Time seemed to fly and one day Arthur was fifty-eight years old.
His knees hurt when it rained.
This was, he reflected as he stood at the eastern window of the lord's chambers in the grey predawn light, a deeply undignified development for a man who had once climbed killed a wyvern. His knees should not hurt when it rained. His knees should have had the decency to remain functional out of sheer respect for the things he had put them through.
Though they did not have that decency.
Thiugh he compensated for it by using [Hamon] to keep the worst of the effects of age at bay and keep his body functional at a level that would have been impressive for a man twenty years younger. He could still fight. He could still swing Sunset with speed and power that made younger men blink. He could still ride Quiet, who had not aged a single day since the day she first appeared, and he could still run the mountain road in half the time it took his guardsmen.
But the mornings were harder now than they used to be.
The mirror on the wall beside the window showed him a face he was still getting used to. The grey had won the war with the blonde and his hair was almost entirely silver now, worn long and tied back with a leather cord the way he had worn it since his twenties. His beard, which he had started growing at forty because Cassie said it made him look distinguished was white. His face was lined and weathered and the scar across his cheekbone from the had faded to a thin pale line that was only visible in certain lights.
He looked old.
But he did not feel old, not inside. Inside he still felt like the boy from Harrowfield who had woken up one morning with a system in his head and a world full of impossible things waiting to be done.
But the outside was catching up and the outside was winning.
The castle was quiet around this time. Mira and Cassie and Rhaella were asleep in the great bed behind him, three women who had shared his life and his bed and his heart for the better part of three decades, and they slept the way they always slept, tangled together in a pile of limbs.
The children were not children anymore.
Mordred was a lord in his own right now, married, with lands on the mainland that Jaehaerys had granted him. Morgana had gone to the Free Cities to study engineering and clockworks, because Brightwater could not contain the scope of what her [Inventive Genius] wanted to build.
Percival served on the small council in King's Landing as an advisor on matters of law. Lancelot was a knight of some renown who had won three tourneys so far.
Sheira had established a library on Brightwater that scholars came from across the realm to use. And Rhaegar had become a figure of such importance in the realm that Arthur sometimes had difficulty reconciling the tall grave man who sat in council chambers and quoted ancient texts with the tiny baby he had once held against his chest.
They visited.
They wrote.
They loved him.
He loved them.
But they had their own lives now, and Arthur's life had narrowed in the way that old men's lives narrowed, not through loss but through the natural process of the world moving on while he stayed in place. The island was still his. The castle was still his. The people were still his. But the days had a different now, done was the time of constant building and discovering and now it was just a time to sit back and enjoy the life he had made for himself.
He looked at the spark.
It was brighter than it had ever been.
The pull in his chest was no longer a voice. It was a hand. A firm gentle patient hand, pressing against the inside of his ribs, pushing him east, pushing him toward the water and the horizon and the spark.
*Come.*
*Come now.*
*It is time.*
Arthur stood at the window for a very long time.
Perhaps it wasn't too late... for one last adventure.
He turned and began to dress.
He moved quietly, pulling on a simple tunic and breeches and his boots, buckling Sunset at his hip out of the habit that thirty years had made permanent. He did not put on armour. He did not pack supplies. He took only what he was wearing and the sword at his side, and crossed the chamber to the bed and stood there for a long moment looking at the three women sleeping in it.
Mira's wheat-gold hair had gone white but it still spread across the pillow the way it always had, and her face in sleep was smooth and peaceful and still quite young. Cassie lay curled on her side with one hand tucked beneath her cheek and the other resting on the curve of Rhaella's hip, and the silver of Rhaella's hair and the white of Cassie's had mingled together on the shared pillow in a way that made it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
He leaned down and kissed each of them on the forehead.
Mira stirred.
"Arthur."
Her voice was sleepy but her eyes opened and found him. "Where are you going."
"For a walk."
"With your sword and your travelling cloak?"
"It is a long walk."
