Betrayal lays the foundation of Merlin’s great achievement, the Matter of Britain: deceiving Arthur’s mother into committing adultery to conceive him – then, manipulating Excalibur to enthrone the illicit bastard, who soon after is duped into incest with his sister, siring another bastard, who will destroy all that the king builds. (Portrait of the fresh-faced old wizard provided by ChatGPT.)
Merlin felt all three hundred of his years weighing heavily on his sixteen-year-old frame, and he sank on his bones. He lay back atop a carved stone large as a wagon wheel, a sundial, where time had been and departed with the fading light.
Attention traveled to the far reaches of his being. What had transpired today with the ghost of Arthur Rex thinned to an afterthought. Three centuries of human memories stepped back, hid, and looked out at a blotted landscape beneath a sky holding the last loose feathers of the sun.
The demon Lailoken crept forward, stealthily as a forgotten dream returning to mind. The wizard had vanished. His absence suggested the murder of a presence, for though Jack’s youthful body sat upright as if he were alert, his mind had departed. But why? Why had the nitwit erased himself?
Out of the carboned horizon, out of the soft collapse of the day, low in the sky two stars kindled. Not stars. Eyes.
With chilling clarity and derisive mirth, the demon understood. The pitiable wizard had retreated, bringing Lailoken forward to protect himself – from what?
The wizard’s witless magic – opening enormous doors to sideways time so he could dispose of the Sword, the Chalice, the Table, and enormous doors slamming shut behind these magical Objects – had roused a primeval power sunk in unplumbed darkness. A queen of the underworld and mother of hobgoblins, Lailoken recognized. He sneered at the fool within.
Small and shrinking smaller, the wizard looked up, bracing for a hard reckoning.
Queen Hob approached, riding a high wind. The cope of night draped her shoulders. Her long wings spread wide through the rolling hills – their slow undulations the wingbeats of her flight across epochs. Forests and valleys folded into the pleats of her robes. Earthbound, wearing tomorrow’s rain, she advanced out of the hollow night.
Her star-bright eyes swooped down the broad field, halting midway toward the sundial. In the looming dark, she revealed her face for both Lailoken and the wizard to look upon, and to each alone.
The wizard, stealing a glance from far within his narrow humanity, saw the queen of hobgoblins slip out of transparency, a black sun illuminating emptiness. The undreamed iridescence of her perceptions ascended and fell around her, serene as frilled jellyfish. Jack’s mortal mind overheated, a puddle of melt trying to make sense of what it reflected.
The Dark Dweller perceived her differently. He approached her inner geometry, the copulation of light and shadow connecting the luster of her higher dimensional reality with the shadowy projections she cast into the phenomenal world. Wind dancing atop the trees breathed with her, and starlight blinking among boughs and branches extended her feelers into the world.
Mother of Manure! Lailoken sneered within the wizard’s mind. He had mauled this entity and swarms like her in lust and rage across worlds and eons. Queens of planetary life, they were one mud to him. He enjoyed splatting them to muck and watching them convulse and ooze back together, and he must have done that to this one more than once over the ages, for she kept her distance.
Bound to the wizard, however, Lailoken could only watch, vulnerable to her fury. She had not yet realized her advantage. Otherwise, Jack’s body would have erupted into bursting boils. No, she did not attack or even approach. She stood in the open field, tall as the moon, with the one called Night Wind at her side.
The Dark Dweller had ridden Night Wind ruthlessly over the ages, chasing prey across dimensions. The nocturnal blur of its giant moth wings frenzied when its eye of swiveling skyshine spotted Lailoken squatting in a body of meat.
The demon barked, and the shadow-steed bolted, swiftly disappearing into the scorched sky of the west.
The black immensity of the queen pulled back into the night, tucked itself among the stars. The wizard realized she did not recognize him. She saw only Lailoken. With a flash of daring, he withdrew his demonic self. The Dark Dweller dropped backward reluctantly, laboring like thunder into darkness.
“Mother Hob!” Jack called. “You know me. I am the wizard who served Arthur Rex.”
“[▬▬]?” A mute throb filled the dark land: his name shaped into silence.
