Chapter Zero · A Brief History of an Ancient Soul
The Legend of Merlin.
What follows is the truth as he tells it. Make of it what you will. The chainsaw, at least, is real.
Round Table · 5th–6th c.
He stood beside Arthur.
He drew the sword from the stone.
Before the kingdom had a name, there was a stone. Before the stone, there was a wizard. He counseled kings. He read storms. He saw what every man avoided in his own face and named it kindly. He shaped Camelot from possibility itself, then watched it bloom.
Battle of Camlann · the long hush
Then the kingdom fell.
The lake took him in.
Treachery. A son. A wound that would not close. The court scattered like ash from a hearth. The lake — that old, patient mother — accepted Arthur in the end, and she accepted Merlin too. He went where he was needed: nowhere, for a while. He learned silence again.
Pilgrim · 7th–20th c.
Centuries passed.
He kept his hands moving.
He walked through plagues and crusades. He carved tools nobody noticed. He whispered to thinkers who would never know his name. He learned the new tongues, the new metals, the new griefs. He waited for a place that felt right enough to set down a workshop. Most places did not.
Mt. Shasta, California · Present day
Then he saw the mountain.
Avalon had a back door.
A snow-capped peak in California. Lemurians whispered beneath it. Saucers cut the sky above it. Pine smoke. Lake water. Crystal in the stone. It felt like home. He moved in among the loggers and the seekers, set up a yard, started carving giants out of the dead trees that had stood when he first learned magic.
The studio, today
Now he creates.
Wood. Steel. Fire. Words.
Yetis tower along county roads. Murals stop helicopters mid-flight. A live-edge desk rises and falls on robotic legs. Ballpoint-pen dragons curl across notebook paper. And every so often, a poem makes a grown man cry. He is equal parts ancient wizard, artist, and quiet philosopher — and he is still creating. His latest sermon names the danger plainly: people looking into their phones instead of at each other.
End of the Chronicle