The silence in the Great Hall carried the heavy stillness that comes before a lightning strike.
Torchlight flickered against stone pillars, throwing long shadows across the oak tables where three dozen knights sat frozen, tankards stopped halfway to their lips.
Mordred stood behind a heavy wooden bench, her gauntleted hands resting flat on the dark grain.
Inside her iron plate, her shoulders tensed, the metal joints giving off a faint rasp.
“Sir Mordred, you stand accused,” Arthur’s voice rolled across the hall, ringing against vaulted stone like a hammer hitting cold iron.
“Do you know why you have been called before this table?
Do you understand the weight of your transgression?!”
Mordred blinked behind her visor slits.
Her mind—still heavy and slow from two days of riding and the raw exhaustion of channeling crimson mana through granite—stalled out.
‘Wait, what?!’ Mordred thought, jaw tightening as she stared at the high table.
‘Are you serious right now?!
We literally just marched back from a warzone!
I blew open a thirty-foot stone wall with my bare hands, saved three thousand of your foot soldiers from getting turned into pincushions by longbows, and brought you a clean victory!
The second we step into the banquet hall, you dig for a reason to throw me under the bus?!
This king is definitely not blood!’
Instead of a sharp retort or a formal defense, a sound of baffled frustration hitched in her dry throat before she could stop it—a raspy, choked little wheeze of disbelief that died against the stone.
“A-ha…?”
The sound faded into the cavernous hall, leaving only her strained breath.
A twitch rippled through the assembled knights.
Sir Kay paused with a piece of roasted pork halfway to his mouth.
Across the room, Lancelot’s brow furrowed, his hand freezing on Galahad’s shoulder.
Princess Rowena’s quill hovered over her vellum notebook, her eyes widening.
Arthur’s pale face remained set in an unmoving mask, her right hand resting over the pommel of Excalibur.
“Although I cannot fathom why you stand stuttering like a sun-struck fool before the Round Table,” Arthur said, her green eyes narrowing as her voice dropped, “you put the captive lords of Bristol to the sword without royal writ, magistrate trial, or crown evidence.
What say you to your crime?!”
‘So that’s where the trap was set,’ Mordred thought, fingers digging into the oak until the finish cracked under her gauntlets.
‘You held back this card just to drop it in front of the court.’
She took a heavy step out from behind the bench, iron boots clattering against the flagstones as she straightened up.
“My King, hear me out!” Mordred rasped, her voice echoing through her visor as she gestured toward the high table.
“Those nobles were the ones pulling the strings behind the whole damn uprising!
They were feeding silver to the rebels, arming mercenaries, and sitting cozy behind thirty-foot walls while common soldiers bled in the mud!
If we left those snake-headed schemers alive, they would’ve just waited for our banners to clear out before stabbing us in the back!
I cleared out the rot before it could spread!
I did it for the crown!”
Rowena’s fingers tightened against her notebook, the ink on her quill tip drying into a dark drop.
The metal of Mordred’s horned visor rattled slightly with the force of her breath.
Rowena looked down at the fresh notes she had made two nights prior.
The parchment hummed faintly under her touch in the draft from the high windows.
Exceptional tactical awareness.
Lethal military instincts.
Unusual, intense attachment to the Crown.
Her hand hesitated.
Beneath those lines, her nib scratched out another observation:
Does not appear to understand his own motives.
Rowena looked up, watching Mordred’s broad iron shoulders rise and fall under Arthur’s unyielding gaze.
‘He acts out of desperate loyalty,’ Rowena thought, ‘yet he remains blind to what truly drives him.’
“Sir Mordred’s actions were aggressive, My King,” Galahad interjected.
The white-armored knight stepped out from his place near Lancelot and dropped onto one knee on the stone, head bowed.
“Yet he acted in the heat of an engagement to secure the vanguard.
Had he not broken the stronghold and neutralized the core leadership, our casualties during the final push would have been catastrophic.
I ask that My King consider his merit on the battlefield and grant clemency.”
“Hold on, hold on,” a voice piped up from the lower tables.
Sir Dagonet, the court’s sharp-tongued jester-knight, pushed himself up from his bench, twirling an empty silver goblet between his fingers.
