i
Hour; One
Where does war begin?
Morgana thinks she could trace it back past the chorus of shouts, cries and gargled screams echoing around her. It was in the way her father's eyes avoided her own; the way the servants bowed and locked eyes with the floor; the way every glance in her direction was tinged with submission and envy. Or maybe it lay within the extravagant victory dinners, held when another land had been viciously ravaged: its goods pillaged, spirit broken and people turned into slaves. She would ask herself then, This is a cause for celebration? Who would celebrate the suffering of a fellow man?
Maybe it is bigger than just her, and the black and white world where she hides. War. Perhaps the first war never really ended. Maybe it began with the start of time: two men forced to fight in a world where only one could survive. The cynic in her believes that war never truly stops; it just builds, climaxes, ebbs, then builds again. But Morgana cannot believe in a world which can find no peace.
She watches it in the ruthlessness of the bandits as they cut her father down, the wicked grins that taint their jaws once they realize victory (destruction, power, ruin) is in their grasp.
She hears it in the sickening groans, withering beneath her bloodied feet, and smells it in the vile stench of death she can never truly forget.
Tears stream in rivulets down her young face, and fall, one, two, three, into the blackness that has engulfed the world.
And it is now, that Morgana knows; with the harsh clash of steel against steel, and the sorrowful cries of anguish, (no...no...please, father, it's okay, no…. just breathe!), that this is the start of war.
Day 2 ; Hour 4
Blood cakes her clothing. It gets in her hair, under her fingernails, and stains the very fabric of her soul. For every scab and flake she manages to remove, the unforgiving ropes that bind her gangly limbs together scratch and draw forth more of the viscous liquid. A prisoner. That is all she is. Packed into the back of a wagon with twenty others, the faint strings of recognition pull at her subconscious. One man's eyes sparkle; hope and quiet sorrow shimmering on the surface. He carries a likeness to her father whom she witnessed fall, not forty eight hours prior. do, not. cry.
She doesn't recognize anyone after that.
Here she was: Lady Morgana, daughter of Vivian and Gorlois, forced into a cage-like wagon, like cattle being sent to the slaughter. I will die here, she thinks to herself. And never before has she come to a discovery so devastating.
The alien tongue of her captor seeps in through the jagged fault lines that encase the wagon. Blind terror spreads like wildfire, infecting the other prisoners. Morgana closes her eyes and begins to rock back and forth. 'Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacta.'
Day 3 ; Hour 12
Her expensive gown draws unwanted attention. She sits, drawing ragged gasps; teeth chattering furiously; hands trembling; holding the torn remnants of her favourite dress around her shoulders. The man behind her suffering, lies motionless beside her. Twisted, his broken neck hangs limply from his shoulders; a lifeless rag doll with all its stuffing pulled out and strewn across the cage.
Everything changes after that.
The other prisoners keep their distance. Their venomous glares screaming hatred, their reluctance to approach her giving away the terror they mask with malice. 'Sorcerer', they whisper. 'Witch', they croon; never daring to provoke her further. Fear colours their every move.
Morgana is scared too - though no one knows it.
Day 24 ; Hour 3
She is traded for the fourth time. Like some kind of axe or sword, forged with blood and iron; whose intentions are honourable at first: saving lives, bringing justice down upon the wicked. But, like the weapons, she inevitably falls into the wrong hands, ones who seek only to exploit the power she wields. Perhaps she isn't that different from a sword. One day when I'm free of these chains, I will cut you down, she promises as they treat her like their tool.
She eventually makes good on this promise.
She learns quickly. That much has always been true, but now more than ever; when a single glance or mistimed word could spell her undoing, her ability to adapt is what keeps her alive. When she is mistaken for a young boy; (her hair; cut for the liability that it was, and scrawny figure, ever accentuated by starvation), she adapts and plays the part. The world she has found herself in is no place for little girls.
Day 24 ; Hour 6
Morgana fetches a good price; some gold coins, if they were being generous. It bothers her that her life is worth so little.
Day 40 ; Hour 10
Uther declares war on magic, and the world is irrevocably changed.
She is passing through a small but prosperous village on Camelot's most northern borders, when the news first reaches her ears.