“Yes.” Jack slid off the face of the sundial and walked into the dusky field, gazing up at Queen Hob. Her body, a monumental sphere of black light, dwarfed the atom of his mind. Constellations crowned her. And a carousel of flares – opalescent sparks ruffled like blossoms – bobbed around her towering presence.
The wizard removed his hat, bent to one knee and bowed his head. “Majesty of Earth, I am the wizard you knew during the reign of Arthur. When the cross-bearers harried your hobs and boggarts, I unfettered them from the chapel woods at Celliwig and led them away from the fanatic monks at Bremenium. Again, at Quimper and across Caledonia, I freed your pyxies from cloister gardens, convent orchards and chapel groves. You remember.”
The voice that emerged sounded from inside the wizard and from every direction around him, and by this he knew she was afraid. She had withdrawn her spatial presence into the hyperreal, terrified the Dark Dweller might seize her. She sounded full of dark impulse, “I, Queen made of the Mother, by me whom the Mother has made, do make remembrance of [▬▬], a wizard of great diligence throughout Albion. Yet I am not deceived. You are not [▬▬] but some semblance, a child masking the Dark Dweller who has so abused us.”
“The Dark Dweller is in my thrall,” the wizard insisted with a spellcasting inflection peaceful as whispering leaves. “My perverse origin ages me backward. Young as I appear, I am the wizard of Arthur Rex.”
The fluorescent sincerity in the wizard’s spell did not lighten Queen Hob’s dismal tone, “We knew Arthur – the king touched of the wyrd and dissevered from our earthly estate to abide with the Swan Queens upon Avalon. Arthur and his cross-bearers inflicted much grief upon us.”
“He did,” the wizard acknowledged, rising to his feet.
The queen of hobs appeared before him as a naked woman of mortal stature, with earth-shaded skin. She stood upright, affronted and majestic. A crown of crimped black hair, braided with acorns and cobnuts, reached the ground in numerous plaits that swayed with her indignation. “Are you Arthur’s wizard or an imposter?”
Still as a toad, Jack faced her and let her feel the expanse of his being, let her witness his three human centuries arrayed before the throne of now.
Radiance loose and purposeless as dandelion fluff wafted in the air before her broad features: long eyes hot with intelligence, wide nose, full lips ripening an oracular smile. She had just correctly measured the man before her and saw that he posed no threat – and, in fact, was vulnerable to her displeasure. She probed him in a soft contralto, “I see your good advice not to fear the Dark Dweller holds true. But.” Her eyes, fathomless jewels faceted with darkness, narrowed. “Are you mortified of all ambition to serve us as spitefully as Arthur?”
The wizard knew better than to look too deeply into her gaze. He spoke slowly and let an imperturbable spell dye the fabric of his voice, “Arthur served the nailed god. And, as you know, I am bedeviled. The Dark Dweller moved me to serve Arthur, and I failed to restrain his hostilities toward the old gods. I dishonored the Piper and the Master of Beasts – and you. Advancing my king, I breached your trust.”
The queen stepped closer, confident now of his identity. “If you are truly [▬▬], you breach our trust even now. We are oft discomforted, our heart full oft wounded when you discard Objects of Authority to the Otherworld. Gone is the chalice, the sword, and the formidable glass mace. Camelot itself – gone. And the wraith! You unrest the blood wraith of Arthur Rex from our earthen bosom! Why it is we know not, nor do we keep wit of it.” She leaned in close. A thousand years of mist and rain swelled about her. “Why you do this, we do not know. If [▬▬] stood before me, he would answer why.”
“I failed Arthur,” the boy confessed, stepping back. She stood tall before him, flagrant in low moonlight. And he spoke swiftly, because her feminine glamour torqued him with rash desire and made the truth of his shame feel wild in him, “I failed the world. My authority proved unfit. I fathered strife and war, and now a thousand years of darkness descend upon the domains of men. To atone, I am removing the Objects I fashioned for my misaligned purpose. The blood wraith of Arthur as well, who is all by all my creation.
She raised her left hand. Lines in her pale palm outlined in blue fire the rune Isa. Ice. She pressed her palm to the wizard’s brow, and her pupils tightened to luminous threads that stitched her will to his. “You must stop.”
“I will not.” He swiped her arm aside, and her grimace jarred his entire body as he broke her willful reach. His steel-gray gaze did not waver.
