† Day Four †
He used every trick in the book to escape. Whenever the Lady of the Lake disappeared for a little while, when she thought him asleep or too exhausted to move, Lancelot walked down the shores of the island in search for a hidden path out. Nothing. The boat had disappeared, and the mist confused his sense of direction to lead him back to the island after a few hopeless steps. He explored the castle ruins and countless towers for a secret tunnel the Lady might have overlooked. Nothing. When the Lady manifested from his nightmares to watch Lancelot on his walks, he used every opportunity to attack her. Twice he cut her head off, and both times she melted into a puddle of water only to reassemble with a wicked laugh. He set up traps for her, but she slipped through every snare and avoided every avalanche of castle stone like the shadow she was.
Her hands twisted lazily around her figure, but the moment he let his guard down, they crept forward. Always there to pick the thoughts out of his head, always ready to twine around his limps and drag him into her black abyss.
On the third night, after the pale sun had drowned in the depths of the lake, Lancelot walked to the shore, thrusted Jericho's sword into the sand, and continued on until the water reached his chin. The cold drove the air out of his lungs. He fought forward long after the ground disappeared under his feet, long after he lost his sense of direction and his understanding of up and down. The sky shone with a blackness as complete as the depths below. With frantic movements, he held himself above water, desperate for air, desperate for life. But his arms felt heavy, and his soaked tunic pulled him down, down, down.
He swallowed water. Its taste filled his body and his mind, a plain nothingness that replaced every other thought. Pure and impure. His undoing. The bubbles of his last desperate breaths danced around him, and he sunk down, down, down into the depths.
When Lancelot woke up, the sun had risen, and the Lady of the Lake hovered a few feet away. His clothes had dried, but the pressure on his lungs had lost nothing of its force, and he coughed for the tasteless air of this realm. In Benwick, a million different flavors had filled the air, the herb scent of conifers and moss, the sweet aroma of spring flowers, grass after a night of rain, the gentle but distinct trails of mushrooms. This place smelled of nothing, tasted of nothing, and the air Lancelot pulled in left a dry savor in his throat.
He pushed himself up with trembling arms and faced the Lady, who had to have saved him from the lake. For what purpose, he could only guess.
"What do you want?" Lancelot asked and gave his enemy a glare he hoped looked menacing. "I don't wanna play your games anymore."
The Lady inched closer. "The question isn't what I want. But I know what you want, and I can help you achieve what you desire."
Lancelot shifted backwards and closed his hand around the nearest stone. Even a well-calculated throw wouldn't faze her, but the diversion might buy him the time to escape her endless riddles.
"You don't know me," he said.
"Oh, but I do. I have watched you for years. Every time you passed a river on your patrols, I could hear you sing to yourself, pretending to live without a care in the world. I saw your outbursts over the mistakes of your pathetic Fairy friends, and I witnessed your frustration whenever your father abandoned his duties as king. I watched as the loneliness carved lines into your face with each day the people around you refused to treat you like an equal. You had no friends, no one to trust or to talk to, so you turned to duties and responsibilities to give you meaning. I understand you long for the strength of an adult to challenge all who do wrong."
Lancelot's chest cramped. The rock bit into his palm. No, she didn't know him. Nothing she said had any value, if he let her words get to his head, she would swallow him like she had done with Jericho, and that would be the end of his story. She didn't know him.
He hurled the stone at the Lady's head but forgot to stagger to his feet and flee as planned. "SHUT UP!"
"I'm offering you a chance, Lancelot, on behalf of my master. Whether or not you decide to use this chance is up to you. But know that I have high hopes for your future. You will stand above kings as the strongest knight humankind has seen. Isn't this what you want?"
"LEAVE ME ALONE!"
And with a final twirl of her uncountable hands, the Lady obeyed and seeped into the earth like water.