Cendred's men are merciless. They rape, pillage, and steal; sucking the life out of the people and the land. Uther's knights are sent to deal with them, whilst outing any sorcerers they discover, dragging the accused kicking and screaming from their beds, back to the land of 'justice' to be burned alive. They linger around the villages Cendred has his eye on, and do not miss any opportunities; snatching loose goods and girls. The farmers defend their withering land against the 'defenders', one hand tightly grasping their pitchforks, and the other holding their daughters and wives close.
Nothing is left untouched.
Day 61; Hour 19
Morgana has developed a system. It is not the best system, and some might say it is the worst system, but it is her own and it works most of the time: act first, think later.
She always does her best to look for some distinguishing mark to let her know whether it is her captors or one of her own that she spots, but when it gets too frenzied and frantic and she can't tell, she has no choice but to act first and deal with the consequences later. She has learned by now that there isn't time for hesitation in a fight for her life.
When anyone gets too close, she reacts instinctively; sending them crashing into the iron cage or onto the sodden earth below. If the other prisoners have noticed this lacklustre and rather repetitive method, they haven't yet said anything to her. The people on the receiving end of it have varying reactions. Some of the prisoners are understanding, but others, the ones whose families had been ripped apart by the gifts she possesses, merely count the seconds until she is taken; for they know, as she knows, that it will not be long before her captors offer her head to the king.
She is sorry for those who try to help her. Those who nudge her shoulder gently in the early hours of the morn, offering her what little food they have, only to be thrown back by some unseen force with the overwhelming power of a tidal wave, into the unforgiving steel bars that cage them all like beasts. She will not forget the sickening crunch of bones shattering against metal.
Morgana wants to apologise, but can never find the words.
Day 62 ; Hour 20
One man persists. His skin is drawn together in old age, wrinkled with the passage of time, the countless specks and scars littering his skin, telling stories of their own. His chin is covered with layer upon layer of unkempt facial hair, which kicks and curls around the nape of his neck, wisps extending all the way down his chest, reaching the centre of his gut. Like the rest of them, he is thin. So much so that his bones, so weathered with age, stick out and protrude from underneath a flimsy layer of paper-like skin, warped and deformed from years of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of their unforgiving captors.
His eyes glimmer a brilliant blue when he introduces himself as Tom.
"Fay," she responds in kind.
Day 79 ; Hour 4
Her first attempt at escape is ill advised and very nearly kills her. When she hears her captors discussing the incoming meeting with Uther's knights, the sealing of her fate terrifies her into a catatonic state. The night drags on into the early hours before dawn, and it is not long before absolute panic takes hold.
The rotten woodwork and flimsy iron bars are no match for her anguish, ripped away by an ancient tide, the desperate all-consuming need to survive dominating her very existence. Prisoners screams ripple and fade, some grasping for some semblance of freedom and escape, others fleeing from her.
Morgana staggers away from everything she has known, bruised, bloodied, broken and so, so tired. Darkness greets her like an old friend, and she welcomes the infinite black.
Day 79 ; Hour 12
Her dreams are filled with blood and misery. Breathe, she tells herself; the air as thick as mud, clogging her throat, leaving her gasping for breath. Breathless and trembling, her head pounding with nightmarish screams roiling all about, she scrambles to the lip of a crater, and seeing that there was no glimpse of light, crawls over the edge and slides into the darkness. She strikes something, and recoils instantly. But in the sudden flash above the crater's rim, sees that it is, after all, only a dead man. And Morgana had long stopped being afraid of the dead.
She offers the corpse one last glance, before familiarity strikes, and her blood runs cold.
Tom's eyes are empty, void of the life and hope she had admired above all else. They are grey, they are dull, and they are dead. She chokes on the scream that tries to crawls up her lungs, nothing more than a broken sob escaping.
Then there is light.
When she wakes, it's to Tom's eyes. But they are warm and golden and flicker with the life she never truly appreciated.
He tells her how he saved her, how he brought her to a small group of 'rebel' fighters: fellow sorcerers fighting against Uther's tyrannical regime.
She is swept along with their tales of victory, redemption and salvation, the unbridled joy, no longer feeling so alone, conquering all else.
Day 83; Hour 8
In war stories, she always wondered how they could tell the between friend and foe, having to depend solely on uniforms. It is always portrayed as the simplest, most basic thing in battle besides perhaps 'swing and hit.'
