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“The world is over!” says the princess of Ireland, lifting an old gatorade bottle filled with vodka into the air. “Let’s drink.”
“Aye aye.” Tristan leans over, purloins it from her hand, and takes a long swig. Then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, a frenzied look in his eyes. “Last vodka in the world. Last vodka of my life, babe? What do you think?”
This last is to Dinadan, who’s pacing the living room of their penthouse apartment caught in some horrible netherworld of his own. He barely hears Tristan, barely sees the brittle edge of Iseult’s broken smile. All he can do is try desperately not to look out the window at the endless black expanse of a city that should be vibrant and glowing. He does anyway.
And that’s life, is it? The meek shall inherit-- well, Dinadan’s been meek enough, despite what anyone who talked to him would think. He’s been a background tapestry to other people’s lives, and according to the canon of the Lord that means the world is his now. But what fucking use is a dead world to a musician?
“There’s more vodka in the cupboard.” Iseult leaves the Gatorade bottle to Tristan, stands, tromps over to the kitchen by the light of her cellphone flashlight. There’s a horrible clattering noise as a cupboard unburdens itself under her careless hands, a muffled curse, and then the noise of something shattering.
Tristan bursts into tears. “The world is over,” he tells Dinadan, his voice thick and watery. As though Dinadan doesn’t know. “I thought I was going to go to Eurovision.”
Kay is at his brother’s house when the lights go out. It’s the worst piece of cursed luck he’s had in his entire life, and he’s had a lot of cursed luck. Luck because Arthur lives on a fifty-acre property in the middle of Wales, with gas lighting and no internet and an honest-to-God well, even if it hasn’t been used since the 50’s. Of all the places to be stranded, it’s a fortunate one.
Cursed because Bedivere is on the other side of the country, and no one will ever make a phone call ever again.
It doesn’t take him as long as it does most people to figure out what happened. Trade school was the best decision he ever made-- first because being an electrician paid the bills like nothing except maybe plumbing, and second because he’s in a unique position to remember all the conspiracy jokes his classmates made about how all it would take is one solar flare in the wrong direction and they would be the most valuable people on the planet. It was a funny topic of conversation. Nothing serious. But the one-in-a-million chance one-in-a-millioned, the Earth’s magnetic field writhed under the sun like an ant under a magnifying glass, and now the world is over.
Maybe in three hundred years they’ll figure it out again. The only upside as far as Kay can figure, which he tells to Arthur with a measure of flattering awe, is that at least traditionally poor rural areas around the world will be relatively untouched. There’s something beautiful in that, the idea that people who’d been victimized by the capitalist industrial Tower of Babel now carry the torch of happiness. Maybe some people, in remote corners of the world, will continue life as normal. That’s the only thought that gives Kay cause to keep living.
“You can’t go,” says Arthur, the second night after the blackout, when he catches Kay in the garage with a camping bag and non-perishable food supplies to last a fortnight. “You can’t. There’s no way you’re going to find him.”
Kay stares at him, pain squeezing the back of his throat. “I have to.”
“No. No, you don’t. You’re not going to find him, all you’re going to do is die. I can’t--” Arthur’s voice catches. “I can’t lose my brother. You’re the only person I know I can hold onto, now.”
A tense moment holds its breath as the two of them stare at each other, Arthur with his cold instant coffee and slumped shoulders, Kay with his hiking bag and lifted chin. Then he collapses into tears. Arthur looks astonished at this-- Kay had never cried in all their childhood, not once, not ever. “There, there,” he says, awkwardly patting his arm. “Maybe it will all work out. Maybe we’ll all find each other.”
The prophets come out of the woodwork. In Paris, a young physics student named Galaaz-- or Galaad; the scribbled writings found by future historians will disagree-- leads the desperate, dying people of the downtrodden suburban streets to build an autonomous commune somewhere outside la périphérique. He brings the light of explanation, and moreover the kind of fervent faith in the hand of God that those whom science has failed so desperately crave. A year ago the world would have called him a cultist. Now he’s just a community leader. After all, living is the only thing that matters anymore.
That’s what Dindrane says; the kinder Welsh equivalent to Galaaz. She and her brother Perceval travel the roads with their long black hair and peaceful smiles, distributing seeds and root cuttings to desperate urbanites who’ve fled the dying skeletons of cities. Unlike Galaaz, they don’t ask for faith in return, although whether that’s a good thing is not so crystal-cut as it would have seemed in the old world. Faith is galvanizing. Faith gives a reason to live.
And so the world goes on. The death toll is incalculable, although historians centuries later will try. Things that had been lost come back-- a couple of farmers from Somerset spend two years wandering the country and passing out lovingly hand-made pamphlets explaining crop rotation and growing cycles. They save enough people to fill the Ark. Their names are lost to history.
And while humanity is busy rediscovering its forgotten knowledge, other things drift back into the world. A mechanical society has no place for the unmechanical, but now there is no one to hold the doors closed on the Otherworld, and so the heady liquid of Fate seeps back. It finds its favourite playthings, dresses them up in new language and old patterns, and slots them into place.
