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It's raining down in Cornwall. Storming actually, with thunder clapping and lightning hissing, the sky prematurely black despite the early afternoon hour. A bad time to be a Knight of the Round Table returning home after a long day being chivalrous.
“The King will be glad to hear how many villainous heads we chopped off today.” Laughs the young and angelic Sir Galahad, his bright eyes darting across the path separating him from his less than angelic father, his magnificent horse fairy-stepping down it.
Yuri of the Lake, the White Knight, the Red Knight, the Black Knight, pulls his reins back sharply, his left eye twitching so rapidly it forces itself closed and half blinds him. Oh oh. Everyone knows such a tick heralds the arrival of one of his rape-induced fits of madness. They come upon him randomly, or so it seems to others. Really, they come upon him whenever he is reminded of being repeatedly tricked into sleeping with a woman pretending to be his beloved, and then being victim-blamed by said beloved upon being awakened from the spell. Someone really ought to speak kindly to him about it, and remove the head of the woman who persists in molesting him under cover of magic, even to the point of abducting him for years on end like some sort of boy sex slave, but the King says that first the long, long lists of quests they have on the books must be completed.
“You go on ahead,” he says to the beautiful son he cannot bear to look at. “I must slay a few dragons before I return.” His nostrils flare, the scent of hot lizard blood filling them, the lightning invisible to his one open eye, which stares at nothing, as flat and dead as a three day old fish’s, but which may at any moment fling itself wide with insane rage, the body it belongs to slashing and chopping at imaginary feminine foes with the greatsword the knight carries.
Galahad’s white steed comes to a stop beside his father's black one, the pair looking out over a wide, green plain of fields towards a distant wood, where the most lightning dances, causing the trees to appear as spindle-fingered monstrosities. “If you are sure-”
“I am. How many dragons have I slain now?”
“A fair few. More than any other knight.”
“Exactly. Godspeed. Say good evening to King Vitya for me, and remember me to Queen Guinevere.”
The younger knight's eyes narrow slightly, and turn pained. “Probably an unwise idea, and Father, the river of beasts never runs dry. You could be slaying them till the Day of Judgement arrives.”
“And?! I do not recall asking your opinion, boy.”
Being a good man, by far the goodest King Viktor and his closest companion have ever laid eyes on, Sir Galahad does as he's told, making the Sign of the Cross as he wheels his horse about. Knights go off on lone missions all the time, but still, the mad are as liable to hurt themselves as they are to hurt others.
Once he's turned the corner of the path, and a hedgerow has hidden him, his unwilling father spurs his horse in the opposite direction, off the track and down towards the vast field, where he makes the animal leap over a stone wall, his inky black armour, as full of frozen fire as obsidian is, glittering wildly in a flash of white lightning.
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“My king, please, your most loyal knight, the brave Sir Yuri, suffering one of his deranged spells, has run off to slay as many dragons as he can. I beg you to release me to assist him should he require it, or at least to watch over him.” Sir Galahad, he for whom the awful Siege Perilous waits, kneels before his king and queen, perfect head bowed.
Up on the throne, where he sits with one leg elegantly crossed over the other, the scabbard of Excalibur glowing brightly beside him, King Viktor glances aside at his beautiful Queen, gluts his sight on her as a dying man wishes to glut his deadly thirst, and turns back to the young man petitioning him. “Run or ride? I imagine he did not leap off his horse in order to charge after dragons?”
“Ride, my liege. You are correct.”
“So he's still in some sort of possession of his wits. Although, I suppose he might fall off at any moment and be unable to get up again. That black stallion of his is a nasty brute.”
“Haha,” twitters Guinevere, from behind a fair hand. “Sir Yuri is a nasty brute. A nasty, devoted brute. I like him better mad. It's funny when he leaps out of windows and runs howling off into the night.”
“My queen, that is my best friend you are speaking about. I prefer him as he used to be,” King Viktor chides, before breaking into laughter himself. “Although his antics now can be amusing.’
Galahad swallows. Life is a vale of tears, and he must tolerate what he would rather not. Really, everyone involved should have their heads chopped off, but he would rather fall on his own sword than execute his father or his king and queen. No matter, the king has his own comeuppance coming for him in the form of his son and nephew, Mordred, and such unnatural offspring did not come from rape.
After he's been kneeling there on the hard, cold stone for a time, and thus put in his place, he is given leave to chase after his poor, mad father.
“Mind the hour, good knight, it’s growing late and the sky is furious. Be aware of wolves.” The King helpfully states when he's leaving.
Wolves. What are wolves to dragons? And what are dragons to Galahad? Swinging onto his horse, the knight in pearl armour, the knight who smells of the flowers of paradise, whose very glances cure the sick and lame, takes off across the castle moat at a gallop, thunder and lightning accompanying him without daring to touch a single hair of his head.
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The local lair of dragons is found down a narrow rock gully full of bones and half eaten corpses of the monster's victims. To arrive there one must pass through a dark wood full of terror, none of which can have any hold on the holy knight of God. He passes through the clutches of the devil as if the demon’s claws were made of water, as if they were dew in the morning sun, his heart burning with love too hot for Satan to stand. Skulk back to his cold hell the wretched fiend does, demons fleeing from before the face of Galahad.
His horse’s pale hooves thump across stone, raising a pleasant sound which delights the ears of one who finds a reason for joy in all things. His lance sits ready under his arm, but the stench of blood and guts, and the total lack of the cacophony of battle allows him to relax his hold on it. His father, the king's best warrior, has been at work, and reptilian corpses lie strewn about before the mouth of a cave, parts and pieces scattered over walls and floors painted crimson and scarlet. No pieces of a human being though, and Galahad's sharp, clear eyes search for the silver glint of a sword, for where his sword is there shall his father be.
The storm that has ever been accompanying him, that is his friend as it is no other's, paints the world titanium white for an eternal instant, leaving its light lying along a long strip of steel, which lies half buried beneath the largest dragon corpse, along with its wielder, whose dark head rests beside that of the monster, both sets of eyes closed, their blood mingling in a poisonous pool.
“Father!” leaping off his steed and dropping his lance, the greatest knight of them all approaches his fallen parent, shoving the unholy beast off him and pulling him into his lap. “Father…” he cries, raising the man's visor and wiping the blood off his cheeks. Cheeks still far too young for all of this.
Sir Yuri, orphaned and raised by the Lady of the Lake, opens his eyes, both of them. “Galahad. To sire such a son, is no dishonour. It is a blessing. I kissed your mother when she told me she would bear you…as much as the telling hurt me.”
“Father-”
“Do not worry about me. You know I cannot lose a fight, no matter how many dragons crawl out of the pits of hell,” sighing the sigh of a man who finds his own existence a burden, Yuri laboriously turns over so that he faces the rock and the soil again, his wounds healing, his split blood retreating back into his veins, his armour repairing itself. “I cannot go home, cannot escape. Not into madness, and not into death.”
“You don't need to escape, Father.” For the first time in his life, Galahad shares an embrace with his father, who gives up attempting to rise, and merely lies upon the earth, his tears running down the side of his nose to mingle with the blood and the rain.