An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Title: through the desert repenting
Rating: Mature
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: 1000 words
Warnings: Temporary MCD
Summary:
He lets Merlin sleep, snoring faintly in the fast-fading darkness while Arthur keeps watch over him, thinking about all the things he would give up for Camelot and gladly—except for this.
A companion piece to all our dead, unfinished selves and the body is not an apology, but can be read as a stand-alone.
When Arthur is born, he cries for three days straight, and nothing that Gaius or the wet nurse can do will soothe him.
“He misses his mother, sire,” says Gaius—the only one who has dared to mention Queen Ygraine since her passing. Uther stares down at the boy in the crib, his own eyes red-rimmed with grief.
“He’ll have to learn to do without her,” he says.
+
Perhaps that’s where it starts. Without his mother, Arthur is passed from nurse to nursemaid as he grows, and from nursemaid to tutors when he gets old enough. His father is always there, distant but commanding, and Arthur seeks out the scraps of his approval like a rat in a maze, scouring the citadel in search of satiety.
He doesn’t cry anymore. There is always someone who has more need of sorrow, just as there is always someone who has more need of bread, and a prince must learn to think of his people before himself. Instead, he makes the best of what he has. A handshake here. A backslap there. On the day he wins his first real tournament, there is an entire banquet hosted in his honour, and Arthur dines out on his father’s applause for months before the cupboard runs bare.
+
Then, Merlin comes to Camelot.
He has the look of a starveling, all long limbs and bones, but compared to Arthur, Merlin has never known a day of hunger in his life. Arthur hates him at first sight; the way the flesh meets at the juncture of his throat and the base of his thumbs, the teeth-bruised, tender meat of him. Hates the way that Merlin can somehow make him want—not his smiles or his wit or his shining eyes but his generosity, the picture of largess where Arthur has only crumbs.
In this way, love takes him like a famine, never a feast: an insatiable hunger. For every night spent devouring Merlin’s mouth, his hips, his thighs, he spends another morning hungry for more, another day dreading the prospect of starvation. Merlin feeds him with clumsy fingers, portioning off what parts he can, but Arthur wants to consume him utterly; to tear into him with teeth and tongue till there is nothing left, and has to be careful not to take too much. Even in repletion, he never seems to have enough.
+
And then: the magic. Merlin, standing over the body of a man who has tried to kill him, one hand outstretched and the gold still fading from his eyes.
“You’re a sorcerer,” Arthur says. The word tastes like ozone and ashes, like the consequences of his own greed. “You lied to me.”
“Not on purpose,” Merlin says, trying to smile. There’s blood on his teeth, his mouth, a dagger in his shoulder that was aimed at Arthur’s heart. “Things got a little…complicated.”
Arthur should banish him—of course he should. He can learn to do without the strange, small kindnesses doled out like sweetmeats; the unlikely seasoning of truth that flavours Merlin's speech. It will be a slow weaning, but a necessary one; a spiritual fasting.
But there is Merlin, looking up at Arthur with dark eyes that reflect the same monstrous appetite, the shame of wanting something that cannot bear to be wanted, and Arthur is tired of the waste of doing without; of tasting only the bitter and never the sweet. What good is denying oneself if it’s being offered to one freely anyway?
“Don’t,” Merlin rasps, naked and hungry as Arthur has ever seen him, “don’t send me away.”
“I won’t,” Arthur promises—his turn to be generous—and it's worth the years of guilt and avarice for the feast he makes of Merlin’s smile.
It was like watching a rocky cliff crumble into the sea.
“All this time,” Arthur said, voice steady, face calm, eyes devastated, “you’ve been lying to me. Manipulating me.”
“I…” He hadn’t thought about it like that; he’d only thought about getting Arthur to make the right decision, the choice he obviously would have made if he knew all the facts. “That’s not—”
“Don’t.”
Arthur held up a hand, and Merlin fell silent. He could see the storm raging, but he couldn’t feel it yet, not until Arthur opened his mouth and said, “Get out,” and Merlin left, stepping out of the king’s chambers and into the hall and down the stairs and across the courtyard, his feet carrying him to the stables before he had time to think. Arthur didn’t call him back, not even when Merlin was riding out of the gate, trailing his tattered hopes and fears behind him.
that whole "make your characters want things" does so much work for you in a story, even if what your characters want is stupid and irrelevant, because how people go about pursuing their desires tells you about them as a person.
