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(A/N: Not too pleased with this chapter, but I kind of threw it together in a rush and didn't really have a lot of time to edit. Hopefully my readers enjoy it though.)

A Summary of Events

"Where do we even begin with this?" Elsa said, sitting down with Maghereb and Anna in private. "What we're about to tell you…"

"Frankly, you won't believe it. There's not a chance in Hades you believe it," Anna said.

"Do you know the legend of the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur?" Elsa asked.

"I have always found them among the most interesting stories ever written," she replied.

"What if we told you they weren't just stories?" Elsa asked.

Maghereb stared at them like she wasn't quite sure what to make of that. "Not just a story?" she finally asked. To their surprise, she sounded more hopeful than incredulous.

"There's a story. Arthur and the Cave. Have you read it?" Elsa asked.

"No," Maghereb replied.

"The long and short of it? A man runs into a mystic in the road who tells him about a magical cave filled with treasures and explains to him how to find it. They find the cave and magically unseal it, then enter only to find themselves in the tomb of King Arthur, his Knights of the Round Table, and the Queen's Knights or Knights of the Realm. There's a bell in this cave, and the mystic tells the man that ringing it will awaken the Knights and Arthur. He warns him not to touch it so they can just grab some treasure and go, but of course the temptation is way too much for the man, so he rings the bell and sure as anything, the knights as one leap to life, and all the knights at the table, and Arthur himself, and a cacophony of shouts and orders fly around as they try to figure out what the heck is going on until Arthur tells them 'the time isn't yet' or something like that, and they all settle back down. This hush comes over the cave and soon the knights are all fast asleep again. The man and the mystic leave. Many times after, the man tries to find the cave again, but he never can," Anna summarized.

"The tale is based on a legend that in Britain's time of great need—or Europe's, one of the two—Arthur will return from Avalon with all his knights to save it," Elsa said.

"And right now, we really, really need saving with the wicked troll and sprite hybrid coming after us with a cursed bear hellbent on destroying everything in its path," Anna said. "Ooh, wait. You don't know that story yet either, do you? Wow, this just got a whole lot more complicated. Evil jotun trying to take over the world. Created a cursed mirror that shattered in the sky and rained down on the earth corrupting whoever its shards struck into seeing only darkness and evil. From the story you told, sounds like your grandma might have been one of them. Probably your step-uncle too. Anyway, this evil jotun is working with a man who was cursed to become a magical, unstoppable bear. That man isn't the first who's suffered that curse, though. It's passed down through that entire family line. The point is, that bear is said to only be able to be defeated by the strength of another bear and probably an assist from the fae, and he's really mad, and he's really determined to get the Princes of the Southern Isles under his paw. So is the Jotun. Meanwhile, another thread of this whole web has to do with the Knights of the Round Table. Particularly Mordred. Who was cursed in his own right to live and die over and over and over. He showed up in this era, though we didn't know it at the time. We kind of pieced together the possibility later and told the Knights of the Round Table when we went down to Avalon, and they mentioned it was the first time they actually knew where he was and decided to try and save him from his curse, so some came up to the surface via some kind of power to try and rescue the poor kid. They did so but subsequently got drawn into our web, and Carabis—that's the cursed Jotun—learned about them, and of course, who better to have under your thumb than the Knights of the Round Table who could take on like one hundred men to every one of them. Corrupt them or get them on your side and you have a pretty powerful force. Well, some shenanigans spiraled and something went wrong, and Mordred found his way to the cave and rang the bell and woke them up. We were able to put them to sleep again, but not all of them because some escaped before we could, and those ones who escaped disappeared into thin air and now we have to find them because if we don't, Carabis will, and if Carabis finds them the world is doomed!"

Now Maghereb was staring at them like they were crazy.

"O-kay, now let's start this over a bit more coherently," Elsa said. "Actually, better yet, get Hans to do it. I'm not exactly a storyteller. He, on the other hand, is, so right now I'm really regretting not bringing him in on this conversation."

"It sounds like it might be best if you do," Maghereb dryly said.

"Right. I'll go get him," Elsa said, grimacing a little. Rising, she left to fetch him. Anna gave Maghereb an awkward grin and shrug.

