Edward could feel himself going mad. He had just enough sense remaining to know that he couldn't go back to the enclave like this. He wouldn't be able to hold in the enormous guilt of the slaughter he'd just committed. He didn't believe the Mythicals deserved vengeance anymore. The rabid hatred was still there; it still dominated his spirit, but it was no longer the only thing reaching for the steering wheel.

And with that, he was no longer part of the cult. He had excommunicated himself by losing the faith.

In a brief, torturous moment of total clarity, he became the vengeful Hunter he had been, only long enough to see a terrible truth.

The woman. The seductress. He'd seen her before. She was a legend, the archetype of a monster's twisted power.

Morgana Le Fay.

She'd cursed him, turned his own mind into a continually-shifting labyrinth. Where there was once a simple, divine purpose, all the questions he'd buried and repressed in the name of becoming a “slayer of evil” were exhumed from their graves. He knew they wouldn't die this time.

And then, just as quickly as he'd grasped the nature of the curse, he lost it again. The name “Morgana Le Fay” retreated into the depths of his mind. He descended into horrific confusion once again with the knowledge that he'd had the answer to what was happening to him, but lost it with no way to recover it.

Hunters were naturally hardy. Each usually lived past 300 years of age, and though they lacked the abnormally long lifespan of the beings most skilled in the use of magic, a Hunter was not burdened by the fear that their life would end after failing to maintain a longevity spell. His long lifespan was guaranteed, and all that the god of vengeance demanded from him was to protect the weak through the violence they were so skilled in performing.

Edward was only 26, barely an adolescent by Hunter timescales. This gnawing madness would continue another three centuries.

******

“How does Darkchaser work?”

After a month of convalescence, I returned to the lab. Morgana's question continued to haunt me.

I watched the readout as it populated the screen in front of me. Genetic data made far more sense to me now than it had when I returned to work a year ago. Darkchaser resistance seemed like an important avenue of research after the Bentonville attack, and it ate up most of my working hours these days. Most of the Mythical community was on-guard after the first Hunter massacre in 70 years, but thankfully, it seemed to be a one-off.

An answer to the mystery was beginning to form. Darkchaser caused the user's body to generate strong aerosolized pheromones that, when taken into the body of those with a surplus of active M-genes, caused the fight/flight response to go into overdrive. The vast, vast majority of the time, Darkchaser moved that switch in the brain firmly to “flight” for those on the receiving end, but clearly, there were rare exceptions. As it turned out, I had unidentified M-genes that altered these pheromones, suppressing the fear response and activating my vampire stalking instinct to an overwhelming degree. The theory was that it was a natural evolution that had probably happened before, but just hadn't had the chance to be passed on. Nature was finicky that way.

My desk phone rang. She was here, the receptionist informed me.

******

At the cafeteria table, she stared into a tumbler filled with coffee. She seemed lost in the sight of its swirls, like it was some gateway to another universe. It was remarkable how, even after all her years, she still found wonder in the small things.

“Ah, Norman. You're looking great,” She said, with a friendly, open smile I was now quite familiar with.

“Well. I'm trying,” I said, shrugging with my arms extended, showing off my minimal exercise gains. Taking compliments was getting easier.

She stood to give me a hug. A hint of earth and flora filled my nose, making me feel relaxed and alive all at once. I'd never stop being in awe of her comprehensive beauty, but I'd become a friend to her, rather than a lovestruck puppy stuck in an awkward romantic fantasy.

“Alright. I can't wait any longer. Give it to me,” She said excitedly.

“You could at least buy me lunch,” I joked. She rolled her eyes; we both often poked fun at my awkward past self and her inability to keep every man (and some women) around her from falling in love. It was freeing to see your weaknesses from a place of humor.

I took out my phone, flipping to the document I wanted to show her.

“Forgot my tablet at the desk, and I don't want to go back through security. Guards are thousand year-old crones with no sense of time. Uh…no offense to millennarians. Anyway, this is fresh from peer review, so if you want intel in the future-” I began.

