35 A warlock's quest

Without thinking Arthur freed the sword from Galla's chest. He fought a blinding vertigo when this opened the boy's torso even more. Standing up, he almost fell again. "You" he said hoarsely "you made me murder my own son! When I thought I killed this giant monster, I really …."

"Yes" Armand replied. "I lied to you."

At first, Arthur didn't grasp it. What? What was the other man saying? "Why?" he asked, trying to understand the incomprehensible "For the good of magic, for some twisted plan, for the greater glory of your fucking Old Religion, can you at least tell me why on earth I had to kill my son with my own hands?" The words felt as if they couldn't be possibly his. He was choking on them.

"You will not understand…."

"You're fucking right" Arthur exploded, the paralysis driven away by pure hatred "I won't understand, but you will tell me, before you die!" Armand didn't flinch when Arthur's fist grabbed his throat and pushed him back, away from Galla's body.

"I owed you as much as a second chance, My Lord. As well as I owed it to myself. Your own son was your bane, Arthur. When Morgana gave him up to the old Gods by renaming him Mordred, she had no idea what she was doing!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"It was a singular prophecy, the one that foretold that Arthur Pendragon would fail his glorious destiny because of the boy Mordred. The Druid boy you once saved is long dead, but your own son – was not Galahad at the bottom of your every failure? Let go off me!" Violently Armand broke free of Arthur's grip. "With Galahad's birth the balance between the two religions was unsettled, with Galahad's inability to be your heir your kingship failed. If Margaly had lived….."

"But she did not live. She's dead. They're all dead. Don't you dare speak to me of second chances…." Arthur yelled, his face a contorted mask of rage.

"Well, if it comforts you" Armand now yelled back "we're two of a kind. Besides yourself Galahad was the only one left with your blood in his veins. It had to be your blood spilled, here, in this place, at this day, by Excalibur and by your very own hand, if I was ever to reclaim my home. My people, King of Camelot, my soul, my very god-damned heart! All that ever was dear to me was at stake. And I've lost it!"

"What…"

"Oh, Your Majesty does not understand, do you, but then, you never did." Armand was feverish, he looked like a madman. "Morgause took the Isle from me, she took all I've ever lived for. For you, for Camelot, for these fucking idiots in Albion. I brought you here to get it back, to get my very soul back, it was your life or your boy's, cursed as he was, damned as he was from the day he was born; I was fool enough to choose your life over his!"

"How dare you" Arthur said, his lips were white and he was freezing from within. "How dare you make this choice for me."

"Because you're an idiot. You stomp through this world with your sword, and your code, and your fine words and your noble intentions. But what did you achieve? You promised peace to your realm, freedom to magic, and restoration to the Old Religion. Where is all that, pray tell me? You promised everything to everyone, but you could not keep your promises, because they were mutually exclusive!"

"Did you kill my boy so that it might make you feel more justly cheated?"

"Your son is dead because we both are fools, Pendragon. We cling to our dreams far beyond the slightest hope. Two sides of one coin, as it has been foretold, a Golden Age for Camelot with you on the throne, and the Blessed Isle restored to its former glory. I never gave that up, not for a single moment. It had to be Galahad who died today, not you!"

"Curse your god-damned magic, curse it to hell. I should have listened to my father, I should have slain you years ago!"

"Go on, do it. There is one thing you did achieve. Magic is gone. Gone, Pendragon! The Isle is no more, magic is no more. I felt it my grasp, but it slipped, slipped through my very fingers….." Armand was panting, he could hardly speak, his voice was breaking. "Your sister and your precious friends, Arthur Pendragon, they've destroyed it before it would come back to me! It was all in vain, all for nothing. Your friends did this to me!"

"Enough" Arthur shouted. Excalibur still in his hands he came for Morgwyn, hell-bent on making an end of everything, regardless of the consequences, without so much as giving the other's words a single thought, knowing only that his son was dead and cried for justice and revenge.

Excalibur sang when the blade met with Morgwyn's sword. Arthur drove his swing home with all his might. Armand turned his blade, almost disarming his attacker. Arthur had to pull back before he attacked. Again, the blades collided, and this time Excalibur snagged with the other sword. Armand pulled upwards, and twisted his sword. Arthur had to let go, but before his hilt left his hand, he kicked against Armand's leg. Morgwyn stumbled, and lowered his arms to regain his balance. He yelped when Arthur's elbow landed in his stomach pit. Pendragon pirouetted on his heel and with one swift move regained his own blade. He thrust back, but Armand avoided the sword aiming for his vulnerable belly with a side step. As he moved, Morgwyn swung his blade to the left. The razor-sharp edge cut deep into Arthur's hip.

