Chapter 6: Padmé and the Ghost of Guinevere

The Council's summons came before the Temple's artificial dawn had fully brightened, delivered by a young initiate who knocked at Arthur's assigned quarters with the careful precision of someone who had been told, twice, to be respectful and was not entirely certain what that required of her posture.

Arthur was already awake. He had not slept in the particular way this galaxy seemed to expect of its inhabitants — the lights dimmed, the body horizontal, the surrender complete. He had rested in the manner he had learned during the long campaigns: sitting against the wall with Excalibur across his knees, breathing slowly, allowing the body its recovery without releasing the mind from its watch. The sword had hummed quietly throughout the night. Not urgently. The way a hearth holds its warmth after the fire is banked — present, attended, not demanding.

He followed the initiate through corridors that smelled of stone dust and something faintly resinous he could not name, and noted that the Temple was different before its full population woke. Quieter in a way that was not merely the absence of sound but the presence of something else — a collective stillness, distributed across every room and corridor, as though the building itself breathed with measured intention. He had felt something similar in cathedrals. He had felt something similar, very occasionally, in the moment before battle resolved itself from chaos into clarity.