Chapter Text
Aldric felt the change before he saw it. A low, building charge in the air that made his hairs stand on end. He had been issuing orders when it started, and he stopped mid-sentence because something older and more primal told him to. He turned to the source.
The young man standing over the fallen mage was not someone Aldric had flagged as particularly dangerous. He had noted him earlier in the engagement of course—positioned close to the Pendragon heir and working with what appeared to be controlled precision, weaker lightning-work mostly. Competent. Dangerous enough to keep an eye on. But nothing noteworthy like the others.
He was not that anymore.
The magic radiating from him now was not the careful, targeted work Aldric had observed earlier. It was not controlled in any way he recognized. It seemed like it was barely controlled at all, and that was somehow worse than if it was completely uncontrolled. At least uncontrolled power was predictable in its chaos. This was something that was still controlled by conscious choices, if only barely. And the choices it was making were not random. It was directed.
The fire came first. a wave of flame swept outward from the young man in long, burning lines across the ground, chasing his soldiers with the purposeful directness of something hunting. Aldric watched three of his more senior men break formation and simply run. He had never once seen those men run.
Then the lightning came. Not the precise arcs Aldric had observed earlier, but something vast and barely leashed, branching across the churning sky above the young man and striking the earth in jagged columns that jumped after the fleeing soldiers like divine judgment. The ground where they struck was not just scorched. It was split apart, stone cracking open and the earth itself recoiling from the impact.
And through all of it, the sheer overwhelming scale of power made Aldric’s battle-experienced mind struggle to process it. Even more astonishing, the camp behind the young man was untouched. Every burning line stopped short of friend. Every lightning strike found only his enemies. Not a single ally was harmed.
That was the part that stopped Aldric’s blood cold. He had seen grief-rage before. He had seen mages lose control and burn everything and everyone within reach without distinction. He had contingencies for that. Indiscriminate chaos was manageable and could be used against them.
This was not chaos. This was a young man, barely into adulthood, holding what he could now feel was the full weight of that ancient inherited power while kneeling over his father’s body—holding it in grief and fury, the rawness of a loss not yet a minute old—and still directing his magic. Still knowing where his allies were. Still keeping the line between them and the fire even when every human instinct must have been screaming to burn it all.
Aldric had spent nineteen years serving a king who employed battle-mages, who had contingency plans and suppression tactics and specialized units for almost every kind of engagement.
He had no contingency for this.
The older mage, the one they had worked so hard to bring down, had been extraordinary. Aldric had recognized it and had him removed for exactly that reason.
This one was going to be something else entirely.
Not today. Aldric could see it in the way the young man’s body shook, the way the power was costing him, the way it would almost certainly leave him wrecked when it finally burned through. If Aldric rallied his remaining men and pressed now, they might still—
A fresh column of lightning struck the ground five feet ahead of him, close enough that the shockwave staggered him backward, close enough that he felt the heat of it on his face.
It had not been aimed at him. He knew that immediately. If it had been aimed at him, he would not be standing.
It had been a warning.
Nineteen years. Aldric had never retreated without an order to do so. But today…
“Fall back,” he commanded.
His second-in-command stared at him. “Commander—”
“Fall back.”
Because Aldric was a practical man, and the practical assessment was this: the father of the young man had been one of the most powerful bloodline mages he had ever encountered. The man on the western flank who he now believed to be the grandfather, was still working with an old and subtle lethality that had cost him more men than the eastern breach had.
And the son—barely an adult , newly grieving, magic barely reined in and yet still precise enough not to touch an ally—was going to be something even greater.
Brutus II would need to know. And Aldric intended to live long enough to tell him. He turned and did not look back.
When it finally stopped, Merlin was on his knees in the scorched grass, both hands pressed flat against the ground, his chest heaving.
The camp was quiet. The clouds above were already breaking apart, the unnatural charge bled out of the air with the last of the magic leaving a clear sky.
Isildor reached him first, moving with the urgent deliberateness of someone who felt exactly what had just happened and understood every part of it. He crouched beside his grandson without a word and placed both hands on his shoulders from behind, steadying him.
Merlin was shaking.
“He’s—” Merlin started.
“I know,” Isildor said, his voice softened with his own grief.
The smoke rose thin from the blackened lines of earth stretching toward the tree line. The camp smelled of charred grass, ozone, and the sharp aftermath of spent magic. The wounded were calling out. People were moving again, carefully, taking stock of their win and casualties.
Arthur reached them a moment after, dropping to one knee on Merlin’s other side. He had blood on his arm, which Merlin hoped wasn’t his, and the focused expression of someone setting aside what they were feeling in order to be useful. He looked at his friend’s face and then, briefly, past him to where Balinor lay.
He looked back at Merlin without flinching.
“I’m here,” Arthur said.
He did not say that it would be alright. He had never been the kind of person to say things he couldn’t guarantee.
Merlin pressed his hands harder into the scorched earth and breathed. He let the tears fully out with the first exhaled sob.
Isildor gently shifted himself and Merlin until he could hug his grandson and let him weep. Arthur sat beside them, a silent support for his friend.
The fire was out. The lightning had gone to ground. The grief was overwhelming. But there were others who could grieve with him and support him. That would have to be enough.