Alexan POV

*Clink*

"GAHH!"

Everywhere I looked, the bloodied battleground of two armies were the only thing I saw. The wails of the wounded and the screams of the living filled the air. It was an unbearable sight of human cruelty and desperation.

"Is it hate that drives you? Hatred for me?!" A scream caught my attention. I turned to see a knight in silver and red armor glaring at a blonde woman wearing a blue dress encased in metal armor plates.

The colors may be different, but the general design of the knight's armor was inconceivably similar to King Mordred. That would make the other female to be King Arthur and the place I stood was the Battle of Camlann.

I witnessed their duel for dominion over ancient Britain. Every moment their blades clashed, reality became ever more distorted as if the battle between the two warriors was poison to reality's very existence.

The results of the battle never transpired as the landscape and everything within it spontaneously froze. Even the dust uplifted by the duel stood in place.

My limbs fell into the same fate of defenseless paralysis. Suddenly, a ghostly face irrupted into the world and drifted directly towards my face.

"Find it." A little girl's voice escaped its lips.


I awoke inside my car in a cold sweat. The suit I wore was not doing any favors in masking the panic I received from my nightmare.

This dream was not an odd occurrence; I have seen it many times since childhood. It was always the same from start to finish, where I stood on the fields of a medieval war. However, the discovery of Mordred's true history by me and my friends had lessened the frequency of its emergence to once a week rather than once a day.

Though the issue of my nightmares was of lesser concern. The events of today were of greater significance.

Slowly, I exited my car and passed the creaking gates that guarded the ancestral grounds of the Burin family. Gray clouds covered the noon sky and cold winds brushed past my brown trench coat. The place was left empty as relatives and family members had left to partake in other portions of the ceremony.

I stood alone upon the funeral grounds of my ancestors and relatives. This land was a property of my family since the Medieval era, where every man and woman under the Burin name had the honor of resting in the embrace of family for eternity. The biggest tombstone was also the oldest. It was the final remembrance of the founding father of the Burin noble family, who was said to have seen the rise and fall of Camelot…And experienced the death of both the King of Knights and Mordred.

I always perceived my family's past with a grain of salt, but the gemstone that bulged from my breast pocket pushed me into a state of regret.

Throughout my childhood, my father spoke of the Burin family history as a treasure to be passed on and cherished in the same care and love as our family heirloom-the gemstone. Before I discovered the secrets of the gemstone, I believed the medieval tales as partial truths that were distorted by the flow of time. Never had I known it was the full truth.

As I stood over my old man's grave, I regretted never apologizing about my childish mocking of our family history. I was too caught up in the glory and fame of the discovery that I neglected my father's well being. He kicked the bucket a few days after news of our discovery went public. Decades prior, the doctor noted that his constitution was degrading greatly due to a tumor in his head; it was a shock to everyone that he had lived till now.

I truly resented myself for never contacting him first when I recognized the shame I brought to our family name.

Now, I stood before his grave with a downcast look on my face. I placed a hand on my breast pocket, feeling the bulge on my leather coat. There was nothing for me here but grief, not knowing how to move on from the past.

"Still beating yourself to the ground, Alexan?" A elderly woman wandered towards me. I shifted my gaze to my mother and saw a small wooden box cradled in her arms.

"You should stop before something bad happens." She counseled me. "Your father knew it was impossible for someone to believe our history without seeing it first-hand. He loved you no matter what you chose to believe because he acted the same to your grandfather."

"He did?" I was surprised how my father, who was so dedicated to our family history, would be skeptical of those medieval tales.

"Of course, he would always joke about how much he toyed with the amulet and grasped for the truth before understanding the weight of the Burin name." She chuckled as she recounted the enjoyable days of the past. "Perhaps he knew this day would come."

My mother extended the box towards me and smiled. "He wanted you to have this."

I slowly took the box with trembling hands as if a sudden shift of my fingers could vaporize the container.

"Take care of yourself. I don't want to die before I meet my grandchildren." She gave her farewells and turned away to leave.

"I will." I called back and smiled. My reply was met with a hearty nod by my sole surviving parent as we parted ways.