Frozen

Hans looked incredulous as Elsa explained the situation to him, but nonetheless followed her with Kristoff and Olaf in tow. Now he sat in the presence of Yuwabe's Queen reviewing the story in his head and determining where to start. All eyes were on him now so he was really feeling the pressure. "Once upon a time, there was an order of knights so renowned and skilled, so adventurous, that their names carried down throughout history. These knights, it was said, could never be defeated. Not by outside forces anyway. There was no accounting for inside ones, though. You've read the legends. You know how they end. The traitor Mordred, King Arthur's own son, mortally wounding his father in battle and dying at Arthur's hand in turn. By the time the battle of Camlann was finished, you could probably count on two hands how many Knights of the Round Table were left. The knights of that great order were buried along with the Knights of the Realm in a hidden cave sealed by magic so that no one could ever find them, but fate wasn't finished with them yet. Deities are fickle. They play games mortal kind can't even begin to comprehend, and they played those games with King Arthur and his knights in spades. As it turned out, what we perceive as death wasn't what befell the Knights of the Round Table. More… suspended animation. Except for the traitor. The traitor who they made suffer immeasurably. One moment in Avalon, the next torn away and returned to the living world to live out a life that wasn't his own and die in agony over and over and over. The problem was that though he was the traitor, the Knights of the Round Table still somehow in some way loved him, and they fought to keep him with them. Arthur most of all. It was for nothing. They couldn't fight gods, so time and time again Mordred was ripped away from them and sent back to the surface world to live and suffer and 'die' in agony again and again and again with his brothers-in-arms helpless to do anything to save him. For now, we leave their tale there and jump to a new one.

In an ancient kingdom in Scotland, though not quite so ancient as King Arthur's, there lived a king who had four sons. The youngest was wise, the third was compassionate, the second was just, and the eldest was strong. One day the king grew ill. Before he died, he divided his kingdom up among his four sons instead of giving it solely to the eldest. He believed that together they would make the kingdom greater than any that had come before it. The eldest son, though, was displeased by this. Filled with greed and arrogance, he refused to accept the lot and waged war on his younger brothers seeking to regain the throne for himself. No matter how hard he fought, though, his brothers matched him. Desperate, he went to a witch to ask for a spell that would give him the strength of ten men. He offered his signet ring and she gave him the spell in a drinking horn but warned him of an evil fate that would befall him if he didn't make amends with his siblings. The prince brought his brothers before him by staging a truce. When they came, he drank the spell which gave him strength far greater than he had expected, but it came to him in the form of a great black bear. A choice was put before him, then. Break the spell by making up with his brothers, or accept his fate and refuse. He did worse than refuse. He slew them all in cold blood. He then tried to take control of his army again, but all they saw was the beast, and they turned on him. He attacked them in vengeance, slaughtering many while many more fled in terror. With the armies fractured and the brothers dead, the kingdom collapsed. The bear, Mor'du, ended up cursed to roam the area evermore, his human consciousness lost forever because he chose power over family. None were found who could conquer him, not even armies. It was said no one ever would and that he would only fall to the strength of another bear. It sounds strange, I know, even one man can take out a bear if he's skilled enough, but curses are funny and cryptic things. Eventually, a heroine stepped forth who took on the bear and all his might. She did so with the help of her mother, who had been accidentally turned into a bear, and you can probably guess where that's going. Together they defeated Mor'du. Knocked him against a menhir which fell on him and killed him, finally releasing his tormented soul. The curse, though, didn't end with him. It passed down the bloodline. Every hundred years or so, a member of the line would make the same mistake the original Mor'du had and choose power over family, and become the bear until they were ultimately defeated. None, however, matched the strength of the original. Until now. This brings us to the part three of this convoluted mess.

You must attend to the commencement of this story, for when we get to the end we shall know more than we do now about a very wicked hobgoblin. Carabis. He was one of the very worst. One day, in a merry mood, he made a looking glass that caused everything good and pretty that was reflected in it to shrivel away to almost nothing, and everything that was no good and ugly to show even worse than what it was. The most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach. The best of men grew hideous or else stood on their heads and had no stomachs. Their faces were so distorted they couldn't be recognized and if anyone had a freckle, you could be sure it would spread all over his nose and mouth. The troll thought it was extraordinarily funny. If a kind, pious thought passed through a man's mind, there came such a grimace in the glass that the troll couldn't help but laugh at his invention. He ran a school and the corrupted sprites that attended it spread the news of this mirror, claiming that in it you could see what the world and mankind really looked like. They ran everywhere with the glass until there wasn't a country or person left who hadn't been distorted in it, and afterward, they decided to fly up into the sky to show even the gods, but the higher they flew with the glass, the more it quaked until they could no longer keep hold of it. It fell out of their hands and was dashed on the ground below where it broke into pieces, and when it did, it made things even worse. Some of the shards were hardly as big as a grain of sand, and they flew all about in the world, and when they got in peoples' eyes, they stuck there and the people either saw everything crooked or else had only eyes for what was wrong in anything, for every little splinter of the mirror had kept the same power of the whole glass. Some people even got little splinters of glass in their hearts, and that was horrible because the heart became like a lump of ice. Some pieces were so big that they were used for window glass, but looking through those windows, as you can guess, wasn't a pretty picture. Other pieces were made into spectacles and if anyone put them on in order to see correctly and judge rightly, take a guess what happened. The troll laughed and laughed and laughed while the thing he'd created destroyed the lives of whoever it met. My father was one of the people it met.