Arthur toppled over in pain. Armand screamed in triumph and went in for the kill, his sword raised high for a fatal blow on Arthur's unprotected head.

On his knees, Pendragon skidded sideways and fell on his unhurt hip. Even so, the impact made him gasp with pain. Without really taking aim, he brought his sword hilt up. By sheer luck, he made hard contact with Armand's groin.

Morgwyn recoiled with a grunt. Arthur gritted his teeth and rolled out of the other's reach, trying to stand up before Armand could come back.

But he was far too slow. Morgwyn was with him in an instant. Arthur tried to evade his blade, skidding over the ground on his back. He cried out in terror when he collided with Galla's dead body; and his neck came to lie on Galla's shoulder. Again his hand got smeared with his boy's blood and intestines. Arthur's arm glided down the slick dead skin and got hold of something in Galla's belt.

"If it makes this easier for you" Armand hissed through tensed jaws "your son died a very happy young man, talking to his mother. He neither saw nor felt anything that happened to him. I wish I could do the same for you!" He pressed his sword at Arthur's throat. "Good Bye, Your Majesty!"

Arthur cried out when he slid down from Galla's body, evading the sword tip by mere millimetres, as the blade still scratched over the skin on his throat. Armand pushed harder to cut the neck from the back, bending over in the process.

Arthur's other arm came back for him and the knife from Galla's belt cut into Armand's side. Once more, Armand screamed with pain and rage, recoiled, only to come back for his enemy at once. Meanwhile the ground beneath his feet was covered in blood.

With a courage born of desperation Arthur threw away the knife, grabbed Armand's closest foot, and pulled. In every other fight, this would have meant instant death. As it was, Morgwyn did indeed slip on the slippery ground, and fell. He turned in his fall, but he did not let go of his sword. With all his weight, he crushed down on Arthur's arms, both raised in a defensive reflex.

Armand had an easy job of bringing Arthur down. With Excalibur's magic gone, the blade did nothing to protect Arthur's wrists from the impact, as Armand had known they would. The momentum he'd gained toppled him, though. When Arthur's arms broke and yielded to the blow, Morgwyn fell and they both crashed to the ground.

Arthur screamed before he bit his lip to silence himself. Feeling his arms trapped by Armand's weight, he knew it was over. Disarmed and with two useless hands, all he could do was wait for the final blow.

It never came.

After what seemed an eternity, Arthur pulled himself upright enough to turn over Armand's unmoving body. Without understanding he stared into the High Master's broken eyes. It took him a whole minute before he thought to examine the body closer.

It took him even longer to find Galla's knife buried deep in Morgwyn's flesh.

The High Master had fallen into it. It had cut through the ribs into the heart. Death had been almost instantaneous.

It was over.

Armand of Morgwyn, once Armand of Ravenclaw, the last High Master of the Blessed Isle, the man who'd shaped the fate and doom of Camelot for decades, whose strive had touched and destroyed thousands of lives, whose dreams had forced magic to leave this world forever - lay face-down in the mud like a dead piece of mutton.

One of the most powerful sorcerers of his age had been killed by a weapon just somewhat bigger than a kitchen knife.

Not by magic, not in a glorious battle, not by Excalibur, not by the King of Camelot.

But by slipping and falling into a dead child's shitty toy.

Arthur heard a peculiar sound come from his own throat, a singular blend of guffaw, sob and feral howl.

With his dead son in his back, and his dead enemy in front of him, the High King of Albion found himself alive, and he just could not believe this to be true. No logic, no somehow imaginable twist of fate, however remote, could possibly have led to this absurd, idiotic outcome.

The irony of it, the sheer, utter futility, was overwhelming.

Arthur hadn't understood much of what Armand had talked about during their last hour, but he'd gathered that much – somehow, sometime during this last mad battle between the High Master and the Blessed Isle, Morgana had sacrificed herself to save the Island, and thereby magic itself, from Armand's last and desperate grasp.

Three hearty cheers for the last man standing.

