Long ago a legendary knight rose against the gods and failed.
His body broke under divine wrath and his name was almost forgotten.
His will, however, would not break.
When his mortal heart stilled, that stubborn will bent the last of his fate into something that could not be burned or buried.
It became a blade.
They called it the Sword of Remembering in stories told beside hearth fire.
They called it other names in other tongues.
The truth was simpler and crueler.
A sword born of mortal rage and mortal grief.
It could be lifted only by the worthy.
It drank divine light and spat it back as force a human hand could wield.
It waited where men put all dangerous things when they grew afraid of them.
It waited beneath stone and shadow.
Arthur sat on the cold flags of an empty hall and watched his kingdom breathe in a rhythm he no longer felt part of.
The banners in the great chamber hung motionless.
They had been stitched by hands that loved him.
They were torn now where traitors had practiced knives.
His body carried the traces of poison even though the physicians said the toxin had been washed from his blood.
They had not washed the bitter residue from his mouth.
He had never lost a fight with a blade.
He had never bled for reasons that were not honourable.
They could not beat him with swords, so they turned to what he loved.
His queen had grown pale under the veils of courtly life.
She had taken to the pillows and to the herbs like someone learning a language she would never speak again.
When Arthur fell ill, when his pulse faded to a reluctant echo, they watched him with the apathy of men who had already counted him dead.
His brother sat beside the throne with eyes like a man who had rehearsed a coronation in secret.
He smiled at courtiers.
He smiled for the cameras of power.
He smiled for the graves of a thousand petty promises.
When Arthur wobbled between dreams and waking, he felt hands that were supposed to be gentle pry a cup from his lips.
He felt the warmth of wine turned to poison.
He felt himself slipping like a ship letting go its anchor.
He almost died.
A girl named Elsa found him where the servants had left him dreaming on a pallet in the servants' corridor.
She was a healer by trade and a stubborn child by temperament.
She would not stand while a king was left to rot where the mice nested.
She carried him to a stray chamber and she stayed.
She poulticed his wounds and sang him names of herbs until his sleep softened into something human.
When he woke, Arthur saw her framed in the doorway, her hands stained with the ash of poultice and worry.
He wanted to give her gold and titles.
He wanted to weep.
He wanted to find the court and drag the poisoners by their collars into the sunlight.
By the time he had gathered his feet and his wits to ask her name and how he could ever repay her, she was gone.
The body they showed him later was bloodless and small.
A god had walked into the village and taken a life like one plucks a wildflower from the road.
Thor.
A name the bards would sing with lightning and the clergy would whisper like a prayer and a threat.
A god with a hammer and the appetite of storms.
Thor who laughed when men knelt and wept when they rose.
Thor who had no patience for small human kindness.
Arthur learned the face of injustice a second time.
It twisted him inside and hardened him like something forged in bad light.
There was no demon to blame, no creature between man and god.
There were only gods who could be cruel, and men who had to carry scars they had not chosen.
Enough, thought Arthur as he wrapped his hand around a cup and tasted the lingering bitterness of courtly poison.
Enough.
I would kill all the gods, he said to the empty hall.
The words were not a prayer.
They were a promise.
He searched for a map of old legends and found a smudge of ink that had been pressed into parchment a hundred years ago.
It spoke of a blade the gods had tried to unmake and could not.
It spoke of mortals who had bound a knight into iron and stone so that later hands might have a chance against those who judged men from above.
For a week he rode without sleep.
He slept only in fits and on a horse that could carry him faster than his rage.
He rode through villages that still burned the last of their gods' offerings in fear.
He rode past ruined altars where a coin in a crack caught the sun like an eye.
He found what he had not expected to find.
It was not on a map kept in a royal chest.
It had been left to the gulls of memory and the wolves of the high places.
In a canyon the wind had cut from stone, in a cave rimmed with old salt and the bones of storms, the sword lay above a rock like a promise gone to seed.
Arthur saw the blade at dawn when light came from the west and the cave breathed out cold.
It was dull as a river stone yet sang like a struck bell.
A whisper seemed to come from the metal and Arthur felt his own heart answering in an old language.
Only the chosen can lift.
He laughed at that from the back of his throat.
We shall see, he said to the shadow and to the knight he had never met.
He took the hilt and the world turned sharper.
A memory slid into him like cool water through a cracked lip.
He tasted iron and salt and the smell of a war that he had not lived.
He heard the voice of the legendary knight who had once raised his sword against the gods.
It spoke without moving form.
I am called Lacen of the Last Stand, said the voice.
I would not bow.
I needed to be remembered and made of steel.
Arthur felt the blade's hunger.
He felt how it drank at the seam between mortal breath and something older.
When he lifted it, the cave answered with a low keening like a distant storm.
Power rushed into his arms.
He felt his bones align with brass and his muscles remember bearing a mail shirt.
It was not simply strength.
It was the right to wound that which had been untouchable.
He swung the sword in a small arc and the air hissed.
Leaves in a tree a mile away shivered.
The sword had a name in the old tongue but languages die like birds in a cage.
Arthur called it Drakebane because he liked the sound and because names are maps for men who have lost others.
He swore an oath on a whisper that belonged to Lacen and to himself.
I will kill the gods, he said.
I will take their thrones and burn the votive flames on their altars.
I will name them by their faces and not their myths.
The sword took his oath and burned it into him.
It did not forgive.
It made room for revenge.
When he returned to his lands, there was a false king who wore his face in portraits and his voice in proclamations.
The brother who had smiled in the hall of betrayal stood in the gate and laughed as if the world had not been reshaped by poison and loss.
