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1.
Arthur is dead. Morgana is gone. Merlin won’t wake up.
Douxie has the vague feeling that something else is missing too, that something about the last few weeks just doesn’t add up. His mind feels foggy. It’s mostly grief, yes, but something else is niggling at him. Why wasn’t he with his master at Killahead? Had Merlin ensorcelled him, kept his useless apprentice from helping even when he clearly needed it?
“You’re overthinking it,” Archie assures him. Then, when Douxie doesn’t seem assured, he changes it to, “You’ll understand with time.”
“Stop speaking like Merlin,” Douxie snaps back.
They both flinch at that. Douxie looks away first. There’s no time to squabble. They only have each other now; they have to figure out their next step.
Even though Merlin is incapacitated, nobody seems to want to execute his apprentice for magic just yet. He isn’t sure if that’s because they’re still scared stiff of the wizard, or if something had happened while his mind was fuzzy. Had King Arthur recanted his stance on magic..? Either way, Douxie isn’t sticking around long enough for it to wear off.
The knights who are left help him construct a tomb for Merlin and leave him alone to say goodbye. Looking down at his master gives Douxie an odd, tight feeling in his chest. So he kneels one last time.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help with – whatever it was,” he says. “But master…”
He falls silent for a moment because surely this is when Merlin wakes up. The walls of the tomb themselves seem to quiver in anticipation, ready to echo back the gruff Don’t ‘but master’ me! Everything is silent. Douxie forces himself to continue.
“It won’t be like that when you wake up. You’ll see. Next time I’m going to be ready. No matter long next time takes.”
Then he swipes at his eyes, stands up, and stops being Hisirdoux Casperan, apprentice to Merlin, for nine hundred years. Give or take.
2.
He decides to go to France. He thinks his name, Hisirdoux, might be French. The only thing Douxie remembers of his mother is a soft hand on his brow; of his father, even less. But he likes the idea of them being travellers, and France seems as good a place as any for them to have travelled from.
It takes them a bit to adjust back to being alo – to being on the road. Sore feet, an empty belly, stiff muscles every morning from a hard bed. Merlin had given much more than magic to Douxie, enough that it’s hard to fall back into their rhythm. At the end of the day though, it’s like riding a horse. Once you’ve learnt it, you never really forget.
Casting an experienced eye over the seaside village’s fair, Douxie grins and says, “Lad o’ fortune?”
“That would probably work better once you pick up more of the language,” Archie points out. When he sees Douxie droop, he relents. “Still, what better way to pick up a language than to try a patter?”
The dragon’s bigger than he had been last time they’d done this trick, but he slips under the cup easily enough. It’s a little harder for Douxie.
“Mesdames et mes soeurs,” Douxie calls out and then immediately slaps his forehead. “Oh fuzzbuckets, that means my sisters doesn’t it? Mesdames et messieurs…”
Luckily, the crowd seems to enjoy his horrible French as much as the game itself. When he stumbles over the words, they call out suggestions to him – some of which are clearly vulgar and shouldn’t be used with customers unless he wants his nose kicked in. They’re amused enough to be good–natured about him fleecing them, and toss him a few more coins when he whips out his lute to play a ballad of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. The ballad is old; he doesn’t flinch.
The landscape is different, the language is unfamiliar, but in a way it’s like coming home. Over the next nine centuries, he’ll never quite figure out if the thought’s a relief.
3.
Soon enough, all of Europe becomes their stomping grounds. Douxie manages to take down a werewolf in Bohemia, picks up an ancient grimoire in Iceland, and learns to play the vihuela in Aragon. Archie drags him to Sardinia at least once every half–century, regardless of whose management it’s under; apparently, they have the best fish. Every time the non–aging thing starts getting Douxie odd looks, they gamely move on.
He doesn’t leave Europe much. Merlin might be able to travel anywhere in the world easily, but Douxie doesn’t have that range. When his master wakes up again, he’s not missing his chance.
Sometimes though, one of his contacts on the magical side of things passes on a request for the English wizard. They most certainly don’t mean him, and when dusty and reedy Hisirdoux Casperan arrives instead of Sir Merlin the Immortal, there’s dismay. He sticks with it anyway: he and the local magic users generally manage to cobble together a solution even without Merlin.
A Mayan wizard teaches him to quiet curses sent on the wind; Babylon is abandoned by mortals by the time they drop by, but the trolls who dwell there gift him an actual Harp of Ur in return for taking care of their specterghast problem.
The magical world moves slower than the human: he continues to receive requests for the English wizard even into the 21st century. Archie posits that by that point, his and Merlin’s myths have merged enough that the petitioners genuinely want Hisirdoux Casperan. It’s a nice thought, but Douxie’s pretty sure they’re just that slow.
4.
Magic is not a permissible shortcut to hard work.
Douxie tries to live by his master’s words. But there’s hard work and hard work, right?
