Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,111

Orfeda and several others. They were engaged in kicking the shit out of anything that was stupid enough to come and fight them.

“Your Horsemen weren’t that strong,” Mordred said mockingly.

“They’re fodder,” Merlin said. “They needed years more to be what we needed them to be. You forced our hand. You forced us to destroy Asgard, and you killed so many of our forces we didn’t have a choice. They’re fine for what we need.”

“How do I remove the curse from Tommy?”

Merlin chuckled. “Same way as you.”

“I’m not a werewolf,” Mordred said. “Tommy doesn’t have a one-up waiting for him to pop him back to life. He dies, he stays dead.”

Merlin tried to shrug and started to cough up blood. “You’ll have to figure that out, I guess.”

“Still a dickhead to the end,” Mordred said with a shake of the head.

“I am what I am, son,” Merlin said.

“You might have been my father, but I’m not your son,” Mordred told him, his voice cold.

“You really think they’re going to accept you as king?” Merlin asked with a smirk. “After all the horrors you inflicted on the world?”

Mordred stared at his father for a few seconds, and instead of a powerful man to be feared, he saw a sad, pitiful man who was going to die having never achieved the thing he wanted the most: Arthur in complete control.

“It’s taken me a long time to realize it,” Mordred said wistfully. “But I am their king. I might not be great at it, I might make a lot of errors along the way, but I will try my damnedest to be a good king. A good man. I want future generations to know that we did something important and that we stood up for what was right. And I’m going to make sure that no one like Arthur or you or Hera or any of those pieces of crap you surrounded yourself with will ever be able to push their agendas on people again. Partly because they’re all going to die.”

“You really want me dead?” Merlin asked, blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth.

Mordred nodded. “I really do; I just didn’t think it would be me doing it. My only sadness is that you ruined so many lives before you died.”

“You’re not man enough to just put me out of my misery.”

“You misunderstand me,” Mordred said softly. “You’re going to die a human. You’re going to die powerless, pathetic, alone, with nothing and no one to mourn you. You’re an evil fuck, and you don’t get to go out in a blaze of glory, Merlin. You get to die on a field of mud and stone, while the plans that you put so much of yourself into are burned away. Your name won’t matter to those in the future, because you never did anything that might last long enough to have an impact on their lives. You wasted your potential, you wasted your life, and you wasted my goddamn time. You don’t deserve anything else.”

“Maybe you’re more like me than I thought,” Merlin said, his eyelids fluttering.

Mordred kept the sword on Merlin’s chest and bent forward to whisper into his ear. “I’m nothing like you, Merlin. I never was; I never will be. If there’s one thing you’ve achieved in life, it’s to show me how not to behave like, in the words of my good friend Remy, a hoofwanking cockwomble.”

Merlin kept his eyes open for another second, and then he died.

Mordred stood above him, looking down, just to make sure, and then he created a sphere of light magic and poured every bit of magic he could inside it, heating it to a level he’d never tried before. The sphere was six feet long by the time he dropped it over his father’s body, which was incinerated.

Mordred staggered back and found himself sitting on the ground again. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t have left his father’s body. Not for Merlin’s supporters, who might use it as a sort of shrine, or for those who would defile it just to let out their anger. It needed to be removed from the equation.

Mordred sat there for some time as a large group of his allies appeared not too far from the citadel, all of them giving him the space he needed.

“You okay?” Hel said from behind him.

“I’m okay,” Mordred said. “Weak. Took a lot to do what I just did.”

“Emotionally or physically?” Hel said, sitting beside Mordred and taking his hand