“Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy;
He walked with dreams and darkness, and he found
A doom that ever poised itself to fall,
An ever-moaning battle in the mist,
World-war of dying flesh against the life,
Death in all life and lying in all love,
The meanest having power upon the highest,
And the high purpose broken by the worm.”

                   Idylls of the King, Lord Tennyson


Name:  Emrys Hawthorn
Nicknames: If he had friends they might call him Em (M) or possibly Em's (M’s).
Reincarnate of: Merlin
Age: 25

Powers:
• Intuitive – While he hasn’t recovered his prophetic abilities, Emrys is incredibly intuitive and can often predict the thoughts of others and the outcome of events with an uncanny accuracy.  With it, he's often able to recognize the potential in others, allowing him to guide them to their best futures and hopefully away from their worst.  However, it also comes with a perpetual sense of deja vu and dread, as though whatever is happening has already happened or whatever is going to happen is already set, leaving him moody and a bit off, like he's always one step behind.
• Empathy – An offshoot of his intuition, he’s often able to sense someone or something’s mood, though sometimes, he's caught up in it, sometimes mirroring it himself, though most often reflecting it back to them in reverse.
• Technojinx – As much weakness as power, technology just doesn’t seem to like him very much.  Unless it has moving parts, like a cassette tape player or an old fashioned typewriter, it’s not likely to work for him or even near him.  Sometimes, this could be an advantage.  For instance, electronic locks might open at his touch, ATMs might give him money for free, digital security cameras might not capture his image, etc.

Untapped Powers:
• Shapeshifting – Once upon a time he was famous for his ability to change his appearance and the appearances of others.  While he’s taken on different forms in his dreams, he’s never actually done so consciously or in real life.
• General Magic – The one area he’s yet to study, though he’d be a natural if he ever tried.

Skills:
• Extremely well read – He has read and continues to read constantly.  He knows most of the classic philosophers, well known and obscure poets, the history of most civilizations in world and information on numerous other topics.

Abilities:
• Animal Friend - As a result of his empathy, he’s able to befriend animals easily and while he can’t literally communicate with them it almost seems like it since he’s able to understand them so well.
• Green Thumb – Like with animals, he can’t literally talk to plants, but he’s able to sense what they need and has great success growing just about anything.

Description:

Emrys doesn’t seem overly concerned about his appearance, letting his hair grown shaggy and wearing it disheveled more often than not.  Similarly, he doesn’t bother to shave daily, only every few days when it starts to itch and remind him it’s there.  He’s more comfortable in casual clothes, jeans and simple shirts, though he’s just as liable to throw on a mismatched sweater or jacket when the mood strikes him.  He doesn’t own a tie, but owns a dress shirt or two and a couple of sport coats which he usually only breaks out when he thinks it will help blend in a little.

At 5’10”, 160lbs, he’s lean, but not skinny, his time in the military not quite worn off despite the fact that his exercise routine consists of raising pints of beer more than lifting weights, his physique maintained due to a healthy diet and disdain for vehicles more than anything else.

He has two tattoos, one on each arm, the left ‘hic et nunc’, literally ‘here and now’, the other, in Greek, from Corinthians 10:23, translates as ‘everything is permitted, but not everything is beneficial.’

Perhaps his most striking features are his eyes, which shift from green to blue dependent on his mood, growing warmer and colder as his interest focuses and fades, the more colorful, the more interested he is in whatever might be within his gaze.

Personality:

Emrys is a slave to his moods and to a certain degree, the moods of others.  Volatile by nature, he’s usually jovial and friendly, but can quickly become judgmental and distant.  He gets bored easily, so usually fills his time with activity, either reading, playing music, exploring the city, observing people, meeting women, talking with animals, tending to his plants.  The what doesn’t matter much, so long as he isn’t idle.

He also tends to get bored because he can often tell where something is going before it gets there.  That’s often true of conversations and he has a tendency to finish sentences for people when they are ‘too slow’ or he becomes distracted and starts looking for other things to interest him.  Fortunately, he realizes that would be impolite and has learned to mask his indifference.  With that, he can seem charming and engaged, even when he isn’t really.  However, if something does catch his interest, if he sees something to learn, meets someone exciting to get to know or an opportunity to expand his knowledge and understanding of the way the world works, he can be intensely focused and driven.

To that end, he’s driven by an idea and an ideal.  He’s seen the worst of mankind and is searching for the best.  He stands on the edge of idealism, cynicism whispering in his ear, ‘fool’, but he’s still young enough to imagine a better world, one of fairness, justice and peace and hopes he can somehow be part of it.

History:

The world turns, each revolution, each day a passage from light to dark to light again.  The moon orbits, each full moon the peak of life, each new moon death and rebirth.  The Earth circles the sun, each year another chance to restart again.  To him, those cycles were just the blink of an eye, his life measured in ages, not years.  But he understood cycles all the same.  Even he was held to follow them, growing old and powerful with age, only to reverse direction at the end, to grow younger, weaker, until he was babe, cradled in the arms of the Earth till he could walk the land again.