The more time passes, the less magic is talked about as a fact of life. That’s new. Whether loved or despised, nobody had doubted its existence. Douxie doesn’t come back to the Isles that often: even after so many years, it’s strange not to see Camelot’s towers looming in the distance.
With magic faded so much, it’s lonelier than ever. London feels as foreign as Kyoto, sometimes.
The only place where magic remains unequivocally accepted is the theatre. Douxie is perpetually nineteen; after near four centuries of hard work, he decides to go back to his rebellious teenage years. Acting’s really not that different from any other con. He spends two whole decades doing no magic but that of the stage.
Douxie’s not good enough – and looks too young – to play the main roles in the Bard’s plays, but he doesn’t want them anyway. He goes on as Puck, as Ariel, as one of Macbeth’s witches. Anything that allows him to scream in front of an audience that magic’s still here. That he’s still here.
Being alive is hard work in and of itself, sometimes.
5.
And then Douxie’s running again. Even without him, the humans have somehow remembered magic. With a vengeance.
It’s just rumours first and then it’s suddenly more. Some villages around Trier have been decimated so badly, there’s barely a woman left between them. The Spanish Inquisition is responsible for a fresh set of horrors in the Basque country. Douxie swallows down bile.
The vast majority aren’t even magic users. Sure, there might be a few hedge witches and an unlucky changeling – one of Morgana’s children. But most are older women who are a little too independent, or maybe young girls who don’t want to marry who they’re told. People who don’t pray ardently enough, or pray to the wrong gods. All of them being burnt for his crimes.
“It’s not a weakness to run when you’re outnumbered,” Archie reminds him gently.
He can't curl his soft, lithe body around Douxie like he usually does. For the first time they’ve known each other, Archie stays shifted in the form of a dog. Black cats are too dangerous: in France, they’d stuffed nine of them into the cage with the woman before lighting it.
When Douxie shakes his head, Archie presses again. “Do you think even Merlin could have saved all of them?”
“I don’t know,” says Douxie miserably. “He saved me.”
He saves who he can too, but he knows it’s not enough. He’s terrified and he’s alone. For his cowardice, a thousand other Douxies burn. He side–steps around danger, avoids all major cities because of a sick, rabid paranoia that some grandfather will recognise him and bellow that that boy sold his soul to the devil for immortal youth.
Sometimes his own memory is a little blurry – it’s never fully recovered from whatever happened at Killahead – but he won't forget the eyes of the dark–haired woman he pulls from a pyre near Salzburg. In contrast to Douxie, she’s not actually a witch. She’s as terrified of him as the villagers were of her.
He helps her get to Budapest, and then continues fleeing east alone. Douxie doesn’t speak the Slavic languages as well, but he picks it up. The people here have their own religion and their own problems. In the deep forests, where the reach of tsars and boyars is weak, people even welcome him with bread and salt. They are still used to his kind.
He learns how to avert the evil eye and negotiate with leshiy from his kin, and how to play the balalaika and enjoy red beet soup from the humans.
Douxie doesn’t return west until everyone who stood at a pyre is dead.
6.
He still dreams of Merlin sometimes.
But master, he says in his dreams. I failed them. I couldn’t stop them from being hurt, like you did for me.
He knows it’s a dream because in response, Merlin only hugs him tighter.
7.
Douxie is in love.
Music in general has been pretty great recently. He spent over half of the 18th century just hanging around Vienna, drifting from one concert to the next. One time, he even attempted to bribe a Habsburg prince with a real Anamnesis Stone for the Kunstkammer, in return for hearing Mozart perform. Archie continues to remind him how reckless that idea was a full century later.
This is the best thing he’s ever heard.
“Brace yourself,” he whispers to Archie as the bells ring.
The music swells once more and the cannons go off. Archie yowls; Douxie laughs in sheer, giddy delight. The 1812 Overture is performed with real cannons far too rarely for his taste – the substitution of gunfire or sledgehammer makes sense, but it’s just not the same. He can barely hear the strings over the ringing in his ears.
Tchaikovsky is a bloody madman and Douxie is in love.
8.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” says Archie.
Douxie does know. But this is the big one – he can feel it. If Merlin can’t be bothered to wake up for it, at least one British wizard should be there. Besides, his neighbour’s boy got his conscription papers this morning too, and Douxie isn’t going to be a coward this time. He may still not be powerful enough to change history, but he will at least help a few kids.
He nudges Archie. “Come on, we haven’t been to France in years. Bout time we found out what that can–can is all about.”
So Douxie marches off to join the Great War.
He regrets it the moment he steps foot on the continent. He knows this land. Centuries ago, he and Archie had wandered backwards and forwards over it, singing. Now he can’t hear a single bird.
The war is bloody, and dirty, and truly terrible in a way he doesn’t remember anything else in eight centuries being. Not even the witch trials, not even the Black Death. Douxie uses magic as much as he dares – as much as he can without drawing attention to himself. Heroes don’t live long in the trenches.
