The Lady of the Lake
A Child of Two Worlds
Nimue was not like other children. Even before she could speak in full sentences, she lived half-lost in thought, prone to long silences and sudden absorption. She daydreamed openly, staring out across fields or streams as though following a story only she could hear. Her hands were rarely still. She drew constantly — not scenes from her life, but landscapes she had never visited, blades of living light, and repeating patterns too intricate and consistent to be invention alone. When asked where they came from, she could never say. She did not remember dreaming at all, and would insist she slept without images. Whatever touched her at night left no memory behind, only a quiet pressure that drove her to draw upon waking.
It was what first brought her to the attention of the High Druid Merlin.
At first, he treated her drawings as curiosities — perhaps symbols, fragments of prophecy, or echoes of lost magic. His examination was meticulous. Among druids and seers, there were still rites meant to thin the veil: trance-work, controlled breath, the careful use of symbol. Such practices were taxing, unreliable, and often dangerous — but they sometimes worked.
Merlin was one of the few who still knew how.
During these meditative rituals, he uncovered the truth. Nimue was entering the dreamworld unaided. Her waking mind retained no memory of it; she drew without understanding what she had seen. She possessed an effortless access to the liminal spaces Merlin could reach only through discipline and sacrifice. Some of her images were luminous. Others unsettled even him, a man long accustomed to signs and omens.
Nimue told Merlin everything. She spoke of waking instincts she could not explain, of certainty without memory, of hand and heart compelled to create. Merlin listened without interruption. He never sought to refine her words into doctrine, never pressed when she could not answer. From that moment, Nimue hid nothing from him. And Merlin, in return, never named her gift before she was ready to bear it.
Like many of his generation, he believed history had been shattered by an ancient cataclysm — knowledge fractured, pathways broken, the dreamworld left dangerous and incomplete, reachable only through flawed ritual. Nimue disproved this simply by existing.
Under Merlin’s Care
In the waking world, Merlin became her guardian and mentor. He taught her letters, history, the old druidic traditions that remained — circles traced in ash, chants that honoured river and stone, meditative practices meant to still the mind and open it to deeper currents. Nimue was an attentive student, eager and curious, absorbing everything he offered with bright intensity. She trusted him completely, and in return, Merlin protected her from those who might have feared or exploited her strangeness.
But it was in the dreamworld that the true divide between them became apparent.
Through ritual and trance, Merlin learned to consistently walk the shallow edges of the dream. His methods were deliberate and exhausting — herbs burned low, symbols carved into wood, breath controlled until the world thinned and folded inward. It was an art passed down imperfectly through generations, more superstition than certainty, but it worked well enough for him to glimpse what lay beyond waking.
Nimue did not require any of it.
When she slept, she stepped through.
Where Sleep Becomes Passage
In the dreamworld, she was older than she appeared. Not wiser in any structured sense, but instinctive, fluid, moving through its currents as though she had always belonged there. She remembered nothing clearly — no past lives, no names, no histories — but fragments clung to her like mist. She knew which paths were dangerous. She understood how to shape small spaces for shelter. She recognised souls that carried weight across ages, even if she could not explain why.
Merlin taught what he could, and Nimue obeyed.
But only so much.
The pull of freedom, of curiosity unbound by rules, was constant. She drifted from lessons, exploring hidden depths, drawing shapes from the water that Merlin could not read, stepping into spaces his careful maps could not reach. When he tried to correct her, she would smile, half-innocent, half-knowing, and slip along her own path.
Where Merlin relied on ritual and caution, Nimue responded to the world itself. She learned by touch, by motion, by listening to the flow of things rather than imposing will. Like water slipping through fingers, she followed instruction and then flowed away, returning with insights he could barely comprehend. She moved faster than his lessons could catch up, laughed in the quiet places where he taught silence, and questioned the boundaries he drew. The dreamworld bent around her instinctively; rivers curved, fire flared, and reality itself seemed to adjust to her presence. She did not need him — she could create, not just navigate; shape, not just follow.
Yet no rivalry grew between them. Nimue respected Merlin deeply. He was careful, kind, and understood consequence even when his knowledge was incomplete. And he never sought to cage her, even as he realised how far beyond him she would one day grow.
