Ch486- Merlin- Part 2

“Merlin,” Salazar said at last, his eyes sharp in the firelight. “Why are we bowing to Muggles?”

It struck Merlin as curious, the way the man had begun treating him. Not like a boy dragged in from the road, but as if he were a colleague, even someone whose word carried more weight than his own.

“We are not bowing,” he said after a pause. “We are standing beside them. Bloodshed keeps the wheel turning. Only understanding might break it.”

Salazar spat into the dirt at his side. “Understanding? Those pig kings who bind themselves to Mud-bloods and Blood Traitors understand us well enough. Better than we understand ourselves. It is not ignorance, Merlin. It is choice. They know what we are and they still sharpen their blades.”

Merlin shook his head. “Which is exactly why we teach the rest. Not the kings, they’re too busy playing at crowns, but the common people.” Muggles fear what they cannot name. Their rulers paint us as devils, and so long as we hide, they will believe it.”

Salazar slumped onto a log and stared at the fire. The glow caught in his eyes, making him look older. “I am afraid, Merlin, that comfort will soften us. I am afraid that if we walk among them, we will forget what it is to be different. And I am afraid of fear itself. It does not vanish. It festers. Muggles will never stop hunting us. They cannot.”

Merlin shook his head. “Understanding will win, Salazar. Let us be the first to show it can.”

Salazar only stared into the flames, saying nothing more, and Merlin let the silence stretch. There was no convincing him in one night. That had never been the point. The point was that Arthur had stood before both wizard and Muggle and spoken of unity, and no one had struck him down for it. The first step had been taken.

The years that followed went almost exactly as Merlin had said they would. He’d lived long enough to know that history was a wheel. Empires rose, burned, and crawled out of the ash again. The hard part wasn’t survival, it was cutting yourself deep enough into the stone so that when the wheel turned, your name didn’t wash away with the dust.

He made sure his name stayed.

He spoke in halls filled with suspicious lords, in muddy camps where farmers stared at him like he was a trick of the light, in wizarding circles where old blood bristled at the thought of sharing anything with “lesser men.” He smiled, he argued, he outlasted. Each meeting was another stone placed in the road he wanted built.

Soon the name Merlin was everywhere. Wizards invoked it in duels, slipped it into speeches, swore by it in taverns. A man did not become a legend by standing in the light but by becoming the shadow people pointed to when they needed certainty. He let it run its course. Once the wheel had turned far enough, it was time to vanish.

Legends never lasted under close touch. The moment people could prod, curse, or find you wanting, reverence turned sour. He had never intended Merlin to live forever, only long enough to etch the idea into the stone.

For his final act as Merlin, he wove a ward across the isle itself, subtle, impossible to trace. Whenever anyone spoke his name, the speaker would feel just the smallest lift in their chest, something between hope and relief. Not enough to make them suspicious, only enough to keep the legend alive in memory. It was the perfect trick. Merlin died, but his echo hummed in every corner of Britain.

The man who had worn the mask folded it away and stepped into another face, another story. He shed the boy-soldier and the wizard-king’s counsellor, and stepped out wearing a new mask, Nicholas Flamel.

Nicholas always found it amusing how easy the world forgot. Centuries later, the tales of Merlin were just that, tales. Half sung in ballads, half scribbled in half-remembered histories. A towering figure who could never have been real, they said. And all the while, the real man moved among them as Nicholas, unremarkable, quiet, a name tied only to his stone and his wife.

He’d lived so many faces that slipping into a new one no longer itched. It was routine. The alchemist, the recluse, the genius who could make gold and never seemed to age, these were all safe enough roles. Alchemy gave people something to envy rather than fear. Envy was manageable.

The Philosopher’s Stone was hardly his greatest work. But it was the one that came to define Nicholas Flamel. He had crafted far worse, far sharper things, during wars long forgotten. But transmutation and a trickle of life made a tidy myth, one the world could nod along with.

What amused him more than anything was the way others spoke of him. To some, a saviour. To others, a selfish miser. Some called him a kindly scholar in Paris, brewing cures for the sick. Others swore he was a devil skulking behind shelves. Both sides were half-right, and Nicholas encouraged it. A good legend needs contradictions, something for everyone to argue about.

The years blurred. He remembered sitting across from kings in dusty chambers, only to see their faces carved into tombstones months later. He remembered watching entire wizarding lineages vanish into nothing, their vaults sealed in Gringotts, their names erased from common talk.

He kept an eye on the new players, of course. Voldemort was an amateur in Nicholas’s eyes, ambitious, yes, but crude. His magic was loud, his methods wasteful. Trying to carve immortality through slaughter was like using a hammer for embroidery. Effective in its way, but artless.

Dumbledore and Grindelwald were sharper. They’d been Nicholas’s student, and though Nicholas rarely admitted it aloud, he had liked the boys. Albus had wit, nerve, and enough stubbornness to chase knowledge far past the point of wisdom. But he also had lines he would not cross, and Nicholas had always known that made him weaker than he liked to admit.

When Dumbledore grew older and bent himself into his eccentric headmaster act, Nicholas smiled. He recognised the trick for what it was: misdirection. He had done the same a hundred times before. Hide your strength in plain sight, cloak your danger with foolishness. Yet Dumbledore still carried a measure of idealism, something Nicholas had cut from himself centuries earlier.

Grindelwald, on the other hand, had never pretended to carry such lines. From the first, Nicholas had seen in him a sharpness that cut both ways, brilliance without restraint, hunger without pause. Where Albus dressed his schemes in charm and colour, Gellert laid his ambition bare, a fire that wanted the world to bend or burn. Nicholas had found it fascinating at the time, the raw honesty of it. Dangerous, yes, but almost refreshing. Grindelwald was the pupil who had listened closest to his lessons, and the one who had taken them furthest from what Nicholas intended.

Truly, two faces of the same coin.

The funny part was that Harry Potter reminded him of himself, not the Nicholas Flamel mask, but the one that had come long before. The boy didn’t wear his ambition on his sleeve, but it was there in the way he weighed every word, every choice. Nicholas had seen the same look in Arthur’s eyes, in Salazar’s, in Rowena’s.

The world would brand Harry a hero, or a menace, depending on which story won out. Nicholas knew better. Legends were never real people; they were masks, shaped by who was telling the tale. Merlin had proved that. Nicholas Flamel had kept proving it for centuries. Harry would be no different.

But he achieved his goal. What many in the magical world never grasped was that magic wasn’t only spells or charms. It was fuel, a kind of currency, and Nicholas had been saving it piece by piece for his final act. Over centuries. Over millennia.

He had failed to find Time’s Champion, true, but his first aim, his legend, had worked better than even he imagined.

Nicholas blinked, the memory sliding away as the stones of Hogwarts came back into focus. “I am getting too old,” he muttered, then shook his head with a smile at the absurdity. His boots tapped softly as he carried on down the hall.

The corner turned, and he found Sybill Trelawney drifting along, arms full of shawls, smelling faintly of sherry and incense. She started when she saw him, then broke into a dreamy smile.

“Ah, good to see you again,” she said with the sort of finality she gave her prophecies. She floated past, not waiting for him to answer, already muttering to herself about portents in tea leaves.

Nicholas’s grin widened as she vanished around the bend.