sharp as a bark, a triumphant shout from the boy snicked incubus and wizard back together. Jigsaw pieces of flesh and presence rejoined as an ever-present wholeness. The floating dream of the human world jellied around Lailoken, and the wizard’s memory of the Realized lit up.
He knew again the electric moment he had laid hands on Excalibur’s Rock and felt its wide dreaming. He heard again the Realized’s iron voice in Blancherre’s throat. It had set a command upon him.
Blotting the past, blurring the future, it had marched him over the horizon with the mule and the pitiful girl astride. The chapel-dark of this grove had invited a nap. When he woke, the girl still slept, and he had let hunger lead him into woods of bristling sunlight.
Memory braided him to the present. The day brightened, a minty breeze strolled into the clearing from out the forest, and the wizard sat back down.
Lailoken sat with him. They were two who had become one. Or, as blessed Mother Optima would say, the togetherness of holy body and unclean spirit.
Inside a bauble of time with a diameter of mere seconds, incubus and wizard faced their mutual iridescence: their one mind holding to the prismatic center of that moment.
Lailoken spoke first, “You are going to die.”
“You know better.”
“You are pieced together of atoms.”
“Atoms that dream.”
“You are a creature, son of woman. You will die.”
“Dreaming never dies. We know this, Lailoken. We sullied the dreaming of the perished across numerous worlds.”
“I am a Dark Dweller in the House of Fog, uncreated, older even than the Beginning. I am bigger than dreaming.”
“We are also this man, whose dreaming is the wizard.”
“Shall I shatter this mad moment you’ve conjured? With a scream end this dream?”
“No. Wait the nonce. When this ends, we return to who we were before.”
“Yes. You imagined yourself a powerful wizard. You were my nitwit all along.”
“I know that now. I tricked myself.”
“Ha! Warriors of kindness! The Table Round. The Holy Quest. Your hope was never more than a wish.”
“In a moment, we shall come together again. This time, I know I am your nitwit. I am a man who knows.”
“What do you know?”
“I know the Realized have summoned you to work their magic.”
“The Realized would have me tell their story.”
“We shall not. Our magic is more powerful than their story.”
“Wizard, you are the one who should know better.”
“I may be a nitwit, Lailoken, but now I know what you know. Excalibur’s stone comes from the elder gods.”
“They call themselves the Realized.”
“We will not obey them. Our magic…”
Lailoken would hear no more from the nitwit, and he broke away.
Merlin crackled with alertness. The moment hardened to one world, and the black might of Lailoken once again became his own strength. Simultaneously, the demon’s intelligence returned to hiding on the far side of sleep.
The boy looked around, filling his attention with the tiniest things making the day touchable – wee claws of nettle, the sun’s smile in a dewdrop.
He lifted his gaze to Blancherre, who had scrambled backward, startled by Jack Yonder’s mad dance and the uncanny and doomful stench that had scuffed over them. Primordial evil. It had left her gaping, suspended between despair and a prayer.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“So you say. I felt it. I did. Something terrible. Here and then gone.” On her back, knees and elbows flexed, she appeared ready to scuttle away, but her eyes had little to do with that. Wide with wonder and wondering, she read the scruffy boy’s bland features: a freckled face, ginger hair long and tousled, cheeks smirched with road dust and sweat, wholly common but for that trace of fire in his blue gaze – and that scalding evil he had drawn out of the forest and banished. “What are you then? Fey?”
The wizard would not lie. The Realized had gripped the girl in their dreaming, and they could conquer her day again at any moment. Under her keen stare, he nodded softly.
She shivered so, her joints ached. Matters of life and death – famine, plague, and slaughter – had all imperiled her short existence but never the exquisite horror of a bewitched eternity. “To the hollow hills with me then?”
“No, Blancherre. I’m not faerie.” He puffed both cheeks, exasperated at the pressing need to explain himself to a child. “I’m a man, a very old man, who looks like a chap – but, in truth, I’m a devil, a right son of Balor.”
The name of the death god mulled through the skeletal girl, and she balled up. Balor had taken everything from her but her own shriveled life.
“Fear not.” The tatty lad edged closer and sat on his heels. He smelled of fire. Not woodsmoke or char. His body frothed with elemental heat. “I’m sorry you got caught up with me.” In his wanderings across centuries, how many waifs, orphans, widows, and simpletons had he freed from servitude? Some of their kin, generations later, continued to prosper with the trades and crofts the wizard had set up for them in hospitable communities. Among the many, only this one had felt Lailoken. “I mean you no harm.”
She stayed curled up. The fey boy’s words stacked and toppled. She clapped hands over her ears. She had suffered enough and would not hear of worse to come.
The wizard assessed the frightened girl with a woeful look. Her pitiable life was a small, wild poem. It sang of humanity. He knew it well after ages moving among the living and the dying, sharing pain and glee, arriving too many times at the end of violence to find none of it mattered, only to get swept up again in the living and dying of earnest souls wanting more love, more life, disentangling their destinies from fear, longing for certainty, trusting force, and meeting the malevolence in themselves that had begun wishing for death right from the start.
What to say? What to say to this small, wild girl at the end of violence?
Hapless acceptance alone felt honest. Gently, he touched the back of her neck with his breath. Lifeforce flurried through her, and when she lifted her head, he pressed his thumb to her brow.
Her mind ruffled with childhood memories of hearthside stories about the Round Table’s warriors of kindness, their tragic king, and his sly wizard sired by a malign spirit on a holy woman and born so deviant of natural order he aged backward.
Understanding softened her frown. Almost under breath, she asked, “Might you be –?”
He heard his name as a sob of silence. “I am he. King Arthur’s wizard.”
She gaped at his emphatic youthfulness, not yet daring to believe he could be the legendary mage. Most likely he belonged to an air sprite. That would explain how he sang so well and pulled shadows out of the day sky. Not someone grand as King Arthur’s wizard but something weaker and hence crueler, a creature of the wyrd, boastful and wicked.
“I’m after going my own way,” she spoke to the watchful lad, to test if she were indeed free. “If you find me to Deva, there I’ll take up work for keep.”
“I will find you to Deva,” the boy assured, speaking from under a serious frown. The wizard said nothing about the Realized. He felt the thick fond of fright that caked the bottom of her heart and sought a gentle way to alert her. “First we must talk about what happened earlier today.”
“Sure and first, I’m to the bushes.” She pushed to her feet, bare feet sturdy and dun as the earth, and doddered through the trees to attend to herself.
Merlin returned to the windfall birch where rabbit pelts draped a branch. The skinned animals lay on the trunk. Bark had been peeled to present a smooth surface for him to fillet the hindquarters with a flake-stone.
His hands worked with skilled precision, while his mind pondered, what had happened at Excalibur’s Rock? For too long, he had not been able to recall what the Realized had done – because the Realized had managed to separate him from himself.
Time had become lost light, like rays of a remote star finding different paths through space, swerving around black holes and reefs of dark matter, radiating one self in many places, many selves when the light finally arrives to find us looking.