Outgrowing the Map
Her drawings in the waking world became more intricate. Her wanderings in the dreamworld stretched farther, carried by a hum she could feel rather than hear. It led her to the lake, hidden behind shifting trees, alive and ancient. The water recognised only her; Merlin could not follow. There, Nimue found a space beyond maps, a place outside the rules of the dream itself.
Merlin watched, uneasy but proud. He saw something impossible taking shape, and knew he was witnessing a force older and deeper than any ritual.
In the waking world, she remained his student: attentive, curious, laughing, trusting. But now she visited him from the dream not as a pupil, but as a guide, bringing fragments back across a river he could no longer cross. He understood — painfully, clearly — that his role had changed. He was her anchor in the waking world, the one who remembered what she could not.
Merlin understood then what his true role had become. Nimue would go farther than he ever could — not through ambition, but through nature. Where she passed freely between worlds and returned with only instinct and residue, he remained behind to remember. Names, sequences, consequences — the things the dream took from her, it left with him. He became, in effect, her memory. He watched her drawings with a care bordering on grief, recognising not only what had yet to come, but what had already occurred beyond his reach.
This knowledge he carried quietly. If Nimue drifted too far, he would be the one who could call her back — not with power, but with remembrance.
The Lake: Threshold of Dreams
The lake Nimue discovered was not simply a place. It was a threshold of two directions.
To the waking world, it appeared as still, dark water — fed by no visible river, frozen in winter without ever cracking, reflecting sky and forest with unnatural clarity. Animals would not drink from it unless driven by thirst, and even then only briefly. Sound carried strangely near its shore. Time felt softened there, as though moments took longer to settle.Those who lived nearby told stories: of lights beneath the surface, of figures standing where water should have been deep, of voices carried on mist. None of them were wrong. None of them understood.
The lake existed where Tel’aran’rhiod brushed closest to the waking world, a scar and a seam left behind by the cataclysm that ended the Sixth Age. Beneath the surface, it was thin: the dreamworld pressed close, almost leaking into the waking world. For ordinary people, it was a gateway — a fragile conduit to Nimue’s dreaming self. To step into the lake was not to drown, but to be judged — not by morality or intent, but by resonance. The lake measured whether a soul could exist between worlds without tearing itself apart. Most could not. For them, the water remained only water. Others experienced confusion, disorientation, or dreams that bled dangerously into waking life.
Some returned changed. Some did not return at all. The lake did not kill them. It simply did not hold them.
In waking life, she remained at Merlin’s side, drawing endlessly, her hand tracing rivers, forests, and impossible landscapes. She remembered none of the lake, none of Avalon, yet the echoes of those nights left traces in her instincts: subtle gestures of care, patterns of intuition, the quiet shaping of futures she did not consciously know.
Thus was born the Lady of the Lake: a being of two worlds, a guardian of thresholds, the unseen hand that could guide extraordinary souls and shape destiny itself.
The Secrets of Avalon
The destruction in Tel’aran’rhiod during the previous Age finally revealed what had been masterfully concealed from even her own soul for many Turnings of the Wheel. Beyond the scar of the lake, Nimue discovered something more important than the crack between waking and dreaming worlds. She discovered an ancient bridge to a sublime world, accessible only by a Dreamweaver: the island realm of Avalon.
Avalon was an Infinity Space, formed in the minuscule gaps between the Pattern, first utilised and shaped in the Second Age by Alethea Maelsouvra during the War of Power, and hidden away before her disastrous attempt to seal herself to the Light. It was a margin — a place between endings and beginnings, outside of both the dreaming and waking worlds.
In older Ages it had been many things: sanctuary, vault, experiment. In this one, under Nimue’s care, it became something gentler: a holding place for futures not yet ready to unfold. Arthur would one day be brought there not to rule, but to heal. Others brushed its edges in dreams, guided by Nimue’s hand, only to forget upon waking. As such it became a whispered legend.
The Sword That Waited
It was in this realm that Nimue discovered Excalibur, forged not for conquest, but as a crystallisation of the Pattern itself: light shaped into purpose, a weapon designed to anchor a king whose soul would bear extraordinary weight. In Avalon, Nimue understood this instinctively. The sword did not answer to ambition or strength alone, but to balance: clarity of purpose, restraint in power, and the willingness to serve something greater than the self.
