Mykonos_flypaw_bigbang(1).pdf

Mykonos

flypaw

Summary:

Future AU. After a seeing-stone washes up on the shores of Ealdor, the last Island left

after the great floods and rising Ocean, Merlin sees their salvation - a Sky City named

Camelot. When he wakes up on the shores of the Sky City, Merlin starts to realise the

New World is nothing as it was fabled. It is then that Merlin begins his journey to meet

the 'dragon' that called him there, realising that nothing in Camelot is what it seems.

Together they begin a revolution against a blind king and the foundations the New

World was built on, uncovering even deeper secrets that were thought to be buried with

the Old World when the land sunk.

Warnings:

Character death (mostly minor, but includes a known character who dies in canon and

a child), torture, flooded-world scenario (&associated issues e.g. refugee camps,

starvation etc.), sort-of-slavery, intoxication (leading to what some might consider dub-

con, though it's not intended as such)

Acknowledgements:

- to moonilicious, cutsycat, tx_minion, wovenwater, the_muppet for being an amazing

support through this. I couldn‟t have done it without you!

- to theywerecones for being such an amazing artist to work with. Art link can be found

at the masterpost or at the end of the story.

- and finally, I need to tip my cap to the book „Exodus‟ by Julie Bertagna for being my

main inspiration.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope you enjoy!

Part One: The Islands.

Ealdor.

April, 3500

Merlin woke, as he often did, with a gasp upon his lips. The image of crushing

water surrounded him, swayed behind his eyes, pulling him down with the

current and dragging him to the thick sludge at the bottom of the ocean. He

could feel the waves sliding over one another, calm, as if they hadn‟t taken

another one for their own. And then Merlin had been fighting, thrashing, to

return to the surface.

He never reached it though. He always woke starved of oxygen, panting as if he‟d

really been dragged into the depths of the Great Ocean. The days he woke with

the dream still pressed against the backs of his eyelids were never good days and

Merlin knew, without venturing from his room, that the Great Ocean had

stepped further to his door; crept up their pathway inch by inch while the island

had slept.

Moving his arms above his head, Merlin stretched out his back, spine cracking as

he sighed. It was a few more moments before he swung his legs out of bed, bare

feet padding across the wooden floor as he moved to throw open the storm

shutters. They gave an almighty screech as the hinges, battered from endless sea

storms and countless attacks from the wind, swung open; sunlight streaming

through to warm the cold wooden floors.

Merlin‟s toes curled in delight as he rested his upper body against the window

ledge, his head outside of the window and allowing a calm sea breeze to ruffle

through his hair. He couldn‟t remember the last time they‟d seen the sun this

strong and while the sky was far from clear (to the North you could see lighting

clouds, hovering where Old Man Simmons had said great forests were, back in

the Old World, and the South was shrouded in constant rain, blurring as far as

they eye could see), it was peaceful around Ealdor.

A gull cried out and Merlin‟s heart sung at the sound, one which he hadn‟t heard

for so long. There were legends that said the birds controlled the weather now,

whispers that where their wings dipped and their feet settled would be a place of

harmony. That was a lie though, Merlin knew, for the birds, like so many people,

would move on when the wind changed, fleeing the rising tide and the loss of

land.

“Merlin, breakfast‟s ready,” a voice called from downstairs.

Leaving his perch at the window somewhat regretfully, Merlin exited his room

and closed his eyes, walking through his house from memory rather than sight.

He‟d lived here his whole life, been through so many emotions while doing so,

from fear as the seas raged outside to joy as his mother brought news of a

neighbour giving birth. Children were rare in these times and it was usually up to

the whole community to help the mother care for her child, to support her in a

harsh and cruel world.

Despite having been unable to leave the house for days now that the sun was out

Merlin no longer felt trapped. When the winds were howling like wolves of the

Old World and the sea was stirring in fury, that was the time to feel trapped.

During the often week-long storms, when the stone walls of the home he shared

with his mother closed in against them, that was the time that candles were

snuffed out and people confined to their rooms. Merlin remembered wanting to

see why the world was so angry, so hateful, itching to unclasp the bolts holding

down the storm shutters, keeping the chilling winds and biting spray of rain and

sea water at bay.

That was the most important thing, keeping the demons and waters out when the

weather turned sour. It had happened once, lower down in the village, that

someone had let the demons in and suffered, just like all the tales and cautions

passed around.

