August, the Year of Our Lord 1210
Town of Bram, Region of the Occitaine, France
Galahad was a weary man.
He'd spent the last seven hundred years trying to come to terms with his 'new' reality, his immortality. He had struggled over the centuries to find his place in this new world, but where was an immortal's place here, exactly? Where did he belong, exactly, now that Camelot was nothing but a faded memory, now that everyone he had ever known or loved or even hated had long ago turned to dust in their graves? Well, nearly everyone.
He'd been a knight of renown once—the Best Knight in the World, the only man worthy enough to find and touch the Holy Grail. Sometimes he cursed the day he found that most holy of relics. He could still feel the cool metal of the cup as it touched his lip, could still feel the shaking of his hands, the thundering of his heart. The searing, blinding pain as his mortality was burned from every cell of his body. The numbing, terrifying panic on the day that he clearly understood for the first time that he was going to live forever.
Over the last several centuries he had also been a lowly foot soldier, a scout, and a despised mercenary. He'd been a hermit, a farmer, a tradesman, a merchant, a brothel keeper. He'd been a slave, a tramp, a beggar, a pilgrim. He'd even been a monk for a time, God forgive him. He'd tried losing himself in the most populous of cities, isolating himself in the most barren of deserts, and everywhere in between. Wherever he went, he had made friends, enemies, lovers. He'd traveled the world in search of peace for his spirit, for his soul, but found that there was none for the likes of him.
It was always the same in the end—they all died, yet he lived on. Every few decades he would have to pack up and move before anyone became suspicious, begin a new life somewhere else, become someone else. Eventually he stopped making friends, stopped taking lovers. Leaving them behind, watching them grow old and die off one by one, saying goodbye—it simply became too painful. It was much easier to hold himself aloof, to build a thick, high wall around himself, to harden his heart against the world, otherwise he would go mad. He'd always been on the outside, anyway, had never really been a part of any one group or family. It was his Fate as the Grail Knight, he convinced himself. Never to love, never to be loved. He would always be alone. Each passing year only served to confirm that belief for him.
Every few decades he would see history tiredly repeat itself over and over again. The wars, the invasions, the rhetoric, the politics. One nation enslaving another, crowing about its superiority, only to be enslaved in its own turn by another 'superior' nation. One people conquering another people, citing the wills of their gods or whatever as the justification for it. The plagues and famines that killed by the hundreds and thousands. The oppression, the misery, the poverty. It was grindingly relentless, it never ended, never changed, no matter how hard he hoped or fought for it.
Things just never changed.
And still, Galahad lived on.
Eventually he returned to the life he knew best, was most comfortable in, that of a knight, a horse soldier. He now went by the name 'Sir Thomas of Leicester', a minor, humble knight under fealty to Simon de Montfort, the 5th Earl of Leicester in England and Baron of Montfort l'Amaury in Normandy. De Montfort had inherited his English lands through his mother, but had never set foot in England himself. He still demanded that fealty be sworn to him by the knights that had served his late uncle, the previous earl, however, and Galahad dutifully swore the oath, not expecting this earl to be any more ambitious than the last. He enjoyed the fairly quiet, bucolic life that the fourth earl had preferred, the only excitement being the usual round of tournaments that knights were expected to attend and participate in.
But the new earl was anything but quiet and bucolic. De Montford was fervently religious, Galahad soon found out, and the earl soon took up the cross and joined the Fourth Crusade to free the Holy Land from the infidels. He ordered his vassal knights to accompany him, and so Galahad found himself a very reluctant Crusader. Fortunately, his liege refused to accompany the politically and financially motivated Venetian-led campaign when it unexpectedly diverted to Constantinople, so Galahad was spared having to witness the sacking of that city by his brother knights. The rest of the world was shocked and outraged by the atrocities that occurred in that beautiful, cultured city, but Galahad was mostly numb to it. How many cities had he seen pillaged and razed to the ground in his life so far? He'd lost count long ago.