He’d been at his peak when he’d first met Uther, had granted him the power to bed Ygraine and had first brought Excalibur into the world of man.  Like the full moon, he’d been ancient and old at the time, his hair just as white, his skin just as powdery, his presence strong enough to move the tides.  He was growing younger while Arthur was coming into manhood.  Younger still as Camelot was born.

He was near a boy himself when he gave into her, the woman who would be his downfall.  Perhaps that was why he’d let it happen, the impetuousness of youth taking over, desire driving him to share his secrets even though he knew it would lead to his end, imprisoned in Hawthorn for all time.

Of course, ‘all time’ was a very very long time, long enough for magic to leave the world, for history to become legend, for even Merlin to forget and imprisonment to end.

He grew young in that Hawthorn, then grew old.  He grew young then old, old then young, time and time again as the centuries passed.  The thorns tore at his skin and he forgot everything except for that pain and the dream that was lost when Camelot fell.  Young and old, old and young, the world passed him by.  Kingdoms rose and fell, nations came and went, civilizations advanced and declined.

He might have slept through yet another life had a young woman not come upon his bush.  She lived in the local village and had been out gathering hawberries for jam.  The plant shook ever so slightly as she picked the berries one by one, the thorns pricking his infant body causing him to cry out and wail.  Shocked, she dug him out of the bush and carried him home.

After months of searching, no parents were found for the Hawthorn boy and he was consigned to an orphanage.  After such an inauspicious start, life wasn’t easy for him growing up.  He was always different from the other children.  “The devil’s in him,” some of the nuns would say, and they weren’t far wrong.  It didn’t help that he was more likely to talk to the trees or a stray cat than other children, or that whenever he got near a television or computer it seemed to switch channels randomly or crash without warning.

For the most part he was content to be left alone, happy to find a quiet place and read, though before he was a teen he’d read through the entire library of the orphanage and most of the books at the library in town.  It wasn’t until he was a teenager that his interest shifted to other things, namely girls.  Most of the other children at the orphanage were younger than him, few reaching teenage years without finding adoptive parents, but he’d found ways to slip out under the noses of the nuns and learned to enjoy his freedom.  For a teenage girl, he was almost ideal, roguish; the sort of boy a parent would object to and yet learned enough to spout poetry or the more suggestive sort of words that could make a girl blush.  Still, for all his cleverness he was shortsighted and soon found himself in front of the Mother Superior, chastised for his behavior, for sullying the reputation of the church, the orphanage and more than a few of the more respectable young ladies in the community.

The Mother Superior had finally had enough of their devil child and threatened to have him sent off to a reformatory or the army, where his wayward behavior could be ‘corrected properly’.  Fearing imprisonment more than the army, he picked the latter and at the age of 16, enlisted, the Mother Superior, his defacto mother, happily giving consent.

In its own way, the army was exactly what he needed.  While he despised the structure and discipline of the army and was frequently in trouble with his commanding officers, the experience opened his eyes.  He’d grown up in isolation, in the idealistic world of books and the restrictive walls of the church, but now he’d seen the harsh realities of the world, the horrors of war and the devastation to people it wrought.  When he returned four years later, he set out to make things better, using the education stipend from the army to get an undergraduate degree in political science and hoping to one day find a way to avoid the future he foresaw, of continued war and the devastation of the Earth.

Now, in his first year of grad school, he’s a little bit wiser, a little more experienced and a little more focused.  He’s realized his personality is wrong for political office himself or even a direct role.  He’s too volatile, his background too sullied, his ideals too inflexible, but while he might not change the world, others could, with the right guidance, the right push.  And so, he’s looking forward to teaching, mentoring and meeting the undergrads and others who might just change the world in his stead.

Sample/ Intro Post: 

“Pfft,” he spat, waking up and batting away at the tail hitting him in the face.

“Ruined a perfectly good dream,” he complained, rolling over on his side, dragging the blankets along with him, dislodging the orange tabby from where she’d been sleeping alongside.

He rubbed his face as sleep faded from his mind, his hand reaching blindly for the nightstand, feeling around for a pen and the little journal.

The dream was nearly gone by the time he’d sat up enough to write it down.  He’d been flying over a city, a bright tower in the distance.  He’d felt proud, though he wasn’t sure why, only there was a cloud behind it.  He only jotted down the notes, flying, city, bright tower, proud.  The only full sentence was a line from a poem, “A storm was coming, but the winds were still.”

“Maybe it wasn’t such a good dream,” he told the cat, running his hand over her soft fur while she purred contentedly.

“Coffee,” he sighed, throwing his legs off the side of the bed and forcing himself up.

It was a small apartment, made smaller by the stacks of books piled on every surface.  Even the little breakfast counter had a pile or two, one of which would become a coaster when he made coffee.  He was old school where coffee was concerned.  Not totally old school, he had a mechanical grinder that you just pressed a button and it spun, but from there it was onto a French Press and a teakettle, the water boiling, the coffee soaking.  While he waited, he checked with Jonsey to see what she wanted for breakfast, tuna or turkey.  It wound up being beef that finally got her attention enough to leave the comforts of a warm bed for the cold kitchen floor.

By the time she was eating, his coffee was ready and he mixed it with cream and sugar and carried it to the little wrought iron balcony overlooking the city.  It wasn’t much of an apartment, he’d admit, but it sure had a hell of a view.