Sandra had pulled every string she had to be standing here atop Men-An-Tol at moonrise on this chilly fall day. With nuclear war imminent in the Middle East, most tourism had shut down. Even trips to places as innocuous as Cornwall were severely curtailed by increasingly oppressive and fearful governments. The fear of terrorist bombs prevalent at the turn of the millennium were nothing next to the thought of what some of the more recent power-mongers would do. The doomsayers of 2001 may have only been a decade or two off after all.

The moon crept higher. The beam on the ground lengthened, and still there was nothing. For the first time since her dreams had started, Sandra began to doubt. What if it were just an obsession, like Drew claimed? She removed the chain from her neck, dangling the sapphire in the orange glow through the stone circle. As it twisted in the breeze, she ran through the old, familiar argument again.

"You're crazy," Drew had said, when she had first mentioned wanting to visit Cornwall. "Your mother was crazy, and it's in your genes. You are overly obsessed with a chunk of stone and a family joke."

"It's not a joke, it's a legend. How do you know it isn't true?" Sandra nearly choked on the rising anger. The taste and intensity of it surprised her.

"Oh, right, you are the mythical," and here he spat out the word "mythical", "King Arthur's descendant. And Mordred's. Who'd want to be related to him anyway? Wasn't he the villain?"

She ignored this. "It doesn't explain my dreams, Drew. The sapphire. The standing stones. I recognized Men-An-Tol from the dream. And it's always the same dream."

"So you see this cool ruin on the internet, and you get fancy ideas. Big deal. Maybe you should be a writer. But it doesn't give you the right to go waltzing all over the place looking for Arthur's tomb. Especially not now." He gestured vaguely at the TV, at the black-screened ghost of the recent news of another bombing in the Middle East, and threats from the latest "Liberation Group" that atomic bombs were aimed at New York.

How could she explain to him the certainty, the rightness. that King Arthur needed her help to awaken him? When her mother had died, her father had given her the rosewood music box. Inside were the sapphire and the legend. How Mordred had stolen the sapphire from Excalibur's hilt to weaken Arthur's power, and entrusted it to his beloved serving girl. How Mordred had also left her with child before the last battle. How the serving girl had passed the jewel to her only daughter. Who passed it on to her only daughter. And so on, until finally it came to Sandra.

She was Arthur's descendant. It wasn't just wishful thinking. She knew it in her bones. The sapphire pulsed and glowed when she held it. It had never glowed for her father, never for her friends. Or for Drew.

And with the sapphire came the dreams. Dreams of a sleeping man, his arms folded across his chest, his sword hilt under the hands. The hilt was ornate, decorated with jewels of many different colors. But one was missing. A sapphire. Dreams of a large stone with a circle bored into it framing a rising moon. She would stand in the center of the standing stones, watching the moon rise until the beams just filled the hole of the central stone. And something would move in the light. And she would wake up.

The moon was higher now, lingering just over the horizon. She had had to wait, resenting the slow changes of orbital dynamics, as only during certain years was the moonrise framed by the stone at Men-An-Tol. But the time was now, and she was here. She watched the spinning sapphire, her faith renewed.

In the shaft of framed moonlight, something moved. Sandra's heart raced, but it was only a rabbit. As it hopped away, the moonlight skimmed the stone it had been sitting on. The glimmer off granite accented a square depression that had not been there during the day. Sandra fingered her sapphire, and went to investigate. The cool blue stone fit perfectly. The moonlight scattered off it in a spray of glitter.

A low rumble sounded. The great stone started to sink. Sandra grabbed her sapphire and ran to it. She swung herself inside the sinking circle and curled onto the inner rim. She looked up once more at the moon and watched it until the ground and the darkness swallowed her up.

The hallway was dimly lit. Sandra couldn't see how. A phosphorescent glow came from everywhere. The elevator or whatever it was floated back up to the surface once she had slipped off. Once her eyes adjusted, she could see the doorway, and, in its center, another small square indentation.  The door slid open as she pressed in the sapphire.

He was there, inside a transparent cylinder of some sort. A row of buttons lined one side. Some sort of life support system, then? She paused, not wanting to destroy anything accidentally. Sandra closed her eyes, and let images flow through her brain. Then she selected a set of buttons, and pushed. The transparent cover slid off. Her dream. He looked just like her dream.

He wasn't the old King Arthur that set sail for Avalon in all the legends, but younger looking. Black hair curled over his shoulders. He had a beard, but it, too, was black and short. His forehead and cheeks were smooth and tanned. Strong hands gripped a stunning sword hilt. Even in the green-yellow glow, Excalibur gleamed as if newly polished.

"King Arthur?" She wasn't sure how to wake him. Should she kiss him? It seemed silly. But then he stirred slightly, so she waited. His hands moved first, gripping the sword hilt. Then his eyes flew open, piercing green in the dimness. He struggled to sit up.

"Merlin?" he croaked. And then he saw her. "Morgan!" Excalibur was at her throat.

"Sandra," she managed to get out. "I'm Sandra."

The blade withdrew slightly. "Who are you? You could be her twin. How did you get here?"

She held out the sapphire. The blade fell. "From my mother. From Mordred."

King Arthur pointed to the floor. "Sit. Explain yourself. Mordred is dead. I saw him fall. There's no way he could have gotten to a stasis field in time with those wounds."

Sandra sat, and explained. The rosewood music box. The dreams. Her trip to Cornwall. To the chamber. "I thought, you see, with the world falling apart, and war any day now, if I could bring back King Arthur, bring back honor, and chivalry, and justice.." She looked at the sapphire, then up at the stony face.

"You lie. Mordred never had a child by a serving maid. Impossible." He was trying to convince himself, not her.

Sandra said wryly, "So, should I put the stone in the sword to prove  myself?"

