> The day he walked into my office, I believed we had merely inherited a problem. How foolishly optimistic that was. His presence had the feel of a neutron star, condensed and silenced, and even without any talent with the Veil; I could feel his pressure. His presence. At the time, I had assumed it to be the Myrmidón, yet in hindsight perhaps that was little more than wishful thinking. We had embraced a supernova, and none of us had any idea of what lay in store for us as a result.

“For the sake of what we must do, you cannot remember this conversation. Not until the time is right.”

Arthur frowned at the words of the blonde woman opposite him and watched her critically from across the table between them.

“I am not sure how comfortable I feel with the necessity of this cloak and dagger, Inquisitor. Even for an agent of the Throne, this is a level of paranoia I am unaccustomed to.”

“I assure you, my lord, that this request comes from the highest levels. While I understand this may be confusing, I must impress upon you the need for such drastic measures as I am suggesting.”

“You are suggesting wrapping my very psyche, memories, and sense of self into layers, Inquisitor. Layers that I have neither the recollection to identify nor the power to unravel!” Arthur narrowed his on her, blue eyes meeting brown, and scowled. “More than that, you are asking me to flee to the middle of a backwater mid-Rim nation with no more than what I can carry, and some fabricated backstory with more holes in it than my lecherous cousin’s good sense!”

“I am but the messenger, my lord Zacaris. Pendragon has ever been a loyal part of the Imperium, and your noble bloodline a treasured branch of—”

“Spare me the flattery, Inquisitor. Please. It does neither of us honor to indulge in such theatrics. Instead, tell me why. Why me? Why now?”

“Because you alone are capable of doing what must be done.”

“That is not an answer.” Arthur said with a scowl.

“It is as much an answer as I can give, my lord. I must ensure that we compartmentalize things as much as possible.”

“You want to bury these secrets in sequence?” Arthur asked incredulously.

“That is the easiest way to ensure you only discover what you must, when you must.”

“This is sounding more insane by the word, Inquisitor.”

“Necessity is often married to insanity, my lord. It makes it no less important for those affected.”

“And whom is it, precisely, we are doing this for? Terra? Pendragon?”

“The Humanosphere, my lord. The entire Humanosphere.”

“I find that difficult to accept.” Arthur said with narrowed eyes. “Especially since you are proposing a psionic castration of the very strength that I could use to help it!”

“Only temporarily.” Nataliya said calmly. “Only until it’s necessary to unleash it.”

“You need to give me more than that.”

“I cannot.” She said firmly.

“Inquisitor, if you expect me to—” Arthur began heatedly.

“I cannot, my lord. I cannot take the risk of revealing too much before you are ready.”

“Throne of Terra, it cannot be that cataclysmic. You are acting as if we are all under imminent threat of destruction.”

“Not all threats are so easily quantified, my lord. Not all threats are so easily understood.”

Arthur growled under his breath and leaned back in his chair while folding his arms over his chest, and staring out of a nearby window in thought while his gaze roamed over the levitated spires of Camelot. The Inquisitor seemed content to let him do so, and after some five minutes of rumination he finally spoke again. “How long would I have?”

“You must depart before you are inaugurated as your father’s heir.” the Inquisitor said with her hands—each one shimmering platinum with inlaid Callandium sigils—extended to him in entreaty. “Before the necessity of your pursuit transcends the recapture of a wayward scion and instead becomes the rescue of a stolen inheritor.”

“That’s in five days!” Arthur exclaimed while looking back at her.

“So you must leave within four, then.”

“That’s madness. I couldn’t possibly—”

“I will see to the arrangements, my lord.” Nataliya said with utter confidence.

“You wish me to be seen as a coward.” he seethed. “You wish to dissuade my father from any pursuit out of shame.”

“That would aid greatly in our purpose, yes.”

“Do you not realize how antithetical the very idea of flight is?! I am a Knight of the Round!”