Before I and most of my siblings were born, father was struck by a particularly large shard of glass. It pierced his heart and turned him into a monster whose entire purpose in life was to ruin ours. None of us knew that was the reason why, of course, we never figured that out until recently, but there it was. As a result of this corruption, though, he too inevitably fell to the curse of Mor'du, because we were of his bloodline and of the bloodline of the heroines who stopped him, but that didn't negate a thing, and Father still was stricken by it. He became the bear, and fed by the shard within him, he became a bear of equal power to the original and probably forgot everything from his human life, but we don't know fully how that all ended up working in him.

Meanwhile, I too was afflicted with the shards, and let's just say it was not a pretty picture. To say I was wicked is putting it mildly. The things I did… Well, one of them ended up backfiring. Horribly. This is where the Knights come back into the picture. More specifically, Mordred. It just so happened that one of his unfortunate sojourns to the surface coincided with my rampage, and he ended up losing something really precious to him at my hand. His foster parents. I killed them in cold blood, but for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I'm guessing I can figure out why now, though. Like I said, the deities are fickle things. Instead of taking the boy's life, I called him Mordred and handed him off to some orphanage. Turns out that name meant more than I even realized at the time. You know from the legends what Mordred was like. Vengeful is putting it mildly, though until recently I wasn't aware of just how much danger I was in. I wasn't even aware of who he was. I named him Mordred because it seemed fitting given what I'd done to him. The powers that be probably had a hand in that too though.

Jumping away from him again and getting into the really crazy stuff, Carabis and Mor'du somehow met up, though we have no idea how, and they got it into their heads to form a partnership. Carabis sought to repair his shattered mirror at first, but then sought to make it even more deadly by using me as a vassal. I'm still not one hundred percent certain what Mor'du's plan in all of this is, but I'm pretty sure it's to break free of his curse and pass it to someone else. Ideally me. Who unluckily enough is also the ideal vessel for Carabis' mirror, so needless to say a ginormous target is painted on my back right now and on the backs of anyone associated with me. In the chaos of the ensuing adventures, we at some point found ourselves in the Underworld and found our way to Avalon where we met the Knights of the Round Table at feast. They told us the story of Mordred and what happened to him, and I put two and two together. I told them what I suspected and they, determined as ever to save their treacherous brother from a fate they deemed too cruel, decided to do something about it and probably made a deal with the powers that be to have that opportunity. A select few were permitted to return to the land of the living to find Mordred and try and save him from his fate. Now things get even more complicated than complicated. The number of knights sent up here began growing as things began getting more chaotic, then things were made extra chaotic when the knights found their way to the cave where they had been buried, as per the story Anna told you. Being surrounded by the bodies of people they had once called brothers overwhelmed them all. A guilt-stricken Mordred most of all. A magical bell that might wake them up and reunite them was too tempting to pass up, so Mordred rang it. Chaos ensued and Mordred ended up fleeing the cave in grief, but a group of knights went after him in said chaos and broke out of the cave, and thus out of its spell, then disappeared into thin air, more or less. Now the cave works in three ways. One, you ring the bell and they wake up. Two, a deal is made and knights are awakened and sent to the surface with no negative side effects other than, you know, being lost in a time not their own and left confused and out of their element. Three, they leave the cave without a bargain being made and end up merging with our timestream, in effect living out lives as if they'd actually been born in this time and lived in it, but forgetting who they were. As you can imagine, that makes them extremely susceptible to manipulation, and the jotun and fae are very, very good at manipulation.

