Free The Traitor's Tale by Jonathan Moeller

Chapter 1: The Curse

    I cannot remember my name, not after fifteen
centuries, but I do know that I am a traitor.
    The human mind was never meant to contain so much
time, and many of my memories have faded into nothingness. I cannot
remember my childhood, nor the names and faces of my parents, nor
the taste of food or the pleasure of the wind upon my face. All
this has been lost to me.
    Yet I remember my betrayal well enough.
    I was the Keeper of Avalon’s apprentice, her student
and her confidant. Yet when Mordred Pendragon rose in rebellion
against the High King Arthur Pendragon, wielding dark magic as a
lesser man might wield a sword, I was seduced to Mordred’s side.
For I was a vain and foolish young woman, believing power to be my
birthright, and Mordred’s flattering words spoke to the poison in
my heart. I betrayed the High King and the Keeper, and became
Mordred’s advisor and his lover.
    But he, too, betrayed me, stealing my power to fuel
his own and leaving me to die. Mordred and Arthur slew each other
upon the field of Camlann, and I was left cursed. I would never
age, but I would never again known pleasure or pain, and my flesh
grew pale and corpselike. My magic fled from me, and I was left
with no power save that of the magic of fire.
    In desperation and regret, I fled to the Keeper’s
side, but it was too late. Malahan Pendragon, the High King’s
bastard grandson, rallied the remnants of Arthur’s realm to his
side. The Keeper opened a gate of magic, a portal to another world,
and Malahan and the survivors withdrew through the gate to a new
world and escaped the pagan Saxons.
    And the gate closed, leaving me behind forever.
    For a time I despaired. But the curse the Keeper and
Mordred’s treachery had left upon me ensured that I would never
die, and eventually I moved past the despair. The Keeper had left
Britannia and Earth, but I tried to take up her mantle, using my
limited powers to fight dark magic as she had once done.
    I had a great deal of work to do. The history of
Earth after the departure of the Keeper and the death of Arthur
Pendragon was long and bloody, and tyrant after tyrant arose, many
of them in league with the powers of darkness. I did what I could,
trying to defend the mortals of Earth from dark magic. I also
sought after magical secrets and ancient spells, trying to find how
the Keeper had left Earth for a new world with Malahan
Pendragon.
    How I might find her and beg her forgiveness for my
crimes.
    For fifteen centuries I searched in vain. As the
years piled on and became decades and then centuries, I forgot so
much. I forgot entire centuries, learned languages and forgot them
again. I even forgot my own name. Around the fourteenth century in
Italia, I encountered a poet named Dante and heard him speak of
heaven and hell and the realms beyond. After hearing his great
poem, I called myself Antenora, after the circle of hell where
traitors met their fate. For I was a traitor, and no matter how
many centuries passed, no matter how many new horrors I saw, no
matter how many memories disappeared into the abyss of time, I
never forgot my betrayal and my crimes. They remained as bright and
as vivid as if I had committed them yesterday.
    I never stopped seeking for the Keeper, never stopped
looking for a way to find her.
    And then, one day, the answer was given to me.
    I sensed a tremendous disturbance in the threshold,
the shadow that Earth cast upon the spiritual realm, the ghostly
double and mirror of the material world. I had lost much of my
magic, but I still possessed the ability to travel to the
threshold. There I found a magical gate opening, a bridge between
two worlds, and for a desperate moment I thought that the Keeper
might be returning. But this gate had been wrought using dark
magic, fell and malevolent, and I released that the Keeper could
not be behind it.
    Worse, some dark force was preparing to come through
the gate and seize Earth.
    Then I met Morigna and Mara in the