He had the grace to laugh for a moment. Then he said, "You are in here, and to me that is proof enough that you are descended from one of Avalon. But you see, we cannot breed with the locals. We aren't supposed to breed with each other. Not yet. Not now. Mordred was. a mistake. A treachery." He looked at her. "Who brought you forward?"

"Brought me forward?"

"The Atlantis group is good, but even they can't arrange for one of us to have children by a local, not unless.." He trailed off. "Are you an only child? Is your line of descent from Mordred filled with only children?"

"Yes. All girls." Sandra had always wondered about that family trait.

"Yes, I see now how it could be done."

"I'm sorry, I only know what my mother told me." But he wasn't listening, he had gone over to one of the walls, and pushed a panel aside. It looked like some sort of computer display, though not like anything she'd ever seen used before. His hands flew about, pushing here, pulling there, and then he stared at the resulting glow. "Damn."

Sandra couldn't help it. "Did they swear like that at the Round Table?"

King Arthur glanced at her. "No.  I'm kept up to date on slang during stasis. It's what you would call subliminal programming. The computer has an audio link to the surface, to keep up with the current language. It's part of the time travel device. That and the anti-aging procedure."

"I thought time travel was proved impossible. Paradox problems and all that stuff."

"And I thought that we, as what are essentially different species from humans now, couldn't have children by them. Although apparently it's possible with some gene splicing. Morgan's project, I'll bet anything. But as for the time travel, you can't change the past, no. But you *can* change the future."

"I'm sorry, you aren't making any sense to me. Well, ok, a little sense, but I am clearly uh, behind the times? Ahead of the times? Are you saying you are from the past?"

"Well, I could hardly be from the future, could I now? Paradox would prevent it. Nothing paradoxical about changing the future, people do it all the time."

"But.. They didn't have all this stuff," her hand swept in the stasis chamber and the wall computer,  "in the Middle Ages. Or Dark Ages. Or whenever you supposedly 'lived'. I think historians would have known if they had."

"I forget you are actually a local. It's just so hard to believe Morgan managed cross breeding. No, we are from, well, long before Homo Sapiens, shall we say? We have a legend that we were brought here from alien planets. The Atlantians believe that, but Merlin and I are pretty sure we evolved here, and I think most of the Avalonites agree."

"Yes, I've heard both theories, too" said Sandra.

"I assure you, the current locals are exactly that. Local." He continued patiently, "When the world caught fire, only our top scientists, in isolated laboratories, survived. There were two rival research groups, Avalon, which was underground, and Atlantis, which was underwater. We were both working on stasis fields at the time. We think of them as time machines. To us, they would carry us into the future, when the world would be inhabitable again. When we awoke, we found it was, but that your kind had already taken over. The Atlantis group tried to interfere. We tried to stop them. We succeeded for a time, I think, though the Greek era was the hardest. We had to sacrifice our best man undoing the damage."

"And Merlin was one of your group?"

"Merlin is the head of Avalon group, yes. He's the one who should have awakened me. We have to take turns. One of us must always be awake, or the rest remain in stasis. I was supposed to have rejuvenated and awakened a hundred years ago. I barely made it to this secondary chamber as it was. When Mordred took the stone from Excalibur, he took my homing beacon. My link with Avalon."

"This thing?" She held up the glowing sapphire.

"We can replace it in Excalibur, and find Merlin with it." Each stone in Excalibur's hilt had separate functions, and more than one needed the sapphire to work properly.

"King Arthur," Sandra said, "how do you expect to carry a sword around and get away with it?"

They ended up pulling the other stones out of the hilt. Arthur led the way back to the surface, and Sandra led the way back to her little B&B. The owner was grateful for another customer, and didn't ask any questions when Sandra explained that Arthur was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms.

"I'll pick you up something quick tomorrow morning," said Sandra apologetically.

"Usually the sentry would provide clothes to the awakened," said Arthur. "I wasn't on schedule. Now, Merlin heard that the worst of the Atlantis crew was planning something for the 1900s. What's been going on in the world?"

Sandra asked, "Are the Atlantis crew the bad guys?"

"You could say that. They want to take over, to rebuild what we had. Avalon wants to see where this current species is headed. We're happy to let you obliterate yourselves, but we don't think you should have help."

Sandra was silent for a long moment, then launched into a halting recap of what she remembered about history since the 1900s. She was more firm about current events, however. "There's been a lot of petty fighting since the 1980's. Religious and racial. But since the 2010's, the Middle East in particular has escalated into a nightmare. We expect nuclear bombs at any moment." A digression while she explained nuclear bombs. "Most of it is the new movement, the New Liberation Group. I expect we've tried our best to assassinate their leader. Without his charisma fueling the chaos, I think we might manage to calm things down a bit. But you can see for yourself."

Sandra turned on the TV. The New Liberation Group was, as usual, in the news, with their leader still talking about bombing New York. Arthur sat up, and stared at the screen.

"These images, they are accurate representations?"

"Pretty much, yes."

He took one of the diamonds, and held it up to the screen. It glowed crimson. "I thought he had died on the battle field. He should have died, there wasn't time to save him."

"You mean that's." Sandra stared now too.

"Yes. That's Mordred. I only hope there is still time. We have to locate Merlin and Avalon right away."

Sandra thought of ID cards, passports, and security checkpoints. Of the fear. Of Drew, alone at home and waiting for her. Of the daughter they might someday have, if there was a someday. Of the legend of Merlin, trapped by Nimue. Was Nimue an Avalonite or Atlantian? Or just a legend?

"We'll go down to Tintagel Castle tomorrow, and ask where Merlin is hiding," she said at last. "They know all the legends there. They aren't always right, but it's a place to start."

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