“And the child of a concubine.” Nataliya pointed out without concern for the insult it paid him. “One that has had to prove their worth in the eyes of everyone. This world has never been kind to you, my lord. It will happily believe you a coward, if you but give it the excuse.”

“I fought, bled, and killed to disabuse them of that notion!”

“And still they are ever-so-ready to believe you weak and incapable. You owe them nothing, my lord. You are being called to a higher purpose.”

“You are asking me to give up everything I have worked my entire life for.” Arthur snarled. “You are asking me to lie to myself, and enable you to make me believe it!”

“I am.” She said resolutely.

“I am the rightful heir to House Zacaris! I am the progeny of an inviolate bloodline!”

“And before that,” the Inquisitor reminded him, “You are a son of Terra.”

Arthur opened his mouth, closed it, and then let out a ‘tch’ at her response, his gaze upon the spires resumed with a renewed frown of brooding skepticism.

“Let’s say I do agree. What manner of impact would I have with none of my skills available to me? You intend on armoring me in ignorance and lies, and sending me to a backwater hole of civilization with no more than the clothes on my back—clothes that, frankly, are an insult to my lineage! You must tell me something, Inquisitor.”

“Your body will remember what your mind does not.” Nataliya assured him. “And that will be enough to ensure your survival until your memories properly awaken.”

“How delightfully unhelpful.” Arthur said snidely. “And still you give no answers!”

“The answers must come when you are ready to receive them.” the Inquisitor replied. “Telling you now would be inviting disaster, if not outright sabotaging your chance at survival.”

“Your continued abeyance from specificity does not inspire confidence, Inquisitor.”

“I understand, my lord. Truly I do. This is, however, the nature of the calling. Your calling.” her tone hardened as she said it. “Terra summons you to serve, Lord Zacaris. Will you answer?”

Arthur stared at the spires for another long and ponderous minute as a thousand different reasons to tell the Inquisitor, powerful and indomitable as she was, to go to the deepest void of the frontier rolled through his mind. A dozen different ideas for escape, up to and including summoning other Knights of the Round roiled through his mind.

A coward, his father had often called him. A son of a whore with no spine. A bastard absent the drive, the passion, or the will to succeed. Arthur had proved him wrong with blade and machine both, and devastated those sent to crush him.

He had won his laurels, his rights, and his recognition at the edge of his sword. He had been fighting hatred since his birth. Even his name, Arthur, had been a mockery—that was why they had paired it with his middle name.

The traitor. The abomination. The fiend.

Arthur sighed, and closed his eyes to listen.

To listen to his father’s voice, claiming he was a coward with no resolve.

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To listen to his grandfather before him, mocking his abysmal Callandium capacity.

Arthur let out a low, resigned breath in surrender and forced himself to be calm.

None of them would ever imagine him capable of what Nataliya asked of him.

Arthur’s eyes opened, and he locked his gaze on the Inquisitor’s own.

“Yes, Inquisitor.” he said at last. “I, Arthur Mordred Zacaris, will answer the call.”

Arthur’s mind returned to him slowly. It grew from a spark of awareness of self into a slow and consistent ember, which continued to gather momentum and strength from there.

Distantly he felt as if he could hear voices, though in his mental fugue all he could parse was vague intonations and the implication of urgency from the unclear nature of tense intonations.

“...risks are—find out about—keep it to ourselves—wrath on us all—...”

“...cannot tell—we investigate further—the interim—enough caution for belief—”

A low groan escaped Arthur’s lips when the ember of awareness erupted into a blaze of cognizance, and he felt his mind snap back into equilibrium.

And with it, the awareness of Arthur Zacaris once more.

His true self. His true mind.

Information, awareness, and knowledge hammered into his consciousness with the thunder of an avalanche. The half-heard and distorted words of those around him faded to nothingness under the deluge, and Arthur snapped back to consciousness with a sharp intake of air, and a surge of shock.

The Inquisitor had erased him. She had replaced everything he was with a fabrication, one designed to obfuscate and perfectly suppress everything he knew to be true. She had deleted him. She had removed him as if he’d never been. It was perverse. It was infuriating.

