Chapter 19: Myrddin's Journey (430 AD)
Morgan's house, Britain, 430 AD
POV: Myrddin
The second after Myrddin settled into Morgan's home, he was put to work. He found out that while the witch's house seemed modest from the outside, it was bigger on the inside. It was not as big as the residences of the nobles he had seen but it was still more than any simple commoner would hope to live in. The house was two stories tall, with a living room, three bedrooms, a dueling room, a dining room, a potions room and a kitchen. There were a few strange rooms that she called 'bathrooms' and contained some type of self-cleaning chamber pots. There was also a basement but Morgan didn't allow him inside for some reason. It was evident to him that his new teacher was a commoner in the wizarding world and he noted the relatively luxurious life she lived.
She didn't have to worry about food since she had a farm that magically grow all her dietary needs. She had a roof over her head. He would have killed for these things alone when he was living in the streets.
This helped him realize how much easier wizards' lives are compared to the muggles. A lot of elements that were usually difficult to achieve for a normal person, takes a few waves of a wand for a magical to do. He wondered if any magical has ever grown hungry as he did, grown thirsty as he did, felt despair as he did. No wonder magicals consider themselves superior.
He put those thoughts out of his mind and focused on the task at hand. His new teacher has asked him to gather firewood to heat up the house. It vexed him that he hadn't learnt any spells. All she did was teach him about certain plants, the basics on how to prepare a potion and some meditation. If he hadn't seen it himself, he would have thought she couldn't use magic, she rarely ever uses it for trivial things like he saw the magical do in Londinium. She cleaned everything by hand, cooked everything by hand, even lit fires by hand. He never even seen her using a wand which he knows is necessary for magic.
At least he learnt potion-making. It wasn't spellcasting, but it was something, and it was magical, so he was satisfied. She had shown him the plants they gathered, explained how they can used, how the magical properties of each ingredient interact and how the direction of stirring can affect the entire potion. He did memorize everything she taught him but didn't understand the logic about it, which turned into a new magical discipline to learn arithmancy.
Unfortunately, there was a giant hurdle for him to learn arithmancy and it was his inability to read and write. This of course led to over six months of just reading and writing lessons. He knew this was for his future but he learnt very little magic for the time he spent here and he was very disappointed. It turns out that arithmancy was essentially a way to predict the result of a magical phenomenon using the variables he needed. It was interesting but still, after a year living with Morgan, he still hadn't learnt a single spell.
She said she wouldn't teach him a spell if his meditation remained poor. She seemed very disappointed in his inability to learn her way. He snapped back at her for him not even having a wand to do magic and while she argued that her casting methods were superior, he had refused to budge on the issue. He knew that he was being childish, that he hadn't even tried meditating for a few months but he wanted to learn magic as fast as he could. At the end, after a month of persistence, she ended up buying him a wand which was made of oak and dragon heartstring. The moment where he first touched his wand was one of the most intimate of his life. He knew at this moment for certain that Morgan was wrong. Something that feels this right cannot be worse than her casting technique. He pretended not to notice the disappointment in Morgan's eyes when he wielded his wand. After all, what was some commoner witch compared to entire wizarding world.
After they returned home, she started to teach him the basics of charms which was the addition of a temporary feature to an element. First, he learnt how to create light, how to make object hover, how to make a doll come to life and dance, how to summon objects.
She also started him on Transfiguration, which is the art of turning an object into another. It was a personal favorite of his. He was quite happy with what he was learning and how fast he learnt it. However, he never understood why his teacher wouldn't teach him anything if he hadn't mastered the spell preceding it. And by master it means absolute control. For example, he had to cast the lighting charm with barely visible light and blinding light to proceed to the hovering charm. It seemed like a waste of time, to be honest.
A few years later, she started to teach him the mind arts. It was disconcerting that another wizard could penetrate his mind and steal his secrets. She had taught him how to perform it as well as to defend himself against it, but he often wondered if she had delved into his mind before he learnt occlumency. It was his fault that he hadn't learnt before since meditation was needed to learn the subject.
A side effect of his occlumency studies was the appearance of his divination abilities. He would often get visions and dreams of the future. He called it his clairvoyance. It started as something simple like finding good animals to hunt but sometimes he gets visions of wars and death. He never told Morgan about it because she expressed her distaste over the discipline and he feared that she would kick him out.
His teacher also taught him battle magic, which was essentially certain charms and transfiguration spell geared towards attacking other people or defending against them. There were certain curses that needed a negative emotion to power but he opted out of learning them, finding them distasteful and unnecessarily violent.
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He refused to learn any alchemy after the first month Morgan taught him, finding it to be too complicated for simple results that he needed a wand for. He did the same with runes where he only learnt the mere basics to break wards but not enough to use them instinctively. He even only learnt one runic language and that was Elder Futhark.
Another discipline she taught him was sorcery and by that she meant the magic outside our world. She took him on a trip to connect him to multiple dimensions as to learn how to harness their energy to use them in his spells. She had taught him astral projection, creating shields, weapons out of the energy he collected. She even taught him to teleport with his magic which she called apparition and his portals using sorcery.