do they actually move toward what they desire? how far are they willing to go for it? do they pursue their desires directly or indirectly? do they acquire what they desire through force, trickery, or negotiation? do they tell themselves they aren't supposed to feel desire and suppress it? does the suppressed desire wither away and die, or does it mutate and grow even stronger? is the initially expressed desire actually an inadequate and poorly translated different desire that they lack language for? does the desire change once the language has been updated, or when new experiences outline the desire more clearly? do they want something else once they have better words for it, or once they know that they definitely don't want something they thought they wanted before?
how does the world accommodate those desires? what does the world present to your character and in what order to update and clarify their desires? how does your magic system or sci-fi device correspond to those desires and the pursuit of them?
there's so much good story meat on those bones; you just have to be brave and decisive enough to let characters want specific things instead of letting them float in the current of the plot.
and I loved the responses of “Well, my character is very passive and doesn’t know how to want things, the story is about their process of learning to do that exactly”, because that’s fine, that’s all well and good, but passive people still want things. passive human beings who have been so thoroughly neglected that the articulation of a single desire is beyond them want what their internal sphere of control tells them they are allowed to want. they desire constancy and a lack of conflict. they desire nostalgic artifacts that remind them of prior constancy and lack of conflict. the desire to float is an engineered desire that runs in conflict with the development of a happy healthy human being. Who engineered it? How do you begin to chip away at something like that? How do small, passive desires lead up to that?
Do you have any tips on getting better at writing? I’m always amazed on how real your stories feel, both in atmosphere setting and realism (within reason) and also in how you write feelings in a way that feels like getting punched in the gut lmao
This is the best advice anybody can give you, but it's not fun and it's shitty to execute: the only way to get better at writing is to write a lot.
I'm not going to say that there aren't people who have a better intuitive capability at writing than others, but no matter how much innate talent someone may have, nothing will ever take the place of the journeyman grind of writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. From the first story I ever wrote to the last one I churned out, the difference is immense -- and while yes, I've grown in experience, vocabulary, literary reference and maturity, the only way I was able to deploy those new tools and refinements was by continuously throwing myself bloody against the brick wall of writing yet another story.
The best way to be a good writer is to be a bad writer for a very long time, in essence, and to be able to grit your teeth through that process. That last part, the endurance sport of it, that's the thing a lot of people can't do; even once you're a quote-unquote good writer, writing doesn't get much easier, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and chipping blood out of the rock of your frontal lobe so your story can have a climax is the same agonizing process it's ever been -- regardless of how you avoid thesaurus abuse these days.
Re: the realism and atmosphere, I regret to send you to Elon Musk's twitter, but I wrote a long thread about my process there years ago, which now I'm thinking I should probably transcribe into Tumblr at some point.
There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.
For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.
Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.
They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.
Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.
If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.
If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).
There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!
Title: close to you
By: @schweetheart
Gift for: Crayon
Rating: Teen and Up
Word Count/Medium: 6525 words
Warning(s): None
Creator Notes (Optional):
Dear Crayon,
When I originally agreed to pinch-hit for this prompt, I thought I’d be writing something fun but short—something that I could complete in time for the deadline. Instead, it just kept getting longer and longer, consumed my every waking thought for four days straight, and went in a totally different direction than I was expecting. I hope you enjoy the finished product! 💝
With thanks to diaryofatrekker once again for the stellar beta work, and for encouraging me to keep making things better. You’re a star ⭐️
Summary:
In the months since Arthur became king, he has repealed the ban on magic, appointed Merlin as his Court Sorcerer, and made peace with the Druids. The Golden Age of Albion must surely be at hand—if only he and Merlin could stop arguing long enough to enjoy it.
Or: Merlin and Arthur fall foul of a proximity curse. What could possibly go wrong?
Trying to figure out how to draw armour.
These are some of my notes I uploaded on patreon. A lot more to come since I really want to figure this one out.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Title: makes the whole world blind
Rating: General
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: 3,015 words
Warnings: Canon-typical violence
Summary:
“Put down your sword,” the man said.
“Arthur,” Leon began, but Arthur was already doing it. He laid the sword on the ground and stood with his hands up, showing that he was unarmed.
“Now release him,” he said. He still wasn’t looking at Merlin, because if he looked at him now he knew exactly what he would find, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to go through with it if he saw Merlin watching him with those beautiful, blazing eyes. “Release him, and I’ll come with you. Harm him, and you all die.”
me: does this fantasy setting have no misogyny or does it just have women in the warrior class
they: i dont understand
me: *explains in detail the difference between a fantasy setting w no misogyny n a fantasy setting where the creator just added women to the warrior class n put no further thought into it whatsoever*
they: *laugh* its a good fantasy setting, sir
me: *looks inside* *they just added women to the warrior class*
Explaining cause someone in the tags wanted to know:
A lot of fantasy worlds carry structural misogyny that mirrors our own world, that many readers take for granted, because we are not necessarily used to using the fictional space to imagine radically different worlds and consider what “no misogyny” looks like.
