† Year Five, Day 266 †

Lancelot later could not tell how many people he had killed. One trial blended into the next, one crime became as vile and sickening as the other, and the more pleas for mercy he heard, the less he hesitated to face the cold of death in their eyes. Most people the Lady of the Lake sent to him were murderers, serial killers, or nobles with an appalling sense of fun in regards to the children in their care. But a select few had yet to raise their hands for bloodshed. The dark thoughts resided in their hearts, he saw the images, the wrath and the lust and the evil intent clawing at their insides, waiting for the moment to break free. But the crimes had not taken full shape.

And in a strange way, Lancelot felt the most fulfilled when he put these people to rest. With his actions, he saved the knight with the valuable charger, the girl down the street in the red dress, and the beggar under the archway asking every passing soul for spare coins. When Lancelot repaid the murderers, he brought a hint of justice to their victims, who would never know what became of their attacker. But how much more rewarding was the thought of preventing the evil before it had a chance to strike?

He wanted, needed to hold onto this mindset.

The line he drew was muddled, the waves of the lake washed it away, and sometimes, Lancelot found himself on the wrong side.

An hour ago, the sun had drowned behind the horizon, and without a moon to bedeck Avalon's sky, only the little campfire battled the shadows. The dry twigs cracked as the sparks devoured them. One by one. Piece by piece. Lancelot cuddled in front of the flames, his hands mere inches from its tips, but the fire could not drive out the cold in his bones.

Avalon's magic prevented a change in season or even weather to tell one day from the next. The pleasant temperature was as constant as the lake itself. But this knowledge didn't stop Lancelot from shivering.

With every bit of effort his battered brain could muster, he forced his eyes away from his spear. The weapon leaned against the stone wall behind him and the steel head glowed with the orange hues of the fire. Harmless. As long as Lancelot kept his hands away.

The blood on the blade lured his gaze, urged him to come look at the stains of his misdeeds. He had given up cleaning the spots when his hands had quit their duty with violent tremors. And so, the blood had remained, had followed him here, and if he looked up from the dancing flames for one moment, the blood would hurl at him the accusations he knew to be true.

Enide. Once an aspiring knight with a gleaming future. Now another red mark on his memories.

Youthful pride had guided the knight he had fought today. The call of adventure had glinted in her eyes. Enide. Yes, she had done wrong, she had sinned like every other foe Lancelot had faced. She had trespassed into the forbidden forest and she had tried to capture the Black Hound housing there and she had pushed her male companion into the creature's maws to save her own life. But no evil nested in her heart. Her memories caroled with laughter, put out of tune whenever Erec's death scream resurfaced, but never tainted by the sound of malice. Where Lancelot saw another trial, Enide saw a harmless duel in good fun. The disbelief across her features when Lancelot had buried his spear in her abdomen followed him with every step.

Her hollow face stared up at him from amidst the flames of his campfire.

Erec and Enide. Once aspiring knights. Now mangled by the claws of a hound and a monster.

"I can't do this anymore. I can't take it…" The crackling of the fire drowned his voice. Despite his heavy legs, Lancelot got up and pierced the darkness with his eyes. "I know you're here, Lady of the Lake, I know that you hide in the shadows like you always do to watch me. Then let me make this so clear that you can't overhear it: I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE! You've had your fun, I got rid of your enemies for you while you hovered outside the fray and laughed. I've done everything you asked me to do. When will you finally have enough?"

The shadows denied him an answer. But the face of Enide and the bliss of her memories still flickered along with the flames.

"You haven't kept your part of the bargain. You offered me a chance to become the strongest knight, but you lied. After all the people I killed for you, I still can't defeat Sir Jonathan in combat. That must be quite the disappointment for you, with all this time you devoted to my training. You heard that right, I'm not fit to play the role you have for me. I'm not the strongest knight, and I never will be. Because the only thing you teach me is how to execute fools and murderers. At that I truly excel, don't I? If you want human blood, why not take me? If they deserve to die then why doesn't the same apply to me? Why don't you send me to Purgatory and let me smolder there for a thousand years? Maybe then I'll finally stop feeling the fucking cold!"

Unable to stand and shout into the void for longer, Lancelot slumped to the ground. Too many images hurried through his mind, too many crimes he had witness and too many crimes he had committed. Red-painted tiles; a village in smoke; knights stabbed, strangled, beheaded, and crushed. All the death and lamentation blended into one another until he couldn't tell which memories belonged to him and which he had plucked out of other people's hearts.

The tears ran down his face, and he cried like a child. Alone and forgotten and frozen to the core.

