Merlin the Mad // Madman Emrys (![]() ![]() @ 2011-02-15 23:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | merlin |
Who: Merlin (myrddin) with appearances by Lydia, Mimir and Puck with references to The Lady, Arthur, Galahad.
What: In which Merlin is that very sane sort of mad, Galahad's armor finally gets delivered and we indulge in pointless meandering because we have a fever and shall therefore write what we feel compelled to write
When: Around now-ish
Where: The House, NYC, the woods, wherever Galahad is currently.
There are Merlins the world over, of course, mad prophet magic men bound by the limits of their countries and boundless all at once, lightning strikes of lunacy tied together by being born of the same storm, splinter-shadows cast by the same cohesive incomprehensible whole, fragments of the same broken bowl of a man all wandering along the various crossroads the world has to offer, all with their fingerprints spelling out secrets in unwritten languages while pressed against their walking sticks of native wood.
No hive mind, these men, for they are most of the time separate-though-the-same, each working in unison with the others while on his own. But there are instances of overlap, areas where one will melt seamlessly into the other like rain to a river to the sea. This is how Mimir's head came to Madam Reese's New Hampshire home and why Merlin mailed a single raven feather to Japan with no return address months ago. Like musculature when they aren't like trees, part of a forest while distinctly themselves: each part of a web, each exerting its own effort to move something greater than itself.
This is the why and the how of the armor arriving. This is the manifestation of something greater than any one half-man, in the simple action of a woman with short red hair and no smile for the courier signing for a box and unpacking the talismans of days long gone to dust with hands briskly reverent, efficient in their movements as water finding the path of least resistance down a hill. She is ice and snow melting about the shoulders and joints this time of year, fluid but with something shatter-heavy about her, and she hums lightly as she works. When counterpoint humming joins her from the stairs she is not surprised. She did not hear the door to the work room open, but she is not surprised. Perhaps she has gone beyond being startled entirely, this riptide made flesh living in the house of the pagan heartbeat of the wilderness made something like a man. He has another box with him, and together they move the armor to the room where the fireplace burns merrily. There are words to be said at such a time, gestures to be made, runes to be inscribed invisibly that are blessing and benediction and neither at all simply because they are obligatory. This is ritual, how it is to be and how it must be, and there is something to the fact that as he walks this path without motion there is a slender whipcord woman with an unamused mouth to watch, to work alongside him. A multiplicity of multiples have worked for this moment, this simple nothingness that is everything, that ends with a wordless repacking and the summoning of the golem to play delivery man.
Though they number many, these myths made flesh, and though they shift and flex as the same tree will in different climates, their loyalties are a singular and precise common thread to their warp-threaded tapestry. To the world, and the greening truths and shadow times and the liminal, sideways nature that lies under the pseudo-cohesion of it all. To the hawk and the wolf and the pulse of earth, of mother-of-all as she throbs beneath the weight of cities and fools. To the woman in the lake, in all the lakes, to the divine femininity that he (all of him, all the hes) has long since surrendered tender parts of his being to, those very pieces that mark him as, irrevocably, as much man as myth (she, inhuman and sometimes inhumane, the very definition of exquisite transcendental beauty, she owns him as a woman owns a man, as the moon owns a wolf, as falcon is owned by the arm that extends for it time and time again without fear for its claws). To their King, their rock, the very reason the heartbeat of eternity is worth perpetuating, the soul of man made more than mere. Ever Merlin's failure and triumph, brother and lord, the only one to which he would bend his knee. And in the service of this man the armor arrives, and is dispatched to the knight who wore it all those long years ago.
It gleams, before it is packed away in a box the golem lifts as if it contains naught but air. Some things age can not tarnish. Not so mad Merlin, who sits in the cold carelessly barefoot, the head of a dead god watching with him as the golem disappears into the woods. Merlin lights a pipe, exhales a heady cloud of tobacco into the chill air, breath and smoke intertwining, man and magic and myth all aching with cold and age and through that very aching painlessly aware that they persist, continue, live. Mimir and Merlin, two relics of a time when to be god or god-touched meant to be part of something more than oneself, speak the most divine nonsense to each other as they watch the thing they crafted long ago of paper and witchery walk away from them, straight-backed and so young, so young.
He who was once court magician to the penultimate kingdom, who saw that kingdom fall - or more accurately, did not see - through (in part, though some days it seems a large, large part) his own failings is gone before the sun sets. Not on the heels of his golem-child, no. Not to the water-woman, to root himself to the world through the touch of his lips to her hands, her inner wrists where he can feel her heart beat to the rhythms of the tides. Soon, yes. Soon he will return to her as a hawk ever returns to the sky that unquestioningly completes it by letting it fly free and, when need be, land. Soon. But not yet, not yet. First to the city, to where the concrete will blunt the earth's whisper against the soles of his feet but not the singing of the wind. To the city, where he will find the king made man and the man made king and sit silent or not silent as the mood moves him in the presence of that which is nothing more or less than what makes ever-continued living an exercise in something solemn that tastes like joy (not a raison d'ĂȘtre, no, but an anchor to be loyal and hold to in the turbulent sea of perpetuity. Not a reason to live, but that which gives living meaning beyond an unending series of breaths in the service of the world, that which forever ties him to humanity for better or worse simply by virtue of existing). An owl soars over New York City. No one sees it. No one sees it land.
Elsewhere, the golem finds the knight. Elsewhere, he drops the box before him before turning to make his way home, tireless, ever-sleepless. He dreams as he walks, the man crafted from words written and spoken. Some nights he dreams the tales that went into his crafting. Some nights he dreams of Merlin's hands reaching into him and rifling, rifling. What are you searching for, he asks in ink blots and exclamation points in such waking dreams, foreshadows that may or may never manifest in actuality. In these maybes spun of dream-silk for the perpetually young-old man without the capacity for slumber, there is nothing of warmth about the madman. The wizard's face is lost to shadow as he pages through the golem's heart, lips moving silently as he reads something aloud.