But in the years after the Crusade, De Montfort became increasingly fanatic in his Catholic orthodoxy, so much so that when the Bishop of Rome called for a crusade against the heretic Cathars in southern France, Galahad was not at all surprised when the earl again gathered his knights and took them south. What did manage to surprise the jaded knight was the utter brutality and mercilessness that was visited upon the people of the Languedoc and Occitaine regions of France, Cathar and Catholic alike, noble and peasant.
Such as those the unfortunate Galahad had witnessed over the last year, beginning with the massacre at Béziers. It had been nothing short of a bloodbath—thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children, regardless of their creed, had been butchered, tortured or maimed with no pity. Seven thousand souls alone had been forcibly dragged from the sanctuary of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, where they had fled for safety, and slaughtered in the city square like livestock. When an aide had asked the commander of the expedition, the Cistercian abbot Arnaud-Amaury, how they could separate out the faithful Catholics from the heretic Cathars, Galahad had heard with his own ears as the commander blandly responded, "Kill them all; the Lord will recognize His own".
As if that wasn't bad enough, the city had then been looted and burned to the ground as the various factions of the invading Catholic army squabbled over the blood-soaked plunder like hyenas fighting over a carcass. Such barbarism had shaken the normally unconcerned Galahad to his core. The Grail Knight could still hear the screams and the tearful pleas for mercy of the dying in his sleep, what little he got these days. It was the first time in his life that he had ever considered breaking his knightly oath and becoming a deserter.
And now here he was, a year later, reliving that hellish day all over again, this time in the Occitaine to the west of Béziers, in the town of Bram.
The Catholic forces of De Montfort had chased some refugees of the Béziers massacre to the town of Minerve. Before capturing and burning them at the stake, the earl extracted several confessions from repentant Cathari in Béziers, stating that the towns of Minerve and Bram were both strongholds of the heretics, but that there was more than simple heresy taking place in Bram. A handful of the condemned had sworn that a black-hearted demonic cult was in Bram, a cult that involved human sacrifice, and from whom the Cathari stayed as far away from as possible. To De Montfort it made no difference—any doctrine other than Catholicism was of Satan, and therefore must be wiped from the face of the earth.
After a six-week long siege, the city of Minerve surrendered. The Cathari inside who refused to recant their heresy and return to the one True Church were burned at the stake. Again, De Montfort heard tales of black magic, demon-worship and human sacrifice taking place in Bram, and so he moved his army westward.
Now Galahad was running through the chaotic streets of Bram on this awful, moonless night, dodging the fleeing residents as they frantically tried to escape the invaders. He and a small squad of five knights had been sent by the earl to reconnoiter the abandoned church of St. Denis on the outskirts of Bram, destroyed some years ago by a fire and never rebuilt. The earl had received intelligence from some of the leading citizens of the town that there was indeed a demonic cult in Bram, and that it perversely celebrated its vile rites in the ruined church. He was told that not only did it practice human sacrifice, but that the offerings often consisted of children, even infants.
The Norman commander was now very keen on being able to report to his superiors that he had purged not just one, but two different nests of heretics from the region. He ordered Galahad to pick his men and investigate. The knight was glad to go; he'd just been forced to watch as scores of townspeople were rounded up by the crusaders, then methodically have their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut out. All of them save one man—he was left with one good eye, so that he could lead the other pitiful victims to the next town as a warning to the heretics there of what was to come if they refused to repent of their sins. It was a sickening sight, even to the cynical Galahad.
The knights located the ruined church easily enough. It crouched on the very edge of the town, lifeless, a barely visible glow coming through the windows. It was relatively quiet here, all of the residents having already fled into the surrounding forest. As they approached, the men heard an eerie, rhythmic clacking sound, as though dry bones or sticks were being struck together, accompanied by low chanting in the local Occitan dialect. The church's glassless windows stared at the knights blankly as they approached the main doors and tried to enter, only to find the portal barred against them. The half-burned doors were weak, however, and it didn't take much effort on the part of the heavily-armed knights to force them open. As Galahad and the others burst into the old church, a truly horrifying sight greeted them.
