“If we can get her one of the scrolls, Chloe’s ability to heal will be tenfold what a human’s is. But she will have to learn how to deal with the spirits inside the scroll, and master the demon and whatever new powers she’s given. And if she doesn’t do it, she will go insane, and become a monster.”
“We’ll help her,” Remy said. “We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Once the scrolls are here, we have a chance of saving Chloe,” Jinayca said. “And you have a chance to get home.”
“What does that mean?” Diane asked.
“The dwarf you’re looking for is called Brigg. He was one of main reasons so many of our kind got out of the citadel alive. He knows the hidden tunnels into the citadel—the only warrior left alive in Sanctuary to do so. He can take you to the citadel, into the realm-gate room.”
“And he’s in the library?”
Jinayca nodded. “Once you locate the team in the library, you’ll need to talk to Brigg. He can help you find the spirit scrolls, and hopefully the way to get the realm gate activated.”
“I thought you said it needed a guardian to do it?” I said.
“Brigg worked with the guardians back when we had any,” Zamek said. “That’s why he knows the entrance. Only he can get through the locked doors in the tunnel. We need him. You need him. Otherwise, you get to stay here forever.”
Something didn’t make sense to me. “Wait: how can the realm gate go to multiple places? One gate, one exit and entrance.”
“The gates in this realm are different than those in others. We created these as a way to travel between realms, so each gate has a set number of a dozen or so destinations. It’s why not all of the dwarves are in one place. They’re scattered across multiple realms. We kept away from the Norse and elven realms, the former because of their civil war, and the latter because they caused all of this. And we stayed away from Earth, because we don’t trust Avalon or its people.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The blood elves had help from that realm. We’re certain of it.”
“What Norse civil war?” Nabu asked.
“We don’t know more,” Zamek explained. “The Norse realms cut off all contact with the outside. Last we heard they were at war with one another, then nothing else.”
Well, that explained where all the Norse pantheon went. “I assume you know the way to the library?” I asked Zamek.
“I do, and we have maps to find Brigg and his people. Hopefully, we’ll be there and back within a day. I don’t relish the idea of being in that library longer than we need to.”
I turned to the Fates. “Any of you three like to say anything? You’ve all been awfully quiet.”
“The future is cloudy,” Ivy said. “I don’t know what will happen. But I do know this is your best chance.”
“Let’s get to it, then.”
Mordred was up first. “I won’t be going. My brain . . . the idea of being near so many of those things.” He left without another word, Morgan following behind.
“He was broken by these creatures,” Ivy said.
“You forgive him?” I asked, surprised at the disbelief in my voice, something I instantly regretted. He’d done awful things to the Fates, but he wasn’t that man anymore.
“He is not the same man.”
“I noticed.” I sighed. “Anyone who wants to come with me, stay here. Everyone else can go, if you wish.”
The three Fates stood. “We are more helpful here,” Cassandra said hugging me.
“I know.”
To be honest, I was thankful they weren’t going to be in harm’s way. I knew they could handle themselves; I’d fought beside Ivy before. But I also knew that the blood elves would very much like to capture them again. I didn’t want to put them in that position.
I waited until they’d left before I spoke again. “Diane, Remy, Irkalla: you feel like going after these dwarves?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Irkalla said with a smile.
“Only if I get a dwarven sword,” Remy said with what I assumed was a grin. “And an ax, and a set of armor. Oh and something that goes boom. I really think that would help us out.”
“Explosives will help us out?” Diane asked.
“Sure. Why not?” Remy asked, as if the very possibility of them doing otherwise was insane.
“Okay,” Zamek said. “We leave here as soon as we’re ready.”
“You’re leaving me here? Why?” Kasey asked as most of the others had left the room.
“Because you’re seventeen, and your best friend is in a hospital bed, dying. Your head is here, not out there, so stay and keep an eye on Chloe.”
“I want to be able to do something!” she snapped jumping to her feet and throwing a chair across the room.
“You can’t. Not this time, Kase.”
“You know, at some point those blood elves are going to realize this is where the Fates are,” Diane said, unmoved by Kasey’s outburst.
I nodded. “I assume as much, yes.”
Kasey looked over at me. “You think they’re going to come here?”
“Yes.”
“I need you here, Kase, because I need you to help defend these people, and it would be better for you to know that Chloe was here than several hours away while you sneaked around a library. That’s why you’re staying.”
“The Fates already mentioned there was a possibility of an attack,” Jinayca admitted. “I’ve already got the warriors on look out. We’ll be ready.”
“And now you’ll have Kase to help you,” I told her. “And Mordred is still here.”
“He was in the blood elves’ company for over a hundred years,” Jinayca said. “I’m not sure how much they broke him.”
“Completely,” I said, before leaving the room.
CHAPTER 26
I didn’t go looking for Mordred, but I found him anyway, sitting alone beside the stream.
“I don’t think you’ll catch much,” I said as I approached, letting him know I was there.
“You must think me a coward.”