Camelot was in shambles, all Arthur had ever fought for was gone, all he'd ever cared for were dead, all his strive, all his dreams had led to nothing but destruction, carnage, revenge and counter revenge. An endless vicious circle, finally terminated; not by his doing, but by another senseless carnage crowned by a senseless accident.

That was what the Divine Comedy of Pendragon Destiny had finally accumulated to.

The last, glorious climax of the eternal battle for magic, for the world; the life, the universe, and all the rest: A slip, a fall, a kitchen knife – over and done; the curtain dropped, the lights flared up, and would-you-please-check-for-your-belongings-on-the-way-out-of-the-theatre.

And on their way out, the audience would chatter away most lively. About the piece having been too melodramatic to be funny, or far too comical for a good melodrama. "No, really, I do say" a fat Lady would tell her bored and yawning husband, "all this talk of Golden Ages, of Prophecies, of Destinies – and then, two corpses in the mud, a kitchen knife, and one last man alive, about to go mad? Goodness gracious me! By the way, dinner at our place or at the Millers'?"

A bout of hysteric laughter formed in Arthur's throat. Irrepressible and irresistible. He shoved Armand away, turned on his back unheeding of the pain flaring up in his injuries and curled up into a ball. He hugged Galla's body - and let go of all defences. He laughed and laughed until his voice was all but gone, until the laughter turned into sobs that raked his whole body. He succumbed to the paroxysm of emotion until total exhaustion finally numbed him.

His eyes closed, his powers spent, Arthur lost consciousness on his son's dead body, feeling intense solace from the thought that he'd never rise to see another day.

And that was where and how Merlin eventually found him.

Merlin had had his own version of a twisted epiphany. The ecstasy of magic withdrawing into him, as if he was not a man but a sort of living Holy Grail, had left him in a severe anti-climax. Shaking, puking, stammering he'd spent hours rooted to the spot, not knowing what to do or where to go. The memory of Morgana's last words had finally haunted him back to his feet, and he had stumbled on and on.

For all of the warlock's desperate conviction to be the last man left alive, it had, in the end, not cost him more than a short walk from one hill top to the next to find his final destination.

Merlin stared and stared, trying to make any sense of what he was facing, but he failed miserably. Arthur Pendragon, sleeping on the corpse of his own son, with Armand of Morgwyn lying dead close by.

As miracles came, this was one of the more disastrous kind.

Eventually, Merlin knelt down and did what seemed the only thing remotely adequate – he checked for Arthur's pulse. Then, once he'd made sure the King was alive, the warlock dropped by his side.

"Shit" he thought. He felt a bit guilty and foolish that he could not clothe his wary, tired thoughts in better and less childish words. Ineluctably, he should have phrased it more profoundly, with all the weight, the deepness of feeling and the dark beauty that utter tragedy and dramatic fallacy of all human endeavour have found and created in the proud tradition of human literature.

But – that was what he could actually think, nothing else, nothing more, no crie de coeur that would reverberate through the millennia, no epitaph that would resound with passion's striking beauty for all centuries to come – no, just that, the one, childish word: Shit.

Not for Arthur's doom, and not for his own tragedy. It pressed on him, like lead, like tons of it. Pressed him to the spot. He dreaded remembering it, dreaded realiziation of what it meant for him, but for the life of him he could not cease thinking about it, to relive it in his mind, in his heart, again and again.

And so he did.

Think about it.

With the stink of what had befallen Arthur in his nostrils, the gruesome sight of it in his eyes, and the careless, thoughtless bird-chirping in his ears, Merlin thought about it.

About what presumably had happened to Morgana, his little daughter, and himself.

And then he understood why Arthur was where he was, and how he was, and how he would most probably feel when he would complete his misery by regaining consciousness.

At that point, Merlin curled up by Arthur's side and did what he perhaps should have done, at least now and then, in the right moment, in the past: He let go. He let it all slide.

Let it wash over him. Allowed the world to be the shit it always had been, holus-bolus without his sage and august intervening.

For fate had surely done its worst. Here they were, a King and his warlock, not for better, for all hope was gone, not for worse because worse just wasn't possible.

All our lives we've fought for our destiny come true. Then destiny went broke, but taking us with it slipped its mind.

Here we are then, my Arthur. The world has gone to pieces and left us two bottlers high and dry.