A gathering of about a dozen black-robed men were gathered in the small space. All held large stones in their hands and had been striking them together, the source of the eerie sound they had heard on their approach. In the sanctuary proper of the church, behind the destroyed roodscreen, a lone figure, also wearing black and hooded, stood before the church's stone altar. Every surface of the church's interior had been painted black—walls, floor, altar, even what was left of the ceiling. On a plinth behind the altar, where the crucifix should've been, was a tall black stone, roughly oblong in shape and perhaps five feet tall, topped by the empty-eyed stare of a goat's skull, long, cork-screwed horns jutting from its sides.
A hollow pit opened up in Galahad's stomach as he recognized the idol with shock and dismay. He had been there the night long ago when, through great and dreadful magic, Merlin had managed to rebind a vile, nameless spirit within it, a spirit that fed greedily on misery, fear, suffering and death. A dreadful, unnamable spirit that sought nothing less than the destruction of the world and all of humanity. It had been trapped in the stone eons ago by other powerful magicians, according to Merlin. The spirit had almost been set free by a traitor, one of Arthur's own knights, one of his oldest comrades. A knight who had befriended Galahad and became his mentor when he first arrived at Camelot, who had gladly befriended the bastard-born boy when few others would do so. That man had almost turned this vile spirit loose upon the world; it was the only thing that Merlin had ever feared.
But Merlin had hidden the stone and its foul spirit deep in the bowels of Arthur's castle, protected under the most powerful wards the magician knew—How had that stone found its way here?
The stone and the wall around it were slick and black with layers of blood, including fresh blood that had just been thrown onto it. In the dim candlelight the horrified knights could easily see the small, pale, unmoving figure of a girl-child no older than seven or eight years lying on the altar's dark surface. Her throat had been brutally cut. Galahad knew that she had also been tortured before she had been killed—the spirit craved such things.
The tall figure whirled around as the knights entered the church. In his right hand he held a silver bowl, blood still dripping from its side. His left arm ended in a stump, just above where his wrist should've been. Galahad's eyes stared at the stump.
It cannot be!
The crusaders stared in shock for several seconds, then, forcing himself back to the present, Galahad drew his sword and pointed it at the ghastly, one-handed priest at the altar. His fellow knights followed his lead and quickly drew their own weapons.
"In the names of the King and of the Holy Father, I order you to drop your weapons and surrender!" the knight bellowed. All was still for several long minutes, then the black-robed man, eyes hidden by his hood, threw his head back and laughed in response.
"So! The Most Pure Knight of Virtue has deigned to come down from his golden throne and grace lowly Mankind with his presence!" the man gushed sarcastically with a small, mocking bow. He turned to address not only his own followers, but Galahad's knights as well.
"Behold, crusaders and my own children—Galahad of Camelot has come!" Galahad's stomach twisted itself into a cold knot. He quickly removed his great-helm so as to get a clear view of the man; how did he know Galahad? That voice—it sounded so familiar...
Sweet Iesu, do not let this man be who I fear he is!
"Sir Thomas, why does he address you so?" asked one of the knights nervously of Galahad.
"He is a madman, they are all madmen," answered the tall knight shortly, forcing himself back to the task at hand. "What other reason could there be for abominations such as this?" Galahad indicated the gruesome tableaux behind the roodscreen.
"'Tis fortunate for him, then, that we possess the certain cure for such madness!" proclaimed another knight boldly. Before Galahad could stop him, the knight shouted a war cry and launched himself at the nearest cultist, the blade of his longsword burying itself deeply into the man's chest.
"No! Stop! Fall back!" Galahad shouted, but it did no good. The knights, eager for blood—and any accompanying plunder they might find—fell upon the cultists, mowing down the unarmed men like stalks of wheat.