When the time came, she did not give Excalibur to Arthur.
She allowed it to be taken.
In myth, this became a woman rising from the lake, arm lifted, blade gleaming. In truth, it was the Pattern correcting itself — and Nimue, half-aware, acting as its threshold. Long before Excalibur rose from the lake, Arthur had already drawn a sword from stone. That blade proved his right to rule. This one would test whether he could endure it.
Her waking self never entered Avalon, never raised the sword, never consciously knew Excalibur. Yet the influence of these nights seeped into her drawings, her instincts, and her quiet attentions in the waking world: a hand that healed, a mind drawn to the lonely or gifted, subtle patterns of care she could not explain. The Lady of the Lake was her dreaming self; the girl at Merlin’s side was her anchor in the real world, a presence that bridged two lives without ever merging them.
A Wild Soul Taken Gently
The dream in those days was dangerous and broken. As she wandered and explored, Nimue reshaped fractured parts of the landscape and created pockets of calm where frightened souls could rest, or nightmares could be softened until they lost their teeth. Sentinels hummed at the edges, repairing and redirecting the lost, but they never acknowledged her. They were merely figures caught at the corner of the eye, and the province of something more ancient. Instead Nimue was ever drawn to the dreams of the living, watching from the Inbetween Place of stars.
It was in this wilderness that she first found him: a small boy with a restless heart, raw potential, and a dangerous gravity in his aura. His name was Lancelot. His father was dead, and the world around him could not contain his energy, his longing, his unspoken fear of the strength he did not yet understand. His dreams were loud, and Nimue saw in him the echoes of the chaos she had known centuries before: untamed, impulsive, capable of great harm if unchecked. Yet she also recognised a soul that could endure, that could be shaped without being broken.
When she found the boy, she did not simply guide him as she did many others; she drew him physically into the dream. To leave him exposed to a world he did not understand, a soul so bright and wild, felt intolerable in a way she could not articulate. The lake became the conduit. Grief, exhaustion, and the thinness of the veil did the rest. There, the currents of Tel’aran’rhiod embraced him safely, allowing him to step fully into a space where he could learn, grow, and survive.
For one of the few times in all her lives across the Ages, she became a mother.
Nimue did not seek to restrain his nature. She knew that to cage a soul was to destroy it. Even as she guided she was playful, curious, and uncontainable. She laughed when he misstepped, let him race beneath starlit skies on spectral steeds, allowed him to stumble and learn. Her power was immense, but she exercised it with care; she was a guardian, not a jailer. She created forests, rivers, and refuges that honed his senses, taught consequence, and shaped courage. Through touch, gesture, and quiet example, she taught him to feel the weight of his actions, the threads of consequence, the careful balance between freedom and care.
Arondight, Shaped in Dream
She shaped Arondight for him in the dream, a presence that grounded him, taught him precision, strength, and honour. With it, he learned that power without discipline could destroy, that instinct and restraint must coexist.
Her lessons were playful, fierce, and patient. She nurtured his wildness, teaching him to move boldly without endangering what he cherished. And all the while, beneath her mentorship, was a quiet, personal longing: to care for a wild, free soul once more, to love and protect someone she instinctively understood, and to restore, in some measure, what she had lost in an Age she could no longer recall.
The Letting Go
When the time came, Nimue sent him back to the waking world, sword in hand, heart tempered, spirit untamed. Her heart was both heavy and proud. She remained behind as she must, guardian and witness, holding the echoes of his freedom, and knowing that what she had given him — wildness, honour, love — would live in him always. Through dreams, Nimue would protect him for the rest of his life, reaching out to him whenever she sensed he needed it.
Meanwhile in the waking world, she bore the residue of Nimue’s nights. At Merlin’s side she drew constantly, sketching rivers, forests, starry skies, and impossible landscapes she could not name. Occasionally, her sketches hinted at prophecy — lines and patterns that even Merlin could not fully interpret, though he recognised the fingerprints of powerful souls moving in secret, and began to wonder. She did not remember her guidance of Lancelot or other souls, and yet her instinctive compassion shaped her actions: even awake she was always drawn to the lonely, the gifted, the endangered.
