Page 58 of To Love a Dark Lord

For that was honor.

Was it not?

TWENTY

Mordred was dreaming.

Or, perhaps he had already awoken.

It was hard to say. The world around him felt detached from him—a step removed. He was standing at the edge of a clearing, though it took him a long time to realize that. Where he stood was the abyss of a moonless, starless night—nothing around him but the promise of emptiness. But in front of him was Gwendolyn—though he knew it to be only a vision. There was something empty about it—his love was not truly there. She was laughing and playing with Eod, tussling over a stick. They were happy.

Joyful.

And he was not there with them. He was watching, alone in the darkness.

Behold the light your shadow casts.

Whose was that thought? Not his, surely. But no one else was around. No one but the mirage before him.

In darkness, spare the sun.

The thought was not his own, but it did not feel foreign. He shut his eyes, blotting out the dreaming world around him. He repeated the words to himself, trying to find their origin.

Like the snap of fingers, something shifted. When he blinked his eyes open, the world around him was like nothing he had ever seen. Blades of grass, blue and translucent like the purest glass, shimmered in the moonlight as they swayed around him. Everything along the edges of his vision was a blur. He was still dreaming.

But this time, he was not alone.

He could not see them, but he could sense them. Or sense it, perhaps. He could not rightfully say. This simply did not feel like the magic that he had known all his life—it was the magic. This was Avalon. The heart of it. Or, perhaps, its dreams.

“Am I dead?” It was the obvious question. The Gossamer Lady had run him through with a remade Caliburn. He was dying, last he remembered, when he saw his keep and his feet touched the ground. He had kept his word—he had not lost consciousness on the flight back to his home.

No.

A thought. His and not his. Familiar and foreign. But a relief, all the same. He let out a breath, content with the fact that he still lived. For now.

More madness? Or, perhaps the presence of the gods of Avalon.

He found no harm in entertaining the possibility of the latter, given that offending them would likely spell disaster.

“Behold the light my shadow casts.” He pondered the phrase—no, the order. It had sounded like a missive. He smirked. “Ah. I understand. You were the power behind that vision of Arthur, were you not?”

Silence.

He supposed it was the right of the gods to be mysterious. Especially when his query did not matter. What difference did it make now? He was at war. “If you are attempting to convince me to become this—this monster—you needn’t. I have already made up my mind. I made that choice in the Crystal.”

More silence.

But perhaps he misunderstood. Perhaps it was not here to convince him—perhaps it was here to console him? “The destruction of my honor, my soul, my—my light—will mean she will be happy.”

Yes.

But he had not been there in the clearing with her. He had been alone, watching from the shadows. “Without me.”

A long pause. Long enough that Mordred did not believe he would receive an answer.

In the light, alone.

It was not being mysterious; it was being cryptic. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his knuckles—he had long since learned not to do that with his fingertips while wearing clawed gauntlets—and fought down a sigh. It was worse than that damnable wizard.

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