“Alliances are irrevocable?” Galahad didn’t seem upset by the revelation, just surprised. “Is that a gryphon rule?”
“Yes.” Trystan had just created the rule and he was a gryphon.
Galahad smiled and it was like the sun shining in a cloudless sky.
Trystan jabbed a finger at him, refusing to be distracted. “But this was the only time I will let you fight alone, understand? At least, against dangerous enemies. I will happily watch if you wish to slay weaker ones. That would be enjoyable. But I cannot repeat this trauma.”
“I know how difficult it is for you to not kill things.” Galahad commiserated.
“Exactly!” Trystan flattened a hand over his own chest, trying to express the hardship he’d just endured. “As I stood there, I felt… worry.”
“Gryphons don’t worry about anything, Trys.” He pulled on his shirt. “You’ve told me that forty-thousand times.”
“I know! And yet you made it happen within me, knight. I was worried.” That sounded like an accusation, because it was. “It was the least enjoyable emotion I have ever experienced. Do not ever make me feel it, again. Promise me.”
“I live a life of truth. So, I can’t promise you that.” Fully dressed again, Galahad crossed over to him. “But I promise to try, okay?”
“Try hard.” He gripped the back of the knight’s neck. “I mean it.”
Galahad gave him a quick kiss. “You’re worrying, again.”
Trystan sighed, lost in the man. “Gryphons do not worry… often.” His fingers brushed through his shimmery hair. Touching him calmed much of Trystan’s panic, refocusing him on the next step of the mission. “Now, where is this mural?”
Chapter Twenty
Battle of Legion
End of the Third Looking Glass Campaign
The Rath was like no other cannon ever built, so it was no surprised that the gryphons didn’t understand what they were dealing with. It fired weaponized magic. Abnormal, burning hot magic, cooked up in a lab. It had never been fired before the Battle of Legion.
It would never be fired again.
Galahad would later ensure the cannon was lost in the deepest hole he could find, never to be resurrected. But that was in the future. Far too late for the gryphons at Legion. On that day, it scorched the world.
Vivid green lightning streaked from the Rath’s huge barrel with an unearthly roar and ignited the air itself. The horrific sound and sizzling brightness had most onlookers cringing away
But Galahad hadn’t shielded his eyes. He couldn’t. He was frozen.
The phony magic looked like withered, grasping fingers as it enveloped the village. Wooden houses exploded like they’d never been there at all. Galahad hadn’t known that any weapon could do so much damage. Hadn’t even imagined it was possible. He hadn’t questioned what the Rath even was, when Uther arrived with it from Camelot.
He should have.
God, he should have done so much. But he didn’t and then it was too late.
The Rath fired and, instantly, Galahad knew he stood on the wrong side of the battle. It seemed impossible that he hadn’t seen it long before. Was it egotism or stupidity or naivety that made him so blind? Did it even matter? In that second, everything became tragically, unforgivably clear. And it was too late.
He stood there --The general of an army of villains-- trying to make sense of it all.
For one precious moment too long, the gryphons just stared, as well, as their minds tried to take in the horrible spectacle. None of them could comprehend the scale and speed of the devastation.
“Stop!” Lyrssa shouted from her cage. “There are children!”
Galahad had heard her. Surely the others did, too. Why didn’t anyone else react? Why didn’t they stop? He would never understand it.
Her cry was certainly enough to jolt him from his horrified stupor. His head whipped around to meet her one-eyed gaze, dread filling him. “What?” He bellowed, hoping he’d misunderstood and knowing he hadn’t.
“The town is filled with the young and the very old!” She looked right at him, her words desperate. “Your king won’t listen to me. I’ve told him, but he does not care. He’ll kill them all!”
Galahad’s entire world changed, leaving nothing as it was before.
“Stop!” He bellowed to his men, believing her claims.
