Chapter 11: The Merlin's Confession
The world outside Johnny’s time-door wasn't the manicured suburb they expected. It was a memory.
One moment they were in the lodge's haze of sex and panic, the next they stood on the gravel drive of a large, weathered Victorian house set back among ancient oaks. The air was different—cleaner, tinged with the damp-earth smell of Lake Michigan and the perfume of lilacs past bloom. The light was the golden, forgiving light of late afternoon in early summer, not the brittle winter grey they’d left behind.
“Coordinates were for ‘home,’” Johnny muttered, brushing chip dust from his wrinkled shirt. “This is the temporal address she holds most sacred. Not where she is, but where she was. Clever.”
Godfrey trotted past him, his nose to the ground, tail waving slowly. He led them not to the front door, but around the side, to a solarium whose glass panes were fogged with condensation and the ghost of old magic.
The inside of Calista Gunderson’s living room was a collision of worlds. Sunlight streamed through tall windows, illuminating drifting motes of dust. Velvet armchairs, worn soft in their seats, were arranged in no particular order. One was embroidered with faint, shimmering sigils that hurt the eyes if stared at too long. Another was stained with a splash of dark red wine—or something very like it—that had never quite washed out.
A grand piano dominated one corner, its lid open. The sheet music on the stand was blank, but the air around the instrument hummed with a recent, discordant chord, as if someone had slammed the keys in frustration or grief moments before their arrival.
Casey stopped, her diaper bag slipping from her shoulder. “This is my grandparents’ house. She sold it after they died. I haven’t been here since I was twelve.”
Mike hefted Rick’s carrier, the baby now awake and blinking quietly at the sunbeams. “So we’re… in the past?”
“A pocket of it,” Aunt Noor said softly, her eyes not on the furniture, but on the spaces between. She moved through the room like a woman reading braille on the air. “She pulled a thread of memory from the timeline and anchored it here. A sanctuary. Very difficult. Very fragile.”
Eric knelt, letting Reggie off his leash. The mutt immediately trotted to a particular armchair—the wine-stained one—and sniffed intently, his tail giving a single, definitive wag. Eric closed his eyes, placing a hand on Reggie’s head. “She’s been sitting here. For a long time. The emotional residue is… deep. Lonely. And determined.”
Nora, ever pragmatic, began a silent circuit of the room, her synthetic eyes scanning thermal traces, spectral analyses. “No current hostiles. The pocket is stable but under gradual entropy. We have approximately forty-seven minutes before it destabilizes.”
“Then where is she?” Mike asked.
A door at the far end of the room, half-hidden by a towering bookshelf groaning with leather-bound tomes, creaked open.
Calista Gunderson stepped through. She wasn’t in a power suit. She wore faded jeans and a simple white linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Her silver-streaked hair was down, flowing over her shoulders, longer than Casey had ever seen it. She held a steaming mug in one hand. Her sharp grey eyes took them in, not with surprise, but with a weary, profound acceptance.
“You found the thread,” she said. Her voice was the same, but the Merlin’s camouflage was utterly absent. This was Aunt Calista, utterly. “I wondered if someone would. I didn’t expect it to be you two. And a baby.” A genuine, soft smile touched her lips as she looked at Rick.
Casey took a step forward. Her throat was tight. “Are you…?”
“The Merlin?” Calista finished. She took a slow sip from her mug. “Yes.” The word was simple, heavy as a tombstone. She moved to the piano, trailing her fingers along the edge of the lid. “I came here to remember. Before I go back. It’s easy to forget, wearing that face. The Glamour doesn’t just hide you from others. It starts to hide you from yourself.”
She looked at Casey, her gaze piercing. “You asked me once, at your wedding, why I never married. Do you remember?”
Casey nodded mutely.
“I was in love,” Calista said, her eyes drifting to the sun-drenched window. “His name was Thomas. He was a pianist. He had magic in his fingers, but not of any Order. It was just… music. We were going to travel. He wanted to open a studio. I was going to leave the Wands.” A faint, heartbreaking smile. “Bedivere was my mentor then. He saw my ambition, my power. He said Thomas was a distraction. A vulnerability the Order’s enemies could exploit. He gave me an ultimatum: the Order, or a normal life.”
The silence in the memory-room was absolute, absorbing her words.
“I chose the Order,” Calista whispered. “Thomas left the city. I heard he died years later, in a car accident. Some part of me has always wondered if it was truly an accident. Bedivere believed love was a strategic liability. He still does.”
Mike set down the carrier. Rick cooed, breaking the tension. Calista’s gaze softened as she looked at the baby, then at the two of them.