However, it is a lie. It is one of the worst lies of all.
She can hardly tell the difference at all. Sometimes, she sees the golden dragons crested atop the flowing crimson that colours their cloaks that let her know, Camelot. But the vast majority stands in black, in rows and rows of people she cannot tell apart. It is the most confusing, frustrating, damning group of billowing black that she has ever seen.
There are figures approaching and fighting around her, and she stands in the middle; helpless and lost. Her hands are shaking, but her shoulders are trembling. Her bloodied, bare feet slip and sink in the mud, and her eyes are useless in the smoke and dark. There is a shadow coming at her from the corner of her eye, and to her right, two more are engaged in combat, and another in front of her, and she does not know.
Friend, foe, Friend or foe….friend or foe…? Panic seizes her, and her breath is bitter in her lungs, more heavy than air should be. She cannot feel her heart, but she can feel a brutal ache from the force with which it pounds. Sweat is running down her neck, back, and forehead; making it harder to see than it should have been. Frantically, she turns to the left, the right, circling round and round, and she thinks to scream. To scream and cry. And then the least brave thing that she has ever thought suddenly slams itself into the forefront of her terrified mind.
She will hide. She will pretend as if she was hit by something, and she'll lie on the ground, and pretend to be dead. Play dead. Play dead is what she will do. Suddenly, there is nothing in the world she wants more than to bury her face in the mud and not look up or even breathe until she can hear no more, feel no more.
She hates herself for the thought. It makes her sick, and she screams inside her head, because she is not that person. She is not the scared coward in the mud, and this is her war. This her war, her war, and she won't give them the satisfaction.
She is lost though. Morgana is so completely lost, her arms shaking uncontrollably as she turns to the left. She slides in the mud, almost trips, and it forces her a gasp from her lips which vocalizes her fear. The figure to the right pushes closer, and she knows she will use her powers to stun them despite not knowing who they are. Because this is life and death. Because these are Cendred's men (possibly, possibly), and they take no prisoners.
There is a flash of silver, an arrowhead, and it misses her hip by a mere inch, halting her heart. Her stomach caves in with air choking out from her tight throat, and she's crying. She's crying without meaning to, or even really noticing, but she is. Because she does not want to die. She is eleven, and scared, and does not want to die.
Her throat clicks wetly as she tries to force the hard knot in her throat back down into her gut, and she is certain of her actions as she faces the one responsible.
"To-" She is falling then, forward, frozen.
The world turns black and white. She sees no colour, and there is a burst of prickling warmth at the centre of her back. Her bones are locked, muscles stilled, and she topples like a mannequin. The mud is wet and cold and thick, and the irony of being face down in it now is not lost on her. It makes her want to cry harder, could she muster the strength to do so. Instead, she all she sees is blackness and then tries to breathe, but the mud is thick in her mouth, and it blocks the oxygen from entering her throat and lungs.
Please, please, please, she cries in her head, pushing all her magic and power behind trying to unlock herself.
There are screams and yells, and the sounds of the battle she has heard for an hour now. She feels strangely detached, though, and she thinks she will die here. She will die here, in the mud, and she will never see the sun again. There will only be clouded shadowy figures, fear and heartache, and then this grave of mud and rainwater.
There is a hand, as she laments, and the grip is almost painful as it flips her onto her back. She is expecting a sword, or an axe, the dancing edge keen on mocking or torturing her, intent on only her shame and suffering. Instead it is only Tom, standing above her, digging the mud out of her throat with trembling hands as he sobs his apologies.
Day 91 ; Hour 16
"Can you feel it? It's like it's in the air. I mean, it's happening; really starting to happen." Her voice is a mere whisper. Tom looks up from a tattered magic scroll he's read a hundred times over, and looks to Morgana in mild surprise.
Because Tom can feel it and he knows this. Because Tom has felt it for years and years, exactly as they feel it now, and there is no one who understands that hollow ache in your gut more than Tom does. There has been a lot of fear now; it surrounds them like a wet, suffocating cloth. They feel as if they've lived with it for the longest time, but not quite like this. The real fear is not knowing. In letting one's mind wonder at the possibilities.
But they are brave, and together he thinks maybe, just maybe, they would be all right. They were one and two together, and they would be all right.