At the King’s Side, Unseen
As she became a young woman, Nimue continued to move quietly at Merlin’s side. She was his ward and student, attentive and curious, absorbing the remnants of lost lore and ritual wherever they went. When Merlin journeyed to Arthur’s court at Camelot, she travelled with him.
At Arthur’s court, Nimue’s strangeness took on a quieter shape. She sketched endlessly: swords wreathed in light, crowns half-submerged in water, figures standing at the centre of widening circles. Merlin learned to watch the drawings closely. He noticed patterns — the repetition of symbols, the way certain lines always converged, the way her hand lingered when she drew Arthur, even before his kingship was secure.
She moved through the halls of Camelot like a small, bright current in a still pond: easily overlooked, but impossible to ignore once noticed. She spent hours in the libraries, poring over texts, sketching patterns in margins, tracing the glint of sunlight on armour, the curve of a horse’s neck, or the shimmer of water in the castle moat. Even the mundane — a candle flame, a folded banner, a knight’s restless pacing — became a thread she recorded in careful, compulsive detail.
Nimue was not a noblewoman, and she never sought status. Her presence was tolerated because Merlin vouched for her, and tolerated she was; but her strangeness fascinated as much as it unsettled. Courtiers whispered that she had eyes that saw too much, that she smiled as if she knew secrets they could not imagine. She did not speak prophecy aloud, did not lecture, and never corrected anyone openly — her influence was subtle, a gentle bending of attention and circumstance rather than overt interference.
Arthur noticed her. Not immediately — kings are often preoccupied — but over time, he came to value the small, quiet attentions of the girl who seemed to notice everything. She never flattered him, never praised him, and never drew attention to herself. And yet she listened, remembered details he had overlooked, and sometimes left small sketches where they might catch his eye: the pattern of banners in the courtyard, a sword wreathed in light on a page of parchment, the shape of the lake reflected in a window.
He did not know why he felt he could trust her completely. She offered no guidance, yet her presence brought clarity. She never intruded on councils or knightly duties, but she was always at Merlin’s side when the king sought counsel. In private moments — a walk along the walls, a quiet pause by the gardens, or a shared moment in the library — Arthur spoke with her as he might with Merlin himself: tentatively, aware she might perceive more than she let on.
Her relationship with Arthur was one of subtle guardianship and silent companionship. She did not command his destiny, but she made it possible for him to see the patterns others missed. And while she never revealed the Lady of the Lake’s power, her waking self carried the residue of her dream self’s insights: she instinctively guided without telling, protected without showing, and shaped moments that would later echo in Arthur’s memory as intuition rather than intervention.
She was, in every sense, a constant presence — neither knight, nor seer, nor adviser, but someone who understood the weight of the throne without seeking it, and who made its burdens just slightly lighter without ever revealing the depth of her own strength.
What the Hand Draws, the World Remembers
Excalibur appeared often in her work long before it was claimed: rising from still water, light refracted through mist. Nimue never knew what she drew. To her, they were only images that wanted to exist. To Merlin, they were fragments of destiny bleeding through the veil.
He never told Arthur their meaning. Some knowledge, he understood, must arrive as choice, not warning.
Nimue’s art traced the hidden threads of Camelot. Crowns, circles, and spirals recurred around Arthur, marking the trials and burdens that awaited him. The sketches were never warnings; they were fragments of a pattern unfolding, subtle signposts that only the world would later recognise. She watched Arthur with the same quiet attentiveness she gave all fragile, powerful things. She saw the loneliness beneath his crown, the way duty narrowed his choices, the slow tightening of destiny around him. In dreams, she repaired fractures left by his victories. In waking life, she said little, offering only presence, small kindnesses, and art she did not understand.
If Arthur ever wondered why the Lady of the Lake seemed to favour him, the answer was simple:
Even without knowing how, she sensed the cost he would pay.
To Arthur and the knights, she remained the quiet, sweet, curious woman at Merlin’s side. To Merlin, she was both student and anomaly, a child of two worlds whose waking hands carried echoes of the extraordinary.