“Was that – how’d you do that?” asks one of the boys in his unit. His eyes are wide. He looks the same age as Douxie does: so, impossibly young. They’re alone in the bunker. A moment ago, Douxie had slapped his hands against its wall and stopped a stray artillery shell from caving in the ceiling and killing them.
Douxie’s hands are still shaking. He winks. “Magic.”
The boy laughs. Magic isn’t a thing in the 20th century – at least not in Britain or France, and definitely not in this godforsaken hole. Now that the moment has passed, the boy doesn’t really believe Douxie had anything to do with their little miracle.
It’s nice to hear laughter.
“If you say so, Merlin,” the boy says. He’s grinning as the relief of not being dead sets in. “Can you magic the gas masks over to the sergeant too, or do we still have to carry them?”
To that, there’s only one answer possible. Douxie wags his finger.
“Magic is not a permissible shortcut to hard work.”
They promote him to corporal by the end; he tries to keep his unit alive. Killing people with artillery and machine guns is no different than the few times he’s had to kill people with magic, but he avoids it when possible, on the basis that the poor sods on the German side would probably do the same if they had magical powers.
Despite his best efforts, he even gets some kind of medal, as shiny as the prizes they used to give to knights in Camelot. What would Sir Lancelot think, muses Douxie with a private smile. He’s too exhausted for it to be properly sardonic; it just comes out sad and tired. Hisirdoux Casperan: Merlin’s errand boy and hero of the realm.
When the war ends, he makes sure everyone from his section gets home safe, hugs those that allow it and claps the others on the shoulder. Then he books a bunk on the next ship to the New World. If Merlin wants him, he can fetch him. Douxie’s done with Europe.
9.
The rest of the century is mostly better. There’s another big one, not even thirty years later. Douxie would rather chop his own hands off than fight in the trenches – or whatever their equivalent is – of the second Great War. He also refuses to go back to being a coward. In the end, he compromises: hops on a hospital ship and practices his healing magic. It’s still bad enough that Archie absolutely forbids him to take part in any more human wars for at least a century. Douxie doesn’t argue.
But apart from that, it’s pretty good. That stuff that the Beatles are playing is interesting. That stuff Sweetwater plays, even more so. He falls in with some hippies and helps them symbolically burn their draft cards – and then actually helps them, hiding them from the authorities when necessary. It’s not that different from the witch hunts, in some ways.
Woodstock is a revelation. For three days, Douxie forgets the last eight hundred years and lives completely in the music. If Merlin had called on the 16th of August, 1969, his apprentice would have told him to come back on Monday. Archie’s tastes peaked with Beethoven, but he doesn’t complain. When Douxie gets tired of screaming and dancing, they curl up together in the shade in utter content.
Then he hears Black Sabbath and falls in love again.
Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Deep Purple. Maybe Douxie chose the wrong century to abandon Europe. But they all cross the Atlantic in the end; Douxie’s learnt patience and he can wait. A few centuries ago, Douxie proclaimed that he still existed with the voice of Shakespeare’s faeries. Now, he hollers together with thousands of others about witches at black masses.
The lyrics change over time – there’s less of the magic left by the time of Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Rammstein – but that’s fine. The cacophony of sound is even better than Tchaikovsky’s cannon fire.
There’s still people asking for the English wizard sometimes. Douxie answers each call faithfully, and seems to do more of the teaching than the learning nowadays. It’s a weird, but not uncomfortable thought. Eventually, he settles down in a small town on the western coast and helps the local hedge wizards build up an underground magic/tech company. More trickle in with time. It’s… nice.
He grows his hair out for the first time in years. To keep from looking too much like the silly, useless apprentice he’d once been, he dyes the tips blue, and adds piercings and tattoos.
He’s learnt how to live. When Merlin wakes up, Douxie’s ready for him.
+1.
Arthur is dead, Morgana is dead, Merlin is dead. It’s the 21st century and Douxie is still running more days than not.
But not today.
“Budge over,” says Claire. She flops down on the couch between him and Jim without waiting. There’s a full bowl of popcorn in her lap.
Archie sniffs. “You realise how humiliating this is?”
The Trollhunter, who is by far the nicest teenage boy Douxie has met in nine centuries, looks a little uncomfortable.
“He doesn’t mean it,” Douxie assures Jim.
“Don’t I?”
“Relax, dude,” says Toby. He’s sprawled out on the ground next to AAARRRGGHH!!! and Nari. A whole supermarket aisle’s worth of snacks surrounds them; Nari is meticulously making her way through them all. “It’s not us making fun of cats. It’s us making fun of humans for being so bad at cats. You’ll love it.”
Archie flicks his tail, but finally settles down.
Hisirdoux Casperan, master wizard, grabs a handful of popcorn as the first notes of Cats’ overture drift from the TV.