He would trade everything for the warm embrace of his mother. All the valuable gifts the Lady had awarded him with could not stop the hollow faces from parading before his eyes, but a few whispered words of comfort would have helped him stand again. Hadn't his father told him to get up when life pinned him to the ground? Then where was he now to repeat his advice when Lancelot needed his words the most?

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I let you down."

And when no one came to answer him, Lancelot bent into a tiny ball and cried himself to sleep.

⸸ † ⸸

Like the arrival of dawn chased away the darkness, so too did the sunlight drive out his nightmares. The cold retreated, and Lancelot sat himself up to polish the stains from his spear without feeling anything. At least he told himself that the throbbing at the back of his head was no feeling but instead hunger. Or maybe the aftereffect from a lack of sleep.

If he continued to wallow in his misery, he would help no one, least himself. Yesterday, he had overstepped the line, but as long as he learned from this mistake, he could hope to steer back to the right path. He had also done good, hadn't he? People who would never know his name had escaped the claws of death because he had cut off these claws. Maybe not a praiseworthy act, but then again, nothing Lancelot had learned about knighthood since he had made his first step on Avalon sounded praiseworthy.

Tristan had found joy in tales of chivalry, of heroes and armors, but Lancelot had outgrown the pretty picture books. Saving one person meant sacrificing another. Doing one good deed meant loading a terrible burden onto your shoulders.

And Lancelot's back ached from too many burdens.

Still a little drowsy, he changed his bloodstained tunic for a new one, equipped his belt and scabbard, and went for a walk. The simple task of setting one foot before the other calmed his nerves and gave his thoughts clarity. He always found pleasure in his walks through the forest parallel to the little river, where the water rushed over the stone bed with happy gurgles. Then again, Avalon didn't have a forest. Nor a river.

How strange.

Lancelot searched the hills and ruins, but the shadows he was looking for refused to reveal themselves. And the stench of foulness the Lady of the Lake left behind remained likewise untraceable. On other days, she never missed an opportunity to spy on him, but since last evening, she seemed to have lost all interest in his 'training'. Neither Lancelot's duel with Enide nor his bellowed accusations had enticed her out of her shadows.

After he had patrolled two circles around the ruins, Lancelot steered for the center of the castle complex, where all the trails ran together to form a rotunda surrounded by crumbling walls of knee height. The gravel crunched under Lancelot's boots, the sound muffled by the blood rushing to his head. Here, the Lady of the Lake had first faced him. And here, he would provoke a confrontation with her. She was the only creature on this island he wanted to fight, the only one who he imagined to slay with a clear conscious. Maybe his skills had upgraded to a point where he could stand his ground against her. Unlikely? Yes, but Lancelot knew no other thought than to try and punch some answers out of her.

With closed eyes, he placed an empty palm onto the ground. The crumbs of dirt and small stones pressed against his skin, eager to act out his will like the rest of Avalon did. But instead of the magic on the surface, Lancelot hunted further, for the shadows below the depths, the dungeons the Lady of the Lake hid in. She had admitted to have a place to store people until the moment they became useful to her. Until the moment she could send them against Lancelot. And while she played with the truth with the ease of a child directing their toy soldiers, maybe she did have a secret hiding space. Lancelot had searched every inch of Avalon's surface for such a place – but he had yet to look underground.

With the magic of the lake, tracking down her ugly presence should pose little challenge. In theory. In practice – well, Lancelot had no practice to speak of.

His mind left his body and wound through the layers of the earth, past roots and rocks and rotten pasts, beyond the constructed world itself. One hundred and more skulls stared at him on his way down, each with a face and a name he had known and forgotten. He dug deeper. Empty of emotions, he dug until he could go no further, and an entity without a shape imposed a barrier. Water awaited him there. Another lake, another tide that swashed against him, another boundary he could not cross.

Why, why, why; why did water always confine him?

His body failed to escape the lake around Avalon, and his mind failed to cross the lake below ground to reach the Lady. For all the magic the lake granted him, it charged a price in return: his damn sanity if he had to stare into the water one more time.

Lancelot clawed his physical hand into the dirt, and his spiritual one smashed into the lake. The explosion of energy rocked the foundation of Avalon itself, a geyser of foam and splashes erupted, and shockwaves rippled from the point of impact. The water roared like a rabid creature, mad with agony and bloodlust. No matter where she hid her featureless face, she could not have overheard this call.

But when Lancelot opened his eyes, it was not the Lady of the Lake who greeted him. An all too familiar figure stood at the edge of the rotunda, a sword at his side and a superior grin on his face to complete the picture.

