Unknownfate
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Chapter 85
🕑 Added 2025-04-04 06:17:49 +0000 UTC“My name,” I said clearly, my voice cutting through the air like a drawn blade, “is Arthuria Pendragon. King of Camelot. Ruler of Albion.”
Tony Stark didn’t blink—he stared.
I continued, letting the gravity settle.
“The world knows me as King Arthur, yes. Returned from the mists of history, magic, and war to reclaim my crown. What they don’t know... is that Arthur is a woman.”
Tony’s drink made it halfway to his mouth before he froze. Then slowly—very slowly—he lowered the glass.
“You’re what now?”
I inclined my head, composed, and repeated. “I am Arthuria. King by right, ruler by will. And this—” I gestured to Mordred, who grinned like a shark “—is my son. Sir Mordred.”
Tony took a long moment. Then another.
Finally, he pointed at me with the same energy one might point at a UFO or a tax audit. “You’re telling me that the magical, sword-swinging King of England... the one rebuilding the entire UK into some kind of Camelot 2.0... is standing in my house... in heels?”
“Boots,” Mordred corrected with a smirk. “And yeah. She is.”
Tony put his drink down. “JARVIS, scan me. I might be dreaming.”
“No REM activity detected, sir.”
“Great. Fantastic. I am stone cold sober for this.” Tony let out a long, slow exhale.
Honestly, I had hoped for more, and I could see that Mordred had also been hoping for something, likely an excuse to knock him around. Yet, it seemed Stark was just… tired? Drained?
He ran a hand through his hair, then looked up at me again—really looked.
“You’re her,” he said finally, softer. “You’re him. I mean—her. The King. The sword, the throne, the huge beam of light, the whole navy be gone, and the huge ancient city. All of it.”
I nodded once.
“And you’re just casually dropping that in my living room like it’s ordering takeout?”
“Mordred seems to have taken to getting takeout pretty well.” I casually jested.
Tony walked in a slow circle, muttering under his breath. “Okay. Alright. Deep breath. Tony, you are a super hero, you have survived worse, just breathe and focus.”
He stopped, turned, pointed between us.
“You’ve got the sword?”
“Several,” I replied.
“You do magic?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not gonna, like… pull a dragon out of the ceiling?”
“Not unless provoked,” Mordred said cheerfully.
Tony stared. Then he laughed once—sharp and a little breathless. “This is insane. This is absolutely—” he gestured vaguely, “—beyond even my threshold for weird. And I built an Iron Man suit in a cave. With scraps.”
“You handled that quite well,” I said.
He gave me a look. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting the King of Albion to show up looking like a goddess on loan from a renaissance painting.”
Mordred grinned. “She gets that a lot.”
Tony collapsed onto the nearest couch like a man who’d been hit with a revelation and needed a soft place to process.
“Okay,” he said again. “I have so many questions.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, that sharp Stark intensity settling back into his eyes.
“First of all—how? I don’t mean magic-wand, poof-you’re-back. I mean how are you real? The historians, the myths—none of it added up. You were a legend. Not a flesh-and-blood monarch dropping cities out of the sky and cutting through aircraft carriers like cheese.”
“Why can’t I be real? Why am I just a legend? All legends come from somewhere, don’t they?” I turned the question back to him.
“Sure. But they don’t summon castles out of air and light. You’re real, alright—but you’re rewriting the rulebook while the rest of us are still trying to figure out what game we’re playing.”
Mordred looked delighted. “You catch on quick.”
Tony ignored her. His eyes were locked on mine now, sharper, hungrier. “Do you understand what you’ve done? NATO’s having migraines trying to figure out if you’re a threat or an ally. Every intelligence agency has at least one department dedicated to just you. Magic’s back on the table, and you’ve got nukes scared.”
“I’ve made no threats,” I replied calmly.
“You don’t have to,” Tony shot back. “You exist. You breathe, and the balance shifts. Half the world’s terrified. The other half wants to be you.”
He rose, pacing now. “You brought back faith. Real faith. Not the quiet Sunday kind—the sword-and-sky kind. People are seeing angels and demons in their tea leaves again. You broke the illusion. And the thing about illusions, Arthuria, is that once they’re gone, people want answers.”
I tilted my head. “Then perhaps they should ask.”
He stopped walking, faced me again. “Okay. Here’s me asking: What do you want?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Peace. Stability. My kingdom restored, my people happy and cared for.”
“So, what you already have?”
“Yes, I have most of it already.”
Tony considered that. “Sounds noble. But the world isn’t about to just accept that, you must know that already. They are scared of you, but that won’t last forever.”
“Let them come!” Mordred said as proud as she was loud.
Tony opened his mouth like he was about to rant more about international tensions, but then stopped himself. He waved a hand vaguely in the air, like clearing a chalkboard.
“Y’know what? No. Screw NATO. They’ll spin in circles whether I care or not. Let’s talk about the real bombshell here.”
He turned, eyes bright, almost childlike now. “Magic. Real, actual, capital-M magic. I’ve read every file, every theory, every fringe crackpot scribble out there, and none of it—none of it—was ever proven. Then you show up, and suddenly people are talking about ley lines, incantations, and cups that give eternal life.”
“It is real,” I said simply.
“No, see, you don’t get to just say that. You don’t walk into my house, say ‘I’m King Arthur, also I’m gorgeous, and by the way magic’s back,’ and expect me to go ‘oh, cool, pass the salt.’ How does it work? Where does it come from?”
Mordred snorted into her drink. “She has a sword that cuts through space. That not proof enough?”
Tony shot her a glare. “That’s proof of effect. I want cause. I want mechanisms. Rules. Is it physics we don’t understand yet? Dimensional bleed? Nano-scale manipulation via neural command? Or are you telling me it’s just—what? Belief?”