Day 102; Hour 17
"Group A will come in here, B there, C down and up, and D along this route. Do not move without your team! When you are at your destination, alert the other. When all teams are at their designated areas, you attack as a unit- What, Charlie?"
"Well, do we just... just full out charge or -"
"I'm getting to that. If you'd just. Pay. Attention."
"Sorry, sir."
Tauren isn't in that great of a mood today. He isn't most days, really. His eyes roll, and he wipes the sweat from his brow, scowling and severe. He turns back to the complicated map, retracing the routes once more. He takes a few seconds to collect himself before explaining the rest of the mission.
Morgana is attentive; despite knowing it won't be that hard. She has learned to tell such things by taking who was in the room with her. Despite the presence of only a handful of elder sorcerers and other senior members, it was mostly younger, more inexperienced fighters sitting around the meeting table now.
So when Charlie, (a young novice no more than 16) jokes about how twitchy everyone is, and how they could all really use a warm bath, she pays attention to him and laughs a little too. Because it's nice not to be so swept up sometimes. Because she thinks she might just break and crumble under everything if she doesn't smile at how immature Charlie can be, and how she has a home with these people.
However, that night, Tom dies across the room from her, and eight more are badly injured. Morgana learns then never to judge the difficulty level of a mission by who is sent in. It is war, and people die - in small battles, or big battles, or even simply washing themselves in the morning. No one is safe.
She cries herself to sleep for days, burning cobalt eyes haunting her dreams.
Day 132; Hour 12
There are eight people sitting around the table at their new haunt. At first, she thinks the low numbers is cause from people getting lost on their way, much like she had done her first time here. However, it is now seventeen minutes into the laying out of the plan, and no one else has drifted through those heavy doors.
It was a plan that required at least double their current number. And even then, it was a dangerous mission. Morgana honestly can't see how they plan on completing it with so few.
She raises a hand, more timid that her tutored days, but demanding all the same.
"Yes?"
"Sir, is this it?" She motions around the room.
His eyes follow the half-circle of heads in front of him before turning back to her. "It is."
"Sir, I… it just seems a little –"
"We're at a shortage. We don't have enough people for everything we have to do. This mission can be completed with eight people. You'll make it work – do you understand?"
She doesn't. "Yes, sir."
Day 186; Hour 3
There is smoke, and smoke, and blood. Blood coats everything. It's on her hands, her clothes, and she can feel it caked and layered on her face. It makes her want to throw up, and so she does; all over her new shoes. She spits and spits to try and get rid of the long strands of saliva and the horrible taste in her mouth, but it doesn't work.
She breathes deep, her throat burning and raw, and her breath catches in her chest. Her feet numb and dumb, trip over themselves, and the ground, then a body. It is warm, and it crunches and squishes under her foot at the same time. He is dead, beneath his armour and blood spattered face, but she still scrambles back from him anyway. She spits the bile from her mouth, slamming her eyes shut as she heaves again, and sees the image his lifeless brown eyes staring back up at her, burned forever into her mind's eye. It reminds her of deer her father's knights would bring back after a hunt, their head mounted on the walls, with their, petrified glassy eyeballs staring her down.
Her fingers curl in grass and dirt, and she's crawling. Crawling until she manages to get enough momentum to pull her herself off the ground, and then she is running. Running, and running, through the smoke and the smell of sulphur. There is a crackling in her chest and throat as she strangles air in through all the phlegm and bile, and her heart is like a dead weight in the hole made for it.
"Help me. I just…home. Need….gods." She's starting to edge onto hysteria and she knows it, because her tears have made her blind, and she's running without paying attention.
Through the grey, she glimpses movement. Trivial at first, and then the outline of a sword amidst the smoke. The corpses are collapsed to the ground, and she keeps running. Wounds crisscross her skin, and her shirt is soaked with her own blood. It's running from her head in gushes that don't seem to end, and the twirls and twirls ain a dizzy sort of dream.
"Help!" She tries, screams, because she can't find the medical help she needs by eyesight alone. " Help!"
And it is not for her, but a man she does not know, who's eyes flicker golden with the gift. A man who is dying and gurgling blood bubbles, and who didn't want her to let go of his hand.
"Help me! Help me, please!" She breathes, harsh, spins. "Damn it. Damn. Damn."
