The Immortal Legends: Merlin and Arthur

This is a teaser to the full book. This is, in fact, the first 2 chapters of the already finished book. (Minus formatting and proofreading of course.) 

Prologue

With the chiming of London’s Big Ben hitting twelve o’ clock at night, a fair skinned elderly man with a long white beard, wearing the charred remains of a patched tweed suit, lays in an alleyway that is spattered with his blood. The smell of burnt hair and flesh mingles in the air creating a putrid odor. A beautiful woman, with red hair and emerald-green eyes, wearing a dark colored cloak and hood stands over him. Her dim shadow, cast by a flickering streetlight, drapes across his body. A raging ball of fire burns in her hand, then she dissipates it by clenching her fist. “How the mighty have fallen. You and Arthur were fools to think you could hide from me.” The woman sneers and turns to face away from the man.

“I wasn’t hiding, I was waiting.” The old man whispers out, almost to softly to hear. His voice was raspy and strained with pain.

“To die?” She asks with a wicked grin.

“Yes.” The old man replies and slowly closes his eyes to accept what he knows is coming.

“You have grown old,” curious and looks over her shoulder at the man and says, “but you haven’t gotten weak. Why did you let me kill you?”

“Because, I had found it again, and as long as I knew where it was, it would be in danger; I couldn’t let you have it.” He says softly, but with a slight smirk that fades as another wave of pain washes over him.

She whips around furiously and screams, “No! How did you find it again? TELL ME!” Morgan kneels down beside Merlin and lifts up his top half by his tweed jacket.

“Never…” Merlin says defiantly and he breaths his final breath.

Morgan stands up screaming in anguish and wrath for her loss, “NOOOO,” and shoots Merlin’s body with black bolts of lightning from her stiffly clawed right hand’s fingertips. His dead body convulses with each bolt that hits it, and the smell of charred fabric and flesh fills the air. After a few seconds pass, she stops and lets out a fury fueled scream at Merlin’s dead body. “AAhhhhhhgggaaa!” After finishing screaming, she regained her composure and says, “fine then, perhaps Arthur will be a bit more useful… or at least more fun to kill. I last killed him… what was it now, twelve years ago? I doubt he will know anything, but at least it might be relaxing.” She lets out a mad cackle, and a pulsating green light covers her hands. She waves them in a circle in front of her body and a ghostly fog engulfs her. As it clears, Morgan Le Fay is nowhere to be found. A moment passes and the body of Merlin the Magician seems to fade from existence leaving only his clothes to fall flat on the ground… completely empty.

Moments later, the cries of a newborn baby ring throughout a hospital room. The doctor looks it over and declares, “It’s a boy.”

A nurse standing next to him asks the exhausted mother, “What will you name him?”

The mother, who has flowing brown hair and eyes bluer than a sapphire, gently takes her baby from the doctor and tells the nurse, “Merlin… his name is Merlin.”

Chapter 1: An Unlikely Hero

Fifteen years later, a messy haired Merlin sits at his desk in his room while typing on his computer. Merlin wears a red hoodie over a black shirt that has the logo of his favorite band emblazoned on it, the profile of a golden lion’s head, and light tinted blue jeans. He smiles after a *Bing* chimes from his screen. The text reads “Access Granted”. Merlin spins around, feet lifted off the ground and fists in the air in a celebratory manner, in his chairs then grabs a soda from off his bed that sits by his desk. He takes a sip and puts the bottle down, before resuming his typing.

“Now to just change the patterns and watch the chaos.” He whispers to himself and chuckles. Merlin loves computers and programing, really any puzzle of any kind he finds enjoyable. But his favorite pass time is pranks. After altering a few lines of code, the colored patters in the site’s logo shift from a graceful swan to something a little… stranger; a chicken with its butt hanging out a car window. Merlin cackles with joy at his prank’s apparent success.