Tristan.

The years had left him unfazed, and Lancelot now towered over him by a head. But the confidence in Tristan's mismatched eyes, one the color of the forest, the other the color of the sky, rendered the height difference obsolete. If anything, he carried himself more like a fighter than before. All the might of his father radiated from him, and with a word or a gesture, he could begin or end a war.

Tristan the troublemaker, the boy with the dreams about knighthood, the spoiled prince with too many friends and too few responsibilities looked the same as he had five years ago. But everything about his posture had changed. He was a knight – Lancelot was a failed attempt by comparison.

"Hey, Lancelot," Tristan said in that sweet voice dripping with honey that made girls twice his age swoon when he spoke. "I see you're still spending more time on your knees than on your feet during training. Don't you ever get tired of the view down there?"

Lancelot staggered to his feet, but no number of slow breaths eased the quiver in his calves. "What are you doing here?"

Tristan delegated his interest to his fingernails. "I solved the case. At the end it was quite easy; ask the right person the right question, and they will beg to be of service and hand the solution to you on a silver platter. Anyone with decent experience as a knight could have cracked the code. After I defeated the Lady of the Lake, freeing the humans she had abducted was child's play. You tried to do the same for how long? Four years? Poor thing, you didn't even come close."

"I thought I could…"

"Of course, you did. You tried your very best, but at the end of the day, none of your actions and none of your sacrifices made a difference. The truth can be such a cruel thing to accept. But it's not your fault. It's your genes. With an alcohol-addicted street rat for a father, what good was supposed to come out of you?"

Lancelot couldn't think straight. A single voice screamed at him to make Tristan regret his words. Let the shadows take over, let them drown his thoughts, imprison him until the end of time, no matter. As long as Tristan suffered. Lancelot could snap his neck with a clean jolt. But he didn't deserve such an easy end. No, he would burn. Slowly. Mercilessly.

"What, you're not even going to defend your father?" Tristan laughed. "I suppose I need to congratulate you; you finally realized what a pathetic disappointment you both are. You truly match each other perfectly. You let your precious master die, and he let the naïve Fairy to whom he chained his heart die."

Lancelot dug his nails into his sword hilt, but he kept the blade sheathed. For now.

Such wonderful thoughts sprung to life in his head. Tristan as he drowned in his own blood, Tristan with his impertinent tongue cut out, Tristan disarmed, a few limps short, and on his knees where he would finally have to admit that Lancelot surpassed him.

Tristan snapped a crumb of dirt from his spotless tunic. "I see you're still wearing the scar I gave you. Did I go too hard on you? Were you not prepared for an actual challenge? Poor, poor child. A good thing your beloved master doesn't have to see you as the disappointment that you have turned into. How does it feel to be reminded of your own weakness every time you look at your reflection? How does it feel to cling to the dream of becoming a knight while knowing full well that you don't have what it takes?"

With a roar from deep inside his gut, Lancelot stormed forward. Soon, Tristan's blood would stain the dirt, and Lancelot's sword rattled with anticipation. But instead of defending himself, Tristan spun around and ran for dear life. A scream, higher pitched and more frightened than his voice should allow, escaped his mouth.

Lancelot caught up to his prey before it managed more than ten steps, threw himself onto Tristan, and pinned him down with his knees. Tristan screamed and wiggled, but Lancelot ignored his weak punches and increased the pressure. A rib creaked. Fear, wonderful, delicious fear submerged Tristan's eyes as he struggled to break free.

Then he gave up. With a lifeless expression, he stared at his attacker like a startled animal, too witless to fight for its survival. And Lancelot brought his blade closer to the soft flesh of Tristan's throat.

So easy. One twitch of a muscle, and he would finally prove himself the better fighter of the two.

Before the blade drew blood, Lancelot hesitated. It wasn't the emptiness in Tristan's eyes that made him pause, he had seen the same numb fear before, too often to remember them all. The iron-laden smell of Liones' sunlit yard stung his nose…

Tristan extended his hand towards him. "Let me help you."

"No!" Everything was spinning. 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."

But amidst the hurricane, Tristan stepped forward. He let go of his sword and used both hands to pull Lancelot to his feet. The spinning faded. Halfway caught between painful delirium and a glistening dream, Lancelot looked into Tristan's mismatched eyes. The light he found there was almost blinding. But oh so beautiful.

Tristan smiled. "I think I got carried away a little. Sorry about your head. I've never trained with someone my age like this. But I'd like to do it again. You and I, we will both be knights someday. I know it. So let's do the best we can and always have each other's back, okay?"