Mira sat up making the sheets fall away from her shoulders and she pulled them back around herself and looked at him
"Arthur Pendragon. Where are you going."
He did not answer.
Her stern tone caused Cassie and Rhaella to both wake and they sat up in the bed and looked at him.
"I need to go somewhere," he said.
"Where." Cassie asked.
"I do not know exactly."
"When will you be back." Rhaella asked.
"I do not know that either."
"Arthur, you are scaring me." Mira again. She was out of the bed now, pulling a robe around herself. "Is it the light again?"
"Yes."
"Arthur, there is nothing there. We have been telling you for decades that there is nothing there. Whatever you think you see, it is not real, it is in your head, it is a trick of the light or a reflection or some remnant of the dreams you used to have, and you cannot go chasing after it across the open sea at your age, you will drown or—"
"I have to go."
The way he spoke was something they all recognised. It meant he'd made up his mind and his legendary stubbornness was about to show itself.
Mira's eyes filled with tears. "You promised," she whispered. "You promised me, Arthur. You promised me you would always stay."
"I will come back."
"You don't even know where you're going."
"I will come back, Mira. I have never broken that promise and I am not going to start now."
The door of the lord's chambers banged open.
Mordred stood in the doorway.
He was thirty years old and built like a siege engine, with his father's height and his father's breadth. Behind him stood Percival, silver-haired and calm and dressed in the travelling clothes of a man who had just arrived from King's Landing. Behind Percival stood Lancelot. And behind Lancelot, in the dark corridor, the rest of them. Morgana, who had somehow come all the way from Braavos. Sheira, who had been in her library an hour ago.
Then there was Rhaegar who looked at Arthur with what could only be described as disappointment.
All six of them.
All here.
All at the same time.
Something wasn't right...
Arthur looked at them.
"How," he said slowly.
"We knew you'd do something stupid," Mordred said. "You have been looking at that bloody horizon every morning for our entire lives, Father, and we are not stupid. We could see it coming and we agreed that when the time came, we would be here."
"To stop you," Percival added gently.
"To stop you from doing something foolish," Morgana clarified.
"To knock you unconscious and tie you to the bed if necessary," Lancelot offered cheerfully.
"To remind you," Rhaegar said, "that whatever is out there on that horizon is not worth more than what is in this room."
Arthur looked at his children.
He looked at his wives.
He looked at the window behind him where the spark sat on the horizon, brighter than he had ever seen it, pulling with a force that made his chest ache.
"I love you all," he said. "More than I have ever loved anything. More than this castle. More than this island. More than the name I carry and the sword at my hip and every breath I have ever drawn. You are the best thing I have ever done and the best thing I will ever do and I would not trade a single one of you for all the kingdoms in the world."
He paused.
"But I have to go."
He moved.
Mordred grabbed for him and Arthur sidestepped his son and Lancelot lunged and Arthur pivoted around the grab with the footwork that mastering [Water Dancing Style] had given him.
Percival said "Father, please" and Arthur put one hand on the silver-haired prince's shoulder and squeezed, but then he was past them all and through the door and into the corridor.
He ran.
He ran through the corridors of Camelot with his children's voices echoing behind him, he ran the way he had not run in years. It was definitely harder than he remembered.
He burst through the great doors of the keep and into the courtyard.
He looked and saw Quiet stood at the hitching post, the pale horse's eyes finding him instantly, and she was already moving toward him before he had taken three steps.
He didn't saddle her.
There was no time.
He grabbed the mane and swung himself up onto her bare back with a grunt of effort that his knees protested vehemently, and he dug his heels in and the pale horse launched into a gallop across the courtyard and through the gatehouse and onto the mountain road.
Behind him the doors of the keep burst open again and his children came pouring out into the courtyard, and their voices followed him down the road.
The mountain road wound down through the forest and Arthur took every one of them at full gallop, Quiet's hooves thundering on the earth, the trees blurring past on either side. He reached the coast road and turned east, toward the part of the island he had never built on, the wild eastern shore where the cliffs fell away to the sea and the waves crashed against the rocks below and the only signs of human presence were the goat trails that ran along the clifftops.