The Lady Unrecognised
At Arthur’s court, Nimue saw Lancelot again.
She did not know him.
Yet the face was familiar, insistent. Something in the shape of his jaw, the tilt of his shoulders, the restless gleam in his eyes — she had seen it before. Long ago, in dreams she could not remember.
To her waking self, he was only another bright, wounded soul drawn into Merlin’s orbit: dangerous, loyal, restless. Still, an instinctive pull drew her attention. Her hand moved almost of its own accord, sketching him endlessly: a knight reflected in a pool, a blade catching sunlight, a figure poised between forest and crown. The drawings were familiar, intimate, and impossible — echoes of a life she did not remember living.
Merlin noticed.
He said nothing.
He alone understood the cruelty of remembering. To know yet not know, to feel yet remain silent — this was the burden of Nimue’s dual life. In the dreamworld, she continued to watch over Lancelot, unseen and unremembered. She mended fractures left by battle, softened the edges of nightmares, and offered solace that he never recognised.
In the waking world, her influence lingered in quieter ways. A glance held a fraction longer, a drawing lingered on his likeness, a heart quickened at small signs of danger or restlessness she could not explain. She could not warn him, guide him, or even speak of the connection she felt. Her attachment was distilled into instinct, expressed only through her art and attention.
And Lancelot, unknowingly, carried her care with him. He never knew why sleep brought him peace where waking brought only conflict. A strange calm that followed him into battle, a sense of being watched over — inexplicable, protective, certain. When doubt gnawed at him, the dream responded: a quiet lake, a familiar path, a sense of being held even when he could not say by whom.
He only knew that somewhere, impossibly, he was still being protected.
Nimue remained at court until the end, curious and gentle, considered odd but not unwelcome. Merlin shielded her from scrutiny, guarding her secret as fiercely as she had guarded Lancelot in the dream. She moved among the knights with quiet attentiveness, sketching, observing, and letting her instincts shape her actions.
Her connection to Lancelot remained a silent chord stretching across the waking and dreaming worlds, a thread that tied them together without ever revealing itself. She could not speak it aloud, could not act on it openly — yet it remained, folded into her presence, her sketches, her quiet attentiveness, a whisper of prophecy in every line.
When Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair was exposed, the court shattered loudly.
Nimue did not.
She felt it first as a wrongness in the air — the tightening of threads she had sketched years before without understanding them. What others experienced as scandal or betrayal, she felt as inevitability finally taking form. Something she had seen in fragments, in symbols she never learned to name, had completed its arc.
In the waking world, Nimue was heartbroken — though she could not say why.
She had always known Lancelot as dangerous and loyal in equal measure, a soul pulled too tightly between devotion and desire. She had always known Guinevere carried a sorrow beneath her crown. But now those instincts resolved into grief. Not moral outrage. Not anger. Grief.
She did not judge them.
She had learned too early — from dreams she did not remember, from prophecies she could not speak — that love, when ungoverned, could destroy as surely as any blade.
And yet, some part of her had always hoped they might escape that truth.
The Lady’s Lament
In the dreamworld, Nimue felt the rupture like a wound reopening.
In the dream, she continued to watch him as she always had. She smoothed the places where his violence tore at him. She quieted the nights when guilt and longing threatened to hollow him out. When his honour warred with his love, the dream offered no answers — only stillness, a familiar lake, the sense that something older and kinder had not abandoned him.
When Lancelot left at last, broken and wandering, Nimue did not follow.
She watched from the margins of the dream as he walked onward — wounded, alive, still choosing honour even when it cost him everything. That, more than any triumph or absolution, told her that what she had done had mattered.
The Pattern had taken him from her twice. Once as a child, when she released him back into the world. Once as a man, when she released him from hope.
And both times, she let him go.
This was the final lesson she carried from him:
That to love a wild soul was not to hold it,
but to shape the ground it walked upon,
and trust it to find its own way forward.
The Quiet Distance
After Lancelot’s fall from grace, something in Nimue shifted.
Not sharply. Not all at once. There was no dramatic severing, no argument, no final moment Merlin could point to and name. Instead, she began to grow quieter. Her drawings changed first — fewer figures, more water, more unfinished circles that never quite closed. She slept longer. She wandered farther from the heart of court, lingering at thresholds: doorways, gardens, riverbanks, places where one thing became another.