Lancelot reached for another stone and tossed it at the nearest stone tower with a scream. The structure duly collapsed and drowned out his tirade of curses. His hands trembled as he clawed them into the dirt, ripping out grass blades, yanking at their roots, hoping that the pounding in his head would finally stop. But his shouts did not survive long after the embodiment of his personal hell had vanished. With the shadows gone, so too fleeted the heat from his veins.
He thought about home. About the sun and the sky and the trees, everything which had seemed ordinary, hardly worth words of appreciation. Now all the little pieces of reality slipped away, replaced by shadows and depths and a lake to trap him. He thought about his parents, and he thought about Jericho. Was she alive somewhere out of reach of his heart reading ability? She had to be. Jericho wouldn't lose a fight, not even against a foe as ghastly and remorseless as the Lady of the Lake. A stubbornness that defied death coursed through her blood, and she had taught Lancelot to use the same determination to his advantage. He wouldn't give in, he would continue to fight and honor her teachings.
Ban had never given in. He had fought Demons, unspeakable creatures, the fires of Purgatory, and a full-fledged god to revive Elaine. No obstacle had seemed too high, no challenge too hopeless, he had battled and overcome every stroke of fate. The people of Liones still cheered for him after ten years. When Lancelot thought of the image of a hero, his father's face sprung to mind without fail.
He could not, would not disappoint his father. While the odds worked against him with an overpowering might intent to suffocate him in this cursed realm, the small chance remained that he would succeed in what he had set out to do. The Lady of the Lake had her hands in the disappearance of all these humans, that much was set in stone. And if Lancelot played her game for a little longer, if he showed the patience of an adult, maybe he would gain her trust and solve this case after all.
No one else would step forward to shoulder the burden.
In one thing the Lady had said, she had hit the mark. He wanted to challenge all those who did wrong in this world. And the first source of wrongdoings he would face lived with him on this island.
Lancelot climbed to his feet and traced back his steps to where he had placed Jericho's sword last night. He stopped for a heartbeat before he closed his fingers around the leather-wrapped hilt. The blacksmith had done outstanding work. He had folded the steel many times over until the weapon could withstand even the fiercest blows, and the blade lay with perfect balance in Lancelot's hand. Many a Demons and other creatures of evil had found their end through the sharpness of this steel. Maybe he could one day add a monster who overshadowed them all onto the list.
He took a calming breath and began to reenact the sequences of armed combat Jericho had taught him.
⸸ † ⸸
Ban stood before the bed in his son's room and clenched his hands until the nails drew blood. Other boys his age stacked their room with little treasures, Tristan owned an entire collection of plushies and wooden figurines, but Lancelot had gotten rid of all these small diversions at the age of five. The furnishings were as spartan as what Ban had known when he had payed extensive visits to the plentiful prisons around Raven. But the lack of personality to the organic tree walls didn't make his stay easier. Nor did it help drive out the tenseness in his muscles.
Three full days had passed, and he hadn't moved one step on the tortuous trail to find Lancelot regardless of all his and Elaine's efforts. Three full days spent with turning over every rock inside and outside of Benwick. Three full days' worth of questions on whether the Fairies had heard or seen even the faintest trail that might help. To no avail.
Three days equals permanent loss in seventy percent of cases. Within two weeks, the number jumps to over nine in ten missing children. Since Gowther had presented this statistic with a troubled expression hidden behind his glasses, the numbers ran amuck in Ban's head with no signs of slowing.
The last time one of the carefree and scatterbrained Fairies had seen Lancelot, he had walked towards the borders of Benwick with Jericho. She hadn't reported back since that morning either. Ban had turned her quarters and the places she liked to hang out upside down in an attempt to piece together where she had gone, but her few personal belongings had stood on the shelf of her room untouched. And she hadn't snagged provisions from the storages either.
The fact that Jericho had accompanied Lancelot when he had disappeared should comfort Ban.
It didn't.
