#and the thing in the lake is orthax obviously

[words-writ-in-starlight]

modmother replied to your post “hey so rewatched legend of the sword yesterday w/ a friend (partially...”

I WOULD READ THE HELL OUT OF THIS

Good news, I wrote more Legend of the Sword AU.  This isn’t a complete fic, but here, Final Battle Sacrifice: Briarwood Redux.

every version of me dead (and buried)

Sylas Briarwood listens to the chaos settling in outside with a neutral expression, ice in his heart and snowmelt in his veins.

It's a simple equation.  The Briarwoods have an army of Blacklegs, armed and armored.  The de Rolo children have one mage, one magical sword, and perhaps a dozen motley fighters between them. 

The outcome is foregone.

The Briarwoods are about to be wiped off the map, nothing more than a shadow of nightmare for people to tell their grandchildren about.  The days before the Born King, when the de Rolos were deposed by a sorceress and her consort.  They simply do not have the strength of numbers to stand down the de Rolo boy with Excalibur in hand, to say nothing of his companions.  If they had the incredible good fortune to kill Percival outright, his traitorous bitch of a sister is at his back, ready to take up the blade and the birthright.  

And the reality is that they simply won't get that chance--the de Rolo allies are few in number, but absolutely dominant on the battlefield.  The red-haired windwalker mage, the twin street thieves in blue and black, the berserker Northman, Frederick de Rolo's own bard and priest, having escaped the purge and apparently returned for vengeance.  It's a fatal combination.  Perhaps Sylas and Delilah could have turned the forces back, could have held them off, if they'd been able to shelter in Camelot's high walls and wait the attack out.

The de Rolos, though, have taken their lessons well from the fall of their family.  They wasted no time on border skirmishes, struck straight for the heart of the castle with all their might and magic.  They are already inside, and they will win.  The Blacklegs are no more than living shields at this point, training dummies, and Delilah--

Delilah, his beautiful merciless wife, the love of his long life, is finally all out of things to sacrifice.  Cassandra de Rolo might have been a possibility, but she saved herself more thoroughly than she knew when she turned on them to save her brother.  No longer beloved, no longer an option.  All of Delilah's grief and courage will be for nothing, because her magic just is not enough.

Sylas turns away from the window and picks up the knife on his dinner plate, testing the edge with his thumb.  He watches it part the skin there with a kind of removed interest, like a man who has never seen blood before at all, and leaves the room.

The lake below the castle stinks of mold and decayed things, layered over the muddled scent of wet stone, and the bell seems to echo forever through the cavern.  Sylas has been here, before, when Delilah bled her heart out for the power to remake the world, but he is alone this time, and the difference is infinitely more than he imagined.  When the water parts, it reveals a slick black-skinned creature with the upper body of a handsome young man--not unlike Percival in his features, Sylas notes distantly--and the lower body of a many-tentacled thing.  Sylas has to swallow against a sudden surge of nausea as those fathomless eyes lock onto his and the lips part in a smile that shows a thousand sharp teeth.

"My lord," says the thing in the lake.  It forces its upper body out of the water and sketches Sylas an elaborate bow, mocking.  "There is trouble on the surface, I think."

"It's the boy," Sylas says.  His voice is a thousand leagues away, but from what he can hear it's sure and steady.  "The last of the de Rolos have come to retake the castle, and we are overrun."

"A tragedy," the thing in the lake purrs.  Its skin is so perfectly black that it seems like smoke made flesh, shadow made solid, and the whites of its eyes and teeth are disconcerting, jarring, against the even darkness.  "And where is your lady wife?  Defending her crown to the last?"

"She will lose," Sylas says.  He blinks twice and suddenly, he is himself again, in his own body, clutching the knife in his hand with such fervor that the engraved hilt is certainly leaving marks on his palm.  "She hasn't admitted it to herself yet, but she will lose, and everything she has done and given and wept for will be for nothing."

He is losing the thing's interest.  He can compel its attention with the bell, perhaps, but that doesn't force it to care, and while Delilah is all Sylas cares about, it would be naive to assume that the Briarwoods are anything more than this creature's latest hobby.  The thing drifts over to a stone and lounges against it, with a liquid drape to its limbs that nothing remotely humanoid should be able to achieve.  It gestures disinterest, with one hand and three tentacles, and says, "That is no concern of mine."

"She has provided for you through all these years!" Sylas snaps.

"And is she here now, to beg my help again?"  The thing smiles again, showing off needle-like teeth.  "Or did she send you to me, to grovel in her place?  I do not care who rules in the castle above."

"She didn't send me," Sylas says.  "She doesn't know I'm here."

That earns him an uncomfortably avian tilt of the thing's head, and a murmured, "Well, well.  Isn't that interesting."  It disengages from its stone couch and swims nearly to the edge of the lake, where the water is just barely deep enough to accomodate it.  Sylas has never seen the creature entire, but he has always suspected that there is more beneath the surface that it has ever let on.  "So, my lord," the thing asks, voice slick and sweet.  "Are you here to make a request?"

"I want you to give my wife the power to stand against the Born King," Sylas says.

"That--is a great deal to ask," the thing says consideringly.  "What will you pay, for this gift?"

"Anything," Sylas says, without a moment's hesitation.  "Everything."

And he raises the knife to his own throat.

The thing in the lake laughs, and Sylas knows he's won.

"You would take the thing your wife loves most, to see her victorious?  Condemn her by saving her?"  The thing reaches up as if to stroke Sylas' cheek, but ebbs back before touching him.  "I do think I underestimated you, my lord."

"Do you accept?"  Sylas presses the blade harder into his skin, until he feels a bright arc of pain and blood beginning to trickle hot down his flesh.  "I will not see her reduced.  I will not see her defeated.  I am all she has left to sacrifice, and I would rather die to save her than see her fall at the hands of that--that child."

"I will give her all the power I can offer," the thing in the lake says, and opens its arms to Sylas like an old friend.

Sylas closes his eyes and pictures Delilah, in crown and gown, the dazzling queen he had always known she could be, given the chance.  In his mind's eye, his wife smiles at him, the slow, sweet thing that first ensnared him when they were young and he couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than Delilah, smiling.

It's been a long time and much bloodshed since those first innocent days, but Sylas never did imagine anything more lovely than his joyful bride.

He turns the point of the blade against the hollow below his jaw, where his pulse beats frantically against the thin skin, his heart trying to get in as many beats before the end as possible, perhaps.  Foolish.  Base instinct, trying to stop him, trying to save him, because base instinct does not understand arithmetic.  Does not understand that Delilah, victorious, is worth any price, any payment, any sacrifice.

She will forgive him.

Sylas drives the knife into his throat, in one swift thrust all the way to the base of the blade, and wrenches it out at once, casting it into the water.  Blood begins to bubble through his lips before the pain strikes him--good, he thinks with preturnatural calm and clarity.  Good.  He pierced the windpipe.  Dying will be unpleasant, drowning as his fool heart desperately pumps blood into his carotid artery and thus into his lungs, but swift.

Sylas Briarwood stumbles three steps forward, and crashes to his knees in the frigid water of the underground lake.  One hand is pressed thoughtlessly to his throat, as if to hold back the tide of crimson spilling his life onto the stone, and the other reaches out blindly, forward, seeking--

A cold grip clamps around his wrist, and Sylas is wrenched down under the water.

High above, in the half-finished mage's tower, Delilah Briarwood freezes.

Later, no one will remember the details.  All they will remember is the explosion of brilliant red-white fire, and the sound of the usurper queen screaming for her husband like a thing destroyed.

That makes it hard, later, to hate her properly