“You have what I gave up,” she said, her voice thick. “This messy, ordinary, magnificent love. It’s not a liability. It’s the source. I see that now. I think I began to see it the day you two got married. And I knew, when Rick was born, that I would use every ounce of my power to ensure the world he inherits still has a place for that.”
She walked over to Casey, placing her hands on her niece’s shoulders. “You asked me if I was the Merlin. The title is a weapon, a mask. But the woman underneath… she’s just your Aunt Calista, who loves you very much, and who is so very, very tired of fighting her own people.”
It was a confession of unimaginable weight. The elegant, untouchable aunt was gone, replaced by a profoundly weary woman nursing an old wound in a sunlit room from her past.
The moment was shattered by the sound of tearing fabric.
Nora re-entered from a side hallway. She was completely naked, her perfect redheaded form glistening with a fine sheen of non-human sweat. Slung over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry was a man in a charcoal grey suit, unconscious, his sunglasses cracked. She dumped him unceremoniously onto a Persian rug.
“Found him patrolling the perimeter of the memory-pocket,” Nora announced, her Irish lilt unaffected by her nudity or the exertion. “He was using a resonance scanner. I administered a targeted pressure to his carotid sinus. He’ll be out for twelve minutes.”
She turned her cool, analytical eyes to Calista. “His scan completed its transmission before I could disable it. Bedivere knows the location of this anchor-point. Extrapolating from his known mobilization speed and accounting for temporal dilation within this pocket…” She paused, a human-like calculation flickering behind her eyes. “He will be here in five minutes.”
All the softness bled from Calista Gunderson’s face. It didn’t harden into something cold, but into something focused, like steel being tempered. The weariness was still there, but it was now the weariness of a general pulling on a familiar, hated armor.
“Five minutes,” she echoed. She looked at the unconscious Wand at her feet, then at her family.
Mike and Casey shared a glance. It was a full, silent conversation, borne of years of being kidnapped, enchanted, and thrown into chaos. A shrug, a slight eye-roll, a resigned, fond exasperation. They were the normal ones, the bait, the distraction. Their role was clear.
Casey turned to Mike. “We’re gonna get captured again, aren’t we?”
“Probably,” Mike said, his goofy grin appearing, masking the adrenaline. “Might as well make the last five minutes of freedom count.”
He reached for her, his hands finding the hem of her sweater. There was no frenzy, no magical compulsion. This was them. Deliberate, familiar, claiming their own center in the storm. He pulled the sweater up and over her head, revealing her plain, practical bra. He unhooked it with a practiced flick, letting her small, perfect breasts spill free. He bent his head, taking one nipple into his mouth, sucking deep and slow.
Casey gasped, her fingers tangling in his shaggy hair. “Yeah, that… that works.”
Aunt Noor quietly turned her back, her attention on stabilizing the edges of the memory-pocket. Eric called Reggie to him, focusing on the emotional weather of the room, preparing to project calm. Johnny leaned against the piano, watching the door, occasionally glancing at a pocket watch that didn't tell time.
But Nora watched, her head tilted, data recording. Calista watched too, not with voyeuristic interest, but with a fierce, aching pride.
Mike dropped to his knees. He yanked Casey’s jeans and panties down in one rough pull. He didn’t bother with teasing. He buried his face between her legs, his tongue finding her clit with unerring accuracy. He ate her out like a man starved, with deep, broad strokes and concentrated suction.
“Fuck, Mike, yes!” Casey cried out, her head falling back. She braced her hands on his shoulders, her body already bowing towards his mouth. He slid two fingers inside her, curling them, finding that spongy spot inside her that made her knees buckle. He fucked her with his fingers in time with his tongue, the wet, filthy sounds echoing in the sunlit room.
“Taste so good,” he groaned against her, his words muffled by her flesh. “Always so fucking good for me.”
He worked her with a single-minded intensity, driving her rapidly towards the edge. This wasn’t about prolonged pleasure; it was about affirmation, a reclaiming of their own simple, physical truth against the coming darkness.
Casey came with a sharp, broken cry, her body convulsing around his fingers. Mike held her through it, his mouth still working, drinking her down.
As her tremors subsided, he stood, his own jeans already open, his cock jutting out, thick and flushed. He turned her around, bending her over the back of the wine-stained velvet armchair. She gripped the fabric, pushing her ass back towards him in silent, urgent invitation.
He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and guided his tip to her dripping entrance. With one solid, possessive thrust, he filled her completely.
Both of them moaned, a harmonized sound of perfect fit.
