It’s much harder to commune surreptitiously with the spirit of a legendary mage than you might think. Especially when you’re lying in the middle of a muddy field surrounded by the slowly decomposing bodies of what used to be your friends and family.

Of course, I didn’t personally know these guys from Adam, but it was hardly the lack of familiarity which made all this feel a bit awkward.

“Merlin? As in Arthur’s Merlin?”

I prefer to think of it more like he is Merlin’s Arthur, but I guess that’s by the by. At the very least, you’ve heard of me and understand who I am. That will save us lots of time.

“Sure. For clarity, are you the kindly old duffer, like in the Disney cartoon version, or the hot, young dude from the BBC show?”

I understand all the words you have just used in that sentence, my dear, but appear to be missing some vital context. For the sake of argument, let me just say that I am the recently deceased Merlin, worried he has passed from the world at a critical juncture.

“And you decided that the first move in your afterlife should be to portal the soul of a dying woman into the body of a Conan the Barbarian lookalike and — what? — see where that leads? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.”

If I could have a moment to explain the highly delicate nature of what is occurring across the realms -

“I think my still-breathing corpse is about to be looted, by the way.”

For goodness sake — hang on. I should be able to . . . Yes. Okay. That should stop time long enough for us to talk properly.

At his words, the Smurf-looking dude bending over me stopped moving. But, he didn’t just stop moving like he was startled that the body beneath him was still alive. It was more like he suddenly became an image on a bad VHS tape and someone had pressed ‘pause’. Even down to him flickering like he was stuck between frames.

I reached up and touched the hand he had been using to take the pouch on my belt. Even though it was blipping in and out, it was still completely solid and real. I scrabbled to my feet from under him and looked around the rest of the battlefield.

Everything, the other soldiers, the horses, even the birds in the sky, looked as if they had been turned into a slightly blurry two-dimensional picture.

It was too good an opportunity to miss.

What are you doing?

I carried on repositioning my prospective looter’s hand on the crotch of one of the other guys ransacking corpses. I had already moved the lip of a broken shield underneath the descending foot of another soldier so that, when time restarted, it would ping upwards in the best tradition of rakes and Wily-E-Coyote.

“Are you kidding me? This is like one of those superpowers you fantasise about having as a kid. You know, so you can stop time and then mess with everyone so they totally freak out when time restarts. Don’t tell me you haven’t pulled something like this around the Round Table: I’m sure Lancelot would be an absolute monster for it. Now, where’s a bucket of water when you need one?”

If I can just draw us back to the issue of the end of the world for a moment . . .

I sighed, empathising with how Bilbo felt when Gandalf wouldn’t just let him get on enjoying reading his books and eating his breakfast. “What you need to understand here, Merlin, is that I’m dead. I died. It’s over. Croaked it. Kaput. My watch is ended. Sure, I probably would have liked a few more decades to really try to nail down adulting, but I can make my peace with this being all she wrote. Now, here you are trying to get me back on the whole ‘life’ merry-go-round, and I’m not seeing it as the wonderful opportunity you clearly do.”

I looked around, trying to find a focus for my monologue, but the wizard remained resolutely incorporeal. “Out of the two of us, I think I’m the one having the more mature response to the whole ‘end-of-life’, thing. Here I am, just rolling with the whole isekai vibe you’re pulling on me. Whereas you’re mithering about how important you were and wondering if the world can cope without you in it. It sounds like Merlin might have quite the high opinion of himself . . . Mate, look at it this way. We’re both in the same dead boat. And that particular nautical vessel doesn’t have any skin in the game over the ending of the world.”

You can pretend you feel no sorrow for your passing, but we both know your heart is not as callous as you seek to suggest. I could feel your ambivalence at your moment of death. Yes, there was considerable relief for the cessation of considerable pain, but there was regret and sorrow intertwined with that too.

“Maybe. But saving the world? It’s not like I was a ‘do-the-right-thing’ girl in my own timeline. On my best day, I’d not have been your go-to person for a quest more significant than a hunt for a properly brewed cup of tea. And that was when I was me! The heart that I’ve got right now is from some dude called Wulfnoð, who has just seen his dad killed, and his friends hacked down around him. I’m not sure his blood-pumper is filled with sunshine and rainbows for the continuing existence of the universe either.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Wulfnoð was an honourable boy. Just as you are an honourable woman. You both had great potential as cultivators. Indeed, you may have made the very heavens tremble in other worlds and at different times. I say to you that had he not fallen this day, I would have sought to use him in the way I now appeal to you.

“Merlin, mate. You’re not hearing me. The boy’s dead. I’m dead. You’re dead. There’s a theme here. What does it matter to us if the world ends? We’re dead already!”

Because if you do not help me avoid the upcoming cataclysm, your whole timeline will be wiped out.

“That’s not the dealbreaker you seem to think it is. I’m dead. What do I care if people are robbed of Dave Filoni’s next outrage? In fact, if you’d offered me the end-of-the-world or another seven hours of Ashoka, I’d need to take a moment. We could be doing people a favour.”

