[1] WEEPING MONK // you're not what I was looking for

28| Tender Hearts {Part One}

═ 𝙏𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙃𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙨 ═

{AN// 6.7k words, I am sorry haha. And we've gone past 5k reads 😱 thank you so much!}

[TW// referenced past religious based self harm]

Lancelot begins integrating with the Fey and Ari is at odds with her allies.

❖

Take my mind and take my pain,
Like an empty bottle takes the rain.

❖

The tension in the den was high and Lancelot did not have to think too hard to figure out why he was almost dragged here this morning just after dawn. Barely enough of the cold sunlight was streaming in through the cracks in the roots and entwined branches overhead and he didn't understand why this couldn't have waited just a little longer. The elders surrounded the dark stone table, him at one end, them at the other. Ari was stood somewhere in between, her father and Gawain opposite. Arthur was, unsurprisingly, on the side of the elders. Ari's meeting here the evening before had been a smooth conversation between her and the elders until she had ran out of it, leaving them thoroughly unimpressed that she dropped their assembly because the monk's name had been hushed to her by Gawain. And now she was stood here with them again, feeling less and less in control of the situation and more like the unfortunate spectator at the feast.

"He was here for hours and already broke his promise!" Grenn, the grey haired Sky folk elder with a bitter temper shouted across the stone, his hand coming up and flicking out carelessly at Lancelot as he yelled.

"And he saved a child because of it," Ari argued back with a passive tone that was starting to annoy her for this early in the morning. She angled herself towards the elders, "Nobody else heard the boy's cry, you should be thanking him." A look of horror started spreading across the seven Fey's faces and she knew then that perhaps she had taken her point a little too far.

"And what of all the other children!" The Fawn woman raised her voice similarly to Grenn, allowing it to echo up into the space, "Those that he murdered in their sleep?" Her eyes pointed like daggers across the table and the two pale, hardened antlers from her forehead felt like they suddenly got sharper.

"I don't harm the children," Lancelot stiffened in his place, his tightly clasped hands behind his back pulling his shoulders down, "I always spared their lives." The Fey scoffed at him, likely denying in their minds that that makes what he has done any better. He knew that it didn't, he knew that even though he did not take their lives he instead gave them a harrowing memory that they would never forget. He knew this because he had lived it too.