She had refused to teach him anything else unless he properly masters what she had taught him and he spent over a year going over what he had learnt. During this year, he attempted to seduce his teacher on multiple occasions, but she denied him every time. He usually had no problem with the women in the nearby village, sharing their beds on multiple occasion but Morgan rejects him before even thinking about it. Angry at the constant rejections and the fact that he hadn't learnt anything new in a few months, he decided that Morgan had nothing left to teach him and that it was time for him to move on and pave his path in the world.
And so, he left, Morgan didn't seem to be overly upset when he was leaving, only asking that he remembers the lessons she had imparted into him. He was upset over her nonchalance over his departure; when the village girls learnt of his departure, they had burst into tears in seconds.
And so, he travelled the world. It was during his first duel with a magical bandit that wanted to rob him that he realized the quality of his magical education. Even in Londinium, the knowledge of the entire residents of the city combined, including the nobles, was inferior to his. His teacher was really a remarkable woman. They had never learnt apparition or even heard of such magic. Even a multitude of spells and potions were unknown to them. He found that he liked this feeling of superiority over those who had considered him a useless street rat a decade ago. He decided that his dream was to learn all there was to be learnt about magic, to become the undisputed master of magic.
And so, he began his journey, his clairvoyance guiding him to his destined path. He started with the druids in the Isle where he learnt the magic of nature, then the wand wavers in Rome that focused on battle magic. He learnt from the elementals in Greece and spent over five years in the magical library of Alexandria. He was fascinated by their culture, however, disliked the dominating presence of necromancy in Egypt. He made his way to Kamar-Taj as his teacher told him, to finish his education in sorcery.
Every single person that taught him was flabbergasted at how naturally magic came to him, he only wished that Morgan had been as impressed with his progress as they were. After a couple of decades refining his magic and sorcery, of battles against demons and heretics, he finally became sorcerer supreme. It was then that he received a vision of the magical world being united under his leadership.
To achieve his goal he traveled again, this time making sure to make a name for himself. He started by saving a village from two rampaging Dragons, then the elimination of a pack of werewolf in Europe. The death of an entire clan of roman vampires that was planning to attack Rome. The difference between Roman vampires and regular ones are the fact that they are stronger, faster, didn't need to feed as much as the regular ones and as such had much better control over themselves and are not harmed by the sun. The biggest difference between them is the fact that unlike regular vampires, the roman ones do not lose their magic after they are turned. Their magic sort of mutates and is more geared towards Shadows and Blood Magic but they are still able to cast magic. They were created in an experiment where a Roman emperor attempted to become immortal. However, the victim that he experimented on turned on him and killed him. No one was able to recreate the ritual but the first Roman Vampire, Dracula, became the progenitor of his race.
The name Myrddin Emrys started spreading all over the world, magicals and muggles alike knew of his name and he started being called Merlin, the most power wizard to ever walk the earth. He rather liked the name to be honest, and after decades of work he created the wizard's council. It was essentially an assembly where every magical independent magical community was to send one representative to the council to represent their interest. Each community would have to follow the law decided by the council but would be protected by the council in case of conflict and had access to the public magical repository which is a library he created, with a lot of spells he crafted himself or were taught to him.
Already, many communities in Asia, Europe and Africa have joined the council and he was finally making headway towards his destiny. Unfortunately, not a single community in Britania has joined the council and so he made his way there. The land was divided into multiple kingdoms but one kingdom was by far the strongest and thus the most likely to be able to unite the kingdom. He saw in a vision that the son of the current King would achieve his goal and thus he became an advisor to the King. However, the current king didn't have any children, and so he found the woman Uther Pendragon lusted after, Igraine, and helped him disguise himself as her Husband, Gorlois. She got pregnant from the encounter but unfortunately, she died in childbirth. Her husband had been assassinated by Uther a few months earlier, the child was born.
Barely a few days after the child's birth, the king fell in battle and Camelot was found without an heir to crown. Myrddin took the child and gave him to a loyal knight of Camelot, Ser Ector, that would raise the child as his own and successor. However, the future king was not born a boy but a girl. Her name was Artoria Pendragon. Unwilling to give up on his prophecy, Myrddin accessed his divination abilities and found the best way to solve his dilemma. The girl would be raised a boy. She would be the once and future king.
Grinning, he procured a sword he found in Kamar-Taj. He had it reforged to look like a knight's sword. He had no idea what it was made of but whatever it was, handled enchantments better than even Goblin Silver and was practically indestructible. After enchanting it, the sword would become a fine weapon in the hand of the king of Brittania.
On the day Myrddin was tasked to select the next King, knights and lords from around the country gathered to be selected as king. Each expected the selection to be through jousting to select the most superior one to become a king, but the only thing prepared at the place of selection was a naked sword stuck in a stone with a golden inscription on the hilt reading "Whoever pulls out this sword of this stone is rightwise king born of England." While many knights grabbed the sword trying to follow the command, none were able to pull it out. Camelot would not have a king for years and the sword stayed in the stone. The council of Nobles learned to govern Camelot as stewards of the thrones until years later when a young woman pulls the sword from the stone.