The leader of the cult dropped the bowl of blood with a snarl. He snatched a bloody, long-bladed knife from the defiled altar and joined the fray, making a beeline for Galahad. Along the way he almost casually stabbed one of Galahad's men, ramming his knife's blade through the man's heavy mail with ease. Leaving the knife embedded in the knight's chest, he then smoothly took the man's sword from his hand as he fell, all the while never taking his burning green eyes off of Galahad.
The longswords of the crusaders were difficult to wield in the tight space, but most were experienced, battle-hardened soldiers. The cultists were zealous, but they were no match for Galahad's men, and soon the church floor was littered with black-swathed bodies. Thanks to the frightening speed and skill of the cult leader, four of the six crusaders also lay dead.
The leader stopped just out of reach of Galahad's blade and held up his handless arm to halt any further fighting. Galahad took the opportunity to address his remaining man, a too-young knight barely able to buckle on his own spurs.
"Edwin, go and fetch reinforcements!" he ordered. The young man hesitated.
"Go! Now!" Galahad barked again, his dark eyes never leaving the robed figure in front of him. "I will hold him here. GO!" Edwin turned and fled the church.
"Who are you?" he demanded of the cultist, as soon as the young knight was gone. Without a word, the tall man reached up and shoved the hood from his head, revealing his thin, sallow, bearded face and a head full of long, lank, graying brown hair. The sword nearly fell from Galahad's band as he stared in astonishment.
"Bedivere?!"
The other man smirked, pleased that he had caught his opponent off-guard so thoroughly.
"You recognize me; good!" he sneered. "It has been a very long time, Galahad. I am so pleased to see that you still live, though you seem a bit...careworn." The thin man chuckled at the expression of disbelief on Galahad's face.
"But you are surprised that you are not the only knight of Camelot to receive otherworldly gifts?" He glanced over his shoulder at the blood-soaked stone.
"How are you still alive!?" Galahad demanded hoarsely.
"The Great God has given me immortality as well, and so much more!"
"That…thing is not a god, and you well know it!" spat Galahad contemptuously, quickly recovering from his shock. His face then took on a more conciliatory expression. "It is a demon, a spirit of pure evil that seeks only to corrupt and rule and ultimately destroy! And it has corrupted you, Bedivere, can you not see that? I tried to warn you all those years ago, when you first began to explore the realms of magic, I begged you to turn away from it, to not let the darker sides of it tempt you." He took a step forward, lowering his sword, his voice pleading with his former friend.
"Merlin himself warned us all against this demon, yet you sought to free it! You saw yourself how close it came to destroying him, the most powerful of sorcerers! And yet you still seek to bend it to your will?" Galahad held out his free hand in a gesture of supplication.
"The Bedivere I once knew would sooner die himself than raise his hand against a child, but look now—You now kill children for that that thing! Can you not see the difference between what you are now and what you once were?" Bedivere pointed at the younger man with his sword.
"I see that some things never change. Again, you blindly fight like a fool on the side destined to lose," he said coldly. "Just as you did in Arthur's day."
"I swore fealty to Arthur," Galahad said, roused. "I swore an oath of loyalty to my king, and you know well that a good knight does not break his oath! Nor does he steal from his lord!" Bedivere again laughed.
"Arthur was a fool," he said blandly. "Merlin was a fool. You are still a fool. And it is no shame to abandon a fool. Excalibur was wasted on him! For all of his noble words and new beliefs in his Christian god, Arthur could not even command the loyalty of his own wife in the end, let alone his entire kingdom!" The thin man stared hard into Galahad's eyes.
"Have you not seen enough in your seven centuries of life to know that I was right all along? That Morgan and Mordred were right? Have not all the wars, massacres, plagues, famines, oppression, the general cruelties that man heaps upon his fellow man convinced you of that yet? Has not this latest 'crusade', in the name of your so-called all-loving Christ convinced you that what you call 'Good' simply cannot defeat what you call 'Evil'? Or, as I prefer to call them, 'Fantasy' and 'Reality'. Arthur fought and died for a fantasy—a new Christian kingdom of peace and justice and wise rule—Bah! He wasted his life on a fantasy! Look outside those doors, Galahad, and see what a Christian kingdom of peace and justice and wise rule looks like! Tell me how it is different, tell me how it is better, than what you see and condemn in here!" He waved his sword to take in the interior of the church.