I sat a little distance away; after all, he had told me that he was going to kill me, even if he’d given no indication that he was planning it any time soon.
“Who told you that killing me was your destiny?” I asked, pretty certain I already knew the answer.
“The Fates.”
I nodded to myself. That was the answer I’d been expecting. “When?”
“I went to see them about a year ago. I wanted to . . . find some semblance of forgiveness or something. I don’t really know. They told me they were expecting me, and I spent a few hours trying to atone for my past.”
“And they told you that you had to kill me?”
“They said that there are lots of paths forward for me. But that killing you, and only when you were powerful enough, would change the world. That if you lived, a lot of people would die. And that it has to be by my hand at the right time.”
“You believed them?”
Mordred turned to look at me. “I wanted to show you that I wasn’t the person you thought I was. I wanted to show you that apart from the craziness, I’m a different person. But I am also apparently destined to kill you. I thought you should know. I didn’t want it to come from someone else, or have you accept the me I’ve become, only to realize I’d try and kill you. It felt a little disingenuous.”
“You probably could have told me in a different way.”
“Possibly, but it’s not like you’re just going to let it happen, and Ivy explained that she doesn’t see anything more for me. Either I kill you and save lives, or I fail, and a lot of really bad shit happens. Or maybe it doesn’t. Who the fuck knows? The future is fluid, right?”
“Something like that.” I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the stream. “You know, this is one of the weirdest conversations I’ve had in a long time.”
“When I woke up after you shot me, I had a conversation with Morgan about the place o
f nachos in the world league table of foods. That was a bit stranger. I think I suggested that you could use them as weapons. To be fair, it was a weird time for me.”
“What did these people do to you, Mordred? The blood elves?”
Mordred remained silent for a long time, and I began to wonder if he planned on talking at all. But eventually he said, “When the dwarves realized I wasn’t their king’s killer, they let me go. I was almost to the citadel exit when the blood elves attacked. They dragged me back to my cell as they slaughtered everyone else.
“They tortured me, every single day. They broke bones and tore ligaments. They let me heal, only to do it all again. They brought me in for questioning, and would ask the same things over and over, in a language I didn’t understand. But despite the blood elves’ torture, despite them making me lose my mind, it wasn’t them who fucked with my head the most. It was Avalon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me.”
“Try me,” I said. “I want to hear what happened. I want to understand.”
Mordred stared at me. “People would come through the realm gate. Not elves, or dwarves, but sorcerers, werewolves, a few other types, too. They’d help the elves hurt me, and ask me questions. There were big names in Avalon who turned up to watch me be broken, who had allied themselves with the blood elves. But then there was this one man who came through. I’ll never forget his face; it’s permanently etched in my mind. He used mind magic on me, broke me down, made me want to destroy, and hurt, and kill. They gave me a list of names to hunt down and kill. It had names like Elaine, Galahad, Mac, a bunch of others. He made me want to murder them, to drink their blood, to feast on their flesh. To do anything I could to complete that list, no matter how many people I had to kill to get to them.
“That went on for a few years, until I no longer knew friend from foe. But that conditioning didn’t quite take, and eventually I escaped. I turned the conditioning around, removing the list of people they gave me, and replacing it with Avalon. Merlin, Arthur, and anyone else in a high enough position. Everyone who had helped hurt me.”
“Like whom?”
“Hera was there a few times; she wanted answers about Avalon—about you. About various other people, some I’d never heard of. Kay liked to get his hands dirty himself. Siris—you remember her?—she wore a hood, so she didn’t think I’d recognize her. It’s why I left back in Acre. She figured out I was only going to kill her, that I knew she had been there during those long days in blood-elf confinement.”
“So that’s why you went after Avalon: because of what they did to you?”
“Some of it, yes. I had other . . . personal reasons. But it started off with me skulking around this realm, killing blood elves after being tortured by them for over a century. I spent over a decade here, trying to find a way out, only to discover that the only way out was through a realm gate. But I found another way. One of the Avalon people who had arrived to talk to the blood elves had tablets with runes etched on them. I thought it strange, so I stole one and managed to free myself, ending up in the middle of Scotland during the winter, wearing only thin, tattered clothing and no shoes. It wasn’t a great time for me.”
“So you went after me for all of these years, because these people told you to destroy a list of names, and you changed it to those working for Avalon. That’s why you went after Arthur and Merlin and me?”
Mordred shook his head. “Merlin was personal. I went to him about what I’d seen, and he didn’t believe me. He called me a liar, and a coward, and a murderer, so I escaped the city, and the realm. Arthur is . . . actually I don’t know what Arthur is.”
I got the feeling there was more to be said on the subject, but didn’t push it. I didn’t want to start an argument about my old friend.
“And me?”
“Well, you were more complicated. When you tried to stop me over and over, my mind stopped seeing you as a friend and saw you as an enemy. In fact, it saw you as the reason for everything that had happened to me.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Because on the list of names the blood elves and their Avalon friends wanted me to kill, you were right at the top. I started murdering Avalon people because I couldn’t bring myself to kill you, and Galahad, and Mac, and anyone else I cared for. And when you sided with them, I just snapped again.”
