No.
There's still so much I haven't finished!
I have to live!
Live long enough to put down the rebellion. Live long enough to reclaim my father's throne!
At last, that obsession carved deep into her blood and soul forced the princess at death's door to draw a deep breath.
She collected a sword, bow, and arrows from the corpses of several nearby black-clad Knights and held them close, her eyes filled with determination.
By dusk, a blood-soaked figure staggered out of the dense forest.
Her once pale, flawless skin was now covered in wounds large and small. Torn flesh and dried blood had already stuck fast to her clothing.
Every step tugged at those wounds, as though the Witch were dancing over the edge of a blade.
Finally, after what might have been a quarter of an hour or half a lifetime, the body sustained entirely by willpower struggled its way to the lakeshore.
Then it could endure no more.
Morgan collapsed into the freezing water.
The bone-deep cold washed over her torn flesh and seeped into her marrow, as though even her soul were slowly freezing.
Yet at the same time, the nourishment of the water and the rhythm of nature allowed her battered body to slowly recover its Mana.
Amid the agony of destruction and rebirth, the butterfly finally broke free of its cocoon.
The drenched Witch crawled ashore and wrapped herself in clothing stripped from her pursuers.
Looking toward the endless road ahead, she murmured,
I survived...
Time to set out again...
The battered Witch of Britannia resumed her journey, seeking out the great and lesser lords of the South who had once rallied beneath her father Uther's banner, hoping they would lend her their aid.
Yet every appeal was met with another refusal.
...
Cornwall.
"Sir Ector, you are the most honorable and trustworthy man in Britannia. Please help me suppress the rebellion in the South and reclaim the throne."
"Your Highness, forgive me, but I cannot pledge allegiance to you. According to King Uther's prophecy, only the one who draws that sword has the right to become King of Britannia."
...
Oxfordshire.
"Earl of Oxford, you were one of my father's closest friends..."
"I'm sorry. Rebels are rising everywhere, and I can barely deal with my own troubles. For now, everyone should look after themselves."
...
Darlington.
"I..."
"Hahaha! My dear niece, I can't believe you delivered yourself right to my door. Do you have any idea how much Vortigern is offering for you now? A city as a fief and twenty chests of gold!"
...
The world was changing.
So were people's hearts.
Among the lords of old, some wrapped themselves in righteous principles. Some refused her out of selfishness and fear for their own survival.
Many more revealed their ambitions, directly or otherwise...
And Morgan was precisely the kind of pawn those ambitious men most wanted to seize.
Sometimes she was seeking help.
More often, she was fleeing for her life.
A princess stripped of her kingdom and royal prestige was hardly better off than a wild beast being driven from place to place by hunters.
Again and again, she was wounded to the brink of death.
Again and again, she saved herself and healed.
She was deceived.
She was betrayed.
She witnessed conspiracies and naked ambition.
She had once enjoyed exquisite meals in a royal court, yet she had also swallowed moldy flatbread simply to keep herself alive.
She encountered kindness.
Far more often, she was surrounded by malice.
She wandered from place to place until, without even realizing it, her footsteps had carried her across most of the South.
She saw both desperate poverty and dazzling prosperity, yet remained like rootless duckweed, unable to settle anywhere.
At last, after countless hardships, she reached remote Orkney near the very edge of the world and finally obtained a small measure of power that truly belonged to her.
Just when she thought her own efforts might finally allow her to return to Camelot...
News arrived.
Someone had drawn the Sword of Selection and been crowned King of Britannia.
And that person was also a child of King Uther.
An illegitimate child...
That day, Morgan stood atop the walls of Orkney and stared toward Camelot for a very, very long time...
On the day of the coronation, the conservative lords, the neutral lords, and those who had once wavered...
Every lord who had rejected her...
All of them gathered beneath the new king's banner to punish the rebellious and reunite Britannia.
Under the new king's command, the army swept forward without resistance and rapidly crushed the rebellion throughout the South.
Every vassal and every subject stood beneath the sunlight, cheering for the new king as though she were a god.
They seemed to have forgotten that King Uther had once had another daughter.
A daughter of his own blood who had also given everything she had to suppress the rebellion...