Her pupils dilated wide enough for him to confront the doubled reflection of his small, pallid presence. She spoke very softly, unsheathing grim intent, “We shall sunder you.”
“Then I shall perish, and the Dark Dweller in me will be freed – and you will suffer an age of grievous and vengeful harm.”
Her long plaits whirled as she drew herself up, head held high. In a voice coiling tighter, she replied, “Earth shall bear us witness, [▬▬]. You weaken the wyrd with every Object you remove. In doing so, you cause us to perish in the very manner the cross-bearers desire!”
A panther blur, she rushed forward and seized him in a ferocious embrace, lifting him off the ground with smothering strength. Panic flared through him at her shout, “You must stop!”
He gasped, “I won’t!” and shrugged mightily but could not break her hold. Spinning silence pressed him breathless.
On the horizon, a thin crimson line divided tomorrow from yesterday and sliced through the transparency of the queen’s glowering features. The sheer force of her fury had drained the solidity of her projected form, allowing him to whisper through clenched teeth, “Darkness descends.”
Her grip relaxed, and he pressed on in frayed, shallow breaths: “I see it. Darkness descends. Darkness falls upon the world of men. This cannot be turned away. I see it. And I see the Objects …” He pushed free of her and stood hunched over, hands on his knees, head thrown back to face her angry frown. “My Objects shall be misused – to enslave, torment, and destroy peoples. That must not be. I will remove all the Objects. But, in turn …”
He paused, hung his head, and moaned inwardly: A black moment. For the sake of the many who would suffer if he failed, he must betray – and betray cruelly. He drew a deep breath and stood upright to face his black moment.
“Leave me be to remove the Objects I created,” he beseeched. “Leave me be, and I will honor you, Queen Hob. And in honoring you, I shall strengthen the wyrd.”
“How?”
He nodded, coming to a grim agreement with himself. “I have taken an apprentice. A child. I am bestowing authority upon her. When she is a woman, she shall be yours.”
Queen Hob stepped close, and space thickened like air huddling before a stormfront. “A woman with full authority? In my court?”
“Yes.”
The prospect of a sorceress under her command inspired in the queen vengeful thoughts – visions of wielding life’s secret magnitude against the cross-bearers. She smiled, an ivory gleam against the clear night. “Then, by her knowing enlumined of the wyrd, we decree your apprentice worthy attendant to Queen Hob and the Master of Beasts. These twain with her authority enjoined shall thwart the depredations of men.”
“No.” The wizard shattered the moment. “The Master of Beasts will use her for his lewd rites. I cannot permit that. Cruel men have abused her. No, Majesty.” He leveled a resolute stare at the queen, a flinty glint in the purple first hour of night, “She shall serve royalty. She shall serve you – and you alone.”
Queen Hob looked upon him with sudden animal attentiveness. “My acolyte? With full authority?”
“I personally will bring her to full authority.”
The queen’s buoyant mind streamed with thoughtful feelings neither the wizard nor the Dark Dweller could surmise. Extinctions had hacked her into existence over billions of years. Hushed whispers of star-winds buffeting higher atmospheres spoke to her. The treasured thing at the core of the Earth kept her in place as continents dove into fiery depths and new ranges lifted her toward the star-winds. What she would do with a human being of authority made the soil beneath her shine with bioluminescent fervor.
“Heed me, wizard. With her first blood, you will deliver your apprentice to us at Grimsbarrow. We shall receive and anoint her, so that, by avail of the wyrd, she may thrive and do our bidding in all things. Sooth?”
Jack swelled with relief. “I swear it.”
“It suffices us that it is so.” Queen Hob opened her arms to him, her lithe, naked form solid once more. “Come, [▬▬]. Let us feel your truth.” Her smile had no inner reality. She had stepped obliquely into the hyperreal so that her projection had emptied sufficiently to receive the wizard’s dreaming.
Jack Yonder relaxed under her gaze. The queen saw a furtive and joyless cruelty deep in his eyes. But his adolescent features met her with candor, kind and unafraid. Where fear was missing, there was space for peace and joy.
She melted into him across the space separating them. His human pattern unrolled centuries of perceptions, the broad span of days furrowed by sleep. The animal love that carried him carried him on. And she went with him.
