Merlin is mystic from 5th century England. He was the advisor to King Arthur, and his court magician, but things go a little awry from there. Arthur wasn’t the champion of virtue that the legends tell stories of, but a dark tyrant who would have enslaved all the world if Merlin hadn’t woven a terrible spell. Arthur’s Round Table rained down hellfire and damnation among the other tribes and the other dwellers of Anglia. When Arthur’s knights destroyed Merlin’s love Nimue, it hardened his resolve and he plotted.
Merlin wove a powerful incantation that bound Arthur and his entire dark camelot into an extra-dimensional space and rewove reality to heal the damage that dark Camelot had created. The one thing he could not bring back was his lost Nimue. The failure of his magic to bring her back was shattering to him, and he retired from the world. Camelot came and went, and Merlin disappeared from the world with it.
Later he emerged in Eastern Europe, tracing rumors of a magical artifact that would grant him the power to finally bring Nimue back. As is a pattern that he’s repeated many times over the intervening centuries, Merlin found a magical artifact of terrible power and usually stopped a terrible plan to engulf the world in chaos or darkness. The artifact was not capable of giving him the strength to restore Nimue, and he grew more despondent as the centuries past.
In the 20th century, Merlin ended up in southeast Asia, chasing rumors of an artifact that would finally give him the ability to restore his lost love. Travelling through the Indian subcontinent, Cambodia, Laos and throughout the Korean peninsula, he eventually crossed over into Japan. Unfortunately, the allies dropped the bomb on the city he was heading to before he got there. The artifact he was searching for was destroyed, and he was despondent again.
After the war, he finally quit searching for a way to bring Nimue back. Despondency had waxed and he fell into a cycle of depression, alcoholism, and magical abuse. Eri and Web pulled him out of it during the crisis with the Lady of the Lake in the 1960s, and finally put him back on the path towards something resembling heroism. He’s still haunted by the decisions he made centuries ago, but for the first time in a long time, he sees a bright hope in the 21st century.
He has amassed one of the largest collections of powerful arcane weapons and items in the world, and keeps them under lock and key. The two most dangerous items (probably) are the twin versions of Excalibur he keeps. The dark version, carried by Arthur the Tyrant is an evil blade that hates deviations from humanity and may have been the driving force that spurred Arthur’s tyranny. The light version is a bastion of goodness, and the two blades mostly cancel each other’s influence.
Merlin also has a host of other magical items, ranging from simple trinkets and baubles to reality reshaping artifacts. These are all held in his Sanctum, an extra dimensional space that he is allegedly the only person to have the key for. Most of these items have wills of their own, and after being kept out of the world for so long, they are erratic, and keen to return to reshape the world to their own interests.
Merlin has many, many enemies he’s made over the years. The few surviving others from the time of Arthur’s tyrannical reign remember him in his role as advisor to the mad king. The Lady of the Lake is still trying to retrieve her Dark Caliborn to return it to the world to see what mischief it can cause in the modern world. There are also dozens of magically adept individuals who want access to his collection for their own reasons.
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