Chapter Text
I
-
“You have been summoned by the King.”
It was the greying Sir Barry Burton who had brought him the news. The King’s guardian ‘bear’, a huge man whose house colours of scarlet and gold flourished in rich velvet from beneath his ceremonial armour emblazoned with the symbol of the bear, a sigil gifted by the King following the quashing of a rebellion many, many years ago.
Chris rose from where he’d been polishing his family sword; Redheart , and regarded his older friend and mentor with a dry smile. “What did I do this time to earn the grace of his majesty’s court?”
Barry raised an eyebrow. “Careful, Chris. It’s the King’s faith in your ability that keeps you here. You know Lord Arias would see you removed from the Order for your insubordination of late.” Then, his expression softened a little. And in the golden sunlight that streamed into Chris’ private chamber his old friend seemed so much older than Chris could ever remember. “I believe you’re to be granted a secret task. He’s been rambling again. On and on all night long. About the prophecy.”
Chris could remember strumming his father’s lute and singing the song in soft words to Claire when she’d still been a tiny child. Many years before he’d come to the Capital. Before he’d become an anointed knight of the Order of the Gold Stars. Sworn to protect the realm, to uphold his sacred oath.
The prophecy seemed nothing more than a tune composed of the rambling of some courtly sorcerer a thousand years ago. A mere rhyme from his childhood.
“A task,” Chris echoed, thoughtfully. “Very well. Let me dress.”
The castle was a faded relic of a former mighty kingdom. Banners and tapestries hanging threadbare and sun-faded. Elegant royal emerald turned to soft fern. Needlework depictions of mighty battles against ancient formidable foes unthreaded and filthy. Kings of old all defaced with statues smoothed by age.
Chris Redfield kept his gait steady as he descended the great staircase from the Tower of his Order, walking between the delicate dappled reds and greens and blues and golds of religious imagery projected in the last of the Summer sun.
Each hall as quiet as the next. Just dust and memories of a glory now mossed over with silence like old stone. Stories softened and cloaked. And in the courtyard between the Tower and the King’s Keep the cobblestone was a sea of knee-high wildflower and weeds. Rotting pears from elegant old trees sweetening the warm air with ripe decay, alive with the playful banter of the blackbirds and music of the crickets. Somewhere down in the training grounds the clatter of wooden weapons. But not another face did he meet until he came to the great doors of the King’s Hall.
In the later years of the King’s illness, Chris had seen firsthand the flight of the nobility. One at a time retreating from court to their own strongholds and castles. As civil unrest and political infighting had bubbled and grown bloody under the veil of the Kingdom’s ghost of a strength, it was not just the castle that had begun to crumble away.
Two knights of his Order stood guard either side of the door to the Throne Room. They were the last Order of the Knights to stay.
“Sirs,” Chris greeted them. Being one of the youngest of the Order, he even had to show respect to the likes of his good friends Sir Joseph Frost and Sir Forest Speyer. Both of noble lineage, both formidable warriors, both golden hearts.
Joseph grinned beneath his half-helm, hand on his sword hilt. “I didn’t realise you were so eager to take my posting, Chris. Not that i’ll complain, my feet are killing me.”
Chris laughed, “sorry Frost, i’m here on an unofficial royal rummons.”
“Better go in meekly, Chris,” Forest, a knight with an elegant braid of hair down his back, warned him quietly as he passed him, “Lord Arias is in a foul mood today. He’ll be after your guts for sure if you look too happy.”
Chris put a firm hand on Forest’s plated shoulder, feeling the cold worn steel that had fought alongside his own on so many occasions. These two knights his closest brothers-in-arms, who once rode down rebellions, pretenders bandits, and sorcerers with him. Had bled and wept and drank together for now almost two decades. Since they had all once been boys.
“Lord Arias might not respect our Order, but the King isn’t dead just yet,” he returned in a confident murmur, and then forced a smile to his older friend. “Can you make sure of that for me, just for the next hour?”