Her breath is rush, rush, rushing and now she's hyperventilating. Gasping in air, and reaching out to clutch something, but there is nothing there.
"A man! He's…..a man.." Her eyes drift, and she peels them open, but they drift again "Help."
The world tips, spinning up and to the right, and then any air she had left, leaves her in a whoosh, without a fight. She is met with blackness before she can breathe again.
Tauren. Tauren now, is in her face as she opens her eyes from the dark. It had seemed to last forever and ever, and if she thinks hard, she can see flashes in between of things she does not know if she dreamt or truly saw. The point is that she had fallen to unconsciousness, and now Tauren is above her, drowning her.
Yes, drowning her. There is water all around her, covering her, choking her as she breathed. Morgana gasps and chokes, and loses all connection to oxygen. She grabs Tauren's hands on her shoulders and cuts into them, or tries to, but her fingernails are blunt and she can't break the skin. She tugs instead, and yanks, and presses her fingers like a vice into the structure of bones that makes up Tauren's wrists.
Morgana catches a breath, gasps, and coughs. Coughs long and hard, and it burns her throat like fire. She is winning now, or something close enough as she can breathe a little more. Panic is still tough and terrible, but it is nothing to the look of fright on the face hovering over hers.
Morgana drops a hand away to go for that face, but then Tauren has pulled a hand back as well. It slaps Morgana across the face, again, and then again, and then so hard that it bashes the other cheek off the side of the tub.
Tub.
Morgana blinks slowly at the worn silver. Water rushes in a wave between her face and the steel, and is tinged red with blood. Her blood. Tauren's pure hands buried in all that muddy water.
She breathes, slow, and pulls her head up a little. It is heavy, and she feels as if every bit of her has drained and rushed away with that wave. The water sloshes, and she looks back to Tauren, shell-shocked.
"It's alright." He whispers, and Morgana realizes that they are crying.
There is a tightness in her chest that soars up into her throat, and it cracks and explodes as she breathes out, and she sobs. Pitiful, broken sounds that echo all around, and lets her head fall back on the tub again. Her eyes focus on the water stained ceiling, and her fingers are stiff as they curl into the heavy fabric of her leggings.
"Oh, gods." She remembers the man, and falling, and does not know if this was real or if she has lost her mind fully to war.
"It's okay."
It is not.
Day 260; Hour 16
Morgana crashes to the ground. Her foot snags a muddy lump, and then she is falling. The lump groans, and a small arm reaches out for help.
White-hot adrenalin pumps through her veins, because this is her turn. She can help, and maybe, if she can just save this one life, then she won't feel so inadequate. So useless. Salvation lies within the stubby, palm, reaching out of the mud towards the heavens. Then she is digging. Through the richly smelling earthen mud, she digs, and digs, and digs, through to the other side.
When she first sees Edwin, overwhelming pity assaults her heart. He is younger than she, and he is alive. So very much alive that she wants to yell; to shout to the sky with joy that there are others- like her and not like her- and all the way in-between.
His face is disfigured. Uther's 'purifying' flames rarely left their victims alive, let alone untouched.
"Mother.. father.." he croaks.
She will save him, she decides in that moment. Because everything about this strange boy is too eerily familiar, and she cannot, she will not stand by and watch this happen. Sometimes you have to do what's right and damn the consequences.
She will take him back with her. She will convince him to join their cause; to fight united against Uther's tyrannical reign, and if he refuses, she will sneak him out of the camp and find him somewhere safe. To hide, to survive, to live to fight another day. Because somehow, he is more than just an orphaned child, and in this moment she can almost feel deliverance within her reach.
Day 271; Hour 15
Edwin's hatred festers.
There grew in him a kind of dark savagery that kept Morgana at arm's length. Not because she feared to be its victim, but because she didn't want to be infected. It was of a kind that could plague the world. It allowed nothing to exist under its ghastly contamination without being tainted, corrupted to the point which it had a centre as rotten as itself. Edwin has had a hard life, death, misery, and fear pervading its entirety, but that didn't truly explain it. "Uther murdered my parents," he would say, but it didn't account for what he was slowly, but surely, becoming. It was a contagion, spreading onto to others these days, consuming them with hated, despair and an insatiable thirst for vengeance.
Morgana swallows her fear and reaches out to him, because she knows that they are running out of time. It will not be long before he is beyond salvation, and she simply cannot watch this.
