The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) by Kit Maples

Arthur!”
    “There’s nothing there,” says Bedivere, “because there’s no more world.  The world is done.”
    Bedivere shouts to Jesu and to Gwynn to take his soul and drops heavily into the black water, dying in the lake in which he buried Caliburn and over which Arthur traveled to his tomb.
    “By St. Mary,” I say to Lucan, “don’t you leave me, too.  Don’t abandon Britain!”
    Lucan says to the blank air from which he heard my cry, “Spirit of Scorn, I’ll seek you in the next dead days, seek you to torment you as you torment me now.”
    He staggers and falls to hands and knees.  I see the blood still coming out of his neck wound.  Cured of death by Bedivere, delivered once more into the world as the last of the Round Table, Lucan is still a mortal man chopped and bruised by battle, weary to be the last of his kind left alive, stunned to be the man on whom falls the whole burden of regaining Camelot for Britain.
    I put out my arms to comfort him and hear from out of the atomos of water bumping each to the next across all the distance from Avalon, “You’ve failed, Merlin, and must live again!”
    I see in the water the reflection of the White Druid striding on the lake, black streaks of tears diminishing the silver gleam of his face and forked beard.
    The Druid says to me, “Why have you stopped time in this ghastly place?  You must live again.  Find Arthur.  Teach him to be a holy king.  Grant men his justice.”
    I hear come out of myself another voice that is not mine but a part of me, the male voice of the merlin who preceded me in this quest, the merlin of the last cycle, a voice terrifying to find living inside me:  “If I must try one more time, give me to remember all that’s gone before.”
    “I can’t give you remembrance,” says the Druid, “but in Arthur’s youth I’ll make you wise.”
    “How will you make me wise?” I cry in my own voice.
    “I’ll make you old.  Start time, Lady Merlin.  Live again.  Awaken!”
    The Druid’s silver face flashes out and he’s gone from the night.
    Black night, black lake, black war-field.
    All around me is a uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good.
    I stagger away from the water and the special emptiness that marks the absence of the eye-piercing vision of the White Druid.  I stumble across the dead, slapping away the ravens sniping at my hissing, snaky beard.  I weep in bitterness and rage.
    Am I to be Merlin?  Must it fall to me to dig out of his dreaming hollow hill the purest king since Adam and Holy Jesu?  Or will failure blast me into the hollow spaces between the stars to drift and grieve forever?
    But I cry out into the world, “I accept!”
    There can be no other merlin to save the world but me, with my power to fashion the world sword for Arthur.
    I stumble along through the black-blood night and the last arrowfall, following Urien’s distant beacon of gleaming white.  I grip the hilt to lift the sword from the Earth into which I’d driven it.  Urien sword will not come.
    “You’re the sword I made,” I say.  “You’ll come at my command.”
    But Urien refuses to draw.
    I hear it whisper a single alien word, speaking from its soul to mine.
    “What language is that?  What’s that word?” I say, astonished to have heard the word like a bite of lightning in my soul.
    I realize with dreamy fright that the glowing sword I’d stabbed into the battle mire is no longer Urien.  It has become another sword.  The world sword.
    Excalibur! the sword says to me.
    Here, here is the sword of justice whose spirit existed with the Hero Jesu before the making of all other things.
    I stand stunned to hear the name.  But as hungry to hear it again as a desperate lover yearns to hear a sweetheart’s whispered name over and over.
    My hand reaching for the sword handle cannot close around the hilt.
    I know in my dream this sword will not come alive and draw from the mud until I give it a