Epilogue: Mercy and Remembrance

Morgana glowered at the single frail, purple flower lying atop the rough table that served as her table and desk. Something had appeared every evening for close to a week now. Usually she ignored whatever it was and it disappeared after a few minutes. It was a strong spell that sent these ridiculous offerings every day, but it never varied in it's essential form. Some days it was not a flower, but succulent dark berries in a stoneware dish, or a fragment of a spell, written in careful, rounded characters. One day it was a perfect apple. One day it was the feather of a blue bird, pristine in it's purity.

It seemed like something poor sentimental Agravaine would have done, mused Morgana? But a spell of this kind could not persist without a life force. Perhaps it was young Mordred. She looked away from the flower. The whole thing was hardly worth her notice.

She looked again at the blossom. Her memory stirred as she picked it up and inhaled it's delicate fragrance. She remembered them. Violets. They grew in profusion around Camelot, like shining, earthy, clouds of purple in the beginning of springtime. As she picked it up, she recalled with delight, the core of it's stamen was a heart of gold. How she had loved these when she was a girl! She and Gwen would gather handfuls, even armfuls of them, until her room had been flooded with the fragrance and the color. How they had laughed. The memory hurt. It hurt like a wound that ached with the cold. She did not like to remember her life before, before everything had changed.

She tossed the flower into the fire, but the sigh she gave as she turned away, was for the girl who had lived in Camelot, for something that could not be again. How odd, she thought to herself, to remember the girl she had been with such tenderness. The fragrance of the violet clung to her hand.

The wind wafted the scent from her window and out into the night.

FIN