Today's flash fiction #MerlinsUltimateRival

“I can see my house from here!”

Icarus*

Did much housework today to prepare for Thanksgiving while also getting my haircut. I may now look into a magic mirror and say, "Who is the handsomest in all the land?" and it will probably not say me but I'll be close!

Merlin's Ultimate Rival

      Merlin's rival isn't a wizard who duels the powerful mighty mage. The powerful opposite of Merlin gets the immortal, world traveling wizards in other ways. Merlin's rival doesn't torment Merlin by trying to transform into a toad as Merlin would do with one of his enemies(he has tried to do so to his rival).

No, Merlin's rival wouldn't torment people with curses or transformations like Merlin would. He would summon talking chickens that would quote your favorite movies until you hated them and he ruined your favorite movies forever. The chickens would be everywhere and be protected with the most powerful enchantments so neither the powers of the magic or the mundane could get rid of them. Try to banish them with a spell and it would fall. Try to shoot them and another would appear.

        Where Merlin was an old sage with years of training his rival was a kid that stumbled upon the powers of the gods by circumstance in his world and started to travel more worlds to gather more. All to bother people like Merlin. When Merlin tried to make him his second apprentice he responded with “Nyeh!” and then used his magic to redirect Merlin's phone call to a pet store.

        The rival's name is Suritix. The mighty prankster wizard likes to have the nickname “Sur” mostly because it's easy and he can hear people say “Yes Sur!” to him. Merlin refuses to talk about the wizard and the prankster child just pops throughout the universes so mostly he has become a rumor instead of fact to people. After all who would believe in a child wizard that rivals Merlin and turned a dragon to the size of a chihuahua just to keep it as a pet.

His immortality is through not preservation of the body through enchantments and reincarnation like Merlin but through time manipulation on his body. So really his body is always the body of the child that discovered the power of the gods in his world and his memories are now locked in his soul. It's a strange happening. It made a being that decided to invite challenge Loki to a pranking contest. The subject was Merlin.

Loki won. Suritrix may have pranked Merlin with an elaborate spell that summoned a parade of strange animals while Merlin was napping scaring him crazy and convincing him he had started to lose his mind. But Loki topped Merlin by posing as a powerful angel telling Merlin that Suritrix was dead and providing fake evidence and taking embarrassing pictures of him dancing a silly and giddy jig and then showing them to Suritrix in front of Merlin a few days later. Suritrix pranked. But he couldn't be the prankster god at his own game.

       Suritrix wasn't a purely malicious child. He was Merlin's opposite. The god's energy in his world pulled out the thoughts in his mind when he entered the old cave where their power was hidden and he stumbled upon it. He had recently watched several cartoons which gave him the morals of being silly and going after villains and punishing them. With his amazing powers he never pranked “good” people. Though he would go around the universes punishing villains with his magic in silly ways no matter how demented that silliness was. He fixated on the wrathful wizard Merlin often because the old sage embodied the opposite of his cartoons. Suritrix never found out about Merlin's good side because he saw Merlin as the old wizard villain that turned everyone into toads at a moments notice. Which in many ways that is what he was. So the prankster would dole out his punishment then travel to another world like Merlin would and maybe come back in a day, week, month, year or decade or even a hundred. He had the powers to follow Merlin even when Merlin reincarnated. The child preserved in a time bubble would follow the wizard no matter where he went and would vanish here and there. A ghost on dimensional winds.

        But the prankster fought demons, supervillains and so much more across so many worlds. Though his opposite Merlin attracted him like a magnet at times and was like a home. In many ways because when Suritix took the power of the gods of his world he destroyed it and he could feel it in his gut, although he had no proof, that Merlin had been the one who had sealed the gods in that world in the first place.