The Faerie Blade

Chapter 20

Well daaaammmnnn. Bet you didn't see that coming. I surely didn't.

Okay, this is kind of a break in my telling of the story. Why, you may ask. What exactly did Merlin...AHEM Arthur...say next? Patience, patience. I am going to condense this into my own commentary, so you don't have to listen to the rasp of a dying man as he relates his rather long tale of three hundred and fifty-eight lifetimes. I'm not joking. He lived through the same three years three hundred and fifty-eight times, retaining his memory all the while. It was a miracle that he was not insane yet. Okay, maybe he was a little. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning. The beginning of his tale, that is. Not mine.

~

So this tale goes all the way back to our grandfather. Yep, you heard right. Our. Othur Pendragon. Apparently a chronic adulterer. Despite having a wife, he kept a harem of female Fae, and continued to have affairs everywhere he went. Once he disappeared to the human realm for six months, and rumour was that he was having an affair with a human woman. Jumping ahead, Arthur had been desperate enough to try and locate the potential offspring, which turned out to be me.

Uther Pendragon, Othur's legitimate son and Arthur's blood father, was only marginally better than Othur. He got rid of the harem, and only had one wife. But he was not faithful to her because later, he executed her on some pretext or another, and got his Merlin, whose name was Myrddin, to disguise him as Hoel, the then King of Winter, so that he could seduce and steal Igraine, Hoel's wife. The bargain was that Myrddin would help Uther win Igraine, and in return, the son that came from that union was to be given to Myrddin. Arthur was that son, and Myrddin dumped him with a foster family, intending to come back for him later when Uther had died, so that Myrddin could rule through him. Through a series of 'accidents' that Myrddin somehow arranged, Uther and Igraine died of poison, and he returned for Arthur. Fae reached adulthood in five years (Crazy, right? That explained how Mordred, Arthur's and Gwenwyfar's son now looks like a teenager) so at that point, Arthur was a young man, new to being an adult. Apparently, Myrddin had also orchestrated the enchanting of Excalibur and the altar so that only someone with the Pendragon blood can pull out the sword, thereby 'proving' that he was the true King of the Solar Court. Anyway, when Myrddin returned for Arthur, Arthur refused to leave whom he thought was his father and brother, Ectorius and Cai.

So Myrddin killed them. Ouch, brutal. But that succeeded in driving Arthur into a dark state, where he had no choice but to train with Myrddin for the Trial for the Sword, during which time, he lost his consciousness and apparently became as bad as his father and grandfather. This is where the curse comes in, because he used his considerable power (remember, all white hair? Indication of immense power for Solar Fae?) to rape a female Fae who had caught his attention. Joke was on him, because when he relaxed his hold, the female, full of rage, had accessed her own magic and life force to cast a curse on Arthur. With her dying words, she condemned Arthur to always die to his son. Arthur had thought it impossible, because how can one 'always die', unless he was resurrected over and over to die again?

Well...you guessed it. He was indeed 'resurrected'. His son, Mordred, from his wife Gwenwyfar, was always stolen, or taken away when he did something to drive off Gwenwyfar, in each of his lifetimes. Each time, three years after he ascended the throne, a battle involving Mordred in the enemy ranks would kill him, and after suffering the pain that led to his death, he'd wake on the day that he was to enter the Trial for the Sword. He soon found out that only he retained the memories of those three years, but for everyone else, it was as if those events had not happened. It was only after he tried to access his natural power of manipulating time that he realised that the curse had been tied to it and that he could no longer truly use it. Effectively, time kept rewinding itself, forcing Arthur to live through those three years over and over, knowing that nothing he did would change the outcome.

Having heard this story, I could now understand why he had sought me out and essentially 'forced' me to take his place. I mean, three hundred and fifty-eight times. If I were him, I would totally have gone bonkers ages ago.

But like all curses, Arthur's own curse had to have a way to break it. Apparently, my words to him before I banished him had woken the buried conscience in this Fae's heart and made him realise what the key was to breaking it. He theorised that he had to respect a female enough to see them as Fae worth sacrificing for, just as he did for the males. Just how much was 'enough', he was not sure until today when he realised that I, and the vision that I stood for (equality for all regardless of class or gender), was worth dying for.

How did he know that was enough? His power to bend time had returned, even as he lay there dying. Yet he knew that this power could not change what was meant to be, since it could not affect death's call, as death would always win in the end.