You might profess not to care — I do not believe you by the way. The occupational hazard of being, well, me, is that I can see the truth in most things — but even if you do not care about the world in general, I think you’d hesitate to condemn your sister to never coming into existence.

Man, wizards. They sure know which buttons to press.

***

We’d walked a distance away from the battlefield. I say ‘we’, but I guess I mean that I walked, and the disembodied voice of Merlin continued to lecture me from inside my head. Fortunately, years of conversations with my mother prepared me well for such a situation.

I should say it was quite a thing to walk through a time-frozen landscape. You take so many things for granted when walking in the ‘real’ world that suddenly do not happen when time stops.

For example, let me talk to you about blades of grass.

In a timeless universe, these bloody lethal spikes of death do not gently collapse under your feet. No sir. They stay perfectly solid and rigid and shred the seemingly solid leather boots your new body is wearing. I wondered if people who put up the ‘Do not walk on the grass’ signs are time-travelling altruists anxious to save humanity.

When Merlin judged we were far enough from the army, he released his hold on time, and I felt the world flow back into existence. I cocked an ear, hopefully, to see if the sound of shield-hitting-nose could be heard, but — as with so many things lately — I was to be disappointed.

In the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore. “Okay. I get it. No need to keep belabouring the point. You believe you’ve died at the wrong moment in time, and because of this the whole world will turn out differently. Let’s take that and bank it. Merlin is gone, the world is screwed. We’re on the same page.”

A thought occurred to me. “Aren’t you supposed to be walled up for all time by the Lady in the Lake? I mean, that’s not much better than death, I get it, but I don’t think I’ve ever read that you just straight up died?”

There was what I assume to have been an awkward silence. Not having had much experience with legendary wizards, it was difficult to judge the etiquette.

What do you know about cultivation?

The non-segue took me by surprise. That, and the fact that word took me back fifteen years to an ex-boyfriend’s flat, and a pile of comics that he would defend to the death, were highbrow art and not low-key porn. “Some. I’ve read a few of the more well-known titles. The idea is that you get stronger by improving yourself. Like, inside and out? So, to mix genres, it’s not just hacking down orcs for XP like in Warcraft. It’s about understanding yourself better and meditating on your experiences. So, quality, not quantity. Oh. And there’s pills. Lots and lots of pills.”

That explanation is . . . not totally without merit.

“Don’t burst a blood vessel with all the praise, mate. You know, I had teachers like you, Merlin. You should try turning that frown upside down once in a while.”

What I mean is you appear to grasp something of the essence of what I wish to explain which pleases me greatly. I was a cultivator for many centuries – making myself ‘better’ in your words. By improving myself, I significantly improved my lifespan and hence was able to increase my impact on the world.

There was a pause, and I worried we’d somehow been cut off. Was bad phone signal a thing in the sixth century?

I am sorry to say I became a touch blasé about my progress. It had all come so easily to me that I did not, for a moment, think that I would fail to keep moving through the realms. After all, I had opened my meridians before I lost my first milk tooth. My dantian was full, and I had forced open my eight further meridians, before my twentieth birthday. I mastered all elemental affinities before my thirtieth year …

I going to be honest, I started to tune out a little here. I kind of felt like Merlin had invited me around for dinner and was now showing me all his holiday photographs. Whilst these accomplishments obviously meant an awful lot to him, it was just a lot of words I did not really understand. Like waxing lyrical about how beautifully the light hit the Acropolis at sunset. Sure, sounds great, but can I get another beer?

… and so I never truly focused on forming my Qi core.

The pause in his lecture sounded like a response was required. “I feel you, mate. The number of times I found myself at McDonald’s rather than at spin class. Focusing on that core is hard when life gets in the way.”

I don’t know if it should be possible for a disembodied voice to express quite so much frustration, but the Big M gave it a good go. What I am trying to explain is that I became too focused on what I could achieve in the material world and neglected my spiritual journey. I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I sense the world will not progress as intended because of my failure.

“So where do I come in?”

If, through my own selfishness, I have allowed a hole to appear in the fabric of the world, it is surely my final duty to ensure it is repaired. Thus, at the moment of my death, I sought to leave a part of myself behind to begin that work. Across time, I have searched for anyone with the potential to replace me and perform my role in this realm.

“And the best you could come up with was me? Dude, that’s a crushingly low bar.”

Far from it, my dear. I have been searching across time for millennia. However, each and every time I identified a potential successor, something – or more likely someone – has ensured the focus of my search became unavailable to me.

“By double booking them to play the Roxy?”

By murdering them. In all the realms to which I have access, across all of time, thousands upon thousands of potentials have been snuffed out at the moment I sought to approach them. Imagine my despair when I found myself down to the last two possible beings in all of creation with the potential to take up my mantle. And then, just as I reached out to them both, at the same moment, they were wiped out. One in a battle where the odds, surprisingly, turned against him. And the other –

“Let me guess. Did she fall in front of an articulated lorry?”