Chapter Text
Llamrei nickered, tail flicking as the path in front of them grew darker. They had been riding for the best part of a week, from dawn 'till dusk, over field and marsh and mountain. Both she and Arthur were exhausted, cold, damp, and exceedingly wary of their surroundings. Essetir shared a border with Camelot, sure enough, but this was far from those rolling green hills. The far side of Cenred's Kingdom was wild and nigh on uninhabitable, consisting chiefly of moors, crags and fells. Then there was the forest, the expanse of trees so deep and dark upon first glance from his spot on the hillock, Arthur had thought it a dark sea. Far from the dappled deciduous woodlands of his youth, this forest was dense, and growing denser with every mile they travelled. The pines towered far above the tight spruce, packed together with fir and larch thick with fragrant needles. It would be beautiful, perhaps, if it weren't for the eerie quiet. In any ordinary forest one would expect to hear the chatter of blackbirds and rustle of squirrels, perhaps the far-off call of a falcon or a stag lowing. In this forest there was naught but the creaking groan of living wood, and the hushed susurration of the wind through the uppermost branches.
It did not help matters that Arthur was on edge. He had been so for months, jaw aching with the strain of it, shoulders like rocks and head pounding. He'd not slept a full night since that first report had arrived. His father had not been too troubled at first, for reports of sickness in the rural villages were not uncommon, but the whispers of plague grew louder as the reports began flooding in, closer and closer, until the plague bells from neighbouring towns could be heard on the wind in Camelot itself. It was unnatural, they said, the way people would sicken, wilt away like green shoots in an early frost.
It started with a cough and a fever, as so many sicknesses did, but soon the fever spiked, causing delirium and uncontrollable shivering. Then came the sweating, not a clear sheen as before, but bloody, the taste of pennies in the air as sweat and tears turned red, then black. Then the thirst would take hold, an unquenching desire for water so powerful that victims would break free from their homes in desperation. Always the destination would be the nearest source of water. Always the victims would submerge themselves, drowning in the village well or local spring or nearest river, poisoning the water as they did so. Sometimes the reports would tell of survivors, the very last of their household or village, who would seem to get better, just for long enough for them to reach the next population centre before succumbing to the thirst and poisoning a new water source and beginning the cycle again.
The Thirst, that is what it came to be called, and it did not take long for the Thirst to come knocking on Camelot's gates. King Uther declared it sorcery and declared a witch-hunt, but Gaius had come to Arthur begging for him to seal the city wells. He could not ascertain, he said, whether the cause was magical or not, but that the symptoms were clear and to stop the spread, all communal water sources would need to be tightly regulated to stop any victims contaminating them. Arthur was hesitant to go behind his father's back, but it was clear that his fear of magic was making him blind to the very real issues the Thirst was posing. It was too late, however, for many of the lower town, and it seemed inevitable that it would soon breach the castle walls too.
So the King came up with a new plan. So powerful was the sorcery being used to cause the Thirst that surely the culprit could only be the most powerful sorcerer in all of Albion, and that sorcerer must be struck down to free them all from the acursed plague. So it was that he sent Arthur to find the Warlock of the Tower, a mystical figure known to all as the most ancient and powerful sorcerer of all. No one had ever seen the Warlock, but no one in Albion had not heard of the strange tower, older than it was possible for a tower to be, taller than it was possible to build, and shrouded in magic.
This was the tower that Arthur now looked upon from his place atop a cliff's edge. It was a way in the distance, perhaps an hour or so along the path he had just turned from, surrounded by the same dense trees, but reaching up taller than even the stories had said. It was difficult to tell exactly how tall, but it was certainly at least twice the size of even the tallest neighbouring trees. An impossible spire, imposing and dark upon the horizon. Llamrei nickered again, and Arthur shivered with her, patting her neck both to soothe her nerves and his own. He would likely reach the tower a good while before night fell, but he did not feel comfortable stopping even to rest under the dark canopy of silent trees.
