“Stay back, Your Majesty!” he shouted with an edge to his voice that Arthur had never heard before.

The words had no sooner cleared his lips than Guinevere’s body began to change beneath Merlin’s hands. She gave a shiver, and Arthur gasped, lapping up the tiniest drop of hope into his lungs. She was moving. She could be all right. She might—

And then it happened.

In the snap of an instant, her body lost all shape as it melted entirely into dark pink goo, a perfect mixture of the color of flesh and bone and blood. Arthur had seen so much in years of war, but not this. Never this.

He dropped to his knees, all emotion fleeing from him because how—how could a human possibly feel the entirety of what he was witnessing happening to the single person in this world he’d vowed to protect with his very soul? Arthur was left with a dull, encompassing sickness in his gut and a hearty sense of denial as he watched Merlin continue his feverish movement.

She wasn’t even a human body anymore. He couldn’t imagine what the mage possibly hoped to accomplish. Arthur’s eyes stayed transfixed on the gruesome scene as the goo that was once Guinevere started separating into parts, forming into three clumps. There was a strangled yell—it took Arthur a moment to realize it had come from Viviane who, evidently, couldn’t quite wrangle a scream from her captive state.

Merlin explained it all to Arthur. Viviane had attacked Guinevere. He was restarting Guinevere. She was going to live. She’d be a baby. She’d regrow to herself in—in another time. It was insanity. It was nonsense, but it was nonsense that he clung to.

Guinevere was still goo, though slightly, disgustingly, strangely more solid (like soft lumps of unshaped clay), when Merlin left with her pieces.

So.

When Merlin returned one week later with Guinevere—alive. Walking. Breathing. Real. It was a miracle.

This time, Arthur would love her well. Everything he’d done wrong before, he would do right.

It started well. Her memories were returning. Merlin’s work was effective, and affection was blossoming between she and Arthur— before it promptly fell off a cliff. And then she was dead by Lancelot’s hand as Arthur watched and Merlin carted the body away before Arthur even touched her.

The day directly following that disaster, Merlin arrived with yet another alive and fully formed Guinevere. This time, Arthur led with fear, though a sense of hope had taken him. And Merlin. And Lancelot. He could tell they all felt like maybe they’d made it through the worst of it. Guinevere’s daily sessions with Merlin had been progressing well, with her memory steadily returning. Arthur and Guinevere had been … progressing well. It made him a little bit sick. There was a lot of duty tied up in all of this. But there had been tenderness too. They could be dutiful and tender.

Ugh. She’d been … eager, even, when they eventually were intimate. That had actually been their best day. She insisted on skipping her session with Merlin, and Arthur cleared his morning to be with her. The time together made Arthur believe that it might all be all right.

But overnight, it shifted. She came back from her next session with a headache. Around midday, it made a subtle turn. It hadn’t been so bad, just a little melancholy.

By night, the creeping sadness was so swollen it filled the room.

“Talk to me,” Arthur had pleaded. It was all too familiar. And, like before, she’d not given him anything. She’d rolled onto her side, and he listened to her sob as he stared at the ceiling.

Merlin reassured him. He could help. She’d gone to her session with him the next day, like she always did. Arthur came back to their chamber, feeling hopeful, Matilda at his side.

And they opened the door in time to see her standing in the window.

Her eyes were closed as a ray of sun split through the clouds and bathed her face in its glow. There was probably a rainbow out there. Arthur would always remember the way the sun hit her face that morning. She looked beautiful, mostly from the relief he saw in her features as tears rolled down her cheeks. She turned at the noise of their entrance, and the relief fell.

Arthur saw the danger and moved toward her, his hand raised. “Guinevere—”

Without ceremony, she looked away and stepped out the open window. Matilda screamed and fell to the floor. Arthur ran to the window, hearing the crushing thwunk of her body hitting the ground as he mounted the three stairs up to it in one bound. He barely glanced down at her body below the tower, left leg at a strange angle, before he turned and tore out of the room, down the tower stairs, sensation gone from his fingers.

There were two people standing outside beneath the tower looking on in horror—close enough to see but dumbstruck as Arthur rushed by them. He got to her, ready to check for her pulse, ready to carry her to Merlin, ready to try to save her—

But she was unmoving, and her eyes were open, a tear still clinging to her cheek. She’d landed on her side where blood pooled around her head—she’d hit a rock. He tried not to notice that her head was misshapen, slightly caved in on that side.

He scooped her into his arms and cradled her body close. This was the third time that he’d witnessed her die (well, all but die), and it was the first time he’d been able to hold her body. He sobbed as he clumsily ran with her to Merlin’s tower. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he whispered into her hair all the way.

Maybe she wasn’t so far gone. Maybe. Maybe Merlin could fix it.

He could not.

This time, like the last with Lancelot, she was not far gone, she was dead. But there’d been three lumps of goo that first day. And there was one more Guinevere to be retrieved. Merlin laid his hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “The next one will work,” he’d said.

“No.” Arthur’s voice came out in a broken croak. “Leave her be.” This was doomed.

Merlin had argued, but Arthur wouldn’t hear it. Couldn’t hear it. He just kept saying, “No” over and over again.

Merlin finally ended it with a defeated, “We’ll talk later.”

Arthur left the study. Shivering, which was strange. It wasn’t cold. He started up the stairs to their chamber—his chamber—his body quaking so much he found he couldn’t move another step forward.

He let his knees fall to the stone beneath him and dropped his hands and head on the stair in front of him. The sound careening from his throat was the keening wail of absolute self-loathing.

They’d all followed him—everyone, all the tribes—into war, into peace, into this kingdom. Being their king had never felt normal even though it had, bafflingly, felt right. He’d led them to becoming a nation. He’d protected people he would never meet.

But he could not protect her, and in his desperation, he’d fled to Merlin once more.

He would regret that decision forever. He should have let those onlookers by the tower see that she was dead. He should have let them know that Guinevere was gone.

If he had, this final version of her could have stayed right where she was and lived a life free from all of this, free from him. Instead, Merlin left this morning and by the time Arthur knew the mage had gone, it was all in motion and entirely unstoppable. He’d had his first cup of wine in his chamber then.

Merlin was retrieving this girl from her life in the future at the last moment before time travel would become impossible again for nearly six months. There’d be no stopping her arrival, and Arthur was to meet them—Merlin and her—in Glastonbury.

Hands trembling, he’d made his way to the Great Hall. Lancelot was there waiting for him (bless him) in his riding clothes.

“Ready?” Lancelot said.

But Arthur couldn’t do it. Lancelot went instead, and Arthur stayed in the hall, not in his throne on the dais but on one of the long benches by the lower tables, where he’d drunk more wine than he meant to and kept drinking it out of shame and nerves and defeat. With each cup, the edges dulled, more like being crushed by a smooth boulder than a jagged one. He very rarely drank to excess but found it was birthing a physical ache, a dull sick in his gut—physical pain felt like one tiny morsel of punishment for all he’d set in motion. And physical pain was better than the terror. Horror. Fury. Sorrow of what he knew was coming: he would take her life, too.