Excalibur's Regrets

From the beginning to the end, I saw it all. All those who had possessed Excalibur, all their lives, their struggles, and their memories poured through me and I could see it like broken flashes.

And all the while I was seeing generation after generation of wielders going to war, some losing their lives and some returning triumphant, some whose stories were fulfilling and some who died with regrets, Yngvi was beside me. He too had been watching all those generations of humans. He had thought that if the elves caved in, the war that was rearing its head would die out.

Following the years of his death, that may have been true. There was a brief year of peace. But then it began. Wigheard, the first wielder, died fighting too. He was filled with regrets. And he was the one with the most struggles. He lived for some thirty years after Yngvi's death. And he fought brutally in all those years, just so his friend's sacrifice would have some meaning.

But he knew, as he stared into the eyes of death, bloodied in a battlefield, under a crimson evening sky, Wigheard knew he hadn't succeeded. He had regrets piled all around him in the form of dead soldiers. Mercaia was still standing though.

And it remained standing even after Wigheard had died. As the sword passed from generation to generation, so did the flag of Mercaia. It later came to be known as Mercae.

"Pointless...it was pointless...pointless...pointless", I was muttering over and over again, seeing all those visions.

Throughout those years, as the world was changing, there were many constants. The biggest constant, that was staring me right in my face, as if I could change things, was that it was all pointless. There was no ambition, no end goal. It was simply mindless fighting. To tell you the truth, it was almost laughable how pointless it all was.

No one had stopped to wonder why they were fighting. It simply felt like the default state of the world that they should be fighting. Those who did question it were too close to death to do anything about it. There was no glory in those centuries of war.

In the end, it took only one person. One person that couldn't die. One person to end the war. And just the idea of it made it even more laughable and pointless. And if not for the pure mental agony that those visions brought me in that instant, and the sting of the sword impaling me, I really would have thrown my head back and laughed aloud.

"Boy", Sight's voice reached me when I thought those visions were endless.

But they ended so suddenly, I couldn't have expected them.

"Seraph", Grey grabbed me by the arm, and then pulled the sword out in an instant.

I threw up a bout of blood. And fell down on my knees.

"Now you understand", Silver spoke in a hoarse voice, "Do you still intend to stop me?"

I was unable to speak. I understood what was happening now.

Yngvi had intended Excalibur to be something that carried history within itself. He wanted to immortalize his kind by doing so. Perhaps he had thought that something so noble, imbued with his noble magic, would go on to become a ray of light for people.

But he neglected something. He was only thinking of those that were before him, and in doing so, he completely failed to consider those who were to carry on his ambition. Wigheard didn't have any noble emotions to pass on through Excalibur. He was filled with regrets. And so were many of those who came after him.

Excalibur may have been a beacon of hope at one point. But now it was nothing but a dark mass of distorted emotions. That was to be expected. Its hard for positivity to bloom in a place as bleak as a battlefield. No noble emotions come to you in a place like that. Yngvi overestimated humans. He thought there could be hope in living hands, but he forgot about the darkness of the dead ones.

King Arthur must have known what Excalibur was capable of. That's why he asked Bedivere to throw it into a lake where it couldn't be found.

But Arthur missed something. Or rather, Excalibur fooled him. By the time Arthur had it discarded, Excalibur had already become sentient. When it found Silver as an empty vessel, it chose to take control of her. Silver's soul was already gone. She was just a husk. But even a husk has some magic energy in it.

To give that husk a consistent mind, it used its last host, Arthur. But even so, the Arthur we were seeing wasn't the whole of him. It was only the part that was left inside Excalibur. And from what I could see, it was nothing but anger and frustration.

So then, there it was. Its not that I could tell what Excalibur really was but I knew what it was made of. And I could imagine just what could be born of something like that.

And in Excalibur's case, there was only one constant.

Yngvi.

He had been watching all along. He too must have been riddled in regrets, but I wonder if he knew the current state of the world.

I wanted to tell Arthur too, but I couldn't speak a word. And since Grey and Sight knew nothing, they were figuring out ways to destroy Silver. Yet another pointless struggle, but at least now I knew how to put an end to this endless cycle of regrets.