Tristan stood above the line. And Lancelot had almost lost himself on the wrong side.

His fingers betrayed him, and a slim red line emerged on Tristan's throat before Lancelot tossed the sword aside. He coughed, but he could not tell whether he pined for oxygen or wanted to throw up. Tristan whimpered. The bloody images Lancelot had found pleasure in a moment ago turned on him and manifested into a gush of nausea. He crawled backwards, away from Tristan, unable to look, yet unable to avert his eyes.

"You disappoint me, Lancelot," Tristan's voice said. But his mouth did not move. "I tried so hard to give you a reason to kill him. Don't you understand that he is your enemy? When you will face him again, he might have become one of Arthur's loyal dogs. Your weakness will cost you. I can assure you."

And out of Tristan's body, shadows emerged, clawed out of his flesh like a parasite that had consumed all the life energy of its host. The dark cloud grew and took shape, a thousand ropes with a thousand hands, and to crown the ghastly creature, a head without a face.

The Lady of the Lake growled, a deep, frightening sound. The earth rumbled, the grass blades trembled, and the sky darkened under the weight of her displeasure. To her feet, Tristan lurched on his knees under high-pitched sobs. But the pitiful being wasn't Tristan. With a poof, a cloud enwrapped the body, and soon revealed their true form. A male Fairy replaced the image of Tristan, with wings the color of milky glass. Dried leaves hung in his hair. The Lady might have snatched him from Benwick or even the Fairy King's Forest, all to pose as a stand-in for the one Lancelot wanted to outmatch so desperately. Only one crime had led the Fairy here, at the mercy of monsters: the possession of the transformation ability the Lady had required for her scheme.

"If you hoped your mercy would save him," the Lady of the Lake said, and the fake voice of Tristan morphed into hers, "you are mistaking."

If Lancelot had jumped forward to stop her, he would have nevertheless failed to intervene. While one of her hands constricted his arm, she tore the Fairy to pieces. He screamed when she ripped out his legs, one after the other, with methodical precision to get the most pained outcries out of her victim. Two hands tore out the milky wings, and when she moved over to the arms, the Fairy lacked the energy to cry or close his fist around the grass blades next to him.

Nothing Lancelot could do. He watched the execution like the people do in the back rows of a gathering, cold, expressionless, and convinced the cruelty had nothing to do with him. After the Fairy's heart had fluttered one last time, one last image of a forest teeming with green, the Lady of the Lake pulled his remains into her shadows to devour them. Or perhaps she liked to cleanse the ground of every last trail of her misdeeds.

When nothing but the echo of his cries remained from the Fairy, the Lady turned her head towards Lancelot. She had no need to slither closer to threaten him, the aching in his head sufficed in breaking down his defiance.

"I will not be made a fool by you," she said. "If you prefer to waste your energy with provoking confrontations with me, let me tell you that you won't get off so easily the next time. You desired challenge, you begged for a way to become a stronger knight. You agreed to my terms and have committed yourself to the cause your heart clings to. But you cannot long for the fight and dread its outcome at the same time." Her glare burnt into his skin. "If you lack the will to face the real prince of Liones, you have no use to me."

Her hand increased the stranglehold around his right arm, and with a clean jolt, she snapped the bone in half. Lancelot flinched, his pain receptors exploded with white agony, raw and burning, but he made no sound. If nothing else, he would deny her the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

The Lady released his arm to instead put his chin between her fingers. "You have left me no choice. Don't force me to hurt you again. I won't hesitate if it brings me closer to Chaos."

With these words, the Lady of the Lake dissolved into a cloud of nothingness. Lancelot pressed a new mouthful of air into his lungs; the action came easier to him thanks to her absence. Then he examined his broken arm. Because of her precision and his above human durability, the damage would be repaired in six weeks tops. The Lady had proven time and time again that she wanted him alive and in fighting condition, and as long as Lancelot played by her rules, no harm would come from her. And yet, he swore to make the same decision again.

The Fairy had been innocent. And unless the human world had corrupted his morals in the past years, so too was Tristan.

Lancelot refused to kill innocents.

If he held onto to this mindset, maybe some semblance of himself would make it out of Avalon alive.


12/14/2020 - Sorry for the delay, but my schedule was and remains packed. And lack of energy has also plagued me in the past days. If you are feeling generous, please consider leaving a comment. This project is my darling, and I'm dying to know what you think, also considering the rather bleak atmosphere and my take on Lancelot in general.

Thank you for reading.