Prologue – Wandering the Borderlands
Pain. Searing, burning pain like his whole body was on fire. Pain lancing through his veins, burrowing into his brain, strangling his heart as if to make it burst... His world was all-consuming pain.
And then there was nothing. Nothing but oblivion, dark as midnight and deep as the sea. There was no pain, no anything, not even breath or heartbeat.
Perhaps he was dying.
Perhaps he was already dead.
There was no thought in the void though, so he could not ponder the dilemma he was now in, suspended between the world of the living and the world of the dead. His head fell forwards, his body sagged, but he was still held upright by the ropes that dug into his wrists, binding his arms to the trees and pulling him this way and that like some grotesque parody of a puppet.
A fox trotted by, unnoticed by the man trembling on the verge of death. It padded through the dusky shadows on silent paws and came to stop in front of the prone figure, cocking its head to one side in mild curiosity. Crimson fur stood out like a splash of blood against the vibrant green of the forest, shimmering softly in the fading light. It seemed like nothing unusual—just a plain, ordinary fox. And yet there was intelligence in its dark amber eyes, intelligence as vast and deep as any human's. The fox studied the limp man tied to the trees, almost as if it recognized him.
The man made not a sound, showed not a sign that he noticed the fox's presence.
With a flick of its bottle-brush tail, the red fox whirled away and disappeared back into the woods. It slid under the bushes ringing the clearing, making no noise as it slipped off to wherever it is that the creatures of the forest go when they vanish from the ken of humans.
After the fox's departure, the copse was deathly silent. If the man still breathed, it was not loud enough to be audible. Sagging against his bonds with locks of shaggy hair falling in front of his closed eyes, he looked as if he would never move again until the ropes decayed and his body finally collapsed to the forest floor.
Mayhap his soul had already departed to wherever it is souls go when they no longer inhabit the body. Mayhap what the fox had seen was only the empty shell of what had once been a man.
And yet... There was something about the stillness with which he hung and the listlessness of his body that did not quite match those of someone already dead. His lips were parted ever so slightly, so that maybe the barest whisper of air found its way into his lungs. No sound of a heartbeat could be heard, but all the same his skin was not as pale as it should have been if his heart no longer pumped blood through his veins. He trembled on the border between life and death, dancing that delicate dance on the razor's edge as his soul wandered the shadowy borderlands.
For a long time he hung there alone. With the fox gone, not another animal entered the clearing, not even the ravens and other scavengers that loved to feed on the corpses of the dead. The ravens had other food today, a whole battlefield of the dead, a feast cooked for them by the ignorance and stupidity of men and women who saw fighting as the only answer to their differences.
And then, all of a sudden, it happened that there was another figure in the clearing. She stepped out of the trees so swiftly and so silently that it seemed as if she had materialized out of thin air. Her bare feet glided over the stubby grass as her dark green dress trailed behind her, though she did not seem to notice or mind that it was dragging on the forest floor and had accumulated a smattering of twigs and leaves. All her attention was fixed on the figure strung between two trees, the figure that hovered between life and death, whose soul was on the verge of flight.
The strange woman from the forest knelt and tipped up the head of the prone man with one graceful finger. With her other hand, she brushed back a lock of dark brown hair from his face and studied the high cheekbones and stubbly chin it revealed. Her fingers danced as she ran her nimble hands over his broken body, gently probing his ribs and feeling for a pulse in his neck. She rocked back on her heels and smiled to herself, seemingly satisfied with what she had found.
"Well then," she said to herself as she began to unweave the knots binding the man to the trees. "Sir Gwaine."