So for instance, even in worlds that an author might textually tell us “treat women equally”, and they prove it by having a woman be a warrior (“see? Women can do any job a man can do!”). But, if there’s no particularly different structure to society to handle domestic labour and childcare, then much like our modern world, it places a high burden on women to occupy dual roles in society. They must often be both carer and breadwinner (and also Hot, let’s not forget these settings always want all women to be Hot, and all “ugly” women are evil), while male protagonists are simply “themselves”. They are not truly equal with women because actually, they can look however they want, and also care work is not expected of them. It is rarely a constant passive part of their lives (when it is present, it is a very active part of their narrative, distinguishing them from the “norm” of the world). Women continue to occupy invisible roles in these narratives as the stay-at-home parents, the cooks in the kitchens, the hags, whose stories are unimportant to the narrative because they aren’t considered full and real people with rich interiority. The work of caring itself dehumanises them. The closest we typically get to valuing “carer roles” in fantasy is to create archetypes for the Healer, which are invariably very femme-coded and often tied to damsel-in-distress stories. (The Healer must often then distinguish herself from the devalued image of association with care work and femininity by becoming a warrior as well.)
And then, of course, there’s the uncritical reproduction of systems of violence and war that typically impacts women and other marginalised groups more than anyone else… because “fantasy”…
but the point isn’t to create an ever-moving bar here, because we could talk about all the ways in which this stuff shows up til the cows come home, but to talk about what it means to exercise the attempt to imagine what “no misogyny” looks like. Exploring the possibilities that open up when you ask, “what if childcare was structured communally instead of by individual families and how would that shape our heroes?” and “what if this society assigned gender roles differently/at a different age?” And “would a history in a different world full of female leaders conceive of territoriality differently compared to the Westphalian notion of the nation state as demarcated by men?”
If it starts and stops at warrior women, that’s no different from thinking feminism ended when women got the vote, or the right to die in the army. Fantasy is where our imaginations should explore possibilities, not be trapped by the limits and chains of our current political reality.
“Merlin,” Arthur sighed. “When I said get a message to me at any cost, this wasn’t what I meant.”
Merlin cooed affably, preening his feathers. He hadn’t actually intended to turn into a pigeon, but if it kept Arthur safe—and himself nestled in Arthur’s arms—then he wasn’t complaining.
Merlin bruised easily. Hands at his throat, chains at his wrists, the force of a fist all left a mark, blossoming blue and green on his pale skin. Arthur touched each one with hesitant fingers.
“’S not as bad as it looks,” Merlin promised him.
Arthur said nothing, but there was regicide in his heart.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Title: Puppy Love
Rating: General
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: 6,875 words
Warnings: Brief mentions of Uther's A+ parenting.
Summary:
“No,” Arthur said. “Absolutely not.”
Both Merlin and the tiny bundle of fluff that he was holding gave him identical pleading looks, which Arthur told himself was not in the least endearing. “Arthur, come on,” Merlin wheedled, hugging the squirming puppy a little tighter against his chest. “Haven’t you always wanted a dog?”
OR: Merlin adopts a puppy. Arthur has absolutely no problems with this whatsoever.
Excerpt:
“He’s on your bed,” he said, after barging into Arthur’s room one morning without warning. “Why is Kip on your bed? I’ve been looking for him everywhere!”
“Who’s Kip?” Arthur asked, not looking up from his desk. “Also, do you ever knock?”
Merlin marched back over to the door, rapped on it twice, then returned to stand in front of Arthur, hands on his hips. “You like him,” he said accusingly.
Arthur lowered his quill and looked over at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
In answer, Merlin pointed at the bed. It was true that, at some point after Merlin had woken him and the bed had subsequently been made, a fluffy white lump had taken up residence atop one of Arthur’s pillows. It was also true that this had nothing whatsoever to do with him, save that he had been very deliberately not noticing it so as not to have to shoo the animal away.
“If you’re going to let that creature roam around the castle unaccompanied, it’s going to turn up in all sorts of places,” Arthur said reasonably, dipping his quill in the inkwell again. “I suggest you keep a closer eye on it in the future, if you don’t want it to end up in someone’s stew.”
“Arthur Pendragon, you wouldn’t dare.”
Arthur looked back at him blandly, and Merlin glared.