“Let us not confuse a wild dog’s bloodlust with tactical genius, Sir Galahad,” Dagonet sneered, casting a sideways glance at Mordred.
“Sir Mordred ignored the chain of command, breached military law, and put noble prisoners to the sword without royal assize.
To wipe away such blatant insubordination simply because he won a skirmish?
That is naive.
If every knight went around slaughtering captured lords because they felt like it, we wouldn’t have a realm left to govern!”
Sir Kay set his pewter tankard on the oak table with a thud, ale sloshing against the rim.
“Dagonet,” Kay muttered, keeping his eyes on the tense figure in the center of the hall, “you have a talent for finding the one thing guaranteed to make an armed knight angrier.”
Dagonet paused, fingers freezing around the silver stem.
He cast Kay an offended glare.
“I am merely defending crown law.”
“You are defending crown law because the King is standing right there looking at you,” Gawain said from four benches down.
He leaned back against the wooden trestle, casually paring an apple with a short hunting dagger, the red peel coiling over his knuckle.
Dagonet opened his mouth to snap back.
Gawain didn’t raise his voice; he paused his blade mid-slice and lifted an eyebrow.
The jester-knight swallowed his retort, cleared his throat, and took a quick pull from his goblet instead.
Beside Galahad, Lancelot sat still.
His large hand rested on the pommel of his broadsword, thumb tracing the worn leather wrapping of the grip.
His eyes stayed locked on Mordred.
‘He isn’t breaking with fear or anger,’ Lancelot thought, watching the faint shudder in the green knight’s plate.
‘He looks wounded.’
‘I am going to tear that loudmouthed fool’s arms off and feed them to him,’ Mordred thought, crimson mana sparking behind her eyes as her blood pressure spiked.
“Enough.”
The word cut through the hall with the weight of an iron portcullis slamming shut.
Arthur stood straight, her gaze sweeping over Galahad, Dagonet, and finally settling back on the horned helmet in the center of the room.
“I have heard enough,” Arthur declared, her tone flat and absolute.
“My decision is made.
Sir Mordred’s extrajudicial slaughter of the captive lords directly violated military law and shattered royal protocol.
However, in light of the breach secured at the curtain wall, his service in battle cancels his debt to the court.
The Crown considers the ledger cleared.
There will be no glory awarded for Bristol, nor shall dungeon steel claim him.
He receives neither reward nor punishment.”
Galahad’s head snapped up, the silver mail collar around his neck clinking sharply against his breastplate.
‘A ledger entry?’ Galahad thought, staring at the King.
‘She’s reducing blood and shattered stone to a cancellation of debts?’
He turned toward the horned helm in the center of the hall.
Mordred had gone completely rigid.
The faint rasp of her armor joints stopped.
‘This is going to hurt him far more than a cell ever could,’ Galahad thought, his gauntleted hand tightening over his knee until the leather groaned.
He glanced sideways toward Lancelot, whose face remained set in a grim expression.
Arthur’s eyes hardened, cutting through Mordred like a broadsword.
“Return to your quarters, Sir Mordred.
Reflect upon your duty, your temper, and what it truly means to wear the armor of this realm.”
Silence fell over the hall.
Mordred stood frozen under the glare of the court.
Her jaw worked uselessly behind her visor, breath rattling against the metal chin-guard.
‘Cancels my debt…
the ledger is cleared?!’ Mordred thought.
‘That’s it?
That’s how she sees me?!
I nearly tore my own body apart channeling mana to break that wall!
I bled on their flagstones to save her vanguard!
And she balances it out like a high bailiff tallying up dead cattle on a scroll of sheepskin?!’
Her chest heaved once, twice.
‘I should yell,’ she thought, hands trembling.
‘I should smash that table to splinters.
I should rip this damn helmet off and demand to know why every drop of blood I bleed is met with this cold wall!’
Instead, she forced her head down.
“As…
as my King commands,” Mordred grunted out through clenched teeth.
“My thanks for your mercy.”
‘Don’t look back,’ Mordred told herself, turning sharply on her heel.
‘Don’t you dare look back.’
Her iron boots struck the flagstones in a sharp clatter as she marched out of the Great Hall, leaving the smell of roasted boar, dark ale, and victory behind her.
