Written and Illustrated by Adam Martin

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Arthurian Coagula
Written & Illustrated by Adam Martin
adammartinart.uk
(+44) (0) 7580 069 410
adam@adammartinart.uk
© Adam Martin, 2017.

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Contents-
Prelude- 8
The World- 11
The Presence- 17
The Art- 23
Year Zero- 29
Genesis- (Design sketches, unfinished
work and research.)- 34

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5. 8 9
Breathe.
These words I am about to speak, do your best to take them in. If
they become the last thing for which I am known for, then so it shall
be.
The rock is still above me, unmoving, unchanging, forever stoic in
keeping me from escape. It is my prison, prolonging my suffering,
making me crawl out of my own skin. I scratch my name upon the
gnarled and slimy stone hanging over me so that someone may real-
ise I was once here far beyond my fragile remains. But I take comfort
in the apple trees that wallow and creek outside.
A sodden rag lies upon my withering body, a second hide, heaving
and weighing me down with a thousand chains as much as it brings
me warmth in the hollow darkness.
The precious chest is still beside me, safe and away from digging
fingernails and prying eyes, but still miles away from its home, where
my quest once lead, before I was trapped inside of here.
There is wind outside; a sweet chill for a sweeter song that the crows
cry.
I can only dream of what has come before, careful not to be caught
lingering upon all that could have been, thoughts that erode away at
me with time.
I don’t want to say farewell, nor shall I, not yet. These memories
will flow through me as lifeblood, all that I now have. Listen, take a
minute to breathe from the storm that I know is outside, and keep
me alive.

6. 10 11
The World

7. 12 13
I kept myself a tidy occupation in the weariness of the flesh, tussling
incessantly with one single enigma that would flicker past my mind’s
eye, a recurring dogma, an infinite loop, an obsessive compulsion
that I could not refuse to prod with a brittle stick. ‘What is the
world?’ I would ponder, as I stumbled across the moors, tor to tor,
bog to bog, village to village.
Is it the earthly plane we stand upon, or a blast of dirt that pricks at
our eye? The flicker of a light bulb? Or is it a construction of our own
internal thoughts, fear, hate, love, politics, religion? Some call it a
place in time, with no end or beginning and yet despite this, it has
ended many times before. Falling stars from the sky and dark plagues
and great wars prove this, each unto itself a singular apocalypse,
breaking down and birthing something anew.
‘And lo, a new horizon peers over the craggy peak of the black
mountain top whose shadow we cower behind!’

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In my life I have never experienced an apocalypse, and yet I cannot
ignore that which I feel crawling beside, a predator reaching through
the shadows, scratching at our heels, baying in the hollow emptiness.
There is desolation and decay that belies the still beauty of nature
that this creature wants to snatch away, the patter of rainfall and the
lapping of the leaves. I must focus and recount to myself in order to
retain my own will, my powers.
No suffering I endure eternal
No unjust words I convey
I must reach the soil of Avalon
And lead this rapture astray.
So, what is the world anyhow? Is it the dirt we stand upon, or the air
we breathe, or the ideas we muse? I finally know the answer now,
after my many years of theorising. I know the world. The world is
magic, and it is ending.

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The Presence

10. 18 19
Most believe that darkness
and shadows are essentially
evil, but they are not. They
are necessary universal
forces.
It is what is done in the
shadows that gives them a
reputation. A safe refuge
where beings of ill intent
take their seats.
The Presence. Their minds
have been warped under a
false
pretense, that they must
smother the embers of an
apparently
overdue conflict between
science and magic, that will
end in global
catastrophe.
If they find me and end my
life then they will be able to
find peace, a new utopia, as
I am the last spark for which
‘the world no longer has
room for.’
Ganymede, she is the true
threat, their figurehead and
idol, brimming with eternal
delusion and hate. A woman
for a cause, and the cause is
purely corrupt.
Rumors spread that as a
child, though hard to imagine
such a time, she was taught
by her own mother to take
everything she ever said as
lies. Thus from the very day
she was born, her soul was
vacant. So demons moved in,
to fill the void.
I have barely seen her in the
flesh, but her gaze is one not
soon forgotten, for how else
could she manipulate and
amass such a large force to
which no crown or authority
can answer?
She has them all on her side.
The black mass.
The swarm of flies.
The Presence.

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They need me to cower beneath their pressure, to turn myself in,
putting me to blame for their destruction.
But the Presence must not realise that I cannot hand myself in to them.
Avalon is so near, calling day and night, lumbering into my conscience
whining and screaming. I will take the chest there. Trust in me my
lord.
Many will die because of me, but many will also live, as long as I get
the chest to Avalon. Ganymede, the Presence, they have the advantage
over me in nearly every conceivable way, apart from one.
I am Merlin.
I cannot tell where they are, who to trust, how close behind that they
trail, but I feel them always, an approaching storm, a cloud of bugs
that prick and feed at the sores on the back of your neck.
They have made a desperate deal in order to draw me out, a rotten
steak to a rabid dog. The deal is sickeningly simple.
They pillage towns and settlements that ‘nobody would miss’,
isolated precious communities all across the barren moors until I
turn myself in to them. They know that it is these moors where
I hide, and they care little who stand to resist them. Men, women,
children.

