Merlin vs the Jabberwocky

Merlin, no that Merlin, tries to make a name for himself

The rain came down in buckets. It was the kind of rain that made torrential downpours ashamed to call themselves storms. Imagine standing with your back against the rock behind a waterfall and looking out and you’ll have an idea of just how heavy the rain was on this particular day. If you could see more than four feet in any direction you were lucky, well, as lucky as you can be when you’re standing in a storm like that. Generally speaking, when it was raining that hard, you counted yourself lucky when you were sitting in a nice cushy armchair next to a roaring fire reading a nice, thick volume of the encyclopedia.

Merlin, however, did not consider himself lucky, as he was one of the few unfortunate souls that found himself out in the weather. When he’d set out from his small cottage in the Irish country side, it was but merely sprinkling; nothing a low to mid-grade wizard couldn’t handle. Yes, I said low to mid-grade, because this is not the Merlin you’re familiar with. This Merlin was not court wizard for Arthur and his knights. Nor was he the wizard who banished the evil Morgana to the NetherRealm. No, this particular Merlin wasn’t even distantly related to the Great and Powerful Merlin of legend. He was named after him though, as his father was rather a fan of the old stories.

Merlin’s father had enrolled him in wizard college at the age of fifteen when any young one is eligible for the study of magic. As stated previously, Randolfo, Merlin’s father, loved reading the old tales about his son’s namesake and had always hoped his own son would achieve even greater feats of magic than the original Merlin ever did. Merlin, however, was skeptical from the outset. He enjoyed the stories as well, and found magic quite interesting, but he thought his father had set fairly high expectations for his son. After all, Merlin was one of the clumsiest human beings to ever walk the face of the Earth.

He’d helped around the farm when he was old enough to do so, but it usually ended in broken wagons, escaped cows or chickens, or the occasional broken bone that did not always belong to Merlin. When he was sent to school, his father believed the discipline would help Merlin gain control over his flailing. The second night Merlin was gone, a raven had arrived to let Randolfo know that Merlin had accidentally set fire to a priceless tapestry that predated time itself �" the clocks and whatnot, not history as it were �" but not to worry, as it was put almost in its rightful order with a click flick of the wrist and that Randolfo would only be charged for the small corner that was unable to be recovered.

From there, Merlin had done his best in his schooling, but never managed to really get the hang of the whole magic thing. He managed to turn on some lights without lighting them, open some minor locks, and even pull a rabbit out of a hat though he wasn’t trying to do so. At the end of his schooling, his teachers had given him a low to mid-grade rating simply because he could do some decent work, but only if he wasn’t trying. When Merlin returned home, now a man and kind of a wizard, his father only showed a brief display of disappointment in his son’s low marks. There was a father’s pride there though, one way or another, and Randolfo bragged to neighbors far and wide about his son, the wizard, with any chance he got.

Merlin became something of a joke around his small village. Any time he was called upon to heal the sick or repair broken wagon wheel, he usually made things worse by either making the sick man sicker �" or killing that one fellow �" or setting the entire wagon on fire. After about a month of terrorizing the village at their unbeknownst request, everyone gave Merlin a wide berth whenever they saw him in passing. Most were scared Merlin would accidentally turn them into a newt or some such creature. The rest just really didn’t like him all that well, and didn’t wish to speak to him, wizard or no.

One day, Randolfo came home with a terrible expression of shame and hurt on his face. Merlin asked what ailed him, but Randolfo would not speak of it. With a little digging, Merlin found that his father had overheard two of the local villagers mocking Merlin openly. It was one thing to be a joke to everyone else. It was quite another to have his father know it. Two weeks passed with Merlin trying hard to give his father something to be proud of, but he failed at every turn, only shaming his father further.

When Merlin heard two men in the local tavern discussing rumors of a jabberwocky in the area, he’d made a very rash, generally stupid decision.

“I’m leave in the morning, father,” Merlin said when he got home that night. Mead was on his breath but not so much that Randolfo could smell it.

“To where do you travel, my son?” Randolfo replied. Mead was on his breath as well, as it often was over the last few weeks.

“I go to slay the jabberwocky,” Merlin replied with a hint of pride in his voice. “I’ll make you proud, father.”

Randolfo would have been proud at the moment, but he was now fast in a mead-induced sleep.

The next morning when Merlin set off, Randolfo had presented him with an old shabby looking hatchet with a sizeable knick in the blade. Merlin couldn’t remember ever seeing it before in his life.

“ ‘Tis my grandfather’s,” Randolfo answered at Merlin’s bewildered look. “May it bring you luck, son.”

“Thank you, father,” Merlin said. Father and son hugged briefly, and Merlin tucked the hatchet into his belt. Just like that, he left the village as the rain began to trickle down.

