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I have wept rivers of blood upon the ancient stones, have grasped the beating heart of Avan’ya’s earth between my palms. I have looked into the souls of your warriors-- fathers, brothers, sons, I have taken their lives into mine with the drawing of a single breath. I have played Death’s music on the bones of the crows, the sound to carry upon their wings as ink writing the name of Al’gal’on Death-Lord into the fragments of your soul, to bid you never wake from the sleep in which you trap yourself. I am he you seek to vanquish in dreams, he you seek to escape in your waking world above. I am the Serpent, the Midnight Song, the soul’s Shadow, Incarna Malor. Will you bow to me, servants of your worm king, before you bind me with iron and silence the spells that breathe life into my veins as they rob it from yours? Before you take from me my only joy, my only light, my only hope?
How he longed to shout the words-- tear them from his throat and leave them raw and bleeding at the feet of the king’s guards! They were coming, he knew-- had known from the moment he had taken Bastián into his arms and bid their lips join in harmony sweeter than song. Fools, the lot of them , did they truly think him so blind? So ignorant of their purpose? Would he go to them like a lamb to slaughter, hear them decry his sleeping with another man as the gravest of his sins, worthy of the torture cells and the town square, even as they let that man ( nay, a boy, merely a boy--! ) walk free?
...But then. Bastián was to be absolved of all blame, for Bastián was pure. Not once had he called upon the dark powers, the ancient magics and rhymes; not once had he killed a man by will alone. Or by any other means. Likely had never even contemplated it, for he was but a child yet, with all the innocence that at thirteen should have long since bereft him.
And he loved the boy for it. Truly. Even now, as he brushed wiry locks of oak and ember back from a gently sleeping face with hands that trembled in memory of a fear he should have felt, could not feel . Even now, tears falling unnoticed as he whispered the spell into his kisses, tracing the curve of the youth’s cheek with a spirit’s breath-- for he was a spirit, nothing more: his soul was damned no matter what he did, no matter whether he died for sorcery or love, truth or falsehood.
I will send you to the mountains, my robin, my heart: the mountains whose proud heads loom ever taller in your dreams, reaching towards the celestial paradise you cannot help but believe in, the mountains of Sun and Moon, effervescent in their imagined glory. And forgive me, if you can; I cast you away only out of love for you. You can have no kind of life with me, my robin. Would you have me die for you, for a sin we did not commit? Call me selfish if you like: amoral, immoral, as you have so many times before. I save you , not myself; believe it or not, but I will die for you. And for myself. Perhaps what little virtue I possess is tied only to you.
Fear not for the men sent to condemn me to chains and whips and stones, the men who would twist our love into treason when their gormless tongues dare not speak the word magic , the form truth . For your sake only, I will be merciful; for your sake only I will spare their minds the horrors soon to overtake mine. They will not breathe past the rising of the sun, past your first waking smile, but I will spare their minds. You alone know what a blessing Death can be, to release man from the demons he conjures for himself. I take those demons unto myself; I leave you with naught but my kiss and my name, Modhroch, Harp of Kings, as ward against them. Let the spirit of the Harp fill you with light and song, all mine to give freely, never to return, that you may laugh in the face of evil. Even the evil I shall become.
* * *
“Who in this dwelling do the masses name Mordred, the Dancer-in-the-Hill, the Dragon’s Heart?”
They called for him now, five of them-- tall men, black-armored and black-masked, their fear so strong he could smell it: thick and cloying like the sickly breath of lilies on the grave. Be at peace, Robin. My time had passed ere yours came to birth’s light. “I, masters.”
“By the order of King Angarhad, we charge you, Mordred, with the crime of homogenous fornication. Your resistance will mean your immediate death, failure to meet your sentence the death of your lover--”
“Open this door, in the name of the King!”
A simple enough thing, to meet them: no harsh daylight to pierce his eyes, no frightfully wakened boys to push beneath the rough blankets of a bed built to shelter one. Nothing to fear, for Mordred feared nothing. The Dragon had naught to fear but Death’s vale of shadow, and Death’s piper still less to fear than that. Modhroch could fear, but Modhroch was no more, his life-song bound to the soul of his heart’s guardian one and true.
And so Mordred smiled, tasting the terror written upon the visage of each man before him, cowering behind the tallest and broadest of their company in a phalanx ragged with their unvoiced misgivings. Relishing in the flavor as it mingled with the mist of shallow breaths, the rushing of blood through cold-hardened and weary veins.
“Such wrongs I have committed, masters, such torments I have wrought, yet you prosecute me for the least of them? Is love a crime, one that demands my head as recompense?”
“For a man to love a man as he ought to love a woman, aye, it is.” The frontman was so calm, so outwardly sure of his conviction and cause-- a brute and nothing more, but the lie thrashed and burned in the throes of fever, poisoning his blood, the very air he breathed, and Mordred rankled at it. Cursed as he was with the brashness of a youth years alone forced him to own, he could not keep quiet, could not leave the words unchallenged--
“Nay. Say what you ought: that my magic, not my taste in paramours, is what your fool king mistrusts, what he will take my life to silence. Speak truth, or not at all.”
* * *
Even he cannot see it coming. The guard’s blade, chanting anthems of destruction as it moves to strike. The shock of winter-burned steel meeting heated flesh, tearing his face from brow to chin. The sudden darkness, red blood eclipsing copper skin as the moon eclipses the sun, devouring light and sound and breath all at once. The weight of the Shadow, settling upon the men as he cries out, a blanket of earth and ash to bury their souls beneath the weight of his pain and rage.
He watches without seeing as they fall, feels without knowing as he follows them to the ground. Long fingers splayed against a hollow cheek cut to the bone, unable to stem the welling tide of blood. Bastián’s absent soul, flown with his body to his palace of dreams, a gaping chasm in the edges of his consciousness not yet frayed by the ceaseless tirade of bloodfireicepainpainPAIN --!
No merciful gods were the keepers of Time. How could be they be anything but cruel, they who had spun the thread of his life out so long and whittled away at its edges all the while, until it faded to nothing, spider’s silk envenomed and enveloped in a world of shadow? They who bade him steal, beg, cheat, lie, kill, and worse-- only to punish him for the simple joy of loving another? They showed him no mercy, no justice, no semblance of a life of peace-- but perhaps it was meant to be. His life was gone, his love was gone-- only Mordred remained. Mordred, who was no god’s puppet; Mordred, who would sooner destroy himself than live at the mercy of a kingdom built brick by brick upon deceit. If all he held dear was to be taken from him under false pretenses, why should he not carve his own heart from his chest, trample it beneath his feet and let those gods gorge themselves on the dregs of his misfortune? Why should he not destroy himself, his mind, his very soul-- die for the magic he ought to have been condemned for today? He could-- so, so easily. Bind himself to the hands and heart of Al’gal’on, Death-lord, keeper of crows, ardor of misbegotten souls. He could die in the embrace of a man, as all men someday would. His purported crime. His shame. His glory. Irony was a bitter mistress.