The wraith of Arthur Rex stands before the lapping shore of a clearwater tarn in a high meadow.
This is Llyn Dorlais.
The king knows the surrounding pine pastures with their calligraphic shadows and hulks of solitary boulders splotched with lichen. The Lake of Hidden Water.
He visited once on his royal tour of Armorica. Lancelot had come to pay homage to the faerie who had reared him under the lake’s limpid waters.
A snowy mountain reflects in the clarion surface. Yet, no mountain is nearby anywhere in the table-flat countryside of huddled conifers and erratic boulders.
The high sun reflects a holy shine off the still water. Arthur feels he might slip into the hall of memory, where ghosts belong, until a strong voice, slightly out of phase, echoes along the lakeshore: “You are in danger here.”
A tall, loose-limbed man rises out of the lake and strides laboriously out of the water. He carries the wind in his wanton hair, dark yellow locks long as dusk. Eel-skin boots trimmed to his ankles crackle across the pebbly strand in an easy stride. Glistening wet, slick with a transparency thicker than water, he wears a tunic of tawed leather tied off with rawhide cords, tassel thongs and knotted sinews of intricate, talismanic designs.
A small rain runs ahead of him. It sizzles through dwarfish, lakeside evergreens, then fades as the noonday sky swings clear. At his approach, the man’s scent touches the phantom, crisp and spiced blue like the breath off a snowdrift.
The fragrance carries Arthur across the border of memory.
Lancelot!
In an eyeflash, recognition flings the wraith of the king face-to-face with his first knight. Emotions surge and collapse like the empty sleeve of a wave.
Close up, the wraith sees that this sinuous man has become something more than the fierce, agile warrior he was in Camelot. Hip-length plaits of sunburnt hair and long-muscled limbs drip the lake’s gold ectoplasm thick as jelly. The preternaturally vibrant figure stands silent, full of the invisible.
“I recognize you,” the king’s specter says softly as if to himself. “Yet, you are changed.”
Lancelot makes no reply. Beardless as a Roman, his broad face holds a gentle gaze alert with fluid brilliance, actively improvising a plan from the highest heaven.
He quietly, gently, briefly touches the dreaming of this unexpected phantom, the soul of Arthur Rex. Memory sings this name. Memory sings and throws open the eleven doors of awareness that the faerie has carpentered inside her partner during their centuries together in Llyn Dorlais. He sees the thrones of memory and remorse that rule this wraith.
Fugitive from his physical body, Arthur’s ghost feels what Lancelot sees. The phantom thrums. At the speed of silence, all his emotional traumas and wounded thoughts flow from him to his most famous defender – and traitor.
Lancelot’s tender expression tightens to weighty sorrow. He steps back a respectful pace. With watchful lamentation, he puts a square-knuckled hand to his chest and solemnly nods to his king.
Beauty stains the moment – and every anxious thought, vengeful memory of betrayal, and heartache hangs suspended as musings in a far corner of Arthur’s mind. They fade, leaving the phantom feeling born of darkness and secret to himself.
Slowly, he admits to Lancelot, “Merlin woke me from earth that drank my blood. Hours ago, I was nothing. For two hundred years before that, I was nothing. And now? I don’t know what I am. Or where.”
“That is why you are in danger.” Lancelot looks out at the lake. Beneath the reflection of the snow-patched mountain and magnified by the lens of the water, the faerie rises out of sunless depths. Something akin to a human countenance swims closer.
The faerie smiles to see the astonished wraith. She smiles with blue lips and small pearls set in mauve gums. Her amethyst eyes of copper-red lashes, her chalken flesh and iridescent frecklings loom large in the lucid water.
With lustrous limbs gently swirling, she stops and rears her whole length upright among crystalline glimmerings. Entwined in eelish black hair, she floats. Soft breasts and shadowy pubis press half-visible through her diaphanous raiment of silver and green moon shapes.
She shifts her attention to Lancelot, and the little opals that crown her round head brighten and breathe. Her slender forked tongue trills and touches her musical voice in the water, a tranquil song that the king’s ghost hears between his eyes or where they would have been.
Heavy happiness fills Arthur, heavy as bones, and he staggers toward the water’s edge.
Lancelet extends an arm to stay him.
The king feels the solidity of the glossy man dripping with faerie chrism and questions the obvious, “You are alive? All these years?”
“As are you.” Lancelot stares harder at him. “Your body wanders Avalon.”
“You know this?”
Lancelot levels a patient look at the shade of the monarch he knew so very long ago. “The Fire Lords seek you.” He turns the ax-edge of his profile toward a boulder on the far side of the lake, tall as the pines.
Atop the giant rock perches a burning figure with scant wings of twisting silver flame. “And now that you are here, I’ve alerted them.”
