With All That I Am

Chapter One

Camelot was beautiful.

Even though she was quite a bit away from the actual citadel itself, Ethel still marveled at the beauty of the land from where she stood, on a small hill overlooking the woods, with a basket of herbs—filled to near the brim—near her feet.

Ethel had been living in Camelot for several months, having traveled from Ealdor to stay with Gaius as his apprentice. She had been interested in the art of healing for as long as she could remember. As a child, she used to gather random plants from the woods near her village and start guessing their names and uses. 

She remembered relating most of her findings to her younger brother once he was old enough to understand it. She must've talked about it a lot, probably too much in Merlin's eyes (she often caught him valiantly trying not to fall asleep in the middle of her ramblings, and the thought of whether or not he was trying not to hurt her feelings or because he was generally interested, but his older sister's ramblings putting him to sleep crossed her mind. She decided to keep those thoughts to herself and leave that up to him). She tried to talk to the other villagers about it back home. Still, usually, they only pretended to be interested (other than Merlin's friend, Will, who was one of the only people that Ethel would frequently talk to back home), and it wasn't as exciting to Ethel if that was the case.

She never really fit in at Ealdor. That much she knew. And neither did Merlin, despite Ethel's futile attempts to help with that. While Merlin had his magic, being capable of making things move before he even took his first steps, Ethel had a perfect memory and an even sharper mind, being able to learn new things fairly easily and recount relatively large bursts of information from memory.

It terrified and exhausted her sometimes. How she could remember the littlest things and her earliest memories so easily, while others were used to living their experiences and forgetting them without a moment's thought. But then she remembered the good memories, the ones that would put her mind at ease.

Merlin, at around six years of age, sitting next to her in the forest while a 10-year-old Ethel would draw large letters in the dirt (or paper, whenever their mother could find it), trying to teach him how to read. It would often irritate her since Merlin had such a short attention span most of the time, but then she would remember that it was probably because of his magic, so considering that her 'gift' was probably as much of a burden to her as his magic was to him, she couldn't bring herself to fault him for it.

Her father, a few months before he 'left,' wrapping her hand with a spare cloth after 'borrowing' his knife so that she could try and carve a wooden figure for him. She remembered how much she cried when she got the injury, which, at the time, hurt a lot. Combined with the disappointed look on her father's face when he was treating her injury, she also remembered seeing him whittle a wooden dragon for her, wanting to make him proud by doing the same.

 It was an ugly, misshapen thing, but her father treasured it, and Ethel still remembered that day well, reminiscent of her younger self swelling with pride at the thought of accomplishing something, making her father happy and proud of her. 

(She had lost the misshapen carving after her father left. Ethel was sure that he had taken it with him when the cloaks of red had been converging on Ealdor. She no longer had nightmares about that day, but her heart still hurt whenever she thought about it).

Ethel often wondered what it was like to be like Merlin. To have magic. The short attention span (honestly, there had been days where she wouldn't have minded that. Maybe she wouldn't get so many headaches if that were so). The clumsiness (well, to be fair, Ethel was just as prone to fits of clumsiness as Merlin was, although Merlin had an appalling attraction for trouble, even if it was usually unintentional, it was still the cause of most of Ethel's headaches). In hindsight, if she had ended up being born with magic like Merlin, Ethel figured she would be sleeping either 8 hours a week or be burned at the stake.