Even the air, as they drew closer to the tower, seemed heavier, as though each breath took less air in than the last. Arthur was patently aware of how this warlock could have any number of traps primed for those willing to brave his domain, so kept a hand resting on the pommel of his sword as he urged Llamrei onwards down into the glen. The path seemed narrow in places, and in others it almost seemed as though it was pitching upwards. The canopy had enveloped them once more, and he lost sight of the tower under the foliage. It was to his great surprise and dismay that he and Llamrei emerged into a clearing atop a cliff's edge to see the very sight they had done an hour before, looking down onto the tower from atop a hill Arthur was certain they had not climbed again. He shook his head ineffectually and cursed under his breath, moving Llamrei on and choosing a different fork in the path from the one he had assumed would lead him to the tower. If this was a distraction, he would not fall for it. Perhaps the warlock assumed that those who chose the most obvious path and found themselves back where they started would simply give up. Arthur was not a man easily dissuaded.
Much to his dismay, however, Arthur found himself atop that hill, looking down at his destination, time and time again. Each time the sun had dipped lower and lower behind the clouds, painting the sky and the forest around them a deep, sickly yellow. It was almost impossible to see under the conifers, and Arthur felt as though he had exhausted every path open to him. As dusk fell around them, and they were seemingly no closer to the tower, Arthur brought Llamrei to a stop and slid from his saddle with the weight of a week of travel and months of grief and hardship. He rested his head against Llamrei's flank and breathed in a shuddering lungful of air. His faithful companion was warm beneath his hands and his forehead, she smelt musky from days of travel yet still somehow of the sweet straw from her stable. She was a comfort to him, a friend as much as a steed, but in the growing gloam of the forest, he felt as though there was but one way forward for him, and it was one that Llamrei could not join him on.
"I'm sorry, my friend," His voice was hoarse with as much emotion as disuse. "I cannot take you any further. I hope you make it out of these woods safely. I hope we can meet again."
With that, Arthur took his satchels, loosened her harnesses and took the saddle from her back. She was a free horse now, he could only hope she could fend for herself for long enough to be found by a good farmer who might let her lead the rest of her life in peace. She whinnied as he slapped her haunch and sent her on her way, fighting the hot stinging in his eyes as he turned back towards the tower and stepped off the path, into the trees.
When he was a child, Arthur had been watched like a hawk. His father had taken him riding, allowed him supervised activities that were suitable for a young noble boy, but never had he been allowed to run free. He had never climbed trees or made dens from fallen twigs. Never had he got lost in a market or stolen bruised apples that had fallen from a cart. He had not spent days trying to tame a stray dog outside the local tavern, nor had been allowed to forage berries from the roadside or make a den beneath a fallen tree. Boyhood had been all but sterile, carefully curated to be formative but never wild. Never had this been more apparent than as another thorn dug its claws into his cheek, stripping a feral, red line across his golden skin, and tearing into his red cloak in snag and shards. His feet stumbled over roots and shrubs, and more than once he had spat out a cobweb that he had not seen in the gloom of the encroaching night.
Arthur was almost blind in the undergrowth, fumbling forward in the vain hope that he was still going in the right direction, and was not about to happen upon another cliff or sharp decline into a ravine. Each minute that passed made him regret leaving Llamrei more, and made him less certain that he was ever going to see the stars again. However, after some nebulous amount of time, he stumbled out from the thick undergrowth into a clearing of sorts, where the tallest trees fell away, leaving only the small shrubs, black against the wash of intermittent moonlight. It was only when the moonlight fell into shadow again that he realised he had finally happened upon the tower.
It appeared beside him almost as though it had not been there a moment before, a colossus of smooth, dark stone. He approached in with wavering hands, unsure whether the traps he had been expecting would spring as he stepped closer and closer to it. He flinched when his hand finally touched the cold slab of stone, but no reproach came. He tentatively rapped the stone with his knuckles, feeling the solid structure underneath. It was cylindrical, somehow, with nothing holding it in place but its foundations. Looking up, it seemed so tall as to melt into the darkening sky, scraping the very clouds, tearing into them like thorns into his fine woollen cape.
Arthur moved methodically around its base, searching for a door of some kind, but found he had made his way around it thrice and found nothing. The fourth time he moved around it, it almost seemed as though it was finished as soon as it had started, far thinner than the time before. The fifth time he worried he would never reach the place he had started, the tower suddenly impossibly broad. He rapped against the stone again with his fist, then with the pommel of his sword, and even called up to the warlock there, but received no answer.
Exhausted, Arthur retreated from the tower, collapsing beneath the least menacing tree. Dusk was retreating into silken night as Arthur felt a flicker of despair ignite in his chest. He couldn't have come this far and found his quarry only to be denied even an audience. It was cruel.
