/Thousands of years after the fall of Camelot, archaeologists discover a handful of impossibly ancient
human remains beneath an old oak tree in Wales.
When the discovery reaches the news, Merlin is forced to confront a past he has spent millennia trying to escape.
As the truth threatens to emerge from the earth, he returns to the place where he left her, carrying the memories of a woman he once knew, once feared, and can never truly forget.
Some legends are more than stories. And some ghosts never leave us.../
The first bone was discovered on a Tuesday morning.
It was a small thing, almost insignificant, protruding from the earth beneath the roots of an ancient oak tree in the forests of Wales.
The archaeologist who found it initially assumed it belonged to an animal.
The soil was old, the tree older still, and the forest had swallowed countless lives over the centuries.
But when the rest of the excavation team arrived, they found another bone,and another...
By the end of the afternoon, they had uncovered part of a human skeleton.
It lay in a shallow depression in the earth, surrounded by stones and the twisted roots of the oak.
The remains were astonishingly ancient, their precise age difficult to establish at first.
Some bones had crumbled almost entirely, while others had survived beneath the soil, protected by a strange combination of mineral deposits and the roots that had grown around them.
There was no coffin.
No burial chamber.
No grave goods...
Only bones.
-"She wasn't buried here." One of the researches said,staring at the bones.
His colleague looked up.- "What makes you say that?"
-"Look at the position of the bones. She fell here or was left here. There's no evidence anyone ever tried to bury her."
He crouched beside the skeleton.
-"Whatever happened to this woman, it happened suddenly."
He didn't notice the raven watching from the oak above him,nor did he notice that, when he spoke the word woman, the bird abruptly flew away..
───
The discovery made the news three weeks later.
The remains were provisionally dated to the early medieval period, although the laboratory results were so unusual that the university requested further testing.
The bones appeared to be those of an adult woman, but their condition was inconsistent with the age of the surrounding soil.
There were signs of severe trauma.
The woman had suffered a fatal injury to her chest.
Her skeleton was incomplete.
Several small bones were missing, and the remains of her hands had been scattered by roots and the slow movement of the earth.
Yet the position of the body suggested something deeply unsettling:She hadn't died peacefully.
She had fallen backwards, her body twisted, as though she had been struck by someone standing directly in front of her and she had never moved again.
A young researcher named Eleanor Price was assigned to examine the archaeological records associated with the site.
She had always been fascinated by Arthurian legends, particularly the stories of Camelot, though she regarded them as a mixture of folklore, political myth and fragments of forgotten history.
When she found the first reference to the name Morgana, she laughed.
It appeared in a handwritten transcription of an old Welsh account, discovered in the archives of a monastery.
The passage was incomplete, the ink faded:
"...and the sorceress fell beneath the ancient tree, her hatred ended by the hand of the last of the court's servants..."
Eleanor read it twice,then she searched the university database.
Morgana.
Morgana Pendragon. The enchantress. The witch. Arthur's sister.
A woman who, according to the legends, had lived in an age when dragons flew over Britain and magic was real.
A woman who had supposedly died centuries before the earliest reliable records of her existence.
Eleanor shook her head and returned to her work.
It was a coincidence,It had to be.
But that evening, as she was preparing to leave the laboratory, she noticed something strange in the preliminary analysis of the skeleton.
A small fragment of bone from the woman's hand showed evidence of an old injury, healed long before her death and the estimated age of the remains was not merely unusual.
It was impossible.
The bones appeared to be several thousand years old...
───
Merlin saw the news on a television mounted above the counter of a café.
He hadn't intended to watch it.
He had been standing by the window, staring at the rain sliding down the glass, when a familiar word caught his attention.
"Morgana."
The coffee cup slipped from his fingers,It struck the floor and shattered.
Several people turned to look at him but Merlin barely noticed.
On the television, a reporter stood in a green Welsh woodland.
Behind her, a small white tent covered the excavation site.