Forest cracked a lop-sided grin and threw a look to Joseph. “ Til the heart of brotherhood cracks .” It was part of their oath, unbreakable, eternal, and a promise that transcended even the power of the King.
“ Our fates and souls are bound.” Joseph finished, giving Chris a nod. “Don’t keep his Majesty waiting. Even I can’t promise he won’t drop dead of his sickness before you’re done.”
Leaving the two brothers in his wake, Chris entered through the lofty ornately carved oak wood doors into the Throne Room. A mighty hall, too tall to even make out the peeling detailing upon the vaulted ceiling. What was once meant to be a perfect map of the world. From the Great Green Sea to the Citadel. And each vein of river and maw of mountain between.
Walking between the crumbling unpainted columns, Chris approached the Throne. Long strides, his boots echoing each step through the empty hall void of courtiers and entertainers. An atmosphere heavy with mourning and sickness; the stench of mildew from the heavy curtains and thick dust hazed the air.
At last he knelt at the foot of the platform upon which the gilded gold throne sat. Mounted now by an elderly man, frail and fraying like his tapestries. Wispy and grey, almost a pale wraith in his green doublet which only amplified the gauntness of his being. To his right, the proud and kindly-eyed Sir Barry Burton; Knight of the Order, and the King’s personal guard. To his left, the ornately dressed and storm-emblazoned Lord Arias; the King’s Vizier.
“Rise, Sir Redfield,” Lord Arias spoke. His voice cuttingly concise. “Do you take the King’s time for infinite? Your summons were issued almost an hour ago.”
Rising to his full height, proud in his steel armour and green cloak, Chris put his hand on the hilt of Redheart and bowed his head to the King. “Apologies my King. My squire was at training, so I dressed myself.”
Arias scoffed, but the King merely gave Chris a tired smile.
“In these unknowable times,” he said, low and soft and slow, “faith in our legacy is of utter importance.”
His voice stirred up like dust. Images of old; when Chris was first brought to this hall and knighted into the Order, barely sixteen years old.
The King coughed, a rattle of bones, and closed his eyes to sigh heavily. “I grow old, and my legacy predeceased me. My kingdom knows unrest, and uncertainty. Dark creatures and magic a blight on my land and terrorise my people, whom I can do little to protect. So few are my trusted guard. So empty my coffers. It is as the prophet foretold. I just had never thought it would be mine own.”
Chris said nothing as the old man moaned in pain, adjusting his posture in his cold chair. None of this was news to him. It’d take a fool not to see that the Kingdom was nearing its quiet fracturing. And it’d take a fool not to see the hungry, swiping claws of the nobles waiting to swoop in and grasp what power would remain once the King lay in his tomb.
“The more I dream, the more certain it becomes to me,” the king muttered, “the curse… my blight… he who wields both light and the shadow. The scepter… who makes his choice, not a knight or king… yes, the more I think upon those old words, I thread together what must be done.”
In his head, Chris sang the lines he remembered best;
“A figure stands between love and ruin,
Neither true king nor true knight.
Bound in light and shadow,
The cursed bearer of a fractured soul,
who wields the fate of the land.”
“I believe the prophet spoke of a great wielder of magic,” the King spoke, sharper now, his green eyes open once again. His fingers, bone-claws, gripping tight to the arms of his honoured seat. “A sorcerer, who it seems may have made his decision to curse the kingdom. Yes… and I fear he may already have worked his way into the hearts of my court. My sworn Lords… to divide my land and crown and ruin the realm.”
Chris, who wasn’t quite understanding the rambling of the frail King, hid his unimpressed disbelief to ask; “what would you have me do, Sire?”
The King sucked in his breath, and squinted down at Chris. As if trying to read the stories written on his face, now thirty-five years to the world. As though he might detect a worthiness, or a desperate last hope. But he merely sighed, and played with the gold ring he wore upon his left index finger.