The spark was ahead of him.
It was not on the horizon anymore.
No longer at sea but on Brightwater itself.
It was close.
Very close.
Hanging in the air perhaps half a mile ahead, at the edge of the island where the eastern cliffs met the sea. The pull in Arthur's chest had become a rope, a chain, a force that was dragging him forward so powerfully that if he were not riding Quiet he thought he might be yanked off his feet.
Eventually though Quiet stopped.
She planted her hooves at the edge of the cliff and simply stopped, and Arthur nearly went over her head from the sudden deceleration. He caught himself on her mane and swung down and stood on the clifftop with the wind in his face and the sea crashing below and the spark hanging in the air in front of him.
It was floating above a rock.
A single boulder of grey stone jutted up from the edge of the cliff, perhaps four feet wide and three feet tall, its surface worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. And embedded in the top of that boulder, driven in to the crossguard, was a sword.
The blade was buried in the stone so deeply that only the hilt and the crossguard and perhaps six inches of the blade above the stone were visible, and the steel of those six inches were so radiant it was almost blinding.
Arthur stood in front of the stone and looked at the sword.
The pull in his chest had stopped.
This was it.
This was what he was meant to find.
For the first time in thirty years, the sensation that had lived behind his ribs like a second heartbeat was gone.
He reached out and wrapped his hand around the grip.
The leather of the handle was warm beneath his fingers and the moment his skin touched it the six inches of visible blade blazed with a light so bright that it turned the area white and the shadow of everything stretched out behind him for fifty yards across the clifftop.
He pulled the sword and for a moment it resisted so he pulled harder, bracing his feet on the rock, the blade shifted a fraction of an inch and the light intensified until Arthur could see nothing but white in every direction. He set his teeth and pulled with everything he had, he roared and watched as the sword came free.
It came out of the stone shattering it in half, the blade emerging inch by inch and then foot by foot, the luminous steel sliding out of the rock as though the rock were not rock at all but something merely butter.
The blade was long.
Longer than Sunset.
Longer than even Blackfyre
The steel was silver-white and the patterns that moved through it were not the dark rippled waves of Valyrian steel but something else, something that looked like sunlight trapped in running water, and the light that poured from it when the last inch cleared the stone was like a second sun.
Arthur held it above his head and the light exploded.
It blew outward from the blade in a wave that covered the clifftop and the sea and the sky and the island behind him, and where it passed the world changed.
The cliff shattered into nothing.
The grey stone beneath his feet dissolved into mist and the mist dissolved into dark but the dark was not the dark of night but the dark of a place where light had been removed.
The sea vanished.
The sky vanished.
The island vanished.
Camelot vanished.
The trees and the fields and the harbour and the mountain and the waterfall, all of it, every single thing that Arthur had built and loved and lived in for his entire life, came apart like a painting being washed away by rain until there was nothing left but the dark and the fire.
Because that was all there was.
Fire.
And the darkness that was cast by it.
Arthur stood in the dark with the sword in his hand and the light pouring from its blade, only he was not fifty-eight years old now.
He was not old at all.
He looked down at his hands. They were young again and calloused and strong, the hands of a man in his early twenties, and the tunic he wore was not the simple linen of an old lord's morning walk but the bloodstained gambeson he had been wearing on Dragonstone.
He looked down at his stomach.
The wound was there.
The place where Blackfyre had gone through him, the Valyrian steel punching through flesh and muscle and organ.
Thirty years.
He had lived over thirty years inside some sort of dream.
His wives.
The children growing up.
The grandchildren.
None of it was real.
Arthur's knees buckled and he nearly went down but the sword in his hand flared brighter and the light strengthened him, held him up from the inside, poured into his body through the grip and filled him with power.
Then a sound came from the dark.
Laughter.
(AN: Arthur was trapped in his perfect world, but by who I wonder? Anyway hope you enjoyed it.)
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