-"Archaeologists working in this remote forest have uncovered human remains believed to date back thousands of years. Researchers are particularly interested in the circumstances surrounding the woman's death, as the position of the skeleton suggests she may have died violently. Some have begun drawing comparisons with local legends concerning the mythical sorceress Morgana—"
Merlin stopped breathing.
For one terrible moment, the café disappeared.
He could smell damp leaves and cold earth,he could hear the wind moving through the branches.
He could see a woman standing before him, her dark hair blowing across her face, her eyes burning with hatred and something that had once, long ago, resembled sorrow.
He remembered the sword,he remembered her voice,he remembered the awful instant when he had driven the blade into her...Most of all, he remembered the silence that followed.
Morgana had fallen snd Merlin had watched her die.
He had left her beneath the tree because there had been no time to do anything else,Arthur was dying and the battle was over, Camelot was lost to the past, and the world had already begun to move beyond the age they had known.
He had told himself that the earth would take her,that time would hide what he had done,that one day, even he would forget the precise place where she had fallen...But he'd never forgotten.
Not once.
The café owner approached him with a cloth.
-"Are you all right, mate?"
Merlin looked down at the shattered cup.
-"Yes," he whispered.
Then he looked back at the television.
-"No."
He arrived in Wales before sunrise.
The journey took several hours.
He could have travelled faster, of course, but he had long ago learned that there was little point in rushing towards something you were afraid to see.
He left the road and followed a narrow path into the forest.
The trees were taller now. The landscape had changed.
A stream that had once run clear beside the hill had shifted course, and the old stones he remembered were buried beneath moss and soil.
But the oak remained.
Merlin stopped.
For thousands of years, he had imagined this moment.
He had imagined finding nothing, finding only empty earth, finding a tree that had fallen and rotted away until even its roots had disappeared.
He had never truly believed that she might still be there.
He approached the excavation site.
The archaeologists had covered the remains with a protective sheet, and a temporary fence surrounded the depression in the earth.
Beyond it, the ancient oak spread its branches across the morning sky.
Merlin stood outside the fence for a long time.
Then he closed his eyes.
He remembered the forest as it had been.
The smell of crushed grass.
Arthur's fading life...
A sound came from behind him.
-"Can I help you?"
A young woman in a thick coat approached, carrying a clipboard.
Merlin recognised her from the television report.
Eleanor Price.
She looked him over with mild suspicion.
-"The site's closed to the public."
-"I know."
-"Then you shouldn't be here."
Merlin glanced at the skeleton beneath the protective covering.
-"Is that really her?"
Eleanor frowned.
-"Who?"
-"Morgana."
For several seconds, the young archaeologist said nothing.
Then she gave a short, uncomfortable laugh.
-"That's a legend. There's no evidence this woman was Morgana."
Merlin looked at her.
-"I know."
Something in his expression made her stop smiling.
-"You knew her?"
He lowered his eyes.
-"Yes."
Eleanor stared at him, searching his face for some indication that he was joking.
He looked so old,but not that old to have known anyone who might have lived in the age of Camelot!
His features were unremarkable, his clothes unkept and ordinary, his hair and beard long and white... And in his wrinkled eyes there was ancient wisdom.
Something that made Eleanor feel as though she were standing beside a grave that had been waiting for its visitor.
-"What was she like?" she asked quietly.
Merlin looked towards the oak.
-"Powerful." he said.
He swallowed.
-"Brilliant,stubborn...frightening when she wanted to be."
A sad smile touched his face.
-"And once, she was kind."
Eleanor glanced at the skeleton.
-"What happened to her?"
Merlin didn't answer immediately.
-"She lost herself and then spent so long trying to destroy the people she blamed that she forgot what she'd once wanted to protect..."
He looked at Eleanor again.
-"By the time I killed her, she couldn't imagine a future in which she wasn't at war."
The words seemed to hang between them.
Eleanor lowered her clipboard.
-"You killed her?"
Merlin closed his eyes.
-"Yes."
Eleanor should have called the police.
She should have demanded identification, asked for an explanation, or laughed at the impossible confession of a stranger who claimed to have killed a woman from Arthurian legend.
Instead, she found herself asking the question that had been troubling her since the excavation began.
