Chapter Text
Mordred burst into her mother’s room, tears across her face.
“I told you your father would not accept you,” Morgan said, comforting the young homunculus.
“You… you were right, Mother,” Mordred said through her tears. “He’ll never see me as his son, no matter how good of a knight I am.”
“Oh, don’t cry my dear,” Morgan said, wiping the tears from Mordred’s face. “It is not your fault that your father refuses to recognize you. You had no say in your manner of birth, if anything, the blame falls to me.”
“Don’t say that Mother!” Mordred cried out, more tears falling down her face, “It’s all Father’s fault! He won’t accept me cause he hates you! If he could ignore my relation with you and focus on my relation with him, I know he’d accept me. There is no one to blame but him.”
As the young knight’s tears began to be replaced with rage, a smirk began to grace Morgan’s face. This was the moment she had been waiting for.
“Father will see me as his son! I just have to prove my worth to him. And if I can’t do it naturally, then I shall have to use underhanded tactics!” Exclaimed Mordred.
“If that is what you desire,” Morgan said, hiding her excitement, “then I shall assist you however I can.”
As Mordred began planning on how to win her father’s acceptance, Morgan began planning on how to best twist Mordred’s plans in more deadly ways, neither aware of the fact that they were being watched.
As Merlin watched the two scheme, he prepared a letter to Scandia. Camelot would fall, his predictions had said so. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t delay the fall for as long as possible. He had already prepared several possible contingency plans to soften the blow of Camelot’s fall, and it was time to enact one of them.
Later
Mordred slammed the door to her room shut, removing her helmet to reveal a face covered in anger.
“Damn it all!” She screamed as she fell upon her bed. “That blasted Black Knight!”
Her plan to prove herself to her father had failed miserably. It had started off perfectly. She had planned for her father to be ambushed by hunters under her employ, then, right before they “slew” the king, she would swoop in to rescue him. Such an act would have surely earned her the honor of being recognized as his son.
But when she arrived at the scene, Arthur was perfectly alright. Bodies lay across the floor, and a mysterious knight in black armor was standing right next to her father.
She had assumed the knight was one of the men she had hired, most likely the last one standing after her father had singlehandedly defeated the rest, and attacked as such, expecting him to play along, only for her father to step in and tell her that the stranger had saved him from the assailants.
Then her father proceeded to not only knight the mysterious stranger as a member of the Round Table, but he even let him keep his identity a secret.
“Not only have I failed to earn father’s recognition, but now this Black Knight is in the way.”
However, this would not deter her, she would be recognized as the son of the king. All she needed was a new plan, a plan that she had already begun to think of. She would hire more men, this time to kidnap her father and lock him in a dungeon somewhere, then, she would get Agravain to have her instated as king while the other knights searched for her father. Once he was found and returned, he would see how well she had run the place in his absence, and finally recognize her as his son. It was perfect.
Before she could continue her planning, she suddenly heard a knock on her door. Putting her helmet back on, she opened the door to see one of the last people she wanted to see at the moment.
“Is everything alright cousin?” Percy of Scandia asked, an expression of concern across his foppish face. “I heard quite the commotion.”
“Why should you care?” Mordred grunted, her mood only getting worse by having to be near the deplorable coward that she had the displeasure of being related to.
“Though we do not meet often, you are still my cousin, I should want to make sure you are ok.”
“Stop calling me that!” Mordred shouted, “Our blood relation is minuscule at best.”
“Even so, I still wanted to check up on you,” Percy said, “Is everything alright? What’s got you so upset.”
“None of your business!” Mordred shouted as she slammed the door in Percy’s face. She couldn’t tell that blithering idiot anything. If he knew the true reason behind her anger, he’d probably go straight to her father.
Better to go back to figuring out how best to go about this new kidnapping scheme and just forget they had ever met today.
Unbeknownst to her, Percy was already well aware of Mordred’s schemes. He also knew that the men Mordred had hired to merely assault the king had been paid double by Morgan le Fay to kill the king instead. Had the Black Knight not interfered, Mordred would have arrived too late to “save” Arthur.
As Percy of Scandia entered his own chambers, he took a glance at where a suit of black armor lay hidden from sight. Mordred would certainly try to earn the king’s favor through trickery again, and Morgan would certainly try and twist Mordred’s plans in such a way as to kill Arthur.
And it would be up to the Black Knight to stop them.