"I chose, along with Morgan and Lancelot and other enlightened ones, to side with Reality!" He lowered his weapon a little and shrugged off-handedly.
"Even so, it is not too late, Galahad. You can still join us! For the sake of the friendship we once shared, I renew my offer—you and I are two of a kind now, after all. Joined, under the protection of the Great God, we could rule this world like gods ourselves! None would be able to stand against us, not even Morgan le Fay!" Galahad shook his head, an expression of disgust twisting his features.
"Your 'god of reality' demands too high a price for his patronage," he snapped, nodding his head at the dead child behind Bedivere. The black-robed knight glanced backward, then laughed.
"Do not weep for her, Galahad," he said. "The Great God has been most merciful to her. You know what Reality is like for her kind, for the peasantry, the back-breaking work, the grinding poverty. What you call a 'demon' has merely spared her further suffering, has actually given her life meaning by using it to ensure his own survival. Why wasn't your Christian god as kind to her?" He raised his sword again in a defensive stance.
"What is your answer, then, Galahad? Will you join me, or shall I be forced to destroy you?"
"That may be rather difficult to do," scoffed Galahad, preparing himself for a fight. Bedivere sighed dramatically.
"Then you are an even greater fool than your master, Arthur, was, Galahad, for not even an immortal can live without a head!" With lightning speed, Bedivere leaped forward, slashing at Galahad with a swift, backhanded stroke aimed at his neck. The knight barely dodged the blow and swung his own blade up to deflect Bedivere's, cursing himself for removing his great-helm.
The two fought each other hard, dodging and feinting, parrying and striking at one another unrelentingly and they stumbled amongst the bodies of the dead. Galahad was holding his own, but the long string of sleepless nights and now this strenuous activity under the weight of his armor combined to sap his strength. Where were his reinforcements?
The cultist feinted to the right, then suddenly lunged at Galahad. The knight blocked the thrust and threw his body to the side, at the same time bringing up one foot and kicking his attacker squarely in the chest. Bedivere flew backward and slammed into a wall, then began coughing and gasping wildly for air, the wind knocked out of his lungs. Galahad raised his sword and rushed forward to finish the fight.
"Stay your hand, Galahad!" Bedivere choked out feebly, dropping his sword. "I yield! Mercy!" The knight froze in his tracks, honor demanding that he spare any who begged for mercy, certainly one who was unarmed. He approached Bedivere cautiously as the ex-knight continued to gasp and cough, his hand clutching his chest.
It was a trick. As soon as Galahad was close enough, Bedivere struck. Reaching into his robe, he yanked out a dagger, at the same time knocking Galahad's sword-arm aside with his handless forearm. In the split-second the knight was open to attack, Bedivere thrust the dagger forward, aiming for Galahad's stomach. Galahad saw the flash of the blade and instinctively moved just in time, so that rather than burying the blade deep into his enemy's gut, Bedivere only managed to slice deeply into the lower portion Galahad's left ribcage.
Galahad cried out in pain and surprise, staggered back and tripped over one of the dead cultists, fell to the cold stone floor. The dagger had gone through his armor as though it were made of muslin, and the wound it made burned like fire as his blood rushed out of it. Scrambling further backward while he clamped his left hand over the gash, he realized that he'd been struck with a magical weapon. His eyes fell on the dagger clutched in Bedivere's hand, and for the second time that night he was shaken as he instantly recognized it: It was Carnwennan, King Arthur's dagger, lost since Arthur's final defeat at Camlann. His stunned eyes flicked up to Bedivere's gloating face, the cultist slowly getting to his feet.
