𓆩♱𓆪

*(Shh, ironfan has a bunch of dads...ahahahha...)

The campfire had burned down to little more than glowing embers, the air heavy with the sharp tang of charred wood. Shadows stretched and crept across the clearing, licking over the golden plates of Excalibur’s armor as though alive. He sat motionless, sword laid carefully across his knees, his gauntleted hands guiding a strip of cloth in slow, deliberate circles along the blade’s edge. The steel rang with each pass — not a clang, not a true sound of war, but a faint scrape, a whisper of metal against cloth.

Every scrape ended in silence. Not the restful kind that belonged to forests at night, with their distant chirps and rustlings. This was a silence that pressed inward, thick and unnatural, a silence that made him feel he was being watched.

We see you.

The words slid into his skull so softly he nearly thought it was memory, the echo of a dream. But no dream had weight like this. His back stiffened, his grip on the sword tightening until the leather of the hilt creaked.

Excalibur forced his hands to move again, faster now, the cloth rasping over the blade in a rhythm just short of frantic. Sparks of orange firelight glared at him from the polished steel. Only his reflection stared back — his face, cold and drawn, framed by the flawless curve of his helm. His eyes narrowed. Nothing there. Nothing.

And yet he remembered. He remembered Ironfan’s voice, bright with laughter as she accused him of being “too stiff.” He remembered her fierce grin when she spoke of the Spawn, as if she’d seen them herself dancing between trees and shadows. He had always silenced her with a tone as cutting as his sword. “Believe in what you see, girl. The rest is rot.”

But now—

Then see us.

The whisper curled around the campfire smoke like a serpent, invisible, invasive. His hand stilled. The cloth slipped from his fingers and fell into the dirt.

The blade in his lap no longer reflected him. For a heartbeat, a breath, it showed something else — shifting, writhing, a shape of eyes layered upon eyes, endless, unblinking. They gazed out from the steel as though the sword itself had become a window.

The fire cracked violently, sparks spitting into the night. His breath caught, his vision jarred. The reflection was gone. Only steel. Only flame.

Excalibur let out a long, harsh breath and set the sword aside with a heavy thud. His fingers dug into the cold earth at his sides, clawing into it as if soil and stone could anchor him to reality. He tried to catalogue it, to force his mind into order: Earth. Fire. Steel. These were real. These he could hold.

Not gods. Not Spawn.

But the forest seemed to lean closer, the night thickening until even the stars above felt distant, dimmed by something that should not be. And within that dark, the whispers remained, faint and patient.

He almost heard Ironfan again, playful, unyielding. “Told you they’re real, papa.”

Excalibur’s throat tightened. The certainty he’d carried like a shield all his life cracked, if only by a hairline fracture.

And in the empty clearing, with the fire guttering low, a man who had never wavered in faith or duty found himself sitting on the edge of doubt.