Arthur needs a date for Gwen's wedding. The rest is history.

Merlin meets Morgana Le Fay at a support group for People With Freaky Unnatural Powers. Alright, it’s not technically called that, but it might as well be.

In which Prince Arthur meets Merlin and all hell breaks lose.

"I'm sending you to Ealdor. Make Camelot proud." With that the King turned and left his son standing dumbfounded in the armory, grasping for words.

It is an unfamiliar feeling, but there it is, and once Arthur finds its name, he cannot unname it. Arthur is jealous.

Hunith insists on saving them as a keepsake. It's silly and sentimental, but it's proof that Merlin and Arthur are here and that they exist together.

Merlin looked uncertainly to Arthur. "Have you ever made bread?" he asked. "How hard could it be?" Arthur said.

There’d been a time when Arthur, like his father, held grudges with an unyielding persistence. If Arthur felt he’d been wronged, no reconciliation was possible unless the other party was agreeable to groveling in abject subjugation.

The first time Lt Arthur Pendragon properly met A1C Merlin Emrys, he was doing push-ups on the floor of the Fort Campbell weather station.

There were things that young women across Albion were told to be wary of.

Arthur had been taught right from wrong and this, this was wrong!

There was no green shirt in with the blacks. There were no black shirts in with the greens. There were no shirts in any sort of wrong order. The string of curses that fell from his tongue was hostile and possibly suggestive of violence and might have continued to go on for quite a while longer had someone not elbowed him in the side and said: 'Oi, my mother’s here. Stop cursing like a bloody sailor.

King Arthur meets his new manservant, a 16-year-old boy named Merlin.

Merlin is content, but not exactly happy, in Ealdor, so when his mother's friend Gaius' shows up with a tale of dragons under castles and priestesses and an exiled prince, Merlin is thrilled to listen. The reality, however, isn't so great: the priestess is a killer, the prince is a prat, and the dragon sure does have some curious ideas about them. But Gaius is saying it's Merlin responsibility -- destiny, even -- to help Arthur win back his kingdom, and to evade all the forces amassing against him on the way. This would, of course, be a whole lot easier if he could stand to be in the same village as Arthur for enough time for them to stop arguing.

It was just after midnight on a Sunday in June. Merlin’s life was about to change forever, but he didn’t know it yet.

Arthur has never really understood birthdays; why should people celebrate them when they bring nothing but sullen, angry fathers and a lingering sense of uncomfortable guilt? It doesn’t help that his birthday is in November and the weather is inevitably foul and cold, freezing grey rain sleeting down outside.

What really happened was that when Prince Arthur was born the King started boasting of his manly virility, saying that Nimueh's magic had been a fraud and that only he was responsible for the Queen finally begetting a child. And so, when Nimueh heard about this she enchanted the King and all his subjects, as well as all children born henceforth on Camelot soil with the most fitting curse she could imagine.

Arthur in Ealdor was like a tame lion at the dinner table: you weren't necessarily worried you were going to get torn to pieces, but it was still dangerous, decidedly out of place, and made the neighbors nervous.