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The Art

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‘Magic’, a simpler term for the world that which we all inhabit. We are
the universe in this sphere of the visible and the invisible, the know-
able and unknowable, and yet beings like Ganymede wish to tear us
away from its comfortable enclosure with their bare hands and nails,
so that we lie bloody and screaming.
Magic is space of symbols, languages, signs, synchronicities which lie
at our tentative fingertips, and yet it is only some of us who plunge
our hands into its deep and churning pool and scrape the unknown
filthy depths. My hands are stained with its dirt.
As much as I run and hide, I am not afraid for myself, but for that
which I am a guardian of, my own duty of which is far more
important and fragile than I.
As the birds return to nest and the sun falls beyond a blackened
cloud, I feel this universe inside of me, coursing within my veins,
electricity.
Will, I must tame my own will and remember. Men fear what they do
not understand, nor do they understand what they fear. If they wish,
I can give them something to fear. If only the time was right.
This wooden chest within my arms is my devotion now, it withholds
secrets I cannot reveal, but I can speak of the history, of why so many
have passed the objects inside over to me by their own volition.
The objects, they speak. They reach out and cry and caress skins in
the night, begging for help. Yet their hands resist me. Instead they
reach for Avalon, for Arthur. His soul is contained inside, and they
know that I am drawing them near, for their screams grow louder.

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In the fog of Mons, 1914 some recount the dark beasts which roamed
from crater to trench, and angels that were descendant, radiant from
above.
Arthur was a wise and noble leader. He possessed the most persis-
tence and will of all men. Yet, he was bullish and Naïve to the blood-
shed at his feet. Worst of all was his sin, lust, his true befalling. The
bastard child Mordred was the source of Arthur’s pain as Mordred
was his son, that which few knew. Morgause was the mother, and she
was Arthur’s
half-sister.
In vengeance, a black witch emerged to enforce the enemy army, to
warp their minds and twist their fates, they were alone too weak to
resist her spells, so they fell beneath her. She used them as a thousand
individual knives, each to slip inside of Arthur’s own back, twisting
and grinding upon bone and fabric.
I try to ignore that I see her still today. I know she visits me in the
night. She slithers beneath rag and cloth to reach me. I am never to
repeat what she whispers. Plans, actions, desires, such filthy language.
I cannot stop her yet. She is still omnipresent, and controlling of my
own path.
She is laughing as I sink away in here. Just as she had planned.

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Year Zero

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And so now here I lie. The zeroes and ones, alphas and omegas, heav-
ens and hells have convened upon me...
So do I end or do I begin here? Locked away in an eternal dream of
Avalon, forever drifting in the tide...
I still have fragments of hope, that those who seek to destroy me
disappear somewhere else, into the pages of history, not unlike I
unless there is an escape...
It’s funny what you learn about yourself in dark and oppressive times,
for now I know and can see, that best thing about life is knowing you
put it together.

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18. 34 35
Genesis
Design sketches, unfinished work and research.
‘Merlin’

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King Arthur

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Merlin’s Prison 1

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Ganymede

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-“HOW MERLIN WAS ASSOTTED AND DOATED ON ONE OF
THE LADIES OF THE LAKE, AND HOW HE WAS SHUT IN A
ROCK UNDER A STONE AND THERE DIED.
O after these quests of Sir Gawaine, Sir Tor, and King Pellinore, it
fell so that Merlin fell in a dotage on the damosel that King Pellinore
brought to court, and she was one of the damosels of the lake, that
hight Nimue. But Merlin would let have her no rest, but always he
would be with her. And ever she made Merlin good cheer till she
had learned of him all manner of that that she desired: and he was
assitted upon her, that he might not be from her. So on a time he told
King Arthur that he should not dure long, but for all his crafts he
should be put in the earth quick, and so he told the king many things
that should befall, but always he warned the king to keep well his
sword and the scabbard...”
Book IV Chapter I, ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ Sir
Thomas Malory, 1485.
Metal cross ‘found’ at the tomb of King Ar-
thur & Guenevere, Glastonbury Abbey, 12th
century.
“For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something
between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The
roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur ; instead
of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout... And as the soldier
heard these voices
he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with
a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and
with another shout, their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling
through the air towards the German hosts.
The war is already a fruitful mother of many war legends... Some
think that there are too many...There may be something to be said
for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old
myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble,
far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know ? It does not
do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn’t happened and
couldn’t have happened.”
‘The Angels of Mons- The Bowmen and other leg-
ends of the war’ by Arthur Machen, 1915 pp.
34, 35, 64
Roche Rock,Cornwall, inspiration for ‘Merlin’s
Prison.’

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