23 || Full Circle

                                    

                                          
Based on Season 1, Episode 22: It's About Time
(Unedited, 4858 words)
Trigger Warnings: Fight scenes, injury descriptions, trauma, intense moments

I rarely have dreams that are not mine. 
When I have recollection dreams— which are just what I call dreams born from memories—, the memories that bring the dreams forth are almost always undoubtedly mine. Memories like those from my coven often bring good dreams, while those from moments in Camelot and at Killahead and in the England Trollmarket bring nightmares. 
Regardless of where the memory comes from, typically it is mine. 
Last night, it wasn't. 
After I got home from the antique store, I curled up on my couch and read my recollection and retelling of my fight with Angor Rot, which I imprinted detail by detail in my spell book. I wrote of his arrival, which was accompanied by a sudden outbreak of nightmares and unexplainable deaths of plants in the coven. My cursive writing tells tales of the days I spent waiting for the dark omens to produce their challenger. I knew then that whoever— or whatever— was coming was headed to the coven in search of the wounded Trollhunter. I knew the challenger would never find where we had hidden the warrior, but if the man was half as bad as the nightmares that plagued our sleepless nights, I knew he would tear the coven apart looking for him. 
My retelling begins with the omens and follows my every step. From the moment I saw his golden eyes through the fog in the dense wooded area just north of our camp to the moment my foot pressed against his chest with blood dripping down my face and a defeated look on his, I wrote about every detail. 
I couldn't tell you now exactly what I was searching for in the story, but I knew I didn't find it. So, I turned to different accounts of the fight. A five-sentence scribble in a little girl's old diary, a local village report about the "environmental disturbances"— otherwise known as Angor Rot siphoning the energy of the forest, even a mother's verbal account to a traveler warning him to steer clear of the ocean's shore. All the accounts are spread across the books throughout my living room, hidden amongst millions of tales that have nothing to do with me. I find them all, scavenging for something. 
When none of the accounts produced the information I sought— which I still don't remember—, I turned to a more... questionable source. A historian's twisted thoughts on "mythology", laid out in a perfectly incorrect retelling of the story of Camelot, King Arthur, and Morgana. Trolls have been removed completely from the explanation, but near the end, there was a chapter named "Morgana's Tribe". It is a collection of photographs of markings left on rocks located at the sites of great battles. The historian claims they were tribal wars, but from the old pictures of cut stone and destroyed ecosystems surrounding them, I knew the fights were between Angor Rot and his victims instead. There was no mention of the troll by name, nor the magic he used, but the captions held translations of the markings, and many of them were "Morgana". 
Except they weren't, which I found out after recognizing one of the symbols and remembering it from the book on markings and the dictionary. It was midnight when I discovered this, but from that moment on, I was not tired. 
I spent four hours sifting through the symbols, finding that what the historian called "the spelling of Morgana in various unknown languages" was actually a retelling of Angor Rot's story in one language. And it was a language I could translate. 
Even after the four hours of translating, all I had were broken sentences. The pictures had been taken out of order in relation to the time period they occurred in, and the dates of many were mislabeled by one or hundreds of years. I spent another few hours piecing together the story, and by the time I had finished, the sun was rising.