He didn’t start slow. He fucked her. Hard. Each drive of his hips slapped their flesh together, the chair skidding slightly on the polished wood floor with every impact. His hands gripped her hips, holding her in place, his thumbs digging into the dimples at the base of her spine.
“My wife,” he grunted, the words punched out of him with each thrust. “My perfect, fucking brilliant wife.”
Casey pushed back against him, meeting every plunge. “Yours! God, Mike, don’t stop, give it to me, give me all of it!”
It was raw, and loud, and profoundly intimate. A visceral declaration of us in the face of the dissolving world. Mike’s pace became punishing, a frantic race. He knew their time was measured in seconds now. One hand left her hip, tangling in her dark hair, pulling her head back. He leaned over her, his mouth at her ear.
“Come with me,” he demanded, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Now, Case. Come on my cock.”
The command, the feel of him pounding into her deepest parts, the sheer adrenaline of the moment tipped her over. She shattered again, her inner muscles clamping around him in rhythmic, milking pulses. Her cry was long and guttural, utterly spent.
The sensation was too much. Mike drove into her one last, deep time, burying himself to the hilt as his own orgasm ripped through him. He came with a choked shout, pumping his release into her in hot, claiming pulses, his body shuddering against hers.
They collapsed together over the back of the chair, panting, still joined, sweat-slicked and trembling.
Calista’s eyes were glistening. She had seen empires rise and fall, negotiated with beings from other dimensions, wielded power that could reshape cities. But this—this simple, powerful, filthy love—was the magic she had almost forgotten.
She stepped forward as they slowly, reluctantly, untangled. She pulled Casey into a fierce, tight embrace, ignoring the sweat, the scent of sex. She kissed her niece’s forehead.
“Thank you,” Calista whispered, her voice choked. “For giving me a moment to remember why I fight.”
She released Casey and turned to face the room. Her spine straightened. The subtle shift was imperceptible at first, then undeniable. A shimmer passed over her, not a flamboyant transformation, but a settling. The warmth didn’t leave her eyes, but it was joined by an ancient, unyielding resolve. The air around her began to distort, a heat-haze effect that made her features difficult to hold in focus.
The Merlin had returned.
“Nora, Eric, secure the rear. John, I need you to hold this pocket stable for ninety more seconds. Noor, with me.”
“What about us?” Mike asked, pulling his jeans up, his arm around a still-breathing-heavily Casey.
The Merlin looked at them, a ghost of Aunt Calista’s smile touching her now-shimmering lips. “You,” she said, her voice resonating with a quiet, multilayered power, “will do what you do best. Be exactly who you are. It’s the most disruptive force in any universe.”
Outside the sunlit windows of the memory-pocket, the golden summer light began to flicker. A stain of wrongness spread across the sky, like ink in water. The air pressure dropped. The first sound of tearing reality was not a roar, but a sigh—the sound a world makes just before it breaks.
Bedivere was here.
The front door of the old Victorian house dissolved into splinters of light and shadow.
Reality tore like wet paper. The sunlit memory-pocket shuddered, the golden light bleeding into the sterile, buzzing glare of magical floodlights. Shapes boiled through the rupture—figures in charcoal grey suits, moving with synchronized, lethal purpose. They streamed into the living room, not through the doorway, but through the wound in the world itself.
Leading them was Morgane.
Her silver hair was a molten river down her back, her elegant face contorted with a fury that was personal, intimate. Her eyes, like chips of frozen mercury, scanned the room and locked onto Johnny O’Connor, who was leaning against the piano with deceptive casualness. She remembered the Greyhold’s obsidian walls, the humiliating, irresistible wave of want Jan had slapped into her mind, reducing her to a panting, desperate thing. Seeing the family resemblance in Johnny’s lazy posture was a trigger.
“The time-twister,” she hissed, her voice cutting through the chaotic noise of arriving forces. Her hand came up, not with a wand, but with a polished brass device that whirred to life, its front lens crackling with contained temporal shear. “You don’t get to sit this one out.”
Johnny’s blue eyes widened fractionally. “Oh, that’s not good.” He dropped his chip bag and flicked his wrist. The air around him smeared, seconds unraveling like thread. Morgane’s blast hit the temporal smear and detonated in a silent concussion of aged and newborn air, shattering the piano’s lid into petrified wood-dust and fresh splinters.
The fight erupted everywhere at once.