“There have been rumours whispered through the Citadel. Strange speak that Lord Wesker may have aligned himself with the darkness that bleeds my realm. Stories of powerful dark magic sickening the lands around his House’s Ancient seat.” The King feebly lifted himself to his feet, trembling as he extended his ringed finger to point at Chris, certain of his decision. “I bid you Sir, to ride to Lord Wesker’s seat and report to me whether my fears are to be assured.”
Chris suddenly understood. With a heavy blow to his gut, he wavered, his mind reeling with the truth of the matter. Why he of all his Order was to be sent to the hermit lord who had disappeared from court not long after abandoning the Order more than ten years ago. Lord Albert Wesker – his mentor, his friend, his golden dream of innocence of all a sworn knight should be.
“The King has spoken,” Arias snapped.
“Yes, sire,” Chris bowed his head quickly, still in some small shock at the unwelcome mention of that name after so very long. “I shall prepare to leave at once.”
“Very good,” the King collapsed back into his throne with a heavy sigh. Eyes falling shut again. “I hope you return with good news, Sir. My Kingdom sorely needs it.”
“And Sir, I advise you keep your task quiet,” Arias said with his dangerously steely tongue, “we wouldn’t want panic amongst the last few cowardly courtiers now, would we?”
Chris feigned a smile and bowed once more to the King, catching Barry’s eye and understanding there was no argument to be made today. And he turned, and made for the great oak doors.
II
-
It was twilight by the time he reached the upper battlement of the Citadel’s castle - the Emerald Fast.
Far too large now for its duty, and the meagre court it housed. A mish-mash of turrets and halls and chapels stitched like new embroidery over the ancient. Hundreds of years of wear and tear, mend and fix in beautiful carved stone by masters and magicians. Standing up here, Chris could see it all in the fading dappled pink and orange of the dying sun as it fell behind the distant blue mountain range to the West.
Hundreds of miles of forest and field alight with the pink and gold, rippling wheat and smokey hamlets mere glints in the dying light. Scents of woodsmoke and baking break wafting up from the citadel down below; the cheerful calling of those who remained inside the safety of the walls. Bartering, singing to their children, and drinking in the taverns.
A cool breeze blushed against his neck and ruffled through his short-cropped dark hair, sweet with the rot of the royal orchard.
Chris leaned against the firm stone, as steadfast as its title, and watched the sun set in solemn prayer. It felt as though he might never see it again.
He stood until the darkness claimed him, and down below the citadel guard were lighting the lamps to bathe the inner city with safe gold warmth.
It was all too easy to remember it when he was just a boy – training every late summer evening long into the hay-sweet night with his comrades, and oftentimes his mentor.
In his memories he could still recall the first time he’d been brought to court, brought to train under the Lord Wesker. Captain of the Order of the Golden Stars. His armour shining white-gold to match his elegant hair, though he wore a stately sapphire blue gambeson that offset the blue of his eyes. In the summer morning haze of the training yard, he’d seemed more a king than the ruling monarch to a boy still just shy of sixteen.
Lord Wesker had been his senior of thirteen years. Already an established knight and noble, though his sister held his family’s ancestral seat, The Haewen Abbey, in his absence of duty. He’d tempered rebellion, fought the foreign invaders from the kingdom across the Great Green Sea, and it was even said he’d slain a dragon in the mountains.
Chris owed all he knew to the ex-Knight who had seen something in him worth polishing. Plucked him from where he’d found work in a blacksmithy on the Northern wall of the Citadel. Five years of punishing, gruelling training. Five years of mentorship, five years of friendship, five years soured by the Lord’s eventual abandonment of the Order. His uncouth resignation, disappearance, and hermetization following the tragic death of his sister, the Lady Alex.
Perhaps he ought to be desperate to see his old Lord Captain again. To find that closure, that reassurance. To quiet the horror at the thought of his old mentor having turned to dark sorcery – magic that crippled the land he had once sworn to die for.
