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There are nights in which Arthur doesn’t dream, and the nightmares don’t worm their way into his rest; nights he doesn’t see an outstretched hand towards him, pale and licked by the flames. Those are the nights he hates, because it feels as if he is losing the faint memory of him—burnt to a crisp along with his body; an echoing scream finally fading away.
“It is better like this,” Morgana tells him, but her mouth trembles as if she can’t make herself believe her own lies; Morgana is the best liar he knows, and he feels a hollow concern in his chest as she slowly nods at him.
He always wakes up with his heart pounding out of his chest in the middle of the night, when he has the dreams, and loathes his father more than anything when he does. He only recalls a flash of midnight blue eyes; perfectly arched lips that could tilt into a disrespectful grin; unblemished pale hands that touched, touched, touched.
But at least he remembers on those days, even if the dreams fade. All Arthur is left with is this crushing sense of loss and the cursive glances of the court; they all whisper of the prince who loved a sorcerer so much that the king resorted to magic to make him forget. The heresy. The hypocrisy. The burning shame; Arthur is the one who can still meet his father’s gaze and his father is the one who drops his own.
This is not the king that Arthur will be—the one who burns love on pyres, the one who dreads the memory of it so much that he would challenge his own authority for his son. Arthur can’t remember the boy who burnt save for the gentle mockeries that he keeps expecting to hear; doesn’t know his name because Morgana says, it is better like this, even if Arthur thinks he’s got two syllables on his tongue. He thinks the name sounds free, like a bird, flying out into the world never to return.
He has lost it all in flames, even the memory; but Arthur waits for the day he will be king, and the flames are all that will be forbidden.
~*~
There are days in which Arthur doesn’t get out of bed, and neither king nor knight will be able to drag Arthur away from the pillows and the sheet; in his mind’s lost memories, he can still smell the person who used to make his bed, and it has never felt as if he is nearer to touching what he has lost.
The hearth crackles away in his room, in the midst of winter, and it reminds him of the burning, burning, burning. Not all the sorcerers that his father has exiled to the pyre have been taken from his inner eye—if only he had, and would have spared Arthur that pain—so he still knows the shape of the death that took the boy.
The boy; shapeless, nameless, except for all the ways Arthur can now poke holes in his own soul and know the form of what misses; knows that he used to laugh and now doesn’t. There are some things that even spells can’t take away, not even the strongest of magic; it is better like this, Morgana lies, and clasps his arm and eyes the king furtively, and Arthur knows she fears for him.
She loved him too, she knows, the boy whose ghost now haunts Camelot; who hunts his father’s step, the king who has lost the battle from a simple sorcerer from—Arthur can’t remember, but he has lost, and the sorcerer—the bird—the servant has won.
He has been lost in the fire, but he has awoken something that burns even more brightly in Arthur himself, and he can feel the flames licking with each day his father eyes him.
~*~
If anything, the nights pull at Arthur most heavily; he cannot remember if he ever shared them or not, and no one will tell him if he regarded this boy as his only in the muted sunlight of winter’s day or if Arthur ever had his more secretive smile; his private touches; his gentler side outside of what they were supposed to be.
Morgana sits with him, her eyes shadowed and down, and says, “It is not better like this.”
“I know,” Arthur says, lifelessly, and he knows what must be done; has been eaten up by the flame that his father sparked, and he can feel it burning him the way that—that—
If only he knew his name, it might not have been so empty inside Arthur’s soul, with a name to fill up all the spaces that have been emptied out. If only he knew the sound his grief makes, perhaps it could out-thunder the cacophony of that sheer nothingness; but there is nothing, and there never will be, because his father decreed it so.
His father, who claims so many duties in the name of love, and has burnt it until the shadows loomed larger than the fire itself; and Arthur thinks he loved his father once, and perhaps still does—and knows that grief cannot be undone, and can only be deepened, like a chasm.
“I can tell you who did this,” Morgana murmurs, “I can tell you what sorcerer took his name from you.”
