A rousing start to Maydred 2025 (@mordredpendragon's delightful event for Mordred Motivation)! Happy birthday to my fav boy who has been dying badly the same way for almost 1000 slutty, slutty years, etc.
It's insane how much the specific circumstances of his death & Arthur's have stuck to him so tenaciously since Geoffrey of Monmouth, y'know? His character has changed utterly through so many iterations, but so rarely do any of them claw their way off the rails that lead in the end to murder-suicide at Camlann. Which is why it's such a Moment when it's prophesied to him in the Vulgate like... it's happened before and it will happen again. There's nothing you can do. Everyone reading this already knows this about you, and now you know it, too. This is where you die. This is how you die. It's your fate and it's inescapable just as it has been for centuries. Might as well have fun with it!
AS MORDRED PARLEYED WITH THE KING
I have dreamt to see this day for a hundred hundred nights
In a hundred hundred dreams of ten thousand hundred fights
I have come to thee a warlord, I have come to thee as kin,
I have come to thee ten thousand times and ne’er have left again
We have battled with great bravery, betrayed our oaths with guile,
We have traded gentle words that would accord us for a while
But however we have met this day, in all my dreams of strife,
We have never found an end to war, but found an end to life
With one blow, as of the headsman, comes the throne to hold no king
With one blow come down these armies, come ruin and suffering,
With one blow is left one corpse— that of this once-mighty land
With one blow, and with two blades, and with our same and separate hands
Like some giants and some monsters in stricken land of Nod
Like the mighty head of Janus, like the threefold truth of God,
Though we come in opposition, and I wish to strike thee dead
Still I know the blow which kills thee will fall, too, upon my head
If the king and land are one, why then, so too I bear the crown
And its weight is truly heavy, and its weight shall bear me down
For this war has torn the land in two, and killed us from the start
All this land, and thee, and I, all share a single wounded heart
And no man can live forever, and all beating hearts must cease
So this land will die with thee and I before it may find peace
And if ever I have faltered, sought to love thee, sought in vain,
In a hundred hundred dreamings I have seen no end but pain
For by serpent, war, or treason, we will find no peace today
And as I lie cold and broken, thou with grace art borne away,
And the waves will bear thee dying and the earth will bear my tomb,
In ten thousand hundred graves I have lain dreaming as a womb
Yet I know thou wilt returneth— I will rise up as thou dost
Though my body lie in ruin, though my bones be worn to dust.
Does it matter, then, that Britain bleeds, our hateful thirst to slake?
In still other dreams, my dreaming self must dream me here awake.
Though my sword will soon be broken, and thine armor turned to rust,
Yet where thou go’st shall go my ghost, and in that alone I trust.
Let us ply our words in parley, still, and seek to find a way
Let us fight with all our might and will against the scripted play
Though the end is not our choosing, we may choose yet what we say—
I have never seen in dreaming I would tell thee this today.
