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Morgause doesn't die. Morgause falls asleep.
(Of course she doesn't die, Gareth had said; she is their mother, she is forever.)
Gaheris has her in his arms, and he's shaking her-- if Mordred remembers the story correctly-- and then she falls asleep. She doesn't die, her son doesn't kill her, she just falls into a deep, impossible sleep, from which it was impossible for her to be woken from, not even by Merlyn's sour whore of a replacement.
Apparently right before her sleep took her, she whispered, "I shall not die, I shall not wake, until my true son is the true king."
It's sort of understood which son she means.
Mordred soldiers on for years with those words on his back. His mother didn't even have the decentcy to truly die, when she died; no, she has to leave her words with him, she has to leave her plans. He never wanted to be king. He wanted to fix things, to make them right. If he has to be king to fix things, to make them better, then so be it, but that was never his intent.
Mordred knows what kind of king he'll be. It isn't the popular kind. It isn't the long-lasting kind.
He came to terms with that a long time ago. And a good thing, too: he's dying, now.
Mordred doesn't know a great deal about medicine; that was always Merlyn's realm (the old bastard) and then Nimue's (the young bitch). But he knows this much, that the places he's bleeding from aren't supposed to be bleeding. They won't keep bleeding for very long, either. When the blood stops, it will trickle away, and take him with it, down, deep, into the ground.
He limps through the castle, looking for his mother's cobwebbed room, long forgotten by time and fashion.
Mordred fully expects to find a corpse in that bed, full of spiders and dried skin: dead, completely dead, stories and words and plans be damned. The sleeping bit was a hoax, a rumor, to make save Gaheris from further blame.
But Mordred knows his mother, he knows what she did, with her magics. He can't quite make himself truly surprised, when he opens the door and draws away the draperies to find his mother sleeping, just sleeping, looking young as ever. As calm and peaceful as she never was.
He sullies the clean sheets with his black blood. The smell of his sweat mixes with the dust and cobwebs hanging heavy in the air. Mordred is tired, so tired, but he can hear the moths fluttering above him, all around, listening in on his conversations.
They will be with him, when he dies. The king will die alone, save for some moths as witnesses. Who will record his last words? Who will care?
Mordred lays an arm over his mother, puts his head on her pillow and closes his eyes and says, full of the familiar-strange tiredness that he always and never knew came before death, "Mother, I am king now."
Her voice is dry with misuse, with the silence of neigh a decade of waiting and working. He can hear the crack and crackle of her lips moving without moisture, her eyes looking without any tears in them. She says, in the voice as cold and dead as she isn't, "King of Hell."
He makes a keening noise, in the back of his throat; it's very undignified for a king. "Better to reign," he says, but he's dead and cold beside her before he can complete the thought.