The story, offered to little children who wanted to satisfy their curiosity of the

storm, told of newcomers to the village. They hadn‟t been in Ealdor long,

climbing out of their ruined boats and onto the shores of the Island, pleading

and begging for mercy that had been granted freely.

The Ocean had risen too high, as it always had, snapping at their heels and

forcing them to flee their homes. Ealdor had welcomed them, given them shelter

and food, but they‟d opened their windows in a storm, letting the sea-devil

himself in to claw at their skin and invade their bodies.

Two weeks later, when the storm let up, they were all dead. Merlin had been

there, alongside his mother, as they tried the best they could to heal them. There

was no medicine on the island of Ealdor, not even the oldest on their island, Old

Man Simmons, had been alive in the time of medicines, and so it fell to the

sparse plants of their island to try and heal, prayers and wishes mingling with

poultices. None of it had been to avail and the chill had crept into their bones,

claiming them one by one until all that was left was to pile them up in the ruins

of the boat they came and set them sail to the sea, fire purging their voyage and

their demons.

It was a harsh life, but in Ealdor and the last of the Lands, you lived by the sea.

You were born from the sea and you died by the sea. There were no exceptions to

this, it was a simple fact. The Lands followed no Gods, no martyrs, and no idols.

All they knew was the sea, the decider, the harbinger of good and evil alike and

the one constant the Lands knew. The Gods and hopes they carried had died

when the tides had swelled and the land had been taken, claimed by the melting

ice and pouring rains.

As he counted the number of creaks his foot made as he walked along the hall,

Merlin placed his hand on the banister, a skill learnt from years of closing his

eyes and mapping his house blindly. It had served its uses in the past, when the

storms had raged for months and the energy the sun would have provided was

used up and their homes were empty shells. Light was a commodity at night time,

what with scarce electricity even when the solar panels had collected their

maximum. There were the fire pits in each home, but they were to keep warm

more than anything.

The last step Merlin placed his feet on gave a deep groan, as if it was about to

collapse on itself, so he shifted the weight onto the balls of his feet, springing

from the stairs and landing on the sole rug in the house placed in the hall

between the door and the stairs. It was threadbare, as were all the materials on

the island, but it had been at their threshold since before Merlin was born and he

couldn‟t imagine a home without it.

His mother was in the kitchen, a small annexe off of the hall. Merlin smiled to

himself as he heard her humming away, no tune in particular that floated

through the house. She had been beautiful once, but as with many of the people

who remained on the Lands, there was a sharp hardness to the corners of her

eyes; a lingering sense of sorrow clinging to her as a person who had lost too

much already.

What person that lived on the Lands hadn‟t lost anything? People were swept

away by the seas, whole islands lost in one great wave far too often for no one to

be affected. Merlin had lost his father before he was born to the waves, Ealdor

had lost so many more and Merlin wondered how many more they were to lose

in his lifetime.

“Oh, Merlin!” Hunith said, half-turned away from the stove where she was ladling

out porridge. “About time too, have you seen the sun?”

She placed a bowl on the table, a spoon in her hand as she turned to face Merlin.

“Get that under your belt before you even think about stepping out there.”

Merlin dug the spoon into the steaming porridge, stirring the oats around and

blowing on them. The first mouthful burnt down his throat, but he didn‟t lessen

the speed at which he ate. The sun was out and there was no time to lose, but his

mother wouldn‟t let him pass out of the kitchen unless he‟d eaten his fill.

It wasn‟t that food was scarce on the island of Ealdor, but it wasn‟t a good idea to

go wasting it. With harsh, unpredictable weather, any crops cultivated were hardy

and usually unpalatable unless stewed within an inch of their life or mashed

down into something particularly unsavoury. There was always the fish from the

sea and the small amount of livestock people kept in their homes (why waste

space for animal shelters when they could live downstairs, giving you more heat

and enclosed more safely?), but those resources had to be checked carefully and

controlled firmly.

Either way, they had to survive. Trying out new seeds (seeds that had been stored

from the Old World; preserved through many decades of water-borne lands) was

all well and good, but they had never taken to the land. It had left the people (the

Water people, not the Land people) with little option but to turn to lesser

nutritional sources, foods that hardly scraped the barrel in terms of health.

It was just the way they lived, the way of all Islanders. The Great Ocean was a

harsh ruler, but what else could they do?

As they so often did, Merlin‟s thoughts drifted to the whispers of salvation, of

massive sky-cities built when the waters first came rushing over the land. Great,

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