The clearing was a cathedral of ancient stone and silver mist. In the center stood the High Lord of the Druids. His back was turned, his indigo robes heavy and still, absorbing the dim light of the dying sun. He looked like a statue carved from shadow, a silent god in a forest that breathed with his every pulse.
Arthur felt the weight of his ancestors pushing him down. His pride, once a towering fortress, had been eroded by the screams of his dying people and the hollow silence of a year without Merlin.
With a heavy, metallic clatter that felt like the shattering of his own soul, Arthur sank to his knees.
The damp earth soaked into his breeches, but he welcomed the cold. He bowed his head until his chin touched his chest, his hands trembling as he pressed them flat against the moss. He was no longer a King. He was a beggar.
“Lord Emrys,” Arthur began. His voice was a jagged rasp, echoing through the trees. “I have no right to be here. I have spent my life hunting your people. I have shed Druid blood on these very roots, believing I was doing what was right. I was a fool.”
The figure did not move. The silence was agonizing, a physical pressure that made Arthur’s lungs ache.
“My city is dying,” Arthur choked out, his fingers clawing into the dirt. “Every night, the dead rise. They don’t differentiate between the guilty and the innocent. They are dragging children into the dark, Lord Emrys. Children who have never even heard the word ‘magic’ with anything but fear.”
Arthur took a shuddering breath, his voice rising in a desperate, raw plea.
“I know you owe me nothing but a slow death. I know my life is forfeit for the crimes I have committed. Please… I am offering you everything.”
He looked up then, though the Lord’s face remained hidden beneath a deep, shadowed hood. Arthur’s eyes were bloodshot, swimming with tears he no longer cared to hide.
“Take my life,” Arthur begged, his voice cracking. “Take it slowly. Let me suffer for every life I took in my father’s name. If you wish to see me broken, I will stay here and let you do with me what you will. Bind me, torture me, exile me to the wastes—I do not care. I will give you my crown, my sword, my very breath. I will let you strip away my name until I am nothing but dust.”
He leaned forward, his forehead almost touching the High Lord’s boots, a position of total, terrifying vulnerability.
“Just save them,” Arthur sobbed into the moss. “Please. They are my people, and I have failed them. You have the power to stop this. If there is any mercy in your magic, let it fall on Camelot. Let the punishment fall on me. I am the one who deserves to bleed. Not them. Never them.”
Arthur’s shoulders shook with the force of his grief. He waited for the strike. He waited for a bolt of lightning to sear his heart or for a blade of pure energy to take his head. He had offered himself up as a sacrifice, a king trading his soul for a city that was already burning.
The High Lord finally moved. The shift of silk was like the whisper of a ghost.
A hand, pale and slender, emerged from the indigo sleeve. It hovered for a moment above Arthur’s bowed head, trembling with an emotion Arthur couldn’t name. The air in the clearing grew thick and heavy, charged with a power so immense that the grass beneath Arthur’s knees began to glow with a soft, ethereal light.
“You would give up your life for a people who would call you a failure for kneeling here?” The voice was strange—deep, resonant, and layered with a thousand echoes. It was the voice of the earth itself, disguised and distorted by magic.
“I would give up everything,” Arthur whispered against the ground. “I have nothing left to lose but them.”
The High Lord drew a long, shaky breath that sounded like the wind through a winter forest. He did not pull back his hood. He did not reveal the blue eyes that were currently swimming with a matching agony.
“Then stand, King of Camelot,” the voice commanded, soft yet iron-strong. “The High Lord does not trade in blood and torture. We are not like the kings of men.”
Arthur slowly lifted his head, his face wet with tears and streaked with dirt. He looked up at the hooded figure, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“You… you will help?”
“The dead shall return to the earth,” Emrys declared, and as he spoke, the gold light from his eyes spilled out from beneath the shadow of his hood, illuminating the mist. “But know this, Arthur Pendragon: the debt you owe is not to be paid in blood. It is to be paid in justice. You will return to your city, and you will wait for me at the gates. And when this is over, the world you know will change forever.”
Arthur nodded frantically, a flicker of hope finally piercing through his despair. “Anything. I swear it. On my life, on my soul.”
The High Lord turned away, his robes billowing. “Go. The sun is setting. The dead are waking. I shall be at your gates by the time the moon reaches its zenith. Do not look back, Arthur. Not until the dawn.”
Arthur stood on shaking legs, his heart heavy with a strange, terrifying relief. He had saved his people, but he felt as though he had left his old self behind in the dirt of that clearing. He turned to leave, but he couldn’t help but look back one last time at the solitary figure in indigo.
Emrys stood as still as a mountain, a lonely god in the center of the world, watching the King disappear into the fog.