Chapter 14: The Mordred Contract

Chapter 14: The Mordred Contract

The Praetorium was a tableau of frozen chaos. The four colossal Wardens stood silent and inert, monuments to a coup that had lasted less than ten minutes. Sir Kay, the would-be king, was on his knees, his face a mask of shattered certainty as Mordred’s agents, emerging from panels Chase had never known existed, efficiently disarmed his enforcers. The Knight-Commander didn’t resist. The silent, effortless way Chase had deconstructed his ultimate weapons had broken something far deeper than his rebellion—it had broken his faith in absolute order.

Elara, Borin, and Kael stood in a tight, protective formation, but their attention was fixed on Chase. The suspicion, the professional distance, the exasperation—it had all been wiped away. In its place was a mixture of awe and a healthy dose of fear. They had been tasked with managing a dangerous, unstable asset. They had returned with a force of nature wearing a human face.

As Kay was led away, his cybernetic eye dark and lifeless, Mordred turned his gaze from the defeated knight to Chase. The ancient man’s expression was unreadable, but his eyes held a flicker of profound satisfaction, like a grandmaster watching a pawn cross the board and become a queen.

"Mr. Ambrose," Mordred said, his voice calm amidst the quiet efficiency of his agents securing the room. "My office. I believe we are long overdue for a proper debriefing."

It was not a request.

Mordred’s office was at the very apex of the Lexmordant spire. One wall was a sheet of smart-glass, currently displaying a breathtaking, real-time panorama of Avalon. The gleaming, sterile geometry of New Camelot dominated the foreground, while the skeletal, haunted ruins of the old city brooded in the distance under the perpetual twilight. The room was a reflection of its owner: a fusion of disparate ages. An ancient, rune-carved stone table served as his desk, upon which sat a sleek, holographic data-terminal. Leather-bound grimoires shared shelf space with blinking servers.

Mordred gestured to a chair opposite his desk and moved to a small, crystalline decanter filled with amber liquid. "Whiskey? A celebratory drink for a job well done."

It was a deliberate echo of their first meeting in that grimy, back-alley bar, a world away from this seat of power. Then, the whiskey had been a lifeline, a promise of oblivion. Now, the smell of it made his stomach turn.

"No, thank you," Chase said, his voice quiet but firm. He sat, his posture relaxed but alert. The gnawing need was simply gone.

Mordred raised a silver eyebrow, a slow smile touching his lips. He poured a single glass for himself. "Indeed. It would seem you’ve found a more… effective method for managing your grief." He took a seat, the ancient stone desk between them. "The Lex System has officially reclassified your power signature. 'Wizard-Class // Ash.' It's a designation that hasn't been seen since the Scouring of Lyonesse. You have achieved a level of control I had only theorized was possible."

Chase watched the man who had pulled him from the gutter. He had been a pawn, a tool, and every step of his journey since that night had been manipulated. The anger he expected to feel was absent, replaced by a cold, weary need for the truth. "This was never about a simple patrol, was it? Lancelot's clue, Kay's ambition… you knew this was going to happen."

"Knew?" Mordred swirled the whiskey in his glass, the light fracturing through it. "Mr. Ambrose, I have been playing this game since before the foundation stones of this city were laid. I didn't just know it would happen. I orchestrated it."

The admission hung in the air, stark and unapologetic.

"I did not recruit a broken mage from a forgotten corner of the human world," Mordred continued, his voice taking on the weight of centuries. "I recruited a key, specifically forged to fit a lock no one else could see. The lock my father, Arthur, created a millennium ago."

He gestured to the window, toward the skeletal ruins. "What the histories call a victory, the sealing of a great evil, was in fact an act of desperation. Arthur encountered a primordial entity, a sentient emotional resonance. A being of pure grief. He could not destroy it, for how do you kill a memory? So he did what he always did: he imposed his will upon it. He used his own profound sorrow—for his lost kingdom, for his betrayals, for his own impending end—as the magical catalyst to build a prison. He locked it away and built a new world on top of it, hoping its foundation of sorrow would never be tested."

Chase listened, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying clarity. Arthur's story was his own, magnified to the scale of a kingdom. A magical act born of grief, a desperate attempt to contain a catastrophic failure.

"But a prison needs a warden," Mordred said, his gaze intense. "For centuries, I have been that warden. I watched as the ambient, low-level despair of a million souls living in this perfect, soulless city seeped down into the earth, feeding the entity, making it stronger. I watched as men like Kay, in their blind pursuit of absolute order, saw its power not as a threat, but as a potential weapon. I knew the prison would eventually break. And I knew that no force, no law, no army could ever stop it."

He leaned forward, placing his glass on the stone desk with a soft click. "It could never be fought or controlled. It could only be understood. And only someone who carried a similar wound, a grief of a similar magnitude, could ever hope to understand its nature. Only someone who had created their own prison of regret could speak the prisoner's language."

The final, terrible truth dawned on Chase. "Lily," he breathed.

Mordred nodded slowly. "Your tragedy, the event that made you an outcast, was precisely what made you the most qualified candidate in the world. I have access to records that would curl your hair, Mr. Ambrose. I know of every magical catastrophe, every burst of uncontrolled power, every mage who has ever broken. Yours was unique. The energy signature of your accident was a near-perfect echo of the entity's own fundamental frequency. It wasn't just grief; it was grief born of a failed act of creation. The same as Arthur's."

It was all a lie. The Lexmordant wasn't a police force. It was a catalyst. The missions, the team, the danger—it was all a calculated process designed to push him, to break him down and force him to confront the source of his power, to lead him to the heart of the prison. The Lex System wasn't just a shackle; it was a diagnostic tool, a monitor for Mordred to track his progress.

Chase felt a wave of cold fury, not the hot, chaotic rage of before, but something focused and sharp. "You used me. You used her memory."

"Yes," Mordred said, without a hint of remorse. "I used your pain to save a million lives from a tide of psychic despair that would have driven them all mad. I gave your suffering a purpose beyond the bottom of a bottle. The contract I offered you was never just a job, Chase. It was a path to this very moment. A path to your apotheosis. A path to becoming the city's new warden."

The word hung in the air between them. Warden. Not an enforcer. Not a soldier. A jailer. A protector.

"Kay is gone," Mordred stated simply. "His ideology of rigid control has been proven a failure. But the entity remains. You have pacified it, not destroyed it. It is now bound to you, linked to the very grief you have finally mastered. It is the new foundation of this city. And you are its guardian."

This was the true contract. Not the one signed in desperation, but the one forged in ash. He was no longer a drifter, an outcast, a liability. He was a pillar. The city's stability, the sanity of its people, now rested on his ability to carry the weight of his own sorrow.

It wasn't a job. It was a sentence. And for the first time in five years, it felt like one he could serve.