Aunt Noor didn’t chant. She moved. Her hands wove patterns in the air that were less spellcraft and more akin to pulling fundamental strings. A suit of armor lunged for her, and she simply plucked the cohesion from the molecules in his path. He stumbled, not tripping, but sinking into the floorboards as if they’d turned to deep water, up to his knees in solid oak.
Eric and Reggie fought as one. The Crimson Heart mage stood his ground, palms out, projecting waves of pure pacifying intent—a profound, animal calm. It washed over the first rank of attackers, slowing their movements, blurring their hostile intent. Their punches lost vigor; their spells fizzled in confusion. Reggie was a blur of fur and teeth, a non-lethal tornado. He didn’t bite to maim, but to disarm, his jaws snapping around wrists, pulling agents off balance, his growl a constant, unsettling counterpoint to the silent battle of wills.
But there were too many. A dozen. Then twenty. The air filled with the snap-crackle of Golden Wand tech: concussive blasts from polished cylinders, nets of shimmering force, darts that sought magical signatures.
The Merlin stood in the center of it all, a still point. Her form shimmered, a heat-haze mirage. When an initiate lunged, she didn’t strike. She dissolved their weapon into a handful of feathers. When another tried to bind her with bands of coherent light, she stepped through them as if they were mist, and with a touch to his forehead, replaced his aggression with a momentary, overwhelming sense of profound paperwork fatigue. He sat down heavily, staring at his hands in administrative dismay.
She was pulling every punch, diverting every lethal intent. Her movements were efficient, weary, sad. These were her people. Her Wands. Young men and women she’d sworn to protect, now trying to cage her because Bedivere had sold them a lie wrapped in patriotic urgency.
“Stand down!” The Merlin’s voice reverberated, layered with command and desperate plea. “He’s using you! The experiments are abominations!”
Her words were drowned by a scream of temporal rage. Morgane had closed with Johnny. He was faster, flickering in and out of micro-seconds, but her device was creating zones of erratic time-dilation around her. Johnny misstepped, his foot aging a century in a second and crumbling to dust. He cried out, hopping back, his temporal aura flaring to regenerate the limb, but the distraction cost him. A net of cronon-energy, glowing like captured daylight, shot from Morgane’s other hand and enveloped him. It contracted, pinning his arms, the chronal fibers burning where they touched.
“Got you,” Morgane purred, raising her blaster for a point-blank shot that would scatter his consciousness across a decade.
A root, thick as a leg and smelling of fresh-turned earth, erupted from the floorboards beneath her. It wasn’t Annie’s work. It was the memory of the land itself, summoned by Aunt Noor’s fundamental pull. It wrapped around Morgane’s waist and yanked her off her feet, slamming her into the bookshelf. Tomes of forbidden lore rained down on her.
But the tide was turning. Eric was bleeding from a gash on his temple, his pacifying waves growing thin. Reggie was limping. Aunt Noor’s breath came in ragged gasps, the effort of holding the pocket stable while fighting draining her. The Merlin, constrained by her mercy, was being slowly, methodically encircled. Grey suits pressed in from all sides.
The main rupture in reality widened. And Bedivere stepped through.
He wore no armor, carried no obvious weapon. His grey suit was impeccable, his hair perfect. He surveyed the scene—the pinned time-mage, the weary fundamentalist, the bleeding animal speaker, the shimmering, outnumbered Merlin. His expression was one of mild, academic satisfaction.
“A commendable last stand,” he said, his voice filling the strained silence. He didn’t even look at the Merlin, his gaze passing over her shimmering form as just another obstacle. His eyes found Mike and Casey, who had positioned themselves in front of Rick’s carrier. “And the… civilians. How quaint.”
He took a few steps forward, the fight parting around him. He focused on the shimmering figure. “Merlin. Or whoever you are behind that glamour. You’ve led a tedious chase. Relinquish the core authority protocols. Submit to study. My methods have advanced since the Greyhold. I can make the extraction of your knowledge nearly painless.”
He raised a hand, a small, crystalline scalpel glowing in his palm. “The future of our Order demands we understand the magic of others. Your sacrifice will forge a weapon that will make the Consortium obsolete. See reason.”
The Merlin said nothing. Her shimmering form tightened, coiling for a final, potentially catastrophic release of power she did not want to use.
Then the chandelier fell.
It didn’t just drop. It was placed. It fell in a perfect, tinkling crash of crystal and brass, directly onto the densest cluster of Bedivere’s flanking force. No one was underneath the impact point. It was a diversion, pure and simple, creating a smokescreen of dust and startled shouts.
From the kitchen hallway, Cassie walked in, brushing plaster dust from her shoulders. “Path says ‘hi’.”