-"Why wasn't she buried?"
Merlin looked down at his hands.
-"Because I was afraid."
-"Of what?"
-"Of staying."
He walked slowly towards the oak, stopping where the roots rose from the earth like the fingers of an enormous hand.
-"I had spent years believing that if I killed her, everything would finally be over.
The fighting,the deaths,the things she'd done and the things I'd done to stop her."
He took a trembling breath.
-"But when she fell, I realised that killing her hadn't undone -anything, It hadn't brought back the people she'd murdered,It hadn't saved the people I'd failed...And it hadn't made me feel any less responsible."
Eleanor said nothing.
He stared at the earth.
The wind stirred the oak's branches.
For the first time, Eleanor understood that Merlin was not speaking like someone recounting a legend.
He was speaking like someone who had spent thousands of years carrying a body that no longer existed in his arms.
-"Do you hate her?" Eleanor asked.
Merlin looked at her sharply.
The question seemed to hurt him more than anything else she had said.
-"I did."
-"And now?"
He looked towards the covered skeleton.
-"I don't know how to hate someone who has been dead longer than every kingdom I have ever known."
He paused.
-"But I remember loving the person she was before all of this."
Eleanor felt a chill.
-"Before what?"
-"Before she became...Morgana."
He turned away, unable to look at the excavation any longer.
-"I should go."
-"Wait."
Merlin stopped.
-"If you really knew her," Eleanor said, "then perhaps you should be here when we finish examining the remains.
You might know something about her that history doesn't."
He looked at her for a long time.
Then he nodded.
-"Perhaps."
That evening, the excavation team began the careful process of preparing the bones for further study.
The discovery would eventually attract historians, scientists and people fascinated by the possibility that the Arthurian legends contained fragments of real events.
They would debate the age of the skeleton,they would publish papers about the woman's injuries and the strange circumstances of her death.
Some would insist that the remains belonged to an unknown medieval woman.
Others would suggest that the legend of Morgana had grown from the memory of a real person.
And a few would dare to wonder whether the impossible age of the bones suggested something far stranger.
None of them would know the truth.
Only Merlin would know that the woman whose bones lay beneath the oak had once walked through the halls of Camelot, had loved and hated, had laughed and wept, and had been so desperately unhappy that she had mistaken vengeance for salvation.
Only Merlin would remember her voice.
And only Merlin would remember the moment it fell silent.
Several days later, Merlin returned to the forest alone.
The excavation site was quiet,the skeleton had been removed for analysis, leaving a shallow hollow in the earth where her body had rested for thousands of years.
He stood beside the oak as the sun descended behind the hills.
For a long time, he said nothing,then he knelt.
-"I don't know if you can hear me," he whispered.
-"I don't know if there's anything left of you beyond those bones nor If you could finally have found peace..."
His fingers pressed into the damp soil.
-"But I thought you should know that someone remembered."
The wind moved through the branches.
-"I'll always blame myself for what you became..."
He lowered his head.
-"I'm sorry, Morgana."
For thousands of years, he had imagined that saying those words might bring him some measure of peace.
It did not.
Until the darkness gathered around the tree and the stars appeared above the forest.
Eventually, Merlin rose to his feet,he was still alone.
He would always be alone in a way that no ordinary human could understand.
The world had moved forward without Arthur, without Gwen, without Gaius, without the knights, without magic...
He turned towards the path.
Then he stopped.
A raven had settled on one of the oak's lower branches.
It watched him with dark, unblinking eyes.
Merlin stared at it.
For one impossible second, he thought he saw a familiar expression in its gaze: proud, cold, faintly amused.
He almost smiled.
-"Still watching me, are you?"
The raven tilted its head,and then it spread its wings and vanished into the night.
Merlin stood beneath the oak for another moment.
And somewhere, deep within him, the boy who had once served Camelot allowed himself to believe that perhaps the story wasn't entirely over.
He walked back towards the road.
Behind him, the ancient tree stood silent over the place where Morgana had fallen.
The earth had kept her secrets for thousands of years...