Perhaps she had simply been an illusion from the beginning.
Never expected.
Never acknowledged.
...
Inside the bedroom, a purplish-red glow rippled outward.
Samael and Mari slowly opened their eyes as their consciousness returned from Morgan's dream.
On the bed, the Witch remained asleep within drifting petals of purplish-red light.
Her brow was still tightly furrowed, as though the creases there were ravines that could never truly be smoothed away.
The Ancient Serpent remained silent for a moment, his expression dark.
"I really want to curse someone..."
"Don't ask me. I don't judge human morality."
The empathy-deficient Succubus gestured for him to go ahead, watching with obvious interest.
Those two old bastards, Uther and Merlin, were absolute scum!
Samael cursed them furiously in his mind, thoroughly condemning the two people responsible for everything.
Now he finally understood where Morgan's hatred for Artoria had come from.
Back then, Merlin and Uther had created a miracle through artificial insemination.
Artoria, the Child of the Dragon.
But for that seed to bloom and bear fruit, what they lacked most was time.
So before his death, King Uther cast his own biological daughter out into the open, using her to draw attention and absorb every overt and covert attack aimed at the royal bloodline, all to buy time for his illegitimate daughter Artoria to grow.
It did not take much imagination to understand what kind of hell the South had been back then.
Add Vortigern's enormous bounty to the equation, and it was easy to imagine what kind of life King Uther's daughter, alone and utterly without support, had endured.
Artoria, at least, had the love of Sir Ector's family and the protection of her foster brother Kay.
Even with Merlin cramming lessons into her at an almost absurd intensity, the King of Knights had still enjoyed a relatively peaceful and happy childhood.
Morgan, meanwhile, had spent those same years trapped between pursuit, flight, conspiracy, and survival.
The fact that she had lived through it at all was already a miracle.
More infuriating still, neither King Uther, nor Merlin, nor any of those lords fiercely loyal to Britannia had ever given Morgan a chance.
From beginning to end, she had been bait.
A discarded pawn.
She had clawed her way out of the abyss of despair and was just about to touch the light, only for someone else to arrive one step ahead of her and sever every last thread of hope.
No matter how strong someone's heart might be, who could truly endure that?
King Uther was dead now.
The only thing Morgan still cared about was the throne upon which she had placed that obsession of hers.
And the only person left upon whom she could pour all that resentment was her younger half-sister.
That was what eventually drove her to spare no effort in overturning Britannia.
In other words, the hostility and eventual rupture between those sisters had been created from the very beginning by those two old bastards, Merlin and King Uther.
And now Samael also understood why Morgan always became troubled and deliberately kept her distance whenever she saw him caring for those children.
It was loss.
The loss of someone who had never known a father's love.
After venting for a while, Samael calmed himself.
He looked at the Witch still trapped in her nightmare, and a trace of pity flashed through his eyes.
"Dawn is almost here. Let her... have a good dream."
Mari readily nodded, the corners of her lips curving upward with pleasure.
The two quietly withdrew.
Purplish-red petals formed throughout the room, now carrying traces of gentle warmth as they silently drifted into Morgan's dream.
...
The pursuit began again.
The Witch had exhausted her Ether.
Enemies pressed in from behind.
An abyss yawned ahead.
There was nowhere left to go.
Just as Morgan prepared, as she always had, to fight to the death...
A sword light brilliant as the stars slashed diagonally across the battlefield.
The pursuing enemies were blasted from their feet and thrown into chaos.
At the same time, a tall, hooded figure emerged from the swirling dust, holding a gold-and-blue longsword.
Amid the chaos of battle, he slowly extended one hand toward her.
His gaze was solemn, yet gentle.
"Come with me!"
Morgan hesitated.
Then she reached out and took his hand.
For the first time, an indescribable sense of fullness settled over her heart.
...
Morning came.
A ray of sunlight slipped through the window lattice and fell across Morgan's face.
At some point, the tension between her brows had disappeared.
The Witch slowly awakened.
The lingering images from the dream made her raise both hands to her cheeks and sit there in a daze.
What a strange dream...
As she murmured to herself, bathed in the morning sunlight, the corners of Morgan's lips quietly curved upward.
***
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