Merlin is a figure of Awakened mythology and goes by many names: Emrys Merlinus, Myrddin, the High Druid Merlin. Many contradicting tales are told about Merlin, as is common for those who have Ascended. Perhaps the oldest and least known of those tales claims Merlin as one of the survivors of Atlantis, not the greatest of these, but certainly a powerful mage of both Time and Fate[1]. According to many versions of Merlin’s story, the wizard lived “backwards,” remembering the future of others as most people remember the past yet unable to predict his own future because it lay behind him. Though he helped make Arthur King of the Britons, according to the legends, Merlin could not prevent his own imprisonment or slumber (or death) at the hands of the sorceress Nimue, who some claimed to be one of the Fae, another sorceress, or an Ananke.
As best as can be gathered, Merlin was a Silver Ladder Archmage in the years following Rome's withdrawal from Britain[2] around 480 to 540 CE. Roughly 17 Uchronia are said to have been created of Arthurian Britain[3]. Through impossibly wide-ranging spells, decades of manipulation, and low cunning, Myrddin Emrys exploits the lack of a single ruler of Britain to create the national Destiny that one would arise, stage-manages the birth, childhood, and assumption as that Destiny’s focal point of Arthur, and then deliberately triggers its Bane to cement things. In each uchronia, Myrddin creates and then destroys Camelot. He Ascends in the process, and leaves behind Ananke known as Nimue who ensures that all Camelots fall[4]. The Exarchs were unable to stop him prior to this, because he made sure Camelot was resonant with the natures of the Prophet and the Ruin. The Prophet invokes tyranny through 'great men' and the belief that all others are lowly peons - exactly like Arthur, the chosen one. And the Ruin invokes tyranny through inevitable Dooms, and Merlin made sure that Camelot's Doom was always fulfilled, and the kingdom was destroyed. Upon his Ascension, the enraged Exarchs, excised Camelot from history entirely, leaving behind only fragments and myths and confusing historians’ views of what was going on in western Europe at this time.
Who exactly Myrddin Emrys was is not clear to Awakened historians. “Myrddin” is a title, not a Shadow Name; every chief druid of the Walkers in Mists Legacy has been Myrddin, Merlin, Marzhin, or one of a variety of other spellings since before the Roman conquest of Britain, long before the uchronia. To complicate matters, the Arthurian Merlin arrived in 480 CE using his archmastery of Time and freely admitted that his Shadow Name of Emrys was one he’d assumed upon exceeding the known Practices. Officially, the Silver Ladder isn’t certain which Merlin Emrys was; the Walkers in Mists, however, believe that unless Emrys has yet to be born, the most likely candidate is Myrddin Wyllt. After Awakening at the battle of Arfderydd, Wyllt was obsessed with forging one nation out of the fractious British tribes, spoke of a need for a unifying story, vanished under mysterious circumstances in the early 7th century, and was recorded in the Legacy’s annals as having a Nimbus of “renewal,” while the archmaster’s Imperial works cause a well-documented sensation of aging backward in anyone scrutinizing them.
- ↑ MTAw: Tome of the Watchtowers, p. 16-17
- ↑ MTAw: Imperial Mysteries, p. 62
- ↑ MTAw: Tome of the Pentacle, p. 28
- ↑ MTAw: Signs of Sorcery, p. 117