She gathered him into her embrace, against her ample breasts, faces close, touching noses. The blackness within her eyes opened on the space between galaxies. Umber scents of loam, pungent with harmonics of rot, saturated them, and they floated into the intimacy between mineral and life that confides the secret of death.
Queen Hob faced all the faces in the wizard’s memories. They shone in her eonian mind, no more than a sunray in a raindrop. She could not bear to witness Camelot sliding into sideways time, for that loss carried off the gladness of the earth that the citadel had rested upon. She turned away from that recollection. Even a glimpse of sideways time risked plunging her, roots and all, into the void, snug as a tuber.
Instead, she looked beyond the specters and flowing scenes of the wizard’s history. She focused on the Dark Dweller inside him, culling emptiness out of silence. Time swerved. An instant swung wide as history. And the demon’s crooning ached in her with omen force that evoked heartache heavy and hard.
“Look closer,” Jack Yonder spoke aloud.
“Our wits move sadly beyond thought,” the queen mumbled in misery. The Dark Dweller had snapped the thin threads of starlight feeling Queen Hob’s way into the night, unstitching her world of belonging. She trembled.
“See not the demon, Majesty,” the soft voice of the fresh-faced old wizard reached her calmly. “Behold the light that obscures his form. Touch it.”
Indeed, a gauzy glow, nearly invisible, rendered the coiling, slithering mass ever so slightly bleary. Focusing on that sheen, the queen’s awareness slipped tranquilly into a kaleidoscopic flow.
The wizard had directed her attention into something nameless and beautiful: the atoms weaving physical reality. Moving mosaics of flimmering electrons enclosed her in the breezy radiance that was holding all physical things together.
Space pulsed with the same holy feeling she knew at dawn with Pan’s tune sweeping the sky. Greater than the goat god’s jubilant song, the light blurring the Dark Dweller rang out with hallowed vibrancy that launched her beyond appearance into awareness: This was the blessing that the wizard’s mother, Saint Optima, had blended with her blood to lock Lailoken in a human body, to bind his demonic might to the will of this unnatural youth.
What was this reverence greater than Pan? Cloud plateaus over the forest served as altars. The sun stood as an open door to a splendor none could quit. The earth entire – all that Queen Hob knew – from root-weave and slimy wrigglings to rising river mists and mountain peaks – all creation sang adoration.
“This sole power…” Queen Hob, stymied for words, paced. Tiny, dewy blossoms pierced the ground in clusters where she stepped, delicate stems in white bloom raising up in the grass. She stopped and turned sharply to the wizard, “This power encumbered with the keeping of our joy knows the life of our future being.” She drew back with the wonder of it. “This power of love gives us peace in the depths – in the rest and stillness of endless life to come. What shall we say of this?”
“Say divine love,” Jack Yonder replied. “My mother birthed me out of this immeasurable love.”
“Reason this love for us.”
“Divine love is reality’s mystery beyond myth. It is light. The one light from which all creation has come forth.”
Displaced by an order existing outside organic nature, the queen’s conjured form began to fade. “Green divinity in a leaf, we know. Blue eternity in a day sky. Frost talking to stone, divining sand dunes from mountains. The piety of these we know. What constrains the Dark Dweller, the wit of this sole power we know not.”
“Nor would you,” the wizard reassured. “Light knows no distance, no before or after. Light constrains the Dark Dweller with grace – and grace is not of the shaped world.”
“Such election eludes us,” Queen Hob grumbled and withdrew several paces, transparent to the dark boles of the forest. “The illumination of heavenly orbs marks our time upon the horizon. This is the only tangible agency of light that we know. Yet what binds the Dark Dweller lies beyond our sundering, and we shall not sunder you. Say no more of grace. Rather, stay the havoc of your Dark Dweller. And deliver to us in the fulness of time our precious acolyte versed by you in high matters.”
The queen’s transparency dimmed away in the starlit night. Briefly, she hovered in the empty air as a vibration under running clouds and a wink of the moon. Sweet breaths of pollen brightened before vanishing, leaving only her little flowers, effervescent in the darkness, scattered where she had trod.
Jack dropped to his knees. Night and its clustered stars pressed close. He had promised a hopeless child a proud path – and delivered her to the mother of hobgoblins. He pushed his face into the earth and screamed. And the earth gave back only silence.