“Why can no one answer ? Where is His Majesty? Where are the other Round Table knights?” Landevale demanded, her voice cutting through the thick air of the palace halls. The chamberlains, the ministers, the aides, the servants, the guards—everyone she encountered avoided her gaze, their faces pale and tight-lipped.
“Why is the entire Calot conspiring against when it cos to my brother?” Her voice cracked, anger and desperation seeping through. She was monts from tears, though her pride kept them at bay—for now.
Patience had never been Landevale’s virtue, and now was no exception. She stord through the palace like a tempest, tearing through every corridor and room, scattering startled attendants and guards who scrambled to stop her.
But none of them dared to truly stand in her way. She was, after all, the Lioness of Leodegrance, a knight of the Round Table—and a force of nature when angered.
“Your Majesty!” she bellowed, her voice echoing through the ornate halls. “Galahad! Percival!” Each na was a plea sharpened into an accusation.
It was at the back of the palace, in a quieter, more desolate wing, that she found them. A cluster of Round Table knights loitering around a single locked door like nervous vultures. Their faces were shadowed with fatigue, their stances uneasy.
They noticed her imdiately, but none of them moved to greet her. None except Galahad.
“Landevale—” Galahad stepped forward, his arms outstretched, and in one swift motion, he pulled her into an embrace that was more of a desperate restraint than comfort.
“Let go!” she roared, struggling against his iron grip. Her strength, formidable as it was, was no match for his. “Where is His Majesty? This is about my brother, isn’t it?! What’s happened to him? Do you know where he is?! LET GO!”
Her cries reverberated in the stone hallway, but the knights surrounding the door stood mute and rigid, their faces averted. The silence was deafening, and it only fueled her rage. She clawed and pushed at Galahad, her heart pounding with a mix of fury and dread.
The silence wasn’t just an absence of sound—it was an answer in itself. A cruel, echoing void that told her everything she didn’t want to know. Behind that locked door lay the truth she was chasing, but none of them would let her near it.
“Landevale,” Galahad said softly, his voice breaking slightly as he tightened his hold. He didn’t et her eyes. “You don’t want to go in there.”
But she did. She wanted it more than anything. And yet, as she felt the tension in the air around her—the way the knights averted their gazes, the way Galahad’s arms trembled ever so slightly—sothing inside her twisted.
The truth was on the other side of that door. But the truth, she realized, might be worse than anything she could imagine.
“Your Majesty!” Landevale’s voice broke as the tears finally ca, her composure shattering. “Your Majesty…! Where’s my brother?! Is he inside? Tell you’ve found his body! What did they say in the interrogation? What… what did they do to him?!”
CLACK.
The sound was louder than it should have been, a single note that silenced the world. The air grew thick, the stillness oppressive. Even the wind, faint as it had been, seed to hold its breath.
The door swung open.
The man who had opened it didn’t look at them, didn’t speak. He left the door ajar as he turned and walked back inside, his tall, commanding fra now stooped, bearing an invisible weight. His leather apron hung heavily on him, stained dark with blood, and in one hand, he still held a butcher knife.
Burn didn’t stop them from entering, but he didn’t invite them either. His silence, like the door, was open-ended—a choice they were left to make.
Landevale’s wide, tear-filled eyes darted to the room beyond. The first thing she noticed was the bright, unnatural glow of the space. Then ca the details. A loop of pig intestines hung on a wooden bar, swaying gently. A pig’s snout discarded in the corner like trash.
She swallowed hard, wishing—desperately—that her body would give in, that she would faint and escape the sight before her. But fate was not so rciful.
Galahad didn’t stop her this ti. He stood rooted in place, his face an unreadable mask of grief and exhaustion. And so, unrestrained, Landevale stepped forward, trembling as she crossed the threshold into the hellscape.
There, sitting on a chair in the center of the room, was Burn. Blood streaked his hands, his arms, even his face. He looked like a man who had been devoured and spat back out by his own demons. His pallor was ghostly, his eyes sunken, and as he wiped at his chin with a bloodied cloth, he looked up at her—hollow and weary.
“Where’s Aroche…?” Landevale whispered, her voice a fragile thread. Her body felt unnaturally cold without Galahad’s arms around her, the warmth of his embrace replaced by a creeping numbness.
“Where’s my brother, Your Majesty…?” she repeated, barely audible now, her words trembling like her fra.
Her feet carried her forward, though every fiber of her being scread to stop, to turn back. Her eyes darted around the room, cataloging each grotesque detail until they landed on the table.
Stripped bones. Fragnts, really—too small to piece together into sothing whole. It was all that remained of Aroche, all that Burn had been able to salvage after weeks of butchering, dissecting, and sorting through what had once been human—and pigs. The rest had been digested, decomposed, or lost.
It had been two weeks since Aroche’s death and the war, and this was all that remained of him.
Landevale’s breath hitched. The room spun, her vision blurred, and her legs buckled beneath her. This ti, fate granted her reprieve.
She fainted at last.
***
“I thought I could pick apart every microscopic piece of flesh that had fused into the pigs,” Burn said, his voice low as he held onto the warmth of Morgan. His grip was firm, like she was the last thread keeping him tethered to the earth. “Every cell that had absorbed even a trace of him, I could feel it. I kept cutting and cutting, separating inch by inch.”
His voice cracked, almost imperceptibly. “But it wasn’t him anymore. It was… flesh. A pig’s flesh.”
He had thought of everything. Every absurd, grotesque thod. He even considered digging through the pigpen, sifting through the mud and manure to find anything that might still belong to Aroche. The idea of calling a Vision user crossed his mind too—soone who could craft a spell to separate the pigs from his best friend. But even then, he stopped himself.
“I couldn’t ask anyone else to bear that job. I couldn’t subject anyone to what I did. What I must do.”
So, he did it all himself. Everything and beyond. Alone.
In the end, he managed to retrieve sothing—so bones, fragnts of what were unmistakably Aroche’s. He placed them carefully into a box, resting them gently among flowers. A hollow victory, if ever there was one.
“Caliburn…” Morgan whispered. She couldn’t see his face as it remained buried in the crook of her neck. Her hand traced through his hair, soft and slow, as if she could pry him away gently. But his grip was ironclad—unrelenting, almost desperate.
She knew that even now, even today, he believed soone had to do it. Soone had to piece together his best friend, no matter how incomplete, no matter how impossible, no matter where or in what form.
And he had chosen himself.
Morgan closed her eyes. Words felt insufficient—there was no language for this level of loss, no balm for this kind of wound.
“Caliburn… you’re human. You’re not supposed to bear this burden.”
“I am a sword.”
He replied.
In the safety of her warmth, Burn finally surrendered to sothing he had fought against for 23 years. Not even the loops, the loss of his father, or the horrors of war had broken him. But now, in this mont, he broke.
His tears were warm but Morgan’s presence was warr.
Not a human.
Perhaps a butcher knife. Perhaps a throne. Perhaps the law. Perhaps the Empire itself. Perhaps a sword.
But not a human.
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