If he was being honest with himself for a fleeting moment and silenced the cries of denial, he knew what had happened to the two. On the morning where they had set out to abandon every semblance of sense to investigate the missing persons case, rain had lashed the hills outside of Benwick. The drops had run down the grass blades when Ban had arrived at the scene. People, not even a boy as moronic and reckless as Lancelot, didn't disappear for no reason. Unless the rain swallowed them.
The reports on missing commoners and knights across Britannia hadn't passed Ban by unnoticed. How could they? Meliodas had brought up the issue multiple times during his last stay in Liones' capital, and Ban had promised to keep his eyes open. But until the merchant had vanished into thin air on his doorsteps, he hadn't bothered to approach the matter with a serious face. Even then he had waved the disappearance aside to indulge in quality time with Elaine and his favorite type of booze. In the quiet years after the New Holy War, he had lost his grit, had given into the illusion that he had found everything he ever wished for, and that no threat would follow him out of Purgatory to rob, violate, and burn his happiness.
And Lancelot had paid the price for his father's weakness.
Ban reached for the blanket that lay crumbled on the bed, the same as Lancelot had left it behind. As though he would walk into the room the next moment with a rightful lecture about responsibility on his lips. If Ban had done his damn job just this one time…
The rustling of fabric near the door signaled Elaine's entrance. In all likelihood, she had hovered there without a sound for the past ten minutes. "It's not your fault."
Even tired whitewashing sounded pretty in her mouth. As he had done for the majority of the past three days, Ban refused to look at her and instead studied the pattern of the blanket until the black spots were etched into his memory.
"Pretty shabby lie if you ask me."
Elaine had the decency to keep her distance, but she wasn't done arguing. "Ban, you are doing everything you can. No father could have done more—"
"And it didn't make a damn difference."
"Do you think you're the only one who has to live with the same burning questions? With the regret? Every time I go to bed, I'm reminded that I should have felt his desire to live up to your expectations. I should have read the determination in his heart. I should have known."
"Too bad you didn't. That heart-reading shtick you Fairies like to pull would have been real useful for once."
"Good, keep it coming, spread some of these insults if that helps you. I take that over your emotionless fuss to avoid me any day. You know what makes it worse to lie in bed and think about all these what-ifs until I feel like I'm drowning? The fact that you won't even allow yourself to sleep as though that punishment could bring him back!"
Ban gazed out of the hole in the wall posing as a window without seeing any of the trees and mountain ridges beyond. "And what else am I supposed to do? I can't rely on others with this. I lost him because I never did what I was supposed to do."
"You're not the only one who lost him. And I don't care how often before you've pushed away the helping hands of others, you will need your friends. They are all worried about you. Let them help. Merlin knows more about magic than anyone else, she could—"
"Merlin can crawl into Purgatory for all I care. She got her wish, and she wasn't stingy with the number of people she screwed over to get what she wanted. Am I supposed to pretend like nothing happened? That a drink will settle everything? Because guess what, I can't. My crown didn't come packaged with this magical forgiveness thing Arthur has going on. I'm not the guy who makes for a good and responsible king, regardless of what you or the Captain or these pesky Fairies say. All the titles in the world won't change the fact that I am a bandit, a street rat. Lance saw something in me that doesn't exist. And he died because of it."
Before Ban could process what was happening, Elaine rushed past him, turned midair, and slapped him in the face. The punch lacked any sort of force; her fingers wouldn't even leave a mark. But the surprise rendered him immovable, and he stared into Elaine's golden eyes glistering with unshed tears.
"He isn't dead! How dare you to even think that? Take it back, he isn't dead!"
Ban missed the opportunity to reply. The words stole away from his thoughts without warning. And as he looked at Elaine's face for the first time since that fateful morning, all he saw were the similarities between her and Lancelot when they cried. Exactly like his mother, Lancelot had wrinkled his nose in a desperate attempt to keep the tears at bay when he had scraped his knee as a three-year-old during an attempt to outrun his cousin in a round of tag. His lips had twitched the same as Elaine's when he had shattered Ban's favorite mug on accident.