He had taken the queen to bed and gilded his shame with ceremony.
He had thought that the only thing to kill a man was a blade in the throat.
He had been wrong.
Arthur and his men came at night because night was the only place that still remembered what truth looked like.
They moved like roots under snow.
The gate opened like a traitor's mouth and Arthur walked through with Lacen singing against his thigh.
The brother saw him before the torchlight did.
They met in the great hall where the banners hung, where the courtiers kept their teeth and tunes.
The brother drew a sword that had never tasted the necessary thing.
He struck at the seam of a shoulder and Arthur bled but did not fall.
The blade of Lacen bit, and the taste of it was bitter and holy and full of the cries of men long dead.
When Lacen's edge touched flesh it did not merely open skin.
It unmade stories.
The false king's laughter cracked like glass.
He screamed and named gods and mothers and small mercies that had abandoned him.
Arthur did not kill him at once.
He held Lacen to the man's throat and remembered Elsa.
I could see the woman I loved inside his eyes, Arthur thought and it was a madness that had nothing to do with sons of earth.
He let the man go because killing a man in rage is the same as letting him remain.
Go, he said.
Live with your bed and tell your bed to rot.
The brother ran and the courtiers scattered like the leaves before a storm.
They told stories of that night for years and each retelling sharpened Arthur into less of a king and more of a legend.
But legends do not kill the thunder.
They only name that which refuses to bend.
Word came down the old roads like lightning on a string.
Thor had been seen walking a ridge with a hammer that hummed like trapped weather.
He had come to the village that held Elsa and had broken the thatch and the bones of the poor who sheltered her.
Arthur could not forgive with the soft instruments of kings.
He had Lacen now and it sang to the sky like a signal.
The world changed when gods decided to swat a man who carried a blade meant to wound them.
The first meeting was thunder and steel.
Thor came like an argument the world could not let end quietly.
His hammer cracked the ground where it met Lacen.
It sang against iron and the heat of a hundred summers ran through Arthur's hands.
The blow split the air and the sky hurt.
Arthur met it and did not bend.
He felt the blade peel at Thor's mortal seam.
Gods have seams too.
Arthur watched as a god who had been taught to be stern in the temples staggered from a wound that was not fatal and not slight.
Thunder burst from him as if thunder were the thing that filled his ribs.
Lightning braided between them and set the world to silver.
They fought until the village was a place of ghosts.
Thor's hammer found Arthur's shoulder and Thor's laugh was like rain on metal.
But Lacen drank the storm.
It turned prayer into pain and mercy into something that could be held and hammered upon.
Arthur struck and the god cried not like a temple bell but like a man who had been told his father was a liar.
When Thor fell, he did not fall like the dead fall.
He fell like something that had been cut out of his own story.
He rose once more and bellowed to the sky.
Other gods listened because gods, like kings, fear what men will make of them.
They came with faces of marble and the skin of storms and with promises in their pockets.
They judged Arthur and his claims and found him in contempt.
They sent down wrath and sighs and armies of light.
Each god met Lacen and found that their light tasted of iron in a way their priests had never promised.
Arthur fought and with each strike he remembered Elsa.
He remembered the small things that made a life worth saving.
He remembered the salt on her lips and the way she hummed when she bandaged his ribs.
His rage was a river but his love was the bed of it.
He began to change.
Lacen's power demanded wages.
Every time Arthur poured out the blade's light into the world, a part of him crystallised into something apart.
He grew quieter.
He grew strange in the eyes of men who loved the warm man who had once danced at festivals.
That was the cost.
Yet the gods did not stop.
They tried to bind Lacen with chains forged in templefires.
They poured catechisms over it and called it unholy and unmade it in court and in sky.
They could not bend it.
It was made of a mortal will that refused to be translated by gods.
In the final encounter Arthur found himself on the edge of a cliff with the gods circling like crows.
They had brought a tribunal and a flood and a chorus to make his end tidy and clean.
They came with speeches about order and justice and how a man could not hold a thunderbolt in one hand and a hearth in the other.
Arthur did not listen to speeches when the dead were named before him.
He stepped forward and the sword shone white and true.
He cut and the sky split as if a seam had finally been opened and the world could taste the inside of the gods.
Many fell that day and many were spared.
The gods retreated because they feared the way men looked at them afterwards.
To be torn by a human blade is a humiliation a god would not bear for long.
Arthur did not become what he sought.
He did not repaint the heavens with blood and sit like a new storm on a new throne.
The sword had more mercy than his anger gave it credit for.
It stole something else from him instead.
It took his capacity to come back to hearth.
It took the small comforts that had once been simple and made them foreign.
He killed gods and he saved a world from being judged from above.
He walked through a land that wanted hymns and found only silence.
Years later, by a hearth that did not belong to a king, Arthur sat alone and held Lacen like a secret between his hands.
He thought of Elsa and how the small things of a life continued to move like moths in the dark despite the thunder.
He thought of his brother alive somewhere and learning the taste of fear.
When he closed his eyes, he did not see a crown or a corpse.
He saw a girl who had chosen to mend a stranger's wounds.
He saw how small acts of mercy could undo the handiwork of heaven.
If he had a last request it would be a quiet one.
Let a child find a patch of earth and plant a seed there, he would say.
Let them learn that not every answer requires a sword.
But some answers require a sword to make space for mercy to return.
He put Lacen back into the cave where the wind kept its counsel.
He did not bury the sword with myths and curses.
He prayed that the next worthy hand would be gentler.
For a legend that can wound gods must be raised by hands that remember why men loved one another.
And in the silence after, the world breathed and the thunder chose to be rain.