DUTY. HONOUR. SACRIFICE . The three flames of the Order. Their eternal promise to the Kingdom.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” a frustrated female voice called from behind, “it’s rare of you to miss your supper, Chris.”
The Lady Jill stepped in close beside him and met his eye. Her hair braided back from her face, armourless and dressed in a plain blue tunic and cloth pants. Though she still smelled of training sweat and roast beef.
“I heard you’re being sent away again,” she added, cautiously. Suspiciously trying to read Chris’ expression as her friend and ally refused to look her in the eye. “Is there trouble? Are you in trouble?”
“When am I not?” Chris attempted to joke, though his smile was a grim line across his mouth.
Jill frowned, and gave his arm a playful punch. “Why are you holding out on me, Chris? What did the King want of you? Is Arias really trying to have you dismissed?”
“No, not yet anyway.” Chris shrugged, glancing over his shoulder as if to check that there were no eavesdroppers (not after Arias’ warning earlier). “The King wants me to investigate rumours of sorcery amongst the nobility. Rumours and nonsense, probably. Something about the prophecy.”
The lady knight raised her eyebrow to show her contempt for the idea. Then sighed. “It’s cruel for Lord Arias to support his dangerous fantasies. It’s hardly as though we should believe the old drunk in the tavern about supposed wyrms in the Torrens, our King has less senses left than even him .” She sucked on her teeth. “Sorcery… it’s been outlawed for a century now, surely a noble would know better than to tamper with that if he likes having a head.”
Chris grunted his agreement, rubbing his stubbled jaw in thought. It did seem far-fetched to imagine that Lord Albert Wesker would dabble in dark magic. Although… some small painful part of him had doubts even in that. Afraid of what he just might find when he did reach his mentor’s ancestral seat.
It would be a bitter pill to swallow if the King’s fears were true. If Lord Wesker was indeed the sorcerer leeching the life from the realm. Particularly after all he had done to protect it.
“Old gold wears thin, and old kingdom thinner still
torn by loyalty, stretched too long.
Ashes are the gallant few, consumed by the shadow…”
Jill sang, her voice soft in the breathy night wind. The old melody of the song delicate and flowing.
It was more a ghost than all the castle could be. That song. How it had haunted Chris from birth to now; how many times it had possessed his own mouth, and spread the plague of its foreboding. And it made his heart clench, to remember an innocent age. When he had sang it to his tiny sister in her crib by a glowing ember fire. And his world had been so small.
III
-
It was long before dawn when he rose to dress and prepare his quiet departure from the Emerald Fast.
“Please Sir, I won’t get in the way I promise,” his squire had begged as he helped Chris into his clothes and armour, lacing it deftly as his knight stood for him. “Please let me join you! You know I can fight, and I can cook, and–”
“I’m sorry, Finn,” Chris sighed regretfully as the spotty seventeen year old who had yet to be knighted looked horribly wounded, helping to lace up Chris’ gauntlets. “You should prioritise your training while i’m gone,” Chris said firmly but fairly, patting the boy on the shoulder, “I hear you’re coming along with your sword now; and without me here to distract you, you can put your entire focus into it.”
Finn looked miserable all the same as he helped carry Chris’ pack quietly down the Order Tower stairs and down through the keep toward the back of the Fast where Chris’ horse waited already saddled in his stable.
As eager as he was, there was no doubting that Finn lacked a certain edge that most other boys his age who’d already become knights possessed. But he made for a good squire, and had a certain talent for sewing and was seriously coming along in his swordplay.
In the dim light of the stable, Chris could see the boy was still frowning as he mounted his brilliant white horse.
“We can spar when I return,” Chris promised, trying his best to look kindly down at Finn.
“Travel safe, Sir,” Finn said sadly, watching at the gate as Chris rode out from the safety of the Citadel walls and away down the well worn road toward the West.