In Wales, near Caerleon, the Pendragon brothers set up their own makeshift court, tied together with gas lamps and hope. As he rises into middle age-- not sinks, no, his aging is a gift-- Arthur remembers things. He remembers so much; he can see which people will help them, and he knows that he is risen once more.
He doesn’t tell anyone, of course. There’s no point in reopening old stab wounds.
When his errant nephews are hauled in by the night guards, full of righteous anger and unrighteously stolen food, it just confirms what he’s been pondering ever since the blackout. The world likes its patterns. That might be a terrifying thought, considering the vague snatches of what he remembers happening last time, but Arthur has faith. There’s no point in repetition without change. No, this time he knows what to do. Also, he isn’t in an arranged marriage with a woman who hates him, and that’s probably going to help matters.
She turns up too. She doesn’t know him, which he’s thankful for, because he recognizes he was a bit horrible the first time around. In the over-saturated light of the late afternoon, she leads a band of travellers from across the Irish Sea, their clothes stained with seawater. All of their boats have been left at the coast, but the feat is impressive enough as it is. Arthur introduces himself politely and invites her to run in Camelot’s first election, held exactly a year after the blackout.
Guinevere doesn’t run unopposed. Arthur’s damned nephew-- not the smarmy, popular one, as much of a surprise as that is to him, no, the other one, the one who wasn’t always just a nephew-- enters his name late in the game and does his damned best to win by tooth and nail. It’s the one thing that shakes Arthur’s faith that the cycle won’t repeat itself. Briefly, and with a pragmatism which disgusts him, he considers having the young man killed. Then he remembers that that’s what started the issue in the first place, and decides to trust in the power of democracy.
Somewhere very far away in physical terms, but in metaphysical terms as near as the hairs on the back of his neck, the thing that calls itself Merlin is expelled a little more out of the alleys of Arthur’s mind.
The arrival of Lancelot is fortuitous, in that he walks into the carefully constructed council hall right in the middle of Mordred’s speech, which is dramatic on his behalf and anticlimactic for poor Mordred, who has a lot of theatrics planned. The representatives of the communes of Camelot turn as one to stare at him. He’s young, or youngish; age is different now. His black hair hangs down around his ears and he has a sword hanging from his hip, which is an unusual sight. Uncomfortable under the attention of the watchers, he shuffles his feet.
“Hi,” he says, his voice tinged with a faint French Riviera accent. “I’ve come to serve.”
Whether Guinevere would have won all along, or whether Lancelot’s abrupt arrival was a sufficient decelerant to Mordred’s momentum, is a matter that won’t be relevant for another five years, when the post of King-- the one nod Arthur will make to his past-- is up for reelection. And that’s the future. The future doesn’t matter now, only the present, and in the present Lanceot is sitting by the side of the river with King Guinevere’s best friend, trying to explain how he found a sword in a Lebanese restaurant in Marseilles. Gawain isn’t following, partially because the explanation is rambling and incoherent, and partially because he’s too busy watching the way Lancelot’s hands float through the air as he tells the story, and the way his eyes glint in the pale foggy light. He doesn’t say anything, just smiles faintly. The potential rewards are not enough to risk getting hurt, and for the first time in his life he feels that he could be hurt very badly indeed. But he vows to himself: I will follow where you go.
And he does. When Lancelot disappears (an oddly often occurrence), he always begs leave of Guinevere to saddle up his nonsense horse that he found terrorizing the streets of Newcastle, strap a good solid knife to his hip, and ride off to go looking. Somehow, despite the fact that finding anyone at all is very difficult in this day and age, he always finds Lancelot. It’s not that hard. You just have to ride into the sun. No one else seems to understand that: the sun is what killed this world, and what pulled it from the ashes, and Gawain feels as though he is its chosen disciple. The sunrise carries him leagues, gifts him with phoenix-wings and faith, and lets him burn with victory. And, at sunset, there’s Lancelot. Always.
Slowly, they eke beauty out of life. In her boat, Guinevere had brought a few erratic, violent musicians from Dublin: Iseult, Tristan, and Dinadan. The cost of allowing them to stay is that they’re deeply untrustworthy, but Guinevere allows them to exist in return for song. The people of the court at the end of the world need songs. Old songs that remind them of humanity’s childhood, and new songs for a new era where people slay giants and save each other. Where people are people, and not whatever strange otherworldly beings some of them seem to have become. That’s what’s important.
(Only Arthur knows to wonder what happened to Mark. If the story has the same plot beats, then surely he should arrive any day now. But he never does. His body is rotting in a darkened penthouse in Dublin.)
And one day, when the last of the light has faded from the fields, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Kay who opens it, and it’s Kay who stares wordlessly at the bearded, tired, smiling face that greets him.
“Hey,” says Bedivere. “I found you.”