Now here he was, soaked to the bone, not an inch of him dry whatsoever, with the nearest village at least twenty more miles from him in any direction. Merlin pulled his hat down over his eyes in a failed attempt at keeping out the rain and trudged on. His feet began sinking slowly into the mud of the path until he was sinking in knee deep with each step and finding it increasingly hard to retrieve his leg each time. After several minutes of the monotonous trudging, Merlin espied a moderately large mass in the distance which he assumed was a small rock formation.

With a great heave, Merlin persuaded his legs from the muck and flopped into the nearby grass that had turned into a marshland. Wading through the mire, Merlin came to the correctly assumed huddle of rocks which rose from the ground like a massive hernia. Just at the base, luckily enough, was an opening large enough for at least three men to walk abreast and tall enough to fit a good sized cottage. Merlin thanked whatever god it was that ran the whole crazy mishagosh, and entered the cave to wait out the storm.

Once inside the cave, Merlin stripped off his soaked clothes and laid them spread out on the ground. He put his hands together and created a small orb of fire, which was the only spell he could ever seem to get right, and placed it on the ground next to his clothes to speed up the drying process. He created another orb of fire and held it up to illuminate the cave. At the back of the cave, Merlin saw that the ground dropped off into darkness. He walked to the edge of the darkness and found that it was a path that led down into the earth. He walked back to his clothes, grabbed the hatchet, and walked down the path with the orb of fire held over his head.

There were no other paths branching off of the one Merlin was on. It was just a solitary path plunging ever farther into the depths. With each step Merlin tried to convince himself to turn around, but still he walked on, which was surprising, given how terrified he was of the unknown that lay in front of him. When he reached the end of the path, Merlin was standing in a large circular room with nothing but a medium-sized nest in the middle of the floor. In the nest sat three eggs large enough to house a Labrador retriever.

Merlin recognized the eggs at once as jabberwocky eggs and felt the fear inside him intensify. Jabberwockies were a mean lot, but a jabberwocky mother is just about the meanest creature in the world. It’s said that jabberwocky mothers have killed men for simply hearing the word egg uttered from their mouths. Now Merlin was standing not fifteen feet from three of those eggs wishing he was absolutely anywhere else in the world. Even France would do, and that’s saying something.

He had no idea how long he stood, frozen in terror, staring at the eggs, but eventually he forced his body to turn around to leave before the mother showed up. Unfortunately for him, the mother had showed up, and was now standing directly behind him. Merlin was eye to eye with the evil beast and he felt the urine start to flow before he even felt the urge to let it.

Jabberwockies are ugly creatures. They’re about twice the size of any given lion with massive leathery wings like a bat. They have the heads of dragons, teeth and tail of a beaver, and the forelegs of a tyrannosaurus rex. Like I said, ugly creatures.

The jabberwocky dove at Merlin who, by nothing more than luck, dodged the beast and stumbled his way back to the path that led out. He turned and let out a blood curdling scream and hurled the hatchet at the dragon. He didn’t even bother to wait and see if it came of anything, he simply turned tail and ran as soon as he was unarmed.

The path seemed shorter this time, but that was mostly because he was going at a dead sprint as opposed to baby stepping his way. When he reached his clothes, he realized that he could hear nothing behind him. He expected to have to abandon his clothes and run naked back into the rain with a jabberwocky hot on his heels, but nothing of the sort seemed to be happening. He looked outside at the rain, back to the mouth of the path, and down at his clothes. He threw his semi-dry clothes back on, and for a reason he will never be able to explain so long as he lived, went back down the path at the back of the cave.

He went forward at a baby’s pace once more, ready to run at the slightest sound, but he heard nothing. When he reached the circular room at the end of the path he found the nest as it had been. The jabberwocky, however, was huddled midway in between him and the eggs, not moving. It could have been a clever ruse by the beast, but last time he checked, Merlin was sure jabberwockies were exceptionally stupid animals.

 Merlin approached the dragon hesitantly. Once he was closer he found that it wasn’t breathing and appeared to not even notice he was there. He reached out with one foot and nudged the animal over as best he could. It was enough to reveal the creature’s head, which had Merlin’s hatchet buried haft deep between its eyes. He’d slain the beast as he set out to do, although, like almost everything else he did correctly, it was completely unintentional.

Merlin took a moment to dance a victory jig and sing the first song that came to mind which was a jaunty tune about mermaids. He heaved the hatchet out of the jabberwocky’s face and put it back in place under his belt. Merlin walked back to where he’d entered the cave concocting a story worth of song to make up for the pure stroke of luck that he’d experienced. He’d finally succeeded in something worth being proud of and he couldn’t wait to rub in the villagers’ faces.

And that, my friends, is how Merlin, a low to mid-grade wizard slayed a jabberwocky and became known as Merlin the Dragon Killer to the villagers, but no one else. He lived the rest of his days performing small scale spells and telling the story of his feat to anyone that would hear it, each time getting more and more elaborate. Merlin passed onto the NetherRealm himself at the ripe old age of 104 due to a runaway wagon wheel and a drunk chimpanzee.