Behind her, Rainbor filled the doorway, his green skin taut over knotted muscle, a double-bladed axe held loosely in hands that could bend steel. Gregor scampered between his legs, a manic grin on his goblin face, clutching what looked like a handful of jangling, overcharged alarm clocks. Lady Eleanor floated serenely above them, adjusting her spectral bodice.
“The dental plan is quite good,” Gregor squeaked, and hurled the clocks into the air.
They didn’t explode. They rang. A cacophony of school bells, fire alarms, and microwave beeps erupted at brain-shredding volume. The disorientation was absolute and non-lethal. Suited agents clutched their ears, stumbling.
Rainbor moved. He didn’t roar. He was a silent avalanche of green. The flat of his axe blade sent two agents crashing through what remained of the bookshelf. A backhand fist dropped another. He was careful, precise in his overwhelming strength, neutralizing without splintering bone.
The Merlin seized the moment. With a gesture that was more tear than command, the floor around her and her besieged group erupted in a forest of those same, massive roots, creating a thick, living barricade between them and the bulk of Bedivere’s forces. It wasn’t an attack. It was a retreat.
“Time to go,” the Merlin said, her voice strained. She looked at Johnny, who was wresting the last chrono-fiber from his arm. “Now, John.”
Johnny, pale but focused, nodded. He grabbed Mike and Casey’s hands. Aunt Noor placed a hand on Eric’s shoulder. The Merlin’s shimmering hand touched Cassie’s arm. The roots trembled under magical assault from the other side.
A hole in reality, not a tear but a neat, round door, irised open behind them. Through it, they could see the familiar, chaotic comfort of the Lodge’s main hall.
“Everybody out!” Johnny yelled.
As they stumbled back through, the last thing Mike saw before the door snapped shut was Bedivere, calmly brushing crystal dust from his sleeve, his eyes cold and calculating, staring not at the retreating Merlin, but directly at him and Casey. And the carrier between them.
Back in the Lodge, the air still tasted of sex and ozone.
Jan and Bethany stood over a table where Bethany’s vintage phone projected a holographic map of Lake Forest, glowing dots marking the converging forces. The main group tumbled out of Johnny’s new door, collapsing onto couches and the floor, gasping. The Merlin’s glamour dropped completely, revealing a sweat-drenched, pallid Calista leaning heavily on the piano.
“Report,” Bethany said, her voice clipped, but her eyes took in the blood, the dust, the shock.
“He’s there. Army with him. Morgane’s got a real hard-on for our side,” Johnny rasped, checking his regenerated foot.
“He didn’t recognize me,” Calista breathed. “But he saw them.” Her eyes went to Mike, Casey, and Rick. “He understands connections now. He’ll target anchors.”
Jan’s face, usually alight with mischief, was a grim mask. She looked at the map, at the exhausted defenders, then at Bethany. Their old rivalry meant nothing now. This was pure, grim calculus.
“Right,” Jan said, cracking her knuckles. “He wants a war for the soul of the Wands? We’ll give him a distraction he can’t ignore.” She pointed at the hologram. “We take the fight right to his doorstep. A surgical strike. Me, you, Katie, Vivian, and Dale. Stacy, Aisling, and Brigid for backup and tactical havoc.”
Bethany nodded, zooming the map. “We hit fast, we hit loud. The goal isn’t to defeat his army. It’s to draw his focus, create an opening for the Merlin to reassert command authority among the neutral Wands.”
“And us?” Fatima asked, stepping forward, her arms crossed. Hank stood behind her, looking determined but out of his depth.
“You, Aaron, Annie, and Percival hold the Lodge,” Jan said. “This is the only neutral ground left. If this goes sideways, it’s the fallback position. The last sanctuary. You shore up every ward, every defense. You make this place unbreachable.”
Percival, his suit immaculate despite the earlier orgy, gave a solemn nod. “It will be done. The Lodge’s truce-wards are formidable, but they can be reinforced.”
Jan looked around at her friends—the tired, the scared, the determined. She saw Vivian, still pale but steady, Dale’s arm around her. She saw Stacy, checking the clip on her 9mm with deadly focus. She saw Brigid, Will, and Sarah, holding hands, a triad ready to channel power.
“We go in five,” Jan said, her voice low and fierce. “We draw his eye. We make him look at us.” She turned to Calista. “While he’s looking, you remind the rest of your Order who their real Merlin is.”
Calista met her gaze, the Aunt fading once more into the leader. She gave a single, firm nod.
In the corner, Godfrey let out a soft woof, his tail thumping once against the floor. It was time.