We were both silent for several minutes as the news sunk in. “I don’t know what to say,” I eventually admitted.
“You don’t need to say anything. None of this was your fault, but I made it yours anyway. But I will say one thing, Nate. Hera, and Siris, and a bunch of other people who profess to be enemies of one another, or allies with Avalon; they all wanted you dead. Siris, when she tried to destroy Acre, was working with Hera and her cronies to pull it off. The enemies of Avalon have been undermining Avalon’s power for centuries, and they’ve wanted you dead for just as long.”
“Why do they want me dead?”
“They fear you, Nate—fear us. You went through a blood-curse ritual, yes?”
I nodded. “Did you?”
“Yes. Don’t know when, or even who was there, but we were both put through the same ritual, albeit for different reasons, I think. Mine was to just limit my power and remove my memories of my time there. They didn’t do much else, memory-wise.”
“Mine was to limit my power and hide me from a war. They took me from my mother, and wiped my mind. On top of that, Merlin put me through the Harbinger trials when I was only thirteen.”
The Harbinger trials consist of putting a person who is at least a hundred years old into a deep psychic-enabled sleep, where the person lives their life and learns without ever having to do anything physically. The trials are exceptionally dangerous and several candidates have died over the centuries they’ve been carried out. To do it to a thirteen-year-old who had just come into his magic is both unheard of and unthinkable. It’s akin to torture.
“I heard about the trials from some people in Avalon,” Mordred said. “What war?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Zeus was at the ritual with Merlin; Hera, too. But if she wanted me dead, why not just kill me?”
“Ask her the next time you see her.”
“I think I might just do that. I’m getting the impression that people have been playing with our lives for a long time, and we don’t actually know why.”
“I certainly don’t know anyone else with blood-curse marks like ours. Elaine is doing great things with Avalon, but I don’t think too many people want her to continue. I think those who want Avalon’s power for themselves are beginning to align. I don’t think it’ll be long before it gets a lot worse.”
“Hera, Kay, Siris, and all of their allies working together—that’s a scary thought.”
“That’s the thing: none of those would work for any of the others. You heard all of that ‘my liege’ crap?”
For a few years whenever someone who worked with this group had been cornered and questioned, all they could talk about was my liege; there were no names or other details. It had been discovered that all of these people had had their minds tampered with, removing the names of whoever the liege was. “Yeah, who is ‘my liege’? Any ideas?”
“A few. I don’t think it’s a who. I think it’s a them.”
I had to admit the idea had merit. “What makes you think that?”
“I’ve come across a few people over the years who say the same thing. There’s no way all of them worked for the same person.”
“I had a similar theory,” I concurred. “So, more than one person. Probably a cabal of some kind.”
“Well, it’s almost certain that Hera, Siris, and Kay are all members. Anyone else? The blood elves are clearly all stuck here, but from what you say, it’s not hard to believe that the ‘my liege’ group managed to get things started with them.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to think of a hierarchy when you have no
idea of their aims and objectives. Beyond destroying Avalon, and killing anyone who gets in their way, I mean. After what I’ve heard today, I think it’s all but confirmed that this group actively plotted with the blood elves. There’s no way the dwarves would have missed so much preparation for so long. That means some of the dwarves were helping. There’s no other way they could have pulled it off.”
“Maybe when you’re in the library, you can try and figure out who this hooded person is?”
“The thought had crossed my mind. I’m curious about the blood elves’ allies.”
“And their allies are this cabal’s allies.”
“Did you find out who killed the dwarf king?”
Mordred shook his head. “Wasn’t a dwarf; that’s about as far as I got. Could have been anyone but me. Which isn’t a sentence I’m used to saying. I don’t know why they’d go to all the trouble of framing me, unless they didn’t and I was just a good excuse for a patsy while they continued to arrange for the blood elves to fight.”
“What were you here to discuss?”
“Some dwarven weapons had made their way to a bunch of raiders in England. A bad group.”
“I remember them. They sacked several villages along the south coast, but Merlin had me sent to France before we could figure out who was responsible.” I frowned. If Merlin hadn’t sent me away, would I have been stuck here with Mordred? Would I have been broken like him? Or maybe I could have helped stop it.
“After you left I found one of those spirit scrolls, fought the man who was using it, although I had no idea what it was at the time. I went to Merlin about it, and he sent me to the dwarven realms to discuss the crimes and try to figure out how the weapons were being smuggled out of this realm.”
“Is that why you think Merlin was behind it all?”
“No. He had no idea what was happening, or what was going to happen. Merlin’s descent into . . . whatever he is now happened a long time after I was sent here. When I finally returned to Camelot after all of those years here, I begged him to believe me about what had happened to me. I saw the change in him then. That was also when he told me Arthur was to be the new king of Avalon, not me. All that pain and suffering, all of those times I comforted myself with the knowledge that when I got back to Avalon, I would have the realm freed and the blood elves wiped out . . . all of it was for nothing.”