The Magician's Memoir

The bustling foot traffic of George IV Bridge parted around the robed fellow like a current around a river rock – too young, quick, or busy to notice him. Some glanced twice, and as their eyes adjusted, they saw a man of around seventy, six feet tall, wrapped in travelling clothes of frayed wool and weathered leather. The brim of a buckled hat overhung a face carved by its focus and led by a searching nose. A gnarled stave trembled in his willowy hand. A short grey beard pointed down to a round device on a tarnished chain. A bit of a smell – cave water.

He eyed these glancers-back, and in the glint of his gaze, sent them startling. He knew what they would have seen: a flash of lightning, a swirl of stars. It took a certain wisdom to see him through the glamouring. A wisdom more common in children – or dogs. For them, he'd offer a smile.

His fingers toyed with the threads of his sleeves. Dirt under the nails. Mud about the hem. His rings clinked a thoughtful rhythm as he considered the seven stone figures overhead, fixed to the facade of the National Library. Hs gaze lingered on the second statue from the right. The nobility. The sword.

"Got the ruddy thing stuck in stone again, boy?" he murmured up to the regal statue. It wasn't really a statue of him, but right now, he needed it to be. 'I'm finally taking your advice, writing down our tales – if I can only get my books back...'

But he received no reply, and it was time to be off the street before any more years wheeled past. They had everything he wanted here in this library, all the books and scrolls and tomes and grimoires he had returned home to find missing, donated away. Yes, he had been gone longer than planned, but whoever had raided his grotto's shelves had ignored the inscription over the door that he would be back in just two or three centuries. In place of his archive, he'd found only a scrawled address on his writing-desk, pointing here. No signature.

Mustering his courage, he stepped through the sliding glass and into the low chatter of the library foyer. Marble stairs, grand pillars, arches to exhibitions, a shop. Eddying visitors gathered in clumps, attended by figures in black. Courtiers?

"…so we're just beyond our centenary now," one was saying to a group, "and if you'll follow me through to our newest exhibition…"

More eyes caught him here. With a twitch of his fingers, he fogged their focus, turned them away. Tried to get his bearings. Under his hood, his nostrils twitched, then his ears. A flick of the tongue. Dry heat. Scones. Tea. Pram wheels. The rainfall of fingers typing on those thinking machines. His knuckles whitened around his stave.

"Welcome!"' One of those courtiers. No sword, no livery. How standards had fallen. "Is there anything I can help with?"

"You have these manuscripts," he intoned, producing from his robe a sheaf of notes: a literary Wanted list, written with all the righteousness formerly reserved for sending Art's knights out against evildoers. "I would see them."

"Right!" said the courtier, eyes widening as she looked over the lists. "Well, all of our materials are kept in the archive underneath us. Ten floors, in fact, with over fifty miles of—"

"I have walked in realms of scrolls unending."

"Oh! Realms? Marvellous. So, you'd just need to register for membership, this way here, and show proof of identity and…"

As he followed the courtier, he eyed the path of staff through a side-door. If the books were locked away, all he had to do was follow the locked doors to get them. Still, a pass wouldn't hurt. The courtier led him to a small office riddled with those thinking machines.

"A few steps to complete first at our computers…"

"They dislike me,' said the visitor, gesturing to the monitors flickering at his approach. From the nearest one rose a wisp of smoke. 'They… witch?"

"Glitch? Well, we will need to use them to fill out your registration."

"Nevermind," he sighed, resigning himself to the solution. With an adjustment of his necklace and a murmured word, the computers calmed. It felt like shrinking the world to reduce his aura – sacrificing his strangest senses – but if it got him a card…

So they worked through the application together, and for any document they asked of him, there it happened to be, falling out of his sleeve.

"That's you in our system then, Mister…" The name seemed to swim on the screen, the letters reshaping, evading. "Ambrosius? Emrys? No, sorry, Merdinus?"

"Your eyes may take better to Merlin." Saying it again after so long, he remembered the children of the castle grounds delighting at his tricks, singing out 'Merle!' in their lilting French. Blackbird.

"Oh, like the…?" Finally, the name settled into shape. "How funny. Anyway, all that's left now is to take your photo!"

Placing the request for materials had brought him upstairs to Reference Services and the unacceptable news that, being so late on a Saturday, he would have to wait until Monday to view even the first text on his list: Chretien de Troyes' 'Perceval'. To have in his hands the most reliable source on an adventure he had not attended... He could not wait.

Returning to the entrance floor, he sequestered himself in the Contemplation Space under the stairs, locked it, and set to a spell he hadn't needed in centuries. To get through the security doors he'd seen so far, he'd need to be particularly small...

From the café seating, a few heads turned at the flash of light around the doorframe, but none saw a fly bumbling out through the keyhole, then taking flight down the hall and crawling under the nearest Staff Only door. From there, the fly found its way down spiralling stairwells to an archive access door – sealed around its edges. No chance to slip in. After waiting upwards of fifteen minutes for anyone to come through, the fly began to fret about its clothes and items left unattended upstairs, and sadly bumbled back.

Leaving the Contemplation Space in his own natural form, Merlin quietly admitted to himself that even if he had found a way in, finding his materials in an archive this size would likely take longer than waiting. He would have to allow the staff to help. Do as told. Then again, if he had to pass the time, he could at least nudge the clock along...

So he placed himself in the quiet expanse of the General Reading Room, far from the nearest computers. No need to burn them up. Then, settled, he adjusted his necklace. Regained the aura. Returned his senses.

"No time to wait," he said aloud, before suffering a glance from a student. Few people had ever frowned so deeply at him before and lived on as their natural-born species, but he resisted the temptation to lizard them. Instead, with a nod, he simply vanished.