In fact, he believed the woman --his enemy in countless battles-- so quickly that, later, he would realize that he must not have trusted King Uther, at all. Which was worse somehow. He hadn’t trusted the man and still he’d followed his orders for years? Still saw him as a father? Still loved him? What did that say of Galahad’s character?
His honor?
Instead of stopping at his orders, the knights opened fire with their rifles. In Camelot, guns would later be outlawed, because Arthur far preferred the sweep and majesty of swords. Even Galahad’s collection of antique firearms would be deemed illegal. But on that day, a hail of bullets rained down unchecked. The gryphons did not possess a single firearm. There were three hundred and seventy men, women, and children in the village at the beginning of the siege. Within seconds, one hundred and sixty-three of them were dead in the August grass.
And that was just the beginning.
“Cease fire! Goddamn it, stop!” Galahad roared, but it was no use. The bloodlust of battle was upon the knights, now.
“Kill them all!” Uther bellowed. “Kill all the heathens and cleanse the land, boys!”
The warrior gryphons tried to fight back against the King’s Men. Grabbing their swords, they flew at the knights. All of them fell, shot out of the sky. Automatic rifles cut them down like broken dolls, their limbs spasming in grotesque dances as they tumbled to the ground.
The elderly gryphons who remained fled into the Checkered Plains with the children.
Galahad ran for Uther’s horse. “Your majesty, make them stop!” He shouted, frantic now. “They’re killing old women and babies!”
For a heartbeat, he’d thought he could get through to Uther. That the king would be the man Galahad had imagined him to be. That Uther would see what was happening and order the men to cease fire. That everything would somehow be… fixed. Somehow. Galahad had been so stupidly gullible, right up until the end.
Instead of commanding a stop to the carnage, Uther laughed.
Fucking laughed.
“Why do your people always bother about protecting children?” He shouted at Lyrssa, sneering out the words. His face was alight with malicious pleasure. “It makes it so easy to pick you off in battle. Stupid and pointless, like all things you heathens do. Most of the little bastards aren’t even of your race.”
Lyrssa eyed him with palpable contempt. “The innocent belong to all who would care for them. True warriors know this.”
Uther would never understand that philosophy. Not even at the end.
“This is our chance to wipe the winged devils out for good, men!” He shouted at the soldiers and Sir Percival led a cheer at the words, laughing as he fired on the gryphon. “Leave none of them alive! We’re cleansing the world of these savages, once and for all!”
The knights stepped on the piles of dead and dying, picking off any survivors they found.
Later, nobody but Galahad would swear under oath that King Uther had personally issued the command to kill the wounded, so the official inquest would gloss over his account as unsubstantiated. The tragic death of Uther had so affected Galahad’s recollections that nothing he said about the day could be relied on. That was what the bureaucrats in charge ruled, when they sealed and discounted his testimony. Grief had muddled his mind.
But Uther had bellowed at the troops to take no prisoners and the soldiers had followed those instructions to the letter. Thanks to years of Knights’ Academy propaganda, most of the King’s Men saw the gryphons as little more than animals, so their murders were not really murders at all. More like a righteous defeat of evil. If you were entirely right, then your enemies must be
entirely wrong. They must be less than you. Different than you. A threat to you.
Even Galahad had believed all the lies he’d been told about the gryphons being dangerous monsters… Until that moment, when the world started to burn. At that moment, he no longer believed in anything.
Some of the gryphons crouched down into the tall grass, desperate to hide. It didn’t work. The knights set the Checkered Plains ablaze to drive them out. Whether through accident or design, the flames spread quickly in the summer wind, surrounding the village. Trapping many of the gryphons who were left inside a wall of fire.
“No!” Galahad bellowed, instinctively starting forward. “Stop!”
“Don’t stop!” Uther contradicted at a roar, kicking Galahad back. He reeled on his horse to block Galahad’s way. “What the hell’s the matter with you, boy?! You want to confuse the men? We’re in the middle of a battle here! Fight!”