Not long after, I left the cemetery and drove to the mansion that my grandfather used to reside in. It was also the place I was born and lived in for the first ten years of my life before my father became ill. The place was now vacant as the servants were dismissed and my mother moved out to a more modern home.

Delicately, I pushed open the large entrance doors and took in the pleasant nostalgia the walls and old paintings brought to me. My father advertised this place as a time machine that would teleport the modern man to the medieval times. If the stories handed down from father to son were true, then the history of this establishment should be too.

This mansion was potentially the same place my multi-great grandparents had stepped and lived in.

I walked up the stairs covered in red carpets and passed a large portrait of a mysterious knight with blonde hair.

No…Not a mysterious knight, but a king.

"So you were always here and I never noticed. How blinded was I?" I touched the brims of the painting, immersing myself in the wonders of history as it portrayed itself in the flesh.

The layers of silt and candle wax covered the paint and darkened the tones, while cracks murked the fine lines drawn by the artist. Nonetheless, the damage on the art-piece illustrated its authenticity.

I shook my head to snap out of my reverie and continue my stroll to the library. I always saw my father inside it, enjoying his time in the embrace of the night. In my childhood, I never understood why he would silently rest on the old rocking chair for hours to stare at the night sky through the large glass windows of the library.

Now, I could understand the wonders my father had experienced. I sat upon the rocking chair overlooking the mansion estate and saw the silent, yet beautiful, view that invited my eyes' participation.

I sighed to relieve myself of the overwhelming nostalgia of my childhood home. In the silence of the library, where only the light of candles and disappearing sun illuminated the library, it finally felt right to open the box given to me.

I situated the box onto a small desk. My fingers curled around the edges of the container and lifted the cover to reveal a pile of small booklets. Each book was of the same design but varied in age, where the oldest was at the right and newest at the left. I cautiously removed the newest of the booklets and opened it.

It was my father's diary; each page detailing a different time of his life. I closed it and picked up another book to find it to be another diary. This new book was written by my grandfather.

An imaginary hammer struck me as I realized that this box was literally the box of history. Each book detailed the experiences of a generation. No amount of wealth and fame in this world could acquire this treasure. It was a priceless artifact.


Dream

It was another one of those dreams, but the scene was different. Instead of the battlefield, I was inside the cave that was resting grounds of Mordred

The landscape was replaced by a familiar cave, where the pedestal of Caliburn was empty of its blade. The sword laid on the ground a few feet away from its perch. The throne inside the cave was also empty.

I felt nothing until I saw her…

Before my eyes, Mordred knelt on her knees. Her wounds were horrendous in a similar severity as a butcher brutalizing and dissecting a cattle. Yet, a butcher was far kinder as he ensured the animal died painlessly…Mordred did not receive the same mercy.

I could see her chest moving as her body desperately gasped for air…grasping for life.

"This is my...happy ending." I heard her say it…Those same words that iterated throughout the Mordred Notes.

"It was her ending." A child's voice whispered in my ears. It was the same voice that ended every one of my nightmares. A mirror materialized itself in front of me and exposed a ghostly girl floating next to my face. Her arms wrapped around my neck, holding onto it like a scarf protecting the wearer from the cold. "It was her end…Find it."


"AHHH!" I shot awake on my rocking chair and rapidly placed my hands on my shoulders and neck. Steadily, I regained my composure and reminded myself that everything was a dream. The realization did not erase the cold sweat that drenched my back and the trauma I experienced.

I rubbed my eyes to erase the drowsiness from my mind. I was soon well enough to see the mess I caused in the library. A pile of diaries piled high outside the box sat on the desk to my left side and three more diaries laid open on my lap. The candles ran out, leaving the only remaining light source to be the moon's brilliant shine.

I sighed before checking my phone to check the time. It was currently 11:30 PM (GMT+1), 30 minutes until midnight. A missed call and voice message notification from my friend Dr. Macton popped up when the device was turned on.

I yawned to get rid of any remaining fatigue bottled inside my body and played the voice message.