As the early morning began to lighten the sky in hazy silk grey, the low lying fog smudged across the dewy fields of wheat cloaked the world around the lone rider. Soaking the knight’s underclothes with moisture, and cooling the sweat on his horse. The sunless dawn poured pale across the world and silenced all but the huffing of his mount, and the rattle of his armour.
Through the low-lying foggy wheat fields that fed the capital, across the great stone bridge that stood strong above the Torrens and down through the dense woodland that swallowed so much of the land. The greenery had eaten away at the abandoned hamlets and villages, green life burst through thatch and stone. Farmsteads and little forts all consumed in a soft blanket of velvety moss. Here his horse slowed to a pleasant trot so as not to trip on the strangling loops of root that gnarled up from the woodland floor like witchy fingers.
Just before a gloomy midday, he dismounted by a creek to let his horse drink and rest, while he stretched his legs and chewed thoughtlessly on a cold leg of pheasant.
Under the green canopy the world smelled good and green. Fresh and ripe with healthy rot and regrowth. The creek mud-clay, the greenwood of new trees, and the moss and grass that smudged his clothes and armour where he sat on a felled log. And when he closed his eyes, all he could hear was the trickle of the creek between the rocks, the sigh of his horse, the wind in the trees, and the chirp of birds playing freely up above him.
Once upon a time lively villages had occupied much of this land along the river. But as crop famine culled the masses and dangerous creatures emerged from the deepwood, the people of the kingdom had been driven away in hoardes. Now the woods had reclaimed much of its former territory. Blanketing building and bone alike in careful mossy bedding.
“ Do you remember any of them?” He had asked Lord Wesker when he was still just sixteen, riding out to tackle some bandits causing havoc on the woodland road. “ It’s hard to believe all these people just disappeared. ”
Lord Wesker, gallant and beautiful, had agreed.
And that night they’d made camp in the midst of an old farmstead, a good fire between them, watching the stars between the smoke as it spiralled out of the fallen thatch roof. And his Lord Captain of the Order had told him histories; stories of warring families and foreign knights who had occupied the land centuries ago. Taught Chris to read the past in the stars.
Though the Captain had not been old then, he had seemed ancient in wisdom and knowledge far beyond any of his peers. And though Chris now was older than his Captain had been back then, he had none of that. Just those same stories, retold in less beautiful words.
“The past runs in your veins too, Christopher ,” Lord Wesker had said once, knelt before the young man just turned seventeen to help bandage a wound on his forearm. He’d turned Chris’ arm over, and lightly with the tips of his cool, smooth fingers, drawn up the riverway of his veins to the elbow. The tickling sensation had Chris grin and cringe away, but Wesker held his arm tight, and lightly pressed on the vein again. “ Blood is your soul, and your soul carries your ancestry, and your destiny. You must protect it, Christopher. You are a finite source. ”
Chris had looked up into those clear blue-grey eyes, like the sun-fog that clung to the Western mountains on hot summer days, and felt his heart flush violet in his chest. His childish admiration becoming a difficult thing to navigate the further he stepped into his adulthood. And in that moment it had almost felt as if Wesker insinuated that he was precious to him . Though it was of course all wishful thinking.
It had been eighteen years since then. Enough time for Chris to make new memories. But still those pivotal days when he shed his innocence and became a man were ingrained in his soul. In his blood, no doubt. Reason enough as to why his heart cringed with nerves and unresolved feelings when he thought of meeting his old Captain after fifteen years.
Would he even remember him? His arrogant, foolish young knight?
That last night he had looked upon his Lord Captain’s face in the dim candlelight of his chamber, and felt pain like no other. How his skin had felt. How his mouth had tasted of honey wine. How he’d run his fingers at last through that beautiful blond hair he’d only ever dreamed of touching. It had been a hot summer night, and wisteria perfumed the night.
A drop of rain splashed down onto the dozing knight’s face, and he was shocked awake from his memories. Strangely hot despite the light coolness of the rain, he’d splashed his face in the creek before remounting his white horse and riding on through the grey mizzle that seeped through the canopy above.