Galahad barely heard him, frantic to stop the knights before all the gryphons were slaughtered. In a haze, he recognized Bedivere, the boy on the line who’d been so scared, helping to ignite the grass. Heard the little bastard laughing as children screamed.
The anguished wails of people being burned alive mixed with the ceaseless gunshots and roar of the fire and all the goddamn laughter, creating an unholy cacophony. Soot and ash rose, choking the air. It was all chaos.
No one could process it all.
So it was little surprise that no one knew exactly what happened next. That no one could give a fully accepted account at the inquests, or to the newspapers, or even make sense of each individual moment in their own minds.
That, in the end, no one knew exactly how the Queen of the Gryphons escaped.
Chapter Twenty-One
Some would ask why not just give Uther the graal?
Yes, he was an evil man, but is it not also evil to allow his war to ravage Lyonesse, if you have the means to stop it? Shouldn’t have Lyrssa have given into him, for the Good of all?
The answer is no.
Even if we could have acquired it for him, does anyone think that Uther would have been content to heal himself and then leave the graal’s power alone?
Of course not.
He would use it to enrich himself. To gain power and enslave all who stood against him. Giving him the graal would not have stopped the War.
It would have allowed Uther the means to destroy the entire world.
How the Wingless War Happened
Skylyn Welkyn- Gryphon Storyteller
Pellinore Mountains- Corbenic Cave
The mural took up the entire back wall of the cavern.
It had been painted on the smooth white stone, the colors running together in some places and the perspective all wrong. Whoever had created it hadn’t been much of an artist. To Galahad, it looked like a castle map from an old video game. A badly-rendered view of many interconnected rooms, with no writing to explain what it all meant. Over the years, Galahad had had fourteen video games based on his adventures, so he knew what their maps looked like.
Trystan seem transfixed by it. “Your map led us here?” He whispered.
“Yep. If I’m translating it right, I’m supposed to be looking for an emerald trail.” He frowned. “But I don’t see an emerald trail. Do you see an emerald trail?”
“The mural is incomplete.” Trystan didn’t tear his gaze from the wall, but he pointed to a jagged hole at one corner. “It could be there. Do you know what is missing?”
“Oh! Yeah, good point.” Galahad reached into his pocket and came up with the jagged hunk of painted stone he’d found inside the waterfall. “I got this just before the hippocamps stampeded.”
“I knew you were not just taking a bath.”
Galahad ignored that muttered comment. When he slid the piece of stone into place, it completed the map. Instantly, a magical spell was triggered and a dotted line appeared on the mural. An emerald-green trail guiding a path through them maze of rooms and then straight upward to a spot marked with an X.
Treasure maps should always have Xs. It just made everything so much cooler.
“My gods.” Trystan breathed.
“You recognize this place?” Galahad asked him softly.
“Who gave you this mission, knight?” Trystan’s eyes traced over the labyrinth of misshapen rooms. Memorizing them.
Galahad hesitated at the direct question. He didn’t want to lie and he didn’t want to tell the truth, so he said nothing.
“Was it a gryphon?” Trystan persisted, glancing his way. “Did a gryphon tell you to find this?” He pointed at the mural. “They must have. The knowledge is lost to everyone else, except perhaps Avi. The child knows everything.”
“I don’t want to tell you about who sent me on this mission.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because, then you’ll ask me about thirty other things that I don’t want to tell you. You won’t believe me, anyway.”
“That is ridiculous. Tell me everything. Now.”
Galahad shook his head, his heart pounding. “No.”
“Knight…”
“I don’t want to tell you!” Even Galahad was surprised when he shouted the words. He stood there, breathing hard and staring up at Trystan’s face. “I don’t want you to know anything more about my mission, okay?”
Trystan’s head tilted and he edged closer to him. “Why?”
“Because, when I got it, I was covered in the blood of the man I’d just slaughtered and I don’t want you to know about it!”