"Hello Alexan, sorry for calling you this late but I think you have to hear this. You know that we recently handed in the broken bits of the amulet, excluding the gemstone, to a laboratory for DNA testing and the like, right?...Well the results have returned and the findings are more mysterious than breakthroughs. Yes, we have found Mordred's DNA in previous tests, but these new test trials brought more anomalies to light."

There was a pause in the voice message as Dr. Macton thought of ways to properly express the findings.

"We have found different layers of solvents-glues in fact-at the base of the amulet where the gemstone is attached to the rest of the necklace. The oldest is a glue made from tree resin as a base, which was where we found the DNA. Then there were thin layers of tar and glues that were discontinued before the second world war. The most recent of these solvents is a strange mixture dyed gold-"

My mind cut off the rest of the voice message as my mind raced to the statements spoken by my mother.

"Your father knew it was impossible for someone to believe our history without seeing it first-hand," she had said in the cemetery. "He toyed with the amulet and grasped for the truth."

My memories traveled further and into my childhood, where I saw the many times my father would enter this library and sit on this chair with the desk on his left side. Many times, he would be in here for hours enjoying the moment.

Cautiously, I ran my left hand across the side of the desk and felt a handle on the side. I pulled it and a glass container slid into view. I reached for the bottle and twisted the cap off to reveal a glittery gold viscous liquid.

"He knew." I muttered in revelation. I brought out the gemstone and noticed the moonlight piercing through the library window had landed on the stone, allowing the map to imprint itself onto the floor.

"Why didn't he say anything?" I intensely gazed at the gemstone. Another thought jolted my brain as I revisited my dream.

"Find it." The girl had ordered in my dreams.

I reached for the diaries, scrambling through the last few pages of each booklet. There, I found my answer.

Every one of those diaries spoke of weird dreams and the same phrase, "Do not find it."

Why was mine different? How was I worthy of a discovery denied by my predecessors?

I brought the gemstone to eye level to further contemplate my position in life. Unbeknownst to my intentions, my eyes narrowed in onto the bookshelves partially covered from view by the gemstone.

A single book stood out from the rest; it held an oval opening in its spine. I swiftly got up from the chair, careful to not damage the diaries, to reach the shelf. Using the flashlight on my phone, I eyed the oval dent and glanced at the similarly shaped gemstone on my hand.

My arms trembled as I fitted the dent with the gemstone. The gem snapped into place and popped back out onto my palm. Then, the entire library violently vibrated as multiple shelves shoved aside to reveal a secret stairway leading downwards.

I gulped and gathered the courage to enter the passage. At the end was a large room enveloped by more books and sketches of strange markings and circles. Herbs, gemstones, and strange concoctions lined the walls and shelves, filling the room in a medicine-like aroma. In the center was a large painting of a priest, noble, knights, and King Mordred in her glorious black and red armor. Her face was brilliantly sculpted in hundreds of layers of paint, which perfectly sketched out her beauty in every form and perspective.

Entranced by the beauty and majesty of my discovery, I walked towards the painting. A small label embedded in a gold plate named the painting as "The King and Those Who Knew."

Right under the painting was a small booklet with the same design as various diaries I had read. A small slip of paper laid between the pages, acting as an unintentional bookmark.

****You are my son, a child who carries the noble blood of the Burin family. We, who have secretly and proudly served Mordred at her rise, will preserve her legacy against the passage of time. One day, you may be chosen to seek her out. Will you take it with stride and engrave yourself to our family ordeal?

Whatever you may choose, know that I am never once disappointed in you. I am forever proud of you, Alexan…My heir to the collective knowledge of multiple generations of the Burin family's magecraft.

-Hugo Burin****

"I-I-I-I." No words came from my gaping lips. Nothing but the silent cries of immeasurable roar of emotions battling throughout my body and the streams of tears drowning my sight as I stare at the note from my father.

All the while, King Mordred warmly looked upon my sullied form from her painting. Her presence was warm, protecting me and reassuring guidance to all hardship I will face; she had already done so for centuries for my family.

I whole heartily accept this gift and your wishes, father and ancestors.