The mist in the Forest of Gedref did not drift; it clung. It felt like cold, damp fingers pressing against Arthur’s skin, trailing over the stubble on his jaw and the hollows beneath his bloodshot eyes. He had been riding for two days, but the exhaustion went deeper than a lack of sleep. It was the weight of a crown that had become a noose.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw them: the white, clicking ribs of the fallen, rising from the soil of Camelot’s lower town. He heard the screech of steel on bone and the horrific, wet silence that followed when one of his guards was dragged into the earth.
He dismounted, his boots hitting the sodden ground with a heavy thud. He felt small beneath the canopy of ancient oaks.
“I am Arthur Pendragon!” He screamed the words until his throat burned. He turned in a circle, his hands open, palms up—a warrior’s ultimate surrender. “I know you are watching! I know you hear me!”
Silence. Only the drip of condensation from a leaf.
“I have spent my life hunting you!” Arthur’s voice broke, falling into a ragged, desperate rasp. “I have followed my father’s ghost into the dark, and I have brought nothing but blood to these woods. I am not here to hunt today. I am a King with a dying kingdom. I am a man who has run out of hope.”
He sank to his knees, the dampness of the earth soaking through his breeches. The Great King of Albion, kneeling in the dirt, weeping for a people he couldn’t protect. “Please… there are children. There are innocents. If you want a sacrifice, take the man who signed the decrees. Take me.”