I sipped my tea, steady. “It’s not easy to explain, and dreadfully boring and technical, so maybe we should get some food? Or something else to entertain Mordred while we have this discussion?”
“Hey! I can be part of this, I know about magic!” Mordred clearly didn’t approve of me treating him like a child.
Tony turned to look at her, and after giving her a look over, he nodded. “Sure, JARVIS, please take care of our guest, and record this conversation, I might need to go over it later.”
JARVIS responded smoothly, “Of course, sir. Refreshments and entertainment options will be made available to Sir Mordred in the lounge. May I suggest the armored combat simulator?”
Mordred lit up like a kid on Christmas. “You have a simulator?”
“Fully modular, multi-environment, and responsive to melee-based engagements,” JARVIS said.
“I love this house,” Mordred said, already hopping to her feet and following the blinking drone that had emerged to guide her. “Shout if you need me, Father. Or if he says something dumb.”
I gave her a patient nod, and then turned back to Tony as she disappeared down the hallway.
“Alright,” he said, refocusing. “No more distractions. What is magic?”
I sighed and I got ready to explain magic, this was hardly the first time I had done that, be it the members of The Veiled Hand, the former widows, or officials from Albion, everyone had been curious.
“Alright, the most basic way I can explain it is by saying that magic is using energy to achieve the desired result, and in general, magic can’t do anything that is impossible.”
Tony immediately raised a finger. “Hold up. Magic can’t do the impossible? You returned from the dead, you brought the other knights of the Round Table back, you destroyed an entire fleet with one blast of light; that sounds pretty impossible to me.”
“No, bringing the dead back to life is next to impossible, even I can’t do that. You should know of the legend about me no? how I went to sleep in Avalon until my time of need?”
He nodded. “But what about the rest? Even if you somehow didn’t die back then, coming back looking like that after so long, bringing the others with you, that is still impossible, unless everyone didn’t die back then.”
I closed my eyes, for a moment, the memories of my knights, dead, flashed before my eyes. “No, they didn’t survive, and that aren’t really alive… well, that are, but it's complicated.”
“Well, the uncomplicate it for me.”
“It's far beyond the scope of introductory magic, but the reason I could bring my knights back, and not all of my people, is because after death, my knights became a special kind of existence, beyond human, yet not god, and it is due to this that I could bring them back.”
Tony leaned back slightly, eyebrows raised. “Beyond human, not god. So… like demigods? Ghosts? Energy patterns stabilized by narrative weight?” He was halfway serious and halfway trying to categorize her words in science terms.
“Closer to the third one,” I replied. “They are what you might call ‘Heroic Spirits.’ Legends strong enough to echo beyond death. They reside in a realm outside your reality—the Throne of Heroes. It’s not resurrection, not in the way you’re thinking. It’s a retrieval. A summoning. I call them, and they answer.”
Tony let out a low whistle. “So you’re pulling power from a sort of cosmic archive of famous dead people.”
“In a sense,” I said. “But don’t confuse them for puppets. They are who they were—memories made manifest, souls made sharp again. That’s why I can bring back the knights. Because they became more than man.”
He took a slow sip of his drink, now clearly more intrigued than skeptical. “Okay. Heroic spirits and soul databases. That tracks, kind of. But we’re not done. You said magic can’t do the impossible—but you’ve created a city from nothing, sounds impossible to me.”
“Is it?” I questioned. “How do you create a city? What would it take the great Tony Stark to build a city?”
Tony blinked, then set his glass down with a soft clink. “Well… land, materials, supply chains, machines, money. Labor. Time. A lot of time. And even then, I’d need political cover, zoning laws, permits—”
I raised an eyebrow. “So if I built a city faster, does that make it impossible? Or simply… more efficient?”
He paused. “Okay. Point taken. But how does that work?”
“Magic, there are a few different systems of it, but let's start with the one you might understand the best. Magecraft. Magecraft is a means to achieve anything humanly possible, utilizing magical means to expedite the process.
Tony narrowed his eyes, the way he did when he was on the cusp of understanding something technical but outrageous. “Alright. So you’re telling me it’s like hacking reality? Not rewriting it—just bypassing the standard processes?”
“Precisely,” I said. “Magecraft is not the creation of miracles. It is the application of energy—magical energy—to reach a result faster or more precisely than nature or technology might allow. Think of it as… forcing the outcome you desire through a different equation.”
I stood up and went over to where Mordred had shattered her glass and picked up the biggest shard. “Look here, a broken bit of glass, explain for me how you would, step by step, turn it into a ring.”
Tony crossed his arms, watching me with interest. “Alright,” he said, tilting his head toward the shard. “First, I’d melt it down—probably in a high-temp crucible. Then I’d mold it, refine the shape, probably with a CNC glass lathe or precision laser if I wanted something that didn’t look like kindergarten arts and crafts. Then polish it, finish it, maybe etch it. Total time? Anywhere from six hours to two days depending on gear and design.”
I nodded. “And now, watch.”
(End of chapter)
So magic, how does one explain how magic works? In a way, a man who won’t believe it will believe it?
Magecraft, even just explaining that is difficult, but it will also take a while, so likely won’t spend too much time doing it, but will likely spend the entire next chapter explaining the magical world, and let Stark explain it to others so I won’t have to spend time doing it again.
But I do need people to learn about it, because if not, well, it's gonna be a pain to deal with anyone who might not want to believe, so I need Stark to prove it. And he is apparently talented in it; in some timelines, he becomes a big magical powerhouse.
And honestly, I don’t know how to make crystal glass rings, so don’t try to use this as a guide for that. If you must, wait until the next chapter and use the magecraft method.