After years of trying and failing to get me under their thumbs, Carabis and Mor'du decided to switch tactics a bit. Unluckily for us, Carabis learned of the knights who had awakened from the cave. Knights who, at their peak, could go one to one hundred and come out on top. He doesn't know about the knights who pursued Mordred and ended up lost in time yet, but it's only a matter of time before he learns, and if he learns about them, he'll seek them to get them on his side. If he gets them on his side, we have a big, big problem, so we need to beat Carabis to them. The problem is, we don't know who they are or what's happened to them. What we do know, though, is that odds are good they'll follow a similar pattern to the lives they lived before. And somewhere in those 'before' lives, King Pellinore fell in love with a 'Moorish' Queen—though the stories gave another name to the one who fell for her—and had a son with her. A piebald son. Pellinore's eldest son Aglovale followed in his father's path and met a Moorish princess, who he fell in love with and had a child with. That child was Sir Morien, the Black Knight. Called such not because he was black, but because his armor from head to toe was literally black as a raven. Armor, shield, everything. I mean, he himself was pretty dark if the description of him is anything to go by, but it wasn't the reason he was called the Black Knight."

"Our lives echo theirs almost perfectly," Maghereb said, eyes wide. She rose and began to pace nervously, wringing her hands. "I have always had a deep interest in those legends. Most of all in the legends of Sir Aglovale and Sir Morien. They were always my favourites, though I do not know why."

"Even before you met Vale they were your favourites?" Anna asked.

"Yes," Maghereb said. "They spoke to me unlike any other legends ever have. Reading them, I would almost feel like I was actually there."

"Maybe you were," Kristoff dryly said.

"What?" Maghereb asked, looking quickly at him with eyes wide. The others were staring at him too.

"I mean, who's to say that the gods didn't send back a few of Guinevere's Dames to help the knights' lives now echo their lives then?" Kristoff said. "It's a theory, sure, but it's not like it would be the weirdest thing that's happened to us over the course of this situation."

"You-you believe that I could be…? That is completely ridiculous!" Maghereb said.

"It's either ridiculous, or it's unnecessarily cruel. I mean, how would it feel to find out you were just the expy of the woman he truly loved once upon a time? It really doesn't sound like you were, though. Let's get real here. You connected with the guy within what? A month? Two? And by then you two were already looking to get into bed with one another. That doesn't seem just a little strange?" Kristoff asked.

"Whirlwind romances are a thing you know," Anna said.

"In a situation like this, are there really any coincidences?" Kristoff asked. He looked at Maghereb. "I mean, you even said yourself that in this life your romance couldn't have happened, but maybe in a previous one it would have. You didn't even know where that came from, you just said it." Maghereb suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

"I think we should probably leave this matter alone for now. There's a lot of information the queen needs to take in. You don't just dump a tale this large on someone and forge on without giving them time to process it," Elsa said, standing up.

"Are you okay, Maghereb?" Anna asked in concern.

"I-I don't know," Maghereb said, sounding almost dazed.

"Then we'll leave it here for now and give you time to wrap your head around it," Elsa said.

"Y-yes. That would perhaps be best," Maghereb said. "You have been shown your rooms?"

"Yes. Thank you," Anna said. "Oh, we're sorry for dropping all of this on you like this."

"It's alright. It is what I asked for," Maghereb said.

"I don't think you asked for this much," Anna replied.

"I am alright," Maghereb repeated.

"Okay. We'll leave it at that then," Anna said.

"Thank you again for your hospitality," Elsa said.

"Yes," Maghereb said in a whisper. Though worried for her, they filed out one after the other to go to their rooms.

"Do you think she'll be okay?" Anna worriedly asked.

"We'll just have to see," Hans replied.

"Poor Maghereb," Anna said.

"She'll handle it. She's strong like that," Elsa said.

"I hope you're right," Anna replied.

Frozen

Maghereb lay numbly on her bed staring at the roof and trying to process all she had been told. Most of all what had been told to her about the missing knights. She should have been more shocked than she had been. She should have thought they were crazy. She shouldn't believe as easily as she did, but gods how she believed…

"I'm here now. Forgive me."

The image of her love in resplendent clothing she didn't recognize but at the same time seemed so very familiar.

You gave them to him.

She had given him no such thing.

Not in this life.

Her fair love…

"How can I believe you love me?"

"Ask of me whatever task you may to prove myself to you and I will do it."

"Never leave again."

He closed his eyes. "I will never leave again." His voice was so hollow. He loved them like they were his own brothers.

Loved who?

The Knights of the Table Round.

She could not have kept him from them.

"Take me with you. Please."

"I will not ask you to leave this land for mine."

"I will not let you go again."

"I don't want to take you from what you love."

"I love you. I still love you."

"I still love you," she whispered to nothing.

The Queen's Dames…

She drew a breath, closing her eyes tightly. "This time I will find you," she vowed. One way or another.