Trystan caught hold of him when Galahad would have turned away. “It’s alright.” He tugged him against his chest, big arms and even bigger wings enveloping him. “What you did then makes no difference to how I see you now. I have told you this.”
Yeah, Trystan had told him that. But, Galahad didn’t believe it. At all.
“There is no one alive who can better understand the horrors that you’ve seen and done.” Trystan’s palm rubbed the back of his neck. “I was in the War, too.”
Galahad rested his forehead on Trystan’s shoulder and let out a shaky sigh. This mission was so much harder than he’d thought it would be. It brought up everything he wanted to forget. “What you did is not the same as what I did.”
“Of course it is. Truthfully, you and I were waging war upon each other, for most of the last campaign. You would move, and then I would move, and then you would move. We were two sides of a coin. Even then we were connected.” His mouth curved. “Only I hated you.”
Galahad gave a snort of reluctant amusement. “I mainly just admired your abilities. I thought you were a military genius. I still do.”
“Many times I plotted to capture you and torture you to death.”
“I know. I remember the rock ogre who tried to eat me, on your orders. It took me three days to talk him out of it. It’s shocking I’m still alive.”
“I am not shocked, at all. This is the only possible path for either of us.” Trystan’s lips brushed his hair. “Now, tell me why you are searching for Atlantis.”
Galahad pulled back to look at him. “This mural is of Atlantis?” He looked back at the maze of rooms. “I guess it has to be, but…”
“This mural shows Listeneise.” Trystan explained when Galahad trailed off. “The first temple of my people was in Atlantis.” He shook his head. “Perhaps it is the last temple, now. Uther and his men burned the rest.”
“You’re sure this is that temple?” Galahad pointed at the map. To him, it looked like a hundred buildings in a hundred lands.
“I am sure that this symbol signifies Listeneise.” Trystan nodded towards a circle-y shape at the top of the painting. “And that symbol?” He gestured to another one at the bottom. “That is a signature. A man named Fisher drew this.” He made a face at all the squiggly lines and poor color choices. “We are not an artistic people.”
“Fisher was that old gryphon you were in the zoo with, right?”
“Yes. The only one who knew the locatio
n of the Looking Glass Pool.”
Galahad’s eyes widened. “Oh hell…” His head whipped back around to Trystan. “That’s what I’m looking for? The graal?” Galahad tried to process that idea, but it was kind of impossible. “Seriously?”
His incredulous response had Trystan’s smiling. “Only you would go on a treasure hunt with no clue of the treasure, knight.”
“I thought it was gold! She just told me to find Atlantis. She didn’t tell me why.”
“Who told you? Avalon?”
Galahad hesitated. “No, it wasn’t Avi.” He admitted after a beat. “Lyrssa told me to find Atlantis.”
Trystan squinted. “Lyrssa? Queen of my people?”
“Yes.”
“Lyrssa Highstorm sent a knight of Camelot on a mission to find the one thing that Uther most wanted to claim? The one thing that could save or destroy the gryphons?”
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I believe you, I just do not understand it.” Trystan paused, like he was thinking it all over. “Unless she knew you were the ya’lah.”
“For the last time, I’m not the ya’lah. In fact, Lyrssa said…”
And that’s when Galahad remembered where he’d heard the word before. His mouth snapped shut, staring at Trystan as comprehension dawned.
Holy shit.
“What did she say?” Trystan prompted when Galahad went quiet.
“Um…” He cleared his throat, trying to think. “Explain what the ya’lah does, again.”
“The ya’lah is a champion of the gryphon people. He or she is chosen to perform a great task. In this case, the ya’lah is fated to be the one who will remove Uther’s curse and allow the gryphon to have children, again. When Igraine cast the spell, she attempted to make it unbreakable by stipulating that the ya’lah must come from wingless blood. This is why it is important that you are the one on this mission.”
Best Knight Ever (A Kinda Fairytale Book 4) Page 32