Drown

What is the first thing you remember about your life?

For many, it's the first time they road on horseback. Others, it comes from the time they went with their father to the markets as a toddler. Perhaps your answer is just as innocent.

I remember water.

Water, all around me. My heart begin to beat slower and slower, but I felt a single thing inside of me - I had to survive. So I began to swim, and swim, and swim. I swam around the bodies of infants dropping like stones, and finally, I tasted air. When I surfaced, I cried louder than any storm, before I finally fell unconscious. I was a month old.

My adoptive father found me half dead on the banks of the River Thames, surrounded by the corpses of those less fortunate than myself. Without exaggeration, the kindness he showed to an infant saved my life, and gave me the first step toward the destiny I would soon come to loathe. He raised me as his own, and gave me my name - Mordred. He taught me swordsmanship, languages, sciences, history, several trades, and so much more. My memory was sharper than any blade, and I took to knowledge like a fire to tinder.

On the day I turned thirteen, my father took me out in the early morning to our morning sparring session - this time, with metal blades. Skilled as I was, I was no match for him, and I shed blood to blade for the first time, from a gash down my side. After he patched me up, I lay down onto the floor inside our humble home in pain, when he told me to stand. After a few moments of difficulty, I rose to my feet, where he then shoved me back to the floor again. "Stand," he repeated, and so I did, taking more time in this attempt. Once again, as I stood, he thrust me down. "Try again." he instructed, more sternly. Through tears I rose again, but this time, I hobbled back out of the way of his attempt. "Take a seat for lunch. We need to talk." he said as he went to the kitchen to fetch food. As I began to eat, he began his tale.

"I'm sorry, Mordred, but your simple life has come to an end. It's time you learned the truth of your existence, your memory, and your destiny." His change in tone of voice from how I had always heard him left me blank in the mind, the pain numbed. "Your life began in tragedy. When you were hardly a month old, King Arthur ordered that each child born between the first of April and the eighth of April be loaded onto a boat to be sank, supposedly in a bout of madness that began with an oracle, one that stated that his downfall was amongst those children. As far as I know, you're the only one to have survived. This, only I know. However, the King's madness did not subside after his 'appeasement' of the oracle - we've entered into countless wars and petty quests against neighboring kings to establish hegemony and loot relics, and now all of Britain has been sent into wastes by Arthur's actions. The heralds tell us that they are seeking the Holy Grail to repair the land." He scoffed at the very thought.

"But what does all this mean for me?" I asked, dazed by a combination of hatred and dismay.

"It means that you may be the only one who can save us from the Mad King Arthur."