Merlin noticed.
He understood, with a familiar ache, what she was learning.
Nimue had always been drawn to the gifted and the doomed, but Lancelot’s story taught her a harder truth: even perfect care could not undo a destiny already in motion. She had shaped him gently, loved him fiercely, protected him across years and worlds — and still the Pattern had bound him, as it had bound others before him. What she felt was not failure, but recognition. This was the cost of attachment for one who could see too much and remember too little.
She did not stop loving Merlin.
But she began to withdraw from him.
Where once she brought him fragments from the dream — images, intuitions, half-formed warnings — she now kept more of them to herself. Not out of secrecy, but out of restraint. She had learned that knowledge did not always save. Sometimes it only deepened the wound.
Merlin, for his part, did not press her.
He had taught her caution, consequence, patience — and now she was learning them in ways he could not soften. He saw that she was moving toward a solitude he could not follow, not because she no longer needed him, but because she had begun to understand the limits of guidance itself. Where he had once been her anchor, he was now her last tie to a world she was slowly preparing to leave.
Their affection remained. Their trust remained.
But the balance had changed.
She no longer leaned on him. She stood apart, listening to currents only she could hear.
The Once and Future Ending
Camelot did not fall all at once.
It unravelled.
The exposure of Guinevere and Lancelot did not destroy the kingdom by itself — it merely revealed how strained the Pattern had already become. Alliances frayed. Knights chose sides. Old loyalties hardened into law, and law into punishment. Arthur, who had spent his life holding others together, found that there was no longer any space left to bend.
Nimue watched it happen with quiet sorrow.
In the dream, she felt the land tiring. The rivers lost their patience. The margins of Tel’aran’rhiod grew brittle around the places where men fought without hope of reconciliation. Camelot, which had once burned bright with possibility, dimmed into something heavy with inevitability.
She did not intervene.
This was the hardest lesson of all.
When Arthur was wounded — struck down not only by steel but by the accumulated weight of betrayal, loss, and impossible expectation — Nimue was already waiting. The lake answered her call as it always had. The threshold opened, not in defiance of death, but in acknowledgement of what still might be preserved.
Arthur was not taken to Avalon to rule.
He was taken there to rest.
Avalon received him as it was meant to receive all such souls: not as a reward, not as an escape, but as a pause. A place outside time where the Pattern could loosen its grip, where a king who had carried too much could set the burden down.
In the waking world, it became a story: a king borne away by a woman of the lake, a promise of return.
In truth, it was an act of mercy.
And Nimue, having learned the cost of love and the limits of intervention, remained at the threshold — not grieving, not triumphant, but changed. She had become what the world required of her: not a saviour, not a ruler, but a keeper of endings gentle enough to allow beginnings to one day follow.
When the water stilled once more, she stepped back into the margins of the world — neither fully present nor fully gone. In the waking world, her name faded into rumour. In the dream, her work continued quietly: mending fractures, guarding thresholds, watching for souls that burned too brightly for their own good.
Lancelot walked on alone.
He never returned to the lake, though at times he dreamed of it — a place of stillness, of forgiveness without words. In those dreams, he felt no judgement, only the sense that something immeasurably kind had once believed in him.
That was enough.
And so the Age passed.
Lady of the Lake: Keeper of Thresholds
Nimue became the Lady of the Lake in both myth and memory: guardian of Avalon, keeper of Excalibur, and watcher at the margins of fate. She did not rule kingdoms or command armies. She stood where worlds thinned, where choice mattered, and where souls crossed thresholds they could not yet name.
She bridged waking and dreaming, not as a queen or a god, but as a constant presence — guiding those of rare weight, tending fractures in the Pattern, sheltering what could not yet endure the world as it was. She protected the dangerous without destroying them, and the fragile without binding them.
She was neither fully mortal nor fully divine. She was a Dreamweaver: a keeper of the between, a quiet architect of destiny, and a reminder that not all power announces itself.
And by day, she remained only a woman who drew.
Some stories remember her as a woman rising from water, arm outstretched, blade gleaming.
Others remember nothing at all.
Both are true.
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