He watched as the darkness fell around him, he watched as the clouds gathered and broke and gathered again, teasing the warmth of sunset and then the clean gleam of the moon. There was no sign of life from the tower, not even a single candlelit window.
A rustle in the undergrowth snapped him from his gloomy spiral. Arthur watched as a fox slunk out of the undergrowth, trotting with purpose towards the tower. It, too, circled the base of the tower fruitlessly, sniffing for cracks and boltholes that Arthur knew were not there. It paused in the muted moonlight, suddenly alert. Arthur didn't dare breathe. It seemed to have found something that Arthur had not, as it barked and yipped, scratching at a spot in the stone with purpose.
The scratching continued until Arthur was shocked to see the faint outline of a doorway, barely a silver sliver. He was certain that it had not been there in the daylight, but sure enough, the sliver cracked wider until, with a creak, a door that had not been a door before, opened and the fox slipped inside.
Arthur scrambled to his feet, but before he could take a single step back towards the tower, the door closed again, disappearing back into the stone as if it had never been there.
All his previous despair evaporated. There was a door, and Arthur had an idea forming in his mind as to how to get it to open. He waited for a while, until the stillness of the tower and the surrounding forest returned. Then, softly as he could manage, he crept towards the great stone spire, low to the ground. He found the spot he was sure the fox had done, and with his smallest boot knife, began to scratch at the stone. At first there was no movement, nothing to suggest his plan was working at all. He felt slightly ridiculous, kneeling on all fours and blunting his knife in the facsimile of some woodland creature. But no sooner had this thought crossed his mind, than the moon-painted sliver began to trickle down the stone towards him. The door that was not a door creaked open once more, and as quickly as he could manage, Arthur snuck inside, triumphant.
The feeling of triumph lasted about as long as it took for Arthur's eyes to adjust to the low light inside the tower. Much like the outside, the interior of the tower defied belief. It was far, far larger an entry hall than it was possible to be held within the exterior walls he had walked around, the ceilings so tall they disappeared into the gloom, the lines of torches along the walls trailing their meagre light so far into the distance that they merged into one, long line of golden fire. It was dank, a wet, rotting smell permeating the air, and Arthur had to resist the temptation to cover his nose and mouth to keep from gagging.
He followed the corridor tentatively for some time, shadows jumping as he moved past the torches, disturbing the flames as he went. His sword remained drawn the entire way, ears straining for anything dangerous beyond the slow, echoing drip of water onto stone.
The first fork in the path he came across gave him pause, but he chose the right turn simply because his gut told him so. The second fork he chose the left, and the third the right again. It wasn't until he was met with a blank wall, a dead end, that Arthur realised he was not only lost, but trapped in some sort of maze. He cursed as he turned back, hoping the the left-hand path would lead him forward. Unfortunately, it was also a dead end. In fact, every time he thought he had made progress he was faced with either a blank wall, or a corner littered with the bones of other poor souls who had tried their luck along the winding paths of this tower.
Arthur started losing time. There was no natural light, only the glow of the sconces along the wall, and his already weary body gave him no inkling as to how long he had been wandering. Eventually he found his way back to the very first fork and he stopped to gather his thoughts. Guessing was doing him no good, so he'd have to start thinking more methodically.
The first thing he did was get his boot knife and scratch an X into the wall where he had found nothing but dead ends. Then he took the left-hand path and began to mark each path he took as he did so. Sometimes the paths made no sense and he would end up back at a fork he had marked, and yet it was impossible for him to have circled back to. Other times he would turn back and find himself at a fork that had no markings, which was equally impossible. However, as the blade of his knife began to blunt, he finally started to find a path, a way through the maze where he could take only the paths that he knew did not lead to dead ends, or corpses, or at one point a pit that appeared to have formed in a sinkhole beneath the cobbles at his feet.
The first real proof of any success came at the end of another long corridor, where stood a door, so wide and so tall there was almost no way Arthur could get it to open. It was at least five times his height, and solid wood, the hinges forged iron with rivets as large as his fist holding them in place. It took all of his waning energy to get the doors to shift, and when they did they did so with an almighty groan.