Ban broke eye contact. Each and every memory drove a needle into his flesh where no immortality and unnatural resilience saved him from the pain.
"Everyone I love dies. There's nothing more to it."
Elaine opened her mouth for an angry remark, and her hand trembled as if she considered to slap him a second time. But the assault failed to come. Instead, the blow behind his statement distorted her features, her walls shattered like glass, and the tears broke free. Unable to uphold the magic that kept her afloat, Elaine sank to the floor and clutched her hands to stop the violent tremors rocking her body.
Ban looked at her and felt nothing. His sorrow was used up, the rain had washed away his empathy, and the wish to spare the one he loved from the tears had died down into a glimmer too weak to push him forward and put an arm around Elaine's slender shoulders.
Without a word, he left the room to continue the search he had no hopes would succeed. But the stupid task of running the many paths across Benwick up and down like a madman was the only thing he could hold onto. The only mission left to fill the barren emptiness inside. If he wished for the dark clouds long enough, perhaps rain would catch him on his way. But the sky adorned a cloudless blue, and no magical gate opened for him, no matter how often he trotted down the same mossy path Lancelot had used to walk along on his patrols.
⸸ † ⸸
He had repeated the chain of sword swings in slight variation but with an unwavering intensity for a about two hours, judging from the tension in his muscles, when the Lady of the Lake reappeared. Her shadowy form wavered amidst the reed a solid distance away, but Lancelot would have felt her presence even if she had decided to approach him as a harmless wave in the lake. Every time her stinking grimace emerged from the shadows, a headache hijacked his concentration.
No matter how intensely he focused on her shapeless form, he failed to find that spark of conscious thought humans, Fairies, and Giants shared. The Lady of the Lake stood above his measly Fairy talent – his mind connected to nothing but a gaping hole, an abyss with depths so deep no sun had ever reached the bottom. No wonder the Lady surrounded herself with a pale imitation of the sun. Real light would set her in flames the moment she came into contact with it.
The first time he had read the heart of another individual, Tristan's thoughts had appeared in his head with absolute clarity. The memory of King Meliodas, his wicked smile and his words of encouragement, had felt as tangible as the real deal. Since then, Lancelot had battled all these foreign voices banging at the outsides of his skull in demand of his attention. He had often longed for a switch to turn off the unwanted ability to see through other people's lies and spy on their desires, but with time, the constant nagging had become second nature. And a quick look into the intentions of Benwick's visitors had given him the edge he needed to put an end to their criminal deeds.
But in the realm of the Lady of the Lake, silence ate all voices. The only thoughts that kept Lancelot company were his own.
The Lady had either taken notice of his attempts to read her, or the halt he had put to his training session gave her the confidence to move forward. Whichever the case, she slithered towards Lancelot and reached for him with half a dozen hands.
"Have you reconsidered the outcome of our last conversation?" she asked.
Lancelot followed the wavering hands with his eyes in anticipation of an attack. But for once, the Lady chose not to overstep her boundaries. "I have. I want to know more about this offer. But before that, I need confirmation that Jericho is still alive. Otherwise I have to consider you a murderer. And I don't collaborate with murderers."
"She is alive. There are other places where I can deposit humans until they are useful to my master's plan."
"You don't expect me to trust your word, do you? I need proof."
The Lady growled, and the ground to Lancelot's feet darkened as her disdain poisoned the earth and stole the life energy from the grass between the pebble. The odor of ash and iron hung in the air, emitted by the shadows, or perhaps a product of his mind in an attempt to give reason for the shortness of oxygen in his lungs. Lancelot swallowed but forced himself to stand his ground.
"You don't get to decide the rules," the Lady hissed. "Take my word that she is alive or have proof that I will dispose of her the moment she no longer serves her purpose. It's up to you."
