Dame Galahad Corbenic
"She is a knight now, the youngest ever to sit at the Round Table, and I cannot bring myself to feel bitterness about it. She has worked harder than anyone I have ever known. She wears the weight of her bloodline—of Lancelot’s shame, of Elaine’s spite—like armor, yet it does not harden her. If anything, it has made her softer, more compassionate. She does not wield her pain like a sword, as I do. She carries it, quietly, and uses it to guide her actions." - from the journal of Percival Blanchfleur, Knight of the Round Table
Personal Journal of Dame Galahad Corbenic
Beneath the Chapel of the Silver Veil, Taransay
May 6th, 1159 When I was a child, I imagined my father as a mountain. It’s strange, isn’t it? For someone I had never met, someone who existed only in my mother’s stories and my own fragmented daydreams, to loom so large in my mind. But that is how it was. He was a mountain: distant, immovable, his summit shrouded in clouds I could not reach. When I was small, I used to think I would climb him one day, that I would stand at his peak and feel the sunlight of his approval. Then I grew older. I learned my father was no mountain. I learned he was a man. And men, I have come to understand, are far more flawed and far more fragile than the mountains they pretend to be. Mother has never hidden her hatred for him. Her voice grows sharp as broken glass whenever his name is spoken, and her words drip with venom. Lancelot du Lac, she calls him, as though saying the name itself is a curse. A coward, a betrayer, a thief. She speaks of how he cast us both aside, how he stole her honor and abandoned me without even once looking back. She would have me believe that he is a man without conscience, without love, without worth. And yet, for all her certainty, I have always felt a question lurking beneath her words. A why that she cannot seem to answer. Why did he leave? Why did he not claim me as his own? Why, even now, has he remained a shadow on the edge of my life, neither entirely present nor entirely absent? Mother fills that silence with bitterness, as though anger will protect her from the hurt she will not name. I have tried to do the same, tried to share her hatred for him, but… I cannot. I have prayed to Nimue to show me the truth of him, to guide my heart, but the Lady of the Lake is silent on this matter. And so, I am left alone to wrestle with my own doubts. Because part of me does not hate him. Part of me wonders what it might feel like to hear him speak my name for the first time. To see him look at me and know that I am his. I wonder if he regrets leaving me, if he carries even a shadow of the weight I have carried all these years. And now, I will have my answer. He is coming back to Camelot. The court is buzzing with the news—Lancelot du Lac, the Queen’s Champion, the Knight of the Lake, returning from du Lac after a decade away. The man I have imagined in a hundred different ways will be here, standing before me, real and undeniable. I do not know what I will say to him. I do not know what he will say to me. Part of me hopes he will embrace me, call me daughter and beg forgiveness for all the years he was absent. Part of me fears he will look right through me, seeing not a child of his blood but a stranger in armor. Most of all, I fear that Mother has been right all along. That he is no mountain, but a crumbling ruin, incapable of holding anything or anyone steady. I spoke of this fear to Percival yesterday. He has become something of a confidant to me in recent months, though I doubt he realizes it. There is something about him that makes it easy to speak, to share the parts of myself I would rather keep hidden. Perhaps it is because we are alike in so many ways. Percival understands what it is to carry the weight of a parent’s choices, to be shaped and scarred by them. He, too, has spent his life trying to escape his father’s shadow, though he would never say it so plainly. He pretends his quest for the Holy Grail is about justice, about proving his worth to Nimue, but I think it is more than that. I think he is chasing something he cannot name, something that has nothing to do with the Grail and everything to do with himself. I see the way he doubts himself when others are not looking. He wears his confidence like a suit of armor, but it does not hide the cracks. And yet, in his vulnerability, he has become one of the strongest people I know. He is not perfect—no knight is—but he is brave enough to seek perfection, even if he never reaches it. And in that, I see the brother I never had. It is strange to think of him that way, but it feels true. Percival is my kin in spirit, if not in blood. He has fought beside me, laughed with me, shared his frustrations and dreams with me, and I with him. I wonder sometimes if this is what family is meant to feel like. Not a bond of obligation or pain, but of choice. Yesterday, when I told him of my fears about meeting Lancelot, he was quiet for a long time. Then, finally, he said, “Whatever he is, whatever he says, it won’t change what you’ve made of yourself, Galahad. You’re not his shadow. You’re your own light.” His words stayed with me through the night. I repeated them in my prayers to Nimue, letting them echo in the stillness of the chapel. I don’t know if they are true, but I want them to be. I want to believe that I am more than Lancelot’s absence, more than my mother’s anger, more than the endless questions I cannot seem to answer. In a week’s time, I will meet him. I do not know what will happen. I do not know if I will embrace him, curse him, or simply stand silent in his presence. But whatever comes, I will remember Percival’s words. I will remember that my worth does not depend on him. I am not Lancelot’s shadow, nor am I my mother’s weapon. I am Galahad. And I will find the light. Dame Galahad Corbenic
Date of Birth
18th of February
Year of Birth
1143 EM
16 Years old
Children
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