She prays to the gods for the first time since her childhood ended. Please, please, please...
Day 296; Hour 13
Edwin disappears without a trace.
Day 302; Hour 7
She finds a note he left behind, written in the language of the ancients and hidden in a place only Morgana could find it. It contains all of two words, and reading them makes her heart break all over again.
"I'm sorry."
Day 315; Hour 5
Pale moonlight filters through the endless cloud cover, sickly rays skittering across the landscape. Morgana stares blankly at the palms of her hands, and wonder not for the first time what she is doing.
For seven nights now, her dreams have been filled with a child's broken cries and screams, and she can feel anger, and hatred, and a ferocious power the likes of which she has never felt before. Emrys, the shadows whisper. A shudder runs up her spine, crawling from bone to bone and she cringes involuntarily.
She wonders what she is meant to do about it. The whispers in her dreams tell her that this boy, this infant child screaming at the injustice of the fractured world that he has been thrust into, is her destiny. That he, holds the key to the future, and a new world is in the making.
Morgana does not accept this. More than anything, futility and the overwhelming powerlessness that such a notion implies goes against everything she believes. Yes, sometimes there is potential. Maybe some have this capacity to achieve great, great things, or commit other heinous crimes, but the idea that such a thing can be set in stone, somehow cements just how small everyone truly is. If there is such thing, if fate and destiny and everything in between controls everyone and everything around her, she wonders why they even bother. There is a fine line between this ideal of the greater good, and simply becoming a pawn in whatever fruitless plan the world has chosen for you.
She likes to believe - she must believe - that this is her life. She has forged her own path, and no one, no prophecy, scroll, dream, nightmare, not even the king himself can tell her otherwise. This is her life.
And sometimes, when the days are long and hard and they blend and blur together, united in their perpetual misery, this singular thought is all she has. Perhaps there is a greater purpose for her life, and her actions. But this moment, so singular and unique that it would never again occur for all of eternity, was hers. And that is okay.
Day 365; Hour 9
Charlie sits on the sodden earth in front of their new 'home'. Morgana is unsure if he is waiting for Tauren, or someone else, or nothing at all, but the door still creaks when she opens it, and Charlie responds as if he had been waiting for her all this time - no movement at all.
"It's different, isn't it?" And Morgana meant the war, or the dark, or the quiet of night, but Charlie reaches up and tenderly brushes against the bloodied stump that has stolen the place of his right arm.
"Yeah.."
She sees it then, the regret on his face, and thinks perhaps Charlie will never be the same.
"It'll be alright." It won't.
He doesn't respond, and Morgana feels awkward at first, and then just lost in her own thoughts over the year milestone she has reached.
Day 374; Hour 21
Morgana lies still and watches the shadows the clouds create over the moon. She thinks of how alone she has felt for months now, but without the chance to actually be alone. She thinks of Tom and Edwin, and how happy or sad they might be now. She thinks of her parents, and friends, and death, and knights moving in black towers against gloomy skies and white smoke.
Sometimes, she thinks of her blood. She closes her eyes and feels it pounding and pulsing, rushing beneath her skin and through her veins. At times, the feel of it all makes the hollow of her throat cave and croak, and she wants to cry. Other times, she concentrates really hard on feeling important, and confident, and to have faith in who she is. And at times like now, she is not sure how to feel at all.
She plays with the hem of Tom's favourite cloak that she has worn to sleep for almost a year, and sings old lullabies in her head until she falls asleep.
Day 391; Hour 1
It is not like she thought it would be - war, that is. In her childhood there would be a problem, time to find the solution, then a way to solve it. There had been fear and danger, but it had been very different. At the time, she had thought it was a very dangerous thing: her life and her position in society. She understands now that she did not have a broad enough range of experience to fully have a measure of that danger.
War is sloppy. It is bloody, and hard, and wrong, and all the things that are normally associated with it. 'But it is sloppy'; Morgana persists in her head, because she has never heard anyone else say it before. There is hardly any time, and what time they do find is never put to much good use. Then there are long, extensive lags where absolutely nothing happens at all, save for people letting off steam and trying to forget that they are waiting, and what for. But they still need more time, more people, and more research, because she knows already that war cannot be won by heroes and those with hearts.