Inside the Great Hall, the iron-studded oak doors settled into place with a heavy thud that echoed into the roof timbers, cutting off the last sound of Mordred’s boots.
Rowena laid her quill down horizontally across her inkwell, watching the heavy doors settle shut.
“He wasn’t standing like a knight facing execution,” she murmured under her breath.
A few paces away near the high dais, Merlin glided closer, her white silk sleeves brushing against the stone pillar.
Rowena’s eyes narrowed slightly as she met the court mage’s gaze.
“That was not the posture of someone who fears punishment.
That was the posture of someone who desperately wanted something else.”
For a heartbeat, the light in Merlin’s violet eyes shifted, the playful warmth dipping into something dark and solemn.
Then, her familiar smile slipped back onto her face.
“Princess,” Merlin whispered lightly, resting her chin on her fingers, “you have an inconvenient habit of noticing things.”
Merlin leaned in slightly, her small smile holding as she brushed past Rowena toward the high table, though her eyes remained sharp.
“Sending him away before the high council convenes, My King?” Merlin murmured softly so only Arthur could hear.
“Or were you simply testing the temperature of the water?”
Arthur remained standing at the head of the table, hands resting flat on the dark wood.
Her gaze was fixed on the grand oak doors where the green knight had vanished, her face expressionless.
Silence stretched between them for a long moment.
“I tested nothing,” Arthur spoke quietly, her voice devoid of emotion.
“There was nothing to find.”
Arthur’s fingers remained motionless against the cold gold pommel of Excalibur.
“I have noticed,” Arthur spoke softly to the white-robed mage beside her.
“The way he watches my every movement.
The way he reacts to the slightest correction.
The reckless way he throws his body between danger and my vanguard without a second thought for his own life.
That is precisely why I cannot indulge it.”
Merlin studied her unmoving profile, silver hair catching the orange torchlight.
“You believe distance will cure it?”
“I believe cold distance is safer than encouraging an emotional dependency I do not understand,” Arthur replied, her tone hard.
She glanced back toward the empty doorway.
“He is an unstable, dangerously powerful young knight.
If he mistakes personal affection for royal favor, the consequences for the court will be disastrous.”
Merlin’s violet eyes softened with an unspoken sorrow.
“You see it as clearly as I do, Arthur,” Merlin whispered, dropping the formal title as her voice brushed against the King’s ear.
She hungers for your acknowledgment the way a starving person looks at bread.”
Merlin tilted her head, her gaze lingering on the heavy wooden doors.
“And she doesn’t even understand it herself,” Merlin murmured softly.
“Are you truly going to turn a blind eye to her heart?”
Arthur did not flinch.
Her green eyes remained fixed on the far wall, cold as winter ice.
“A king cannot possess personal feelings,” Arthur replied instantly, her voice flat and direct.
“A king is a vessel for the law, not a human being with preferences.
I do not know where his sudden, desperate attachment originates—but my instincts command me to keep him at a distance.”
Merlin looked at the young King’s profile.
A soft sigh escaped her lips.
‘You cold, foolish girl,’ Merlin thought, a shadow passing over her eyes as she looked down at her pale fingers.
‘You stand there holding the burden of a nation, entirely blind to the bloodline standing right in front of you.
You do not even realize she carries your own blood in her veins.’
Merlin swallowed the words before they could form.
The sight of the future—the burning fields of Camlann, the broken banners, the crimson sky—flashed behind her eyes like a ghost.
‘The more you push her away, Arthur,’ Merlin thought, her face dimming into solemn grief, ‘the harder she will strike back when the truth breaks.
Suppress that devotion long enough, and it will twist into a poison that consumes everything you built.’
Without another word, Merlin bowed her head slightly and stepped back into the quiet shadows behind the royal dais.
Arthur clapped her hands together twice.
The sharp sound echoed through the Great Hall, snapping the whispering knights back to attention.
“Enough of minor transgressions,” Arthur announced, her voice reclaiming its commanding authority.
“We proceed to matters of state.
All of you have reviewed the intelligence regarding the western rebellion.”
“Yes, My King,” the knights chorused, their postures straightening as the atmosphere in the hall shifted from personal drama to cold military reality.
