Once upon a time there was a story you already know: about a queen who used to consult her magic mirror; a princess who ate an apple as red as blood; and the envy of the one who saw her position as the most beautiful of all threatened...
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- Mirror, mirror... Is there any woman more beautiful than me?
Anyone who saw the young Morgana Le Fay would never have guessed that her perfect face was thousands of years old. Her stunning beauty had already driven heroes and even kings mad over the centuries. King John was just her latest victim.
And now she was about to complete her cruel and audacious plan: a child of the king was growing in her womb.
However, it was not maternal instinct that had led Morgana to desire this conception.
She was descended from a powerful line of sorcerers, but for her evil deeds, she had been condemned to death by her clan almost two centuries ago, and she had been running away from her sentence ever since.
Morgana had already faced the wrath of men countless times, and had known various forms of death. She had been hanged, impaled, beheaded, burned at the stake and poisoned. Magic always brought her back. It was in her blood: only a witch can kill another witch, just as only a diamond can cut another diamond. It took three witches to exterminate her powers and banish her soul to darkness for all eternity.
And there was only one way to guarantee true immortality: by becoming the Queen of Darkness herself.
To do this, she had to gather the sacred fruit that had sealed the unholy marriage of Hades, Lord of the Dead, to Persephone, goddess of spring: a pomegranate, stolen from the garden of the Hesperides in the far west.
The fruit had been encased deep in the throat of the dragon that once guarded the garden. The dragon was petrified, but Persephone still preserves the fruit inside, as if it were a heart of flesh inside a body of stone. Whoever picked it and planted its seeds in the Garden of the Hesperides would be rewarded with immortality and dominion over the power of darkness.
- Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone to prove he was worthy of being king; and I will cut the heart out of the stone dragon to prove myself worthy of being the Queen of Darkness. However, only a king or queen can enter the garden. Any commoner who crosses its gates, even a wizard, turns to dust.
And his throne would only be legitimized with an heir, and with the death of the king.