It was existentially terrifying.

Worse, he had agreed to it.

Arthur felt his heart race while memories long forgotten surged to the fore of his mind, escaping from where they had been buried beneath layers of psionic power. His entire life in Aurelia was a lie. The information would pass any manner of investigation, because Nataliya Verchenko was nothing if not thorough like all her ilk, but he’d never truly existed there. He had never lived there. He had never even visited Aurelia, really.

Arthur Magellan was a complete fabrication.

He was Arthur Mordred Zacaris, of Pendragon.

He was the most lethal Knight of the Round Table.

He was a Coreblood of the most celebrated lines, bred in pursuit of perfection.

Another moment of thought crashed into him, and he shuddered while reaching up to grip his head. He remembered more. He remembered his staggeringly low Callandium compatibility. He remembered his father’s disappointment. He remembered the mockery, the vitriol, and the shame over an accident of birth he could no more have controlled than he could have willed a star to die.

More than anything else, he remembered himself and was able to view that remembered self more objectively. With only the limited insights into himself, and with the false but still existent medium of Arthur Magellan, he realized something quite immediately.

Arthur Zacaris had been disturbingly self-entitled and arrogant. The very idea of it unsettled and disquieted him. For all that he knew it was who he had been and perhaps even still was under it all, he wanted nothing to do with that particular element of his memory.

He’d come to have respect for Graecia, for Aurelia, for the struggles and realities of the outer sectors and their people. He momentarily wondered if perhaps that had been Nataliya’s plan, but the truth was that he had no context with which to weigh it. He recalled himself, yes, but so too was so much still missing.

For a start, he had no recollection of how to recreate technology before the Fringe. He remembered using the technology, but the same way a man might remember using a sword he had no part in forging. He knew what it felt like, what its strength was, and how to wield it—but he could no more rebuild those weapons and drives than he could sprout wings and fly.

Additional to this was the fact that, in truth, Arthur Zacaris had been a bitter and cruel man. Forged by his environment perhaps, and created through a series of horrible and abusive events that had—to what little recollection Arthur had—shaped him into the selfish, arrogant, and fundamentally spiteful creature he’d experienced in the memory. He could empathize with Arthur Zacaris, but in that moment, he came to an immediate realization.

He had no desire to become him again.

At least not in the way he remembered.

“He’s waking up!” a familiar male voice warned.

Arthur’s eyes opened and he looked up with a sharp gaze to see Cassandra watching him with an impassive and focused expression, her gray eyes drilling into him with searching intensity.

Atreus flanked her to her left, and both Endymion and Perseus had joined her to the right with their visored helmets turned toward him in silence.

Cassandra’s expression softened when his eyes met hers, and she spoke in a perfectly calm and controlled manner.

“Welcome back, Kyrio Magellan. The impact of Lord Atreus’ investigation seems to have taken a toll on you. How do you feel?”

“More myself.” Arthur answered with a small slur. His accent had even been changed, and he felt his remembering mind fighting with false muscle memory to build words in a way he was no longer used to.

“Are you sure you are quite alright?” Cassandra asked carefully.

“I—I will be.” Arthur said while still attempting to master his rebellious tongue. “May I ask what happened?”

“Your psyche collapsed under the strain of the probe.” Cassandra answered while Atreus watched on. Clearly she was the ‘designated speaker’ in the present case. “Lord Atreus has assured me that you will be back to your normal, healthy self in a matter of minutes.”

“I see.” Arthur said carefully, while forcing his tongue to cooperate and quietly reaching out to sip the glass of water still left on the coaster. Much of its perspiration was gone, due to the length of time it had sat idle, and from that he could gauge that he had been unconscious for more than the perceived few minutes of the flashback. “How long have I been insensate?” He asked slowly.

“Two hours.” Cassandra answered with an appraising look. “Though I’m told that’s not unheard of. It seems your psions simply disliked the stimulation that Lord Atreus enacted upon them through contact with your mind.”