Seconds later, red lights flash on his screen and an alarming noise blares; a prompt on the computer reads, “Unauthorized access detected”. “Oh no,” Merlin says while he quickly logs out of the site and begins to pull out his computer’s battery. Once the battery is out the computer shuts off completely and Merlin sighs in relief. “I think I’m good.” He says to himself. He stands up and walks over to his dresser to pull out a pair of white headphones that he then hangs around his neck and walks downstairs. In the kitchen is his adopted mother cooking, or rather burning, breakfast. The smell of what was once toast and eggs fill his nose as he turns the corner to walk into the kitchen. She is a short yet lean dark-skinned woman wearing work clothes comprising of a neatly pressed black suit over a white shirt and black heels. “Hey Mom,” Merlin greets her and gives a kiss on the cheek before grabbing a paper plate and utensils from the drawer next to her.

“Hey baby. How did you sleep?” She asked trying to fan the smoke out of the kitchen window before the fire alarm goes off.

“Good.” He replies and starts the fan over the stove to aid her. This had become their morning dance and they performed this routine well; she burns the food, and he helps her not burn down their small two‑story home.

“I heard a noise from upstairs. You’re getting into trouble again, aren’t you?” His mother asks him while shaking her head disappointedly.

Merlin gives her a hug and reassures her, “Don’t worry Mom, it’s just a little prank; no one is even going to know it was me.”

She rolled her eyes and scolded him, “maybe not, but you never know. And you know how I feel about those kinds of pranks.”

He sighed and said, “It’s just a bit of fun.” Merlin’s mom, Brianna Hensley, cleaned off her hands and moved the over cooked food from the pan to their plates.

“I know Merlin, but you’re so smart. I just don’t understand why you would waste your talents with internet pranks, instead of joining a programing club or something. You could even start taking a few college courses and get some credit with your talents; you could really build a future for yourself.” Conversations like this were all but a daily occurrence. Brianna and Merlin disagreed often about how he should spend his free time. Merlin wants to simply take things day-by-day and enjoy life while he can, but his mother always tells him that he should be less worried about today, and more focused on what may be ahead of him. Merlin was a smart young man, he maintained straight A’s in school, and he even taught himself programing and coding when he was thirteen, which he promptly used to increase the scale and complexity of his pranks.

Merlin is an incorrigible prankster, when he was young his idea of a laugh was Whoopi cushions, but as he got older his pranks became more of a nuisance too. One day, as a prank, he decided to hack into the school computer system and set the fire alarm to go off during a big basketball game that the school’s team had been practicing for. Another time, he programed the smart boards in all of the classrooms to start displaying lewd images whenever someone tried to erase something. Of course, it was never discovered that he had anything to do with it.

“Merlin,” his mom started, “please, do something for me okay. Just… think about the programing club.”

Merlin hung his head, groaned, and said, “okay, I will think about it.”

“Thank you.” His mom said pleased. The rest of their meal went quickly while they both tried their best to eat the burnt food that his mother had made; neither of them could, and they resigned to get drive through for breakfast on the way to school. They threw away their plates and finished getting ready within a few minutes. They went through and got some biscuits for Brianna, and an order of hash browns for Merlin. They pulled up to Merlin’s school a little bit later and said their goodbyes. Brianna hugged her son around the neck and said, “Love you.”

“Love you too.” Merlin replied and let himself out of the car. He walked into the building and saw the same things he looked at every day. To his left was a wall and a glass case full of trophies, and to his right was the door to the gym. Straight ahead was the hallway that led to the rest of the school. He continued walking down the hall and noticed a group of people hanging up decorations for the last game of the season. The school wanted to have a big party and a dance the night before the game to get everyone excited. It was working too, almost everyone in school was talking about the dance. It was the kind of dance where the girls had to ask the guys, so everyone was freaking out in some way; well, everyone except Merlin. He was planning on having a very different kind of fun at the dance, he just didn’t know what yet.