There was little effort involved in coming unstuck from time – honestly, that was the whole trick – and as the clocks wheeled and the lights blinked off and on, readers came and went about him. Invisible, he would register as an itchy space in the air, deterring anyone from accidentally sitting on his lap.

Merlin drifted through the days considering his work ahead and the chapters he'd completed: his life through the golden days of the court, a modest account of all his work building it, sustaining it. The early days of Art's boyhood, the gathering of his friends, the commissioning of that ludicrous table where you could only pass food around with a lance. He'd always favoured Galahad's idea to make the whole tabletop spin.

Idly he wondered at commercial prospects for a memoir like this. From what he'd gathered journeying into Edinburgh, the city had plenty of bookshops to sell it, and extra coin wouldn't hurt now that his royal appointment had literally disintegrated. He could play up the fights. Shine the armour. Embiggen the dragons. Stir up the villainous shadows around Morgan Le Fay. Nothing factual changed, but something to make sure the youngsters kept reading. He could tell the tales afresh. Clarify the gossip about Art and Guinevere and Lancelot...

His fingers noticed the time before his eyes and snatched at his necklace. A thumping crash into sturdy nowness. A sign had appeared on either side of him: internet dead zone. He tried not to laugh. They never would have guessed the cause of it; a blackbird nesting in the reading room.

Established at a desk in the Special Collections Reading Room, the wizard gently opened the protective box before him. Inside lay his very own long-lost copy of Chretien de Troyes' 'Perceval le Galois'. Honestly, it was in far better condition than when he'd first bought it three centuries ago from a Glaswegian bookseller in 1771 – shortly before embarking on his voyages.

A hefty tome of vellum rebound in green leather and edged in gold-tooled borders, its pages creaked and whispered as he opened it into the supportive cushion. The assistant up here had been clear about placing it in a supportive cushion. To this, Merlin had sagely nodded, reckoning it best not to admit that the last time he'd had his hands on this book, he'd been cramming it into the top shelf of his larder between the carrots and the onions.

"Another old fellow," he murmured to himself, enjoying the new binding so much that he began to consider replacing his robe. "Look at us, out of time… This is how we get back there, you and I."

As far as Merlin figured it, the book couldn't relive itself without a reader, and he couldn't relive the time beyond his own memories. With over a thousand years of those now, even dragging a moment to mind could take a day. He needed a curator in his head. One of these useful desk people, shrunk to size and popped in his ear. They could put some shelves in. Organise.

But together, he and the book could bring each other back to there, back to then, with a spell as simple as reading. He didn't even mind the illustrations scattered along the way: hasty, enthused portraits, a few dogs, the odd attempt to draw the Grail. Settling into place for a proper read, he steadied his vision, and word by word, together they went home to old times.

He read of Percival's adventure from the very beginning, in greater depth than Percival had ever shared it with him. He had never known the boy's mother had tried to hide his knightly lineage, and felt for her having to see a passing band of armoured heroes take him from her woodland home to Camelot and knighthood. Drawn into the text, hours passed as Merlin accompanied the youth on quests of his own. Meeting with the Fisher King half-dead on his boat in the lake, struggling through his days at the Fisher King's castle, suffering for his victories as a good knight should.

Merlin had never had much time for those knights who returned from their questing just as young and unmarked as they had left: they were like a rock sent for sculpting returning uncut, proud they had failed to reveal their true self. Percival took well to being sculpted. Percival shone for it. From a curious boy to a dutiful knight, he embraced what time made of him. Still, Merlin couldn't help but whisper advice at the page, urging Percival to slightly better choices.

Merlin felt the winds and heard the hooves, and flinched at clashing steel, and felt the tingling of eerie magic as the youth discovered wonders: the lance with its tip flowing with healing blood, and the Grail itself, and more powerful still: his first and only love, Blancheflor. He'd never heard of their first meeting – the knights had never much shared with him the romances of their lives, likely thinking him uninterested or just a bit too dusty – but he smiled to see the moment unfold knowing all they would have ahead of them.

The tale of Perceval gave way to a chronicle of Gawain, but there Merlin found himself pulling back from the book, reclining in his chair, dabbing under his eyes to save this treasure and his own writings from the rainfall. For centuries, he'd had little but his own memories and relics. Here, he could live days he'd never known, revisit his friends in places he'd never met them. But enough, enough for one day.

He returned his materials to the check desk, and as he waited on the assistant to turn to him from her computer, he felt the value of the diligence, the protection afforded by these walls and processes. The shock of returning to his grotto to find his archive empty was washed away by the thought of the grief that would have come to find them all destroyed by age, rot, or weather.

As the assistant turned to check over the books, he let go of any aspiration to take his books back. His collections had found a home here that even he didn't need to guard anymore. He could come back when he was ready to read further. He could work here. Write here. He could find his friends among the pages, and little by little, reawaken them within him. Here, he wasn't out of time: all of time was here.

"I am glad it worked," said the assistant, setting his books aside and smiling up at him. "I was confident, but not sure."

"Of what?" Merlin said with a start, woken from his wonderings. "What worked?"

"Why, finding you again. Over and over, I thought to myself – and especially when you went hopping between realms - how do you catch a wizard? And finally, it clicked! You take away his dusty tomes, and make him come to you." Her hair draped shadows around a face unchanged for a millennium, and in her eyes, dark stars glimmered. Eyes he hadn't seen since the fall of Camelot. "Oh, really now, Merlin; all this time spent chasing ghosts – I thought you'd be happier to find one! See, I rather need your help with some misbehaving books..."

"Morgan?"