“I… don’t really understand what that means,” Arthur admitted with the same deliberate speech, “but I’m going to optimistically hope it’s irrelevant to me.”

“As far as I understand it, it is.” Cassandra said with a wry smile.

Arthur grunted when a small lance of pressure passed through his mind, and lowered his palms to compress his upper neck and the back of his head while slowly rolling both hands from side to side. The memories in his mind were like blades, each stabbing at his brain in a manner he found exhausting.

It took him almost a full minute before he spoke, and to their credit nobody seemed interested in rushing him.

“Did you find what you were looking for to satisfy your concerns?” Arthur asked carefully, and while looking up at Atreus specifically.

“In every way that matters.” the Myrmidón confirmed coolly. “Though there are extenuating factors we must discuss.”

Arthur grimaced and blinked against the pain in his head, and then nodded his assent. He wasn’t surprised by the statement. He’d suspected something would come of the probe, though he was hoping it wasn’t a revelation of his true origins. Something told him that Nataliya would have planned for that much.

And from what he could recall of Nataliya Verchenko, she was incredibly powerful.

“I am all ears, my lord.” Arthur murmured with a grimace of pain.

“All Eidolon pilots possess psionic talent to some capacity, which is what allows them the prescience, spatial awareness, and almost supernatural reaction times required to be combat effective in what would otherwise be very expensive prostheses.” Atreus said without taking his eyes off Arthur. “Though this is hardly news to you given your status among their number, what is surprising is that while your testing records results show you at a Callandium compatibility of forty-two percent; my delve revealed an oddity with your psion levels.”

“Please enlighten me...” Arthur said while massaging his temples gingerly.

“Your psion density is, frankly, factors larger to the point that I’d suspect it of being false, no matter the fact it’s impossible to falsify.” Atreus said with focused intensity. “I’ve seen high numbers, but this is beyond the pail. You don’t have the highest ever recorded in Hyperion, but you’re in the top twenty at least.”

“Well, I suppose there are worse things to hear.” Arthur muttered with a slow roll of his neck and another grimace of pain. “Though with my lack of Callandium compatibility, I’m hardly about to start crushing buildings.”

“Your psion density is irrelevant in the larger scale, because you cannot handle the Callandium required to catalyze them safely. Yes.” Atreus agreed tersely. “However, it does mean your reflexes, spatial awareness, and neural bandwidth ratings are likely all rated higher than almost any operator in Graecia—to say nothing of your passive ability to inspire comfort, familiarity, and even loyalty in others, as you did unwittingly with my Kidemónes brothers.”

The last part of course was enough to give him pause. It was not as if he’d actively manipulated either Endymion or Perseus, but the simple reality was that someone with psions as dense as Atreus claimed his were could make even the most well-trained mind bend and yield toward disproportionate magnetism. Humanity had often wondered as to what charisma truly was, and in psions, they had found their answer.

People with high psion density were essentially magnets for positive interaction.

The only redemption for such effects was that they could not control them at all.

“You were not honest with us, Arthur.” Atreus continued heedless of his internal thoughts. “You are not merely an Eidolon pilot.”

Arthur eyed Atreus carefully, but said nothing. He waited to see what the Myrmidón believed was the truth.

“You were an Aurelian Champion, weren’t you?”

Had his true memories been revealed to the Myrmidón, then the questions Atreus was asking would have been far more probing and far less courteous, but that was not the case. The tall spartan was rolling with the only logical assumption which the identity of Arthur Magellan allowed: that Arthur was a member, either retired or deserting, of the Aurelian Star Kingdom’s elite Eidolon operators.

It was not too far from the truth, though if he revealed the whole truth he had a feeling he’d give the Graecian soldiers in the room apoplexy.

Aurelia might have been distant and powerful, but being from the Fringe power’s elite was at least something they could logically accept.

Being a Knight of Albion?

Not just that, but a Knight of the Round Table?

He might as well have said he was Achilles reborn.