Lancelot gritted his teeth. He had maneuvered himself into an impasse. While the Lady was not impervious to threats, she had more leverage over this conversation and Lancelot's fate as a whole. She had proven multiple times that she outclassed him in terms of magic and fighting capabilities, but for a reason hidden deep within her shapeless form, she wanted him alive. That was her soft spot. And when battling a stronger foe, you better aimed at every soft spot you can find.
Lancelot straightened. "I accept your word for the moment. Now to the offer you have for me."
The hands coiled around the air in satisfaction. "Your life in the safety of your home has hardly given you the challenge you seek. You already outclass everyone there who is willing to fight you. Your master, she refused to show her true abilities when training with you – you've seen it yourself. They all treated you like a child. No wonder that the Liones prince had such an easy time defeating you. He humiliated you, didn't he? Left you with a scar to remind you of your weakness every single day…"
Lancelot averted his gaze. His grip around Jericho's sword tightened as one of the hands stroked his forehead where the scarred skin was most sensitive.
Yes, he had lost. Yes, he had stood no chance against Tristan's strength, his ability to think on his heels, and the speed with which he had directed his wooden sword. And yes, the bitter taste of defeat still lingered in the back of Lancelot's throat when he thought back to that day.
Tristan extended his hand towards him. "Let me help you."
"No!" Everything was spinning. Lancelot pushed himself up, but as soon as his hands abandoned the safety of the cobblestone, his knees gave in, and he slumped back down. Warm blood ran down his forehead. The skin stood in flames. Too much, too much, too much…
"Should I get your father?" Tristan tapped Lancelot's shoulder, and the images in his head exploded.
"NO! Get away from me! He can't see me like this."
King Meliodas, Queen Elizabeth, places he had never visited, and people he had never met – everything collapsed over Lancelot at once, a kaleidoscope of colorful memories. He walked through the world in Tristan's shoes, a world filled with too much light, too many voices, too many dreams of the Seven Deadly Sins. Shiny Holy Knight Tristan met the future with a drawn wooden sword and a gleam in his eyes.
And amidst the hurricane, Lancelot identified only one thought that belonged to him: Tristan had beaten him. That's why he crawled on the ground of Liones' inner yard, that's why his forehead burned and emitted too much of what he should not see. Lancelot's weapon lay somewhere out of reach, way past his tilting vision. But even if he, by some miracle, recovered the strength to fetch his wooden sword before Ban would arrive, he would end up on his knees again.
Tristan had beaten him. With terrifying ease.
Could the Lady teach him to match Tristan's skills? Even surpass him?
The Lady chuckled. "I have ways to challenge you. To bring out all your potential so that you will one day outmatch not just the prince of Liones but every Holy Knight in Britannia. You will stand among the greats, and not even they will defeat you in a fair battle. Legends will be written about your deeds, centuries, millennia from now. And what better way to right the wrongs in this world than to become stronger than everyone who might do wrong? Don't you think your father will praise you once you are the most fearsome knight of them all?"
His father's praise – how long had he striven for the words of approval he envisioned in his most fantastic dreams? How often had he wished to be considered worthy by the one whose opinion counted? If Lancelot accepted this deal, Ban would have to see him as an adult, as an equal.
The Lady had phrased her offer as a choice. But only one path forward presented itself, and Lancelot knew what he would say before the words formed in his head. Before he could think to ask about conditions and specifics, he submitted himself to the shadows.
"I accept your offer."
Despite the black nothingness of her face, Lancelot imagined a wide smile to spread across the Lady's features. "Good."
10/28/2020 - If everything works out as planned, I should be able to give you one chapter each week. I hope you're enjoying the story so far. If you do, I would be most thankful for a comment of any kind. With it's dark tone and focus on a protagonist who we've seen very little of in the manga, I'm a bit outside of my comfort zone with this story. I'm curious to hear what you think.