"You did not actually think I would take Excalibur but leave Carnwennan behind, did you?" he asked, replacing the dagger into its sheath beneath his robes. "If so, then you are indeed an idiot." He quickly picked up the longsword and was upon Galahad in the blink of an eye. He raised the weapon high over his head in preparation to strike off the knight's head.
With a shout, Galahad rolled onto his knees while swinging his sword upward with all of his strength. It was an awkward maneuver, but an incredibly lucky strike, the tip of his blade catching Bedivere squarely across his neck and cutting into it deeply. Blood instantly gushed out of the gaping wound, soaking the cultist's robes and raining onto Galahad. Bedivere, shocked by the turn of events, dropped his weapon and clutched futilely at his throat with his one hand. His face twisted into a voiceless, bloody mask of rage as he lashed out like a striking serpent at Galahad with his foot and kicked him in the face. The knight fell back against the floor, the back of his head striking the stone so hard that he was momentarily stunned, his sword slipping from his fist.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as he waited for the deathblow that was sure to come now. He was at peace, unsurprisingly, with the idea that he was about to die. Bedivere was right about one thing: Galahad had seen far too much of the worst this life had to offer, had even willingly participated in it too much to ever hope for a chance of redeeming himself one day. Part of him instinctively wanted to fight, to survive, but he ignored that urge. Galahad closed his eyes and waited. It was all right for Death to have him now; Hell could not possibly be any worse than this cursed life...
But Death never came. The reinforcements that the stricken knight had sent for arrived at that moment, storming into the church. Bedivere's wound still poured blood, but at the sight of the dozen or so knights that arrived to help 'Sir Thomas', the cult leader still took the time to glare angrily at Galahad, clearly communicating that this incident would not soon be forgotten. He contemptuously spat a mouthful of blood onto the injured knight, then turned and fled, stumbling behind the altar and through a hole in the partially-fallen rear wall of the church. How he was still on his feet, let alone how he was able to run away, Galahad didn't know. Perhaps it was more black magic.
Young Edwin ordered the men to go after the cultist, then rushed to Galahad's side and helped him to stand. His eyes widened at the sight of the injury to his leader's side.
"Sir Thomas! You are wounded!" he exclaimed, bending to examine the still-bleeding injury. "I will send for the physician at once!"
"No!" snapped Galahad, grabbing the young man's forearm. He realized how sharp he sounded, and loosened his grip, forcing a small, reassuring smile to his face. "That is not necessary, Edwin, it is only a shallow cut. It will stop bleeding of its own accord soon enough."
He walked slowly to the altar and looked down at the dead child. She was much like any other peasant child of this region—poorly clad, painfully thin, her small hands already rough with callouses from having to do the work of an adult. He had seen thousands of such children over the centuries, had seen them die in all manner of ways, but this was the first time he had ever seen one die as a sacrifice. Her half-closed eyes were the color of the summer sky. Galahad pulled off his gauntlet and gently closed them, then brushed the backs of his fingers against her cold, pallid cheek. He tenderly stroked her dirty red hair, as though to comfort her. He had hardened his heart over the years against such cruelties, yet this death strangely, deeply touched him, as though she was someone known to him.
"Be at peace now, little one," he murmured. Galahad whispered a quick prayer for her soul, then turned to the quietly waiting Edwin.
"Take the child, Edwin; make arrangements for her to have an honorable burial in a churchyard. I want her washed, to have a rich burial gown, a coffin, a gravestone, a Mass—everything. I will pay for it all. Do not tell the priest how she died, only that she is a casualty of this accursed crusade."
"Yes, my lord," said Edwin. "Are there any other orders, Sir Thomas?"
"Fetch men with mallets and rope," Galahad answered shortly, casting a hate-filled gaze onto the blood-coated idol. He was determined to prevent anyone from ever offering so much as a prayer to this obscene thing ever again.
As Edwin ran to fetch the men and tools, Galahad snatched a longsword up from the church floor and struck the goat's skull from the top of the black pillar. It cracked as it struck the floor. Galahad walked over to it, and stomped on it angrily over and over, crushing the dry bone beneath his heel.