Sir Lancelot stepped forward first, his silver plate gleaming under the hearthfire, his face set in a deep frown.
“The uprising at Bristol was far too organized for a local baronial dispute,” Lancelot stated, his voice carrying across the oak tables.
“The supply lines were paved with foreign coin, and the tactical deployment of their mercenary vanguard carried the distinct, calculated footprint of Rome.”
Sir Bedivere stepped closer to the high table, heavy leather boots thudding softly against the flagstones.
He extended his hand, pressing two calloused fingers down against the corner of the large parchment map to stop it from curling in the draft.
“The Bristol rebels possessed enough foreign silver to buy horses, arm three mercenary companies, and stockpile grain,” Bedivere said, shifting his fingers along the drawn coastline.
“Either through southern smugglers or corrupted coastal merchants, Rome is bankrolling our disaffected nobles to ignite civil war from within.
Bristol was merely a branch.
The root is deeper.”
Sir Kay leaned forward across his bench, resting his calloused forearms against the dark oak.
“How many other towns have taken Roman coin?”
“We do not know,” Bedivere replied quietly.
Sir Gawain slammed a fist against his leather-clad thigh, brow furrowing in anger.
“When internal strife forced their legions to pull back from Britain’s borders, they didn’t give up their ambition—they simply changed tactics!
It is vile, underhanded, and completely devoid of honor!”
Near the hearth, Sir Ector leaned heavily against his wooden staff, his weathered face solemn.
“If the Roman Empire is actively bankrolling domestic treason, then this small rebellion was merely a preliminary test of our borders.
The moment they realize local instigation has failed, the next wave will not be silver and whispers.
It will be iron, eagles, and full imperial legions marching across the Channel.
We must prepare for a true invasion.”
Silence fell across the tables.
Knights looked to their half-eaten plates, the lingering smell of roasted boar and dark ale suddenly stale against the talk of impending war.
Lancelot’s hand tightened on the pommel of his broadsword.
His eyes shifted from the parchment map on the high table to the grand oak doors at the back of the hall—the doors Mordred had just walked through.
“If imperial legions cross the Channel, My King,” Lancelot said, his deep voice cutting through the quiet, “we will not be fighting undisciplined rebels or local militia.
We will be facing iron cohorts trained to grind shield-walls to dust.”
Lancelot stepped closer to the table, looking directly at Arthur.
“When the wall at Bristol needed to fall, it took one knight channeling crimson mana with her bare hands to break three feet of solid granite and scatter three thousand men,” Lancelot continued, his tone weighted with quiet challenge.
“If Rome brings her full might to our shores, we will need that level of raw, terrifying power on the frontline.
Dismissing her service as a cleared ledger may satisfy crown law…
but it leaves a massive breach in our vanguard when the real war begins.”
Galahad looked up from where he stood near the dais, a silent nod echoing Lancelot’s words.
Across the high table, Merlin’s violet eyes glittered softly in the candlelight, her small smile entirely gone as she watched the King.
Arthur’s hand remained flat against the wood.
Her knuckles whitened slightly over the cold gold pommel of Excalibur, but her face stayed an unyielding mask.
“Sir Mordred remains a knight of this realm,” Arthur spoke, her voice cold and absolute, refusing to yield an inch of ground.
“If Rome steps onto our soil, every blade sworn to Britain will answer the call.
The Crown does not rely on the volatile temper of a single knight to secure its borders.”
Arthur slowly unsheathed Excalibur an inch from its scabbard.
The holy blade emitted a faint, golden radiance that illuminated her pale face and burned away the creeping shadows around the table.
“Let them come,” Arthur declared, her green eyes blazing with absolute resolve.
“We exist for no other reason than to stand as the shield of this realm.
Whether it be traitorous nobles, Saxon raiders, or the full might of the Roman Empire—let our blades shatter them one by one!”
The Round Table erupted.
“Hail King Arthur!”
“For Britain!
For the King!”
The collective roar of three dozen legendary knights shook the high banners hanging from the rafters.
Weapons were raised high and silver flagons slammed against oak—yet as the oaths echoed out into the night, Lancelot and Merlin kept their eyes fixed on the empty doorway, well aware of the dark, silent figure walking alone through the cold stone corridors below.