The angelic presence lights up, and the colossal stone stands bereft of dimension beneath heatless silver fire.
Arthur swallows a moan. “I will burn.”
“Yes. You will burn.” Lancelot raises two fists, knuckles crunching like snow, seizing the wraith’s intention, his pale dreaming. “And afterward you will sit again with the ice age queens for the final age to come.” He relaxes his clenched fists and gently lays hands big as spades upon the emptiness of the ghost’s shoulders and says softly, without admonition, “That is the least penance you might suffer for the incest that brought down your kingdom.”
“Mordred is my penance,” Arthur immediately replies. “I need not burn – if you will show me passage to Avalon.”
“No.” Lancelot removes his hands and leans back. “Morgeu will stake your heart before you rejoin your flesh. And then, the Fire Lords will fail – and the ages of darkness will never end.”
Arthur is not surprised that his plight is known so well by Lancelot. The faerie’s partner gleams with magic, his beautiful face lit softly from within. Yet, the king trusts that he might still reason with his first knight. “If you thwart me, the angels might fail regardless. Success is not predestined. All the world may burn if we simply trust the Fire Lords.”
Lancelot shrugs. “To reach the stars, we must master the fire of the stars. Apocalypse is the hazard.”
The wraith darkens to a color that has no name, and his features sharpen vividly. Trimmed beard and strong jaw lift proudly, amber eyes – pensive and penetrating – appeal urgently to the king’s man, “You know me. You can trust me to find my way to myself – on Avalon where I belong.”
Arthur’s first knight leans closer, speaks in an earnest tone reminiscent of their war years. “Merlin knows you evaded exile. He will be hunting you, and if he finds you, he will cast you into sideways-time. And the Fire Lords will fail. Humanity will devour itself.”
Arthur insists, “Merlin’s magic dims. That is why I am here before you now.” The wraith reaches for his most sincere worldly purpose: “I need to reach Avalon – to confront my sister. Her sorcery beguiled me and authored all my misfortunes. I believe Providence has raised me up this very day and spared me Merlin’s treachery that I might atone directly for my transgression with Morgeu.”
“You will face her?” Lancelot looks incredulous. “Then, you will have to slay her – because she, too, is not dead. Her pagan sorcery has made her a ferocious creature. And she commands goblins. Sire, you do not dare challenge her.”
Arthur pauses a beat, allowing the significance of ‘sire’ to penetrate, before stepping out on a tightrope in the dark: “I dare because I have spoken to Guinevere.”
Lancelot stiffens. He has not seen this. Surprise cavorts across his face. The narrative of expressions reveals a high stake for him in Guinevere’s realm, among the bornless and their sapphire mysteries.
“She is wise and powerful – a servant in the House of the Bornless,” Arthur presses. “She has instructed me to return to Avalon.”
Eyes blue as glacial ice stare with such direct regard the knight seems intent on pressing a message into his silence.
“She is not who she was,” the ghost agrees with the look on Lancelot’s face – slides closer, deeper into his chill aura. “I trust her again. And you.”
Lancelot frowns. The wraith means nothing to him. Their history, filled with sorrow, passed like a mood long ago. The faerie’s stepchild, Lancelot has been dwelling since then in the vortical energy fields of the lake. Over the centuries, he and the faerie have constructed a chalk temple of fluted columns on the basement of the grotto. There, entranced as kelp, they steep themselves in the pelagic rhythms of the planet and share a rapture with undines and sylphs that extends without shores – until the interruption of this wraith.
The lines of force around the ghost ensnare a powerful presence from Lancelot’s past: Guinevere, as high in her far estate as he in the lake’s cavernous gulfs. She awes him. Their intimate lives together, small in the remoteness of time, still hold jeweled focus for him.
“I dwell in the home of the faerie,” he speaks, loud enough for the lake behind him to hear. “I know how to open and close my mind to words, for I am a man. And I know how water undresses stone in this wordless life deeper than time. For I have drunk of faerie’s milk. Of the bornless in their sapphire solitude, I know little.” His features harden. “But I know enough to trust Guinevere. Come!”
Lancelot swiftly turns and high-steps, splashing before diving into Llyn Dorlais. His pale hair fans across the surface then submerges like a shadow of sunlight in the water.
The wraith breezes along, caught in the large man’s wake. He tosses a swift look behind and spots the angel on the far shore atop the towering boulder. It has dwindled. No. The wraith has flown a far distance, and the angel appears smaller, a diffuse light folding into broad daylight, gauzy as a comet’s tail or – in the king’s imagination – like a feather of the divine rebellion fallen to earth.
Ahead underwater, the faerie in a squid cloud of black hair bats her copper lashes. She smiles a lavish string of pearls and – with the little opals that crown her round head sparkling exuberantly – opens wide her lustrous arms to receive the king’s wraith into her darksome delight.