Arthur finds himself shaking at the thought of it, and cannot meet Morgana’s eyes for—it must be seconds, but it feels like hours, when the fire overtakes him and all he sees is the flames, gold; another’s sorcerer’s pyre, but they are all the same, and his father’s love has claimed so much agony, and now it has Arthur’s.
And he shakes his head, because there are things he needs to do before; even now, the whispers of the court—the prince who loved, loved, loved, and didn’t you know they took every shred of memory away from him; as a punishment, as a mercy —and this kingdom is not united while it tears apart its own people; and a king who snatches a prince’s strength away is not a king who builds peace.
Burn, Arthur’s treacherous heart says, but he cannot; there are more honourable ways that justice can be served; and it will not be a heart for a heart, or a love for a love, or a life for a life. It will be for the love of Camelot, and for the golden glint of his father’s crown that should have faded the moment that magic was lost; it is for the names that Arthur has never known, and the one he can’t remember.
“When I am king,” Arthur says, and Morgana presses her eyes closed.
~*~
It is not difficult, in the end; his king has the justice he deserves, and Arthur weeps for the father he should have had and the ruler he has destroyed; and knows that his kingdom rejoices, and many others will live.
And no more names will be lost; they will all be remembered, and Arthur sends out riders to write them down, these dead that were not even done the courtesy of burials and funeral rites; he sends down his knights to honour the names that were lost, and that he will burn into his mind for the one that he cannot—not yet, and that hope is fragile and simultaneously, it is all he has against the looming emptiness that is his memory.
“Do you think he will undo the spell?” Arthur asks carefully, and hopes he does not sound too hopeful on his first day as king; Morgana does not break his gaze, and Arthur wonders if she has told him his name before and Arthur has simply forgotten—if she cannot say it to him, or what else has been done to Arthur.
The crown on his head feels warm from the golden light of the sun; when Arthur touches it, tentatively, carefully, he thinks it is the fire that— he, his unnamed boy, that two-syllabled sorcerer—lit in Arthur; the fire that guided him towards kingship, and towards the end of an age of tyranny.
It seems like an irony for his father to have lit the fire that would burn the edges off Arthur’s path; that would serve him as a torch in the inky blackness of midnight, like a sorcerer’s golden eyes in the middle of a spell.
His life is lost; all Arthur can do is make sure that his actions will not be, and that perhaps, Arthur can at least carry his name with him.
Morgana presses her lips together. “I don’t know, Arthur. He came from nowhere, and I wouldn’t even know where to find him. It was all so sudden, the day that he—well.”
Arthur does not know anything of the day; it has been carved out of his mind like a sword cuts off flesh, and all he can do is imagine—imagine how he threw himself against the cell his father must have kept him in, imagine how much his throat hurt as he screamed himself hoarse on a name he no longer knows.
“Give me his name,” he says, suddenly, and his heart beats loudly at the thought of remembrance—even if it will take him a lifetime, he will find this sorcerer and plead with him for the memory of that boy that set Arthur’s kingdom aflame with hope, and who freed his people and Arthur’s heart both with his death; who flew away like a bird, and Arthur wants to know him as desperately as he once did; as he knows he did, even if he knows nothing else.
Morgana swallows hard. “His name was Emrys,” she says. “Only he can return your memories to you.”
“Emrys,” Arthur repeats, and squares his shoulders; he looks outside, where his kingdom calls—and he should meet his people, and see the hills of his land, the rolling dips and curves that are home to the ones that Arthur has sworn to protect.
And he will travel until he meets Emrys, and can restore his own memories. He sees it now, glinting in the distance; even if it takes him years, he will know the name of that boy; the one who has hold of his soul, and Arthur can only imagine the glint of golden eyes when he thinks of him, and nothing else.
“He will be well-hidden, Arthur.”
Arthur has taken a kingdom to restore the memory of those who his father would have forgotten; he will spend a lifetime finding the name of that boy who lit the final fire, if he must, and will consider it a life well-spent.
“I will find him,” he says, and hopes that the boy will light his flames to help Arthur find this path, too.