The King is Lost
Chapter One: The Battle of Camlann
"Merlin!" a man's low voice bellowed down the battlefield.
As the knights clashed, they could hear the groans of the dying behind and the grunting of the challenger ahead, but melded between this was an almost teary-eyed shriek from the hilltop overlooking the rocky valley of Camlann. The thunder rumbled – a purple flash cleaved red-brown cloud, so pregnant with water that the misty salt could be tasted in the air.
"Merlin!" the man called out again. He took off his golden helm and looked up to the heavens. His was a chiseled face, a broad jaw and bright eyes worn on the edges with the wrinkles of a great weight. Indeed, though his face still had some last smooth vestiges of youth across the brow, shocks of grey harrowed his salt and pepper beard and left little more than a few streaks of brown across a curly head.
On the high ground, he could see the blood flow down the valley – vibrant and black. His eyes burned and with the quiver of a lip, one small tear began to flow down his cheek.
"Merlin," he said, now in a whisper, almost a prayer, "Prithee, lord, spare them. Punish not the innocent for mine error, mine alone."
Another salvo of thunder rumbled, but still – no rain. Then, a thin break in the grey pall opened over the cliff side and white light shone down upon the gold-clad king. A shadow loomed from behind him, and he gave a sharp turn, his right hand instinctively gripping the hilt of his sheathed sword.
He clenched his jaw and swallowed back more tears at the sight of the Great Enemy – a blood bespattered knight dressed all in white armor and crowned with a nimbus of sunshine that glittered across the pearly mail as if it were fish-scales. Yet beneath the shimmering metal and the grease that smeared red across the man's firm brow, there was the cherub-like face of a blue-eyed boy, not a man.
The king smiled, wide but toothless. His eyes were weary and red as he looked down at the enemy.
Mordred stepped forward. He tightened the grip on his drawn sword, brow twitching nervously at the king's fey grin.
"Take up thy sword, Sir," the boy shouted over the cacophony of crashing metal. He raised his arms and brandished his weapon in a square point toward the king. Yet the king made no movement.
"Defend thyself, Sir!" Mordred screamed, grinding his teeth in frustration. The king stood still. And so, with a sudden leap forward, Mordred pulled his sword back and started to swing. In an instant, the king unsheathed his sword – Excalibur!
As the sun shone, the blade reflected blinding light when Mordred's blow came down. Mordred winced, his eyes fluttering closed from the light.
Clash! A deafening ring pealed out as the king parried aside the blow, but the boy did not relent and hacked through the air almost immediately.
With a quick jump back, the king dodged the sword, shuffling toward the edge of the hill. The cloud break passed and hilltop was swallowed up in a dark grey pallor. Feeling the rocks loosen beneath the weight of his feet, the king glanced over his shoulder to see pebbles crumble down, down, down the face of the cliff. Before he had time to look up, another swing of a sword came plummeting down and at the last moment, Excalibur parried it away. With a heave, he forced Mordred's sword aside and threw a sudden punch of his gauntlet into the boy's face. Blood came streaming down and Mordred stumbled backwards, only barely keeping upright.
The king saw it—the perfect opportunity. The sword was to the side, head thrown back, arms wide open. The king took in a deep breath, bringing Excalibur toward his face to kiss the cross of his hilt, and in that briefest of moments, it was enough for Mordred to regain his senses and go back to a fighting stance.
In a rapid succession, the boy swung and swung and swung – three strokes, each parried with ease but with each, the king took a step backward, until with the last swing, he made a sudden sidestep as Mordred shifted forward. The boy tripped and the cliff's edge began to crumble beneath him.
Again, the king saw it—and by an instinct, unknown and unexplained, he dropped Excalibur. Seizing the boy by the shoulder with both hands, he yanked the boy back onto firm earth. Mordred felt himself spinning round, into a near embrace with his enemy and on a sudden realization, he brought his hands up at the last moment and thrust his sword forward. There was the sound of a scrape and a clink – mail began to snap.
The boy glanced down and hardly believed what he saw. He looked up. The king's face paled, and Mordred smiled, wide and rapturous, as he plunged the sword deeper inside. The king, still clinging to Mordred's shoulder, collapsed onto the ground and dragged Mordred down with him.
Thunder howled. Lightning leaped in crimson bounds across the red-brown sky. Finally, it started to drizzle, and then rain, and then pour.
Straddled atop the dying man, Mordred drew his sword out, the king giving out a wet and guttural groan. The boy brandished the steel above him and wondered over the deep claret drooling down the blade, when he felt an excruciating chill pierce into his thigh. Mordred hissed as he looked down to see a dagger stabbed into his leg. Before he could react, the king took hold of Excalibur's hilt and hurled a desperate blow toward Mordred's skull.
Without thought, Mordred cringed, covering his head with his gauntlet. The sword clashed against the metal of his glove, which bounced off into his head, leaving him dazed. The king tugged the dagger out from Mordred's leg and in a rapid move, stabbed the boy straight between two ribs.
Mordred stepped back, wobbled, and lowered his sword to the ground. One hand reached out and fingered the hilt of the dagger curiously, as if uncertain if any of it was real. He glimpsed to his left and saw the vague blur of something coming.
Was it friend? Was it foe?
An air lifted in his head, sending a warm nausea down his spine, and then his vision was nothing but white light. He swung his blade from very fear and cut through empty rain. The dagger burrowed deeper; the pain shot through his whole body, and at that, he tumbled to the ground.
He took a deep breath.
A deeper breath.
He could feel the blade scraping against bone.
But he focused – focused, and his vision started to clear. He saw a train of women scaling down the back of the hill in their long emerald dresses, those same women he had seen before those many years ago when his Aunt Le Fay took him to Avalon. When he was a boy, he thought it all a dream, and maybe, it was; maybe, he was drifting off into yet another dream. That is when he saw it - a ghostly line of gossamer lights, a faint blue dully glowing in the vague image of cats. Atop this feline caravan was the body of the king, floating on their backs as they carried him behind the green-clad witches. At the front was a familiar face - a matronly face with kind eyes and long golden hair reaching down to the waste. He had met this witch of Avalon before - Frigga, a friend and teacher to Le Fay.
No. He would not let that sorceress have his prize. Mordred's whole life had been building up to this moment, and he would be damned if they took it away from him. So he crawled, he crawled on all fours, clenching down his teeth and venting out his pain at each movement with a throaty primordial moan. His eye was on the prize - Arthur! King Arthur!
The rain grew thicker. The clouds above began to swirl in cones. But Mordred kept crawling. Even as his eyes started to dim and his vision tunneled, he kept crawling toward the light – that faint, ethereal glow of Excalibur's blade. Then he felt something – nothing, no rain falling against his skin. There was a break in the rain, a circular patch of dry land, the ground tattooed with Celtic knots. The women stood there in a circle and the king lay in the middle of them with the ghostly cats pawing at his limp body, kneading their claws gently into his arms.
Lightning struck. The circle started to glow. A beam of multicolored light shot down, and then Mordred felt an enormous pull coming. And before he could do or say anything, he was gone…
A/N: I was reading Le Morte D'Arthur when it occurred to me the great similarities of personality between the classical Mordred of King Arthur's court and the chosen depiction of Loki in Joss Whedon's Avengers. I wondered...if Loki had an enemy so similar to himself, wrought with so many Freudian daddy-issues, would he be able to see his own faults - or is he doomed to mischief, as all the legends seem to say?