What lay inside beggared belief. Rather than a standard hall, Arthur was met with a giant's chamber. The ceilings seemed to be a hundred feet high, and everything, from the chairs and tables to the torches and fireplace, seemed larger than life. To get to the tabletop, Arthur had to haul himself up onto the stools beside it, then clamber from there, scrabbling like a rat. The loaves of bread and half-eaten roasted chicken carcasses were the almost as large as he was, and the perspective made him dizzy. He picked at the chicken, slicing hunks of meat off with his sword, and scooped the wine from the goblets with cupped hands. As he made his way along the table, he found pickled vegetables, sliced cold meats, sweetbreads, roasted vegetables, and more. He was not greedy, but he was famished, and he was not going to pass up a chance to eat when he had no idea when he would have another.
When he had eaten his fill, Arthur sat for a moment, propped up against a candlestick that was as tall as he was. It was bizarre, this entire adventure. Nothing was as it seemed in this place, and he could only hope that he had not inadvertently poisoned himself with the giant food.
He took time to rest, to clean his sword and attempt to salvage the blunted blade of his boot knife. He wasn't sure how much time had passed, and in his exhaustion he did not notice the room around him changing. In fact, what alerted him, finally, was the candlestick behind him toppling over from his weight. He turned round to find it no longer as large as he was, but nearly half the size. His head whipped round, and sure enough, the rest of the room seemed smaller too. It wasn't quite the size it ought to be, but as he watched it, he could see it beginning to shrink.
By the time he got to his feet and off the table, the drop was less than three feet. He started to jog towards the door on the opposite side of the hall, but where everything else was shrinking, the hall seemed to be stretching out, elongating, pushing the door further out of his reach.
Arthur began to panic, his feet picking up speed. The ceiling was swiftly descending towards him, and if he wasn't careful he would not only be unable to fit through the only exit, but would be crushed on all sides.
Sure enough, when he finally arrived at the door, it was barely large enough for a child to fit through, he flung it open and threw his sword in front of him before crouching and pressing himself into the doorway. He could feel it closing in around him, his shoulders snagging, then his hips and knees, until finally his foot, barely smaller than the doorway, scraped through and Arthur collapsed onto the floor, panting.
His heart was hammering in his chest, and the food he had taken all that effort to procure was threatening to make a reappearance. When he pulse finally slowed, he sat up with a groan and staggered to his feet. The room around him was warm and well-lit, lined with bookshelves. There was a fireplace filled with well-tended logs, popping and crackling away, and a large, inviting chair sat close enough to the fire to utilise both its warmth and light. His eyes flitted about the room, trying to see if there were any signs of shrinkage, anything warping or changing, anything collapsing around his feet or ready to swing from the rafters.
Finding nothing, he took a tentative step, then another, exploring the room warily. Everything seemed normal, until he turned a corner to see a man. He was facing Arthur, head bowed low over a large book on a table. He was young, perhaps of an age with Arthur, so certainly not the Warlock he was looking for. His hair was cropped short, dark and just curling over his ears and the down the nape of his neck. He was dressed in robes, though they looked neither ratty nor particularly fine, simple and practical for all that robes could be practical. It was only when he looked up that Arthur could see that his startled gaze was brilliantly blue. Even in the warm light, they were clear and bright, and staring directly at Arthur.
Arthur went to raise his hands in supplication, but given that one hand still held his sword where he had retrieved it from the floor, it rather looked like he was raising his sword to the man.
The man startled further.
"You shouldn't be here!" He blurted out, taking a stumbling step backwards. "You can't be here!"
Arthur, still taking steadying breaths from his flight mere moments ago, took a step forwards in return. "Please, you are the first friendly face I have seen since I got to this forsaken tower. Please, I need your help, I beg of you."
The man took in his haggard appearance, the sweat on his brow, the blood on his cheek, and his torn, ratty cloak. His eyes widened further and he threw a chair in front of him.
"You cannot be here! Get out!" He cried as he fled from the room.
Calling after him in vain, Arthur ran to make chase, only to find himself no longer in the warm embrace of the library, but in a dank cave, rushing not towards the young man, but towards the edge of chasm. He skidded to a halt, the stones about his feet tripping off the edge and into the abyss below, clattering as they went until… nothing.
Arthur got to his feet, shakily, and peered over the edge. There was nothing but darkness. Turning back, the room he had come from had disappeared, no more than a bare flank of stone. Beyond the chasm was a door, lit by two sconces on either side. It appeared, Arthur thought, that was the only way forward.
"Oh, only across the abyssal chasm then." He cursed under his breath as he collapsed heavily on the floor.