“Don't talk about it with anyone until it is published or made public after all avenues for publishing are exhausted,” She interrupted to recite my typical secrecy disclaimer verbatim, “Have I done you wrong even once?”

“OK, OK. Had to say it,” I said, returning her smile to let her know I took it in good humor.

“Alright. Dry language warning. ‘Abstract: third stage of inoculation trials against N2A2 - uhh… negative neurotransmitter amplification aerosol… “ I laughed at myself for the shop talk, “Trials for vaccine against Darkchaser… um, indicates improved efficacy and reduction of previously observed side effects. While the vaccine candidates are not yet ready for trials in their target demographic, data indicates that countering the effects of Darkchaser while eliminating the aggressive response induced by a natural immune reaction is possible,’” I said, smiling apologetically as I put away the phone, “Basically, we spent a year and a few million dollars to find out if we could actually do it, and came away with a ‘ehh, maybe.’”

“Trust me, it's better this way than it was a thousand years ago,” Morgana said.

“Hmm… yeah,” I conceded, dismissing the mental images of leeches and bloodletting, “I just feel a little guilty. You came all this way to hear that we're a hair closer to ‘maybe one day’ than we were a year ago.”

She took a long sip of her coffee before answering. The silence caught me off guard; conversations with her had always flowed effortlessly.

“So… you know the legends about me,” She began, the words only partly a question. I raised an eyebrow in confusion.

“I did engineer Arthur’s downfall, once upon a time. He was a good king, at least compared to others. His lands were safer and more prosperous than those of all the other small tyrants. If you had to live under the rule of anyone in a castle, Camelot was the best option,” She began.

“Makes sense,” I shrugged.

“But it's all relative. Camelot was the best place to be in a terrible time to live. It was still a place where women were beaten, drowned, declared the brides of Satan and burned at the stake, for the crime of speaking against their husband master. There, a foreign scholar would be called a warlock and burned, just for asserting that our world was not the center of the universe. It was a time when people of privilege, stronger than the sickly peasants who kept them fed, reserved for themselves the right to decide whose mere existence was an affront to God.”

She had cut through my thoughts once again. Despite the brush with death a year ago, despite being shown the brutality and terror of the old ways, I had slipped back into thinking of my life as slow, mundane and unremarkable.

“But there are monsters. Always have been,” I replied, a dash of defensiveness in my tone.

“Believe me, I know. But…” Morgana trailed off with a sigh, then regained her composure, “How many ‘monsters’ do you think have actually been killed in the course of human history?”

I heard the meaning of the words. Likely, very few of those killed for being monsters actually had any active M-genes. We’d been a convenient excuse when some used a natural, but horrifying instinct that could exist in anyone.

In a familiar ritual, I forced myself to remember the real emotions of that day. Confused stories of what had happened in Bentonville were still circulating, becoming more ridiculous every time they came back around to me. People mostly stopped asking me what it was like to be a “hero,” but paradoxically, becoming someone who was talked about rather than talked to only made my subconscious thoughts on the event of that day more alluring.

I had been no hero. I was seconds away from death, only saved by literal magic.

“I…” I said, drawing out the word until it ended in clenched teeth, “I don’t know. I can’t help what I feel. I know this world is better than it was in the past, but…”

“It’s in your blood,” She said sympathetically, pausing to take my hand, “Thousands of years of evolution made you fit to be a vampire. But never forget that what brought you into this underworld was a choice.”

“I can’t just turn it off, Morgana,” I said, realizing it was the first time I’d ever called her by name.

When she squeezed my hand, I somehow knew she understood.

Thoughts of a squalid medieval existence flooded my mind: the smell of a dark, humid room, the shaking, shallow breaths of young girls accused of witchcraft, and the resolve of the only actual magician in the room as she summons a spell of boredom and hunger to spur the filthy armored men on horseback just outside to go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

I feel her anger, watching as she seethes, knowing she could turn the mind of the soldier in on itself, making the inside of his head a place of unending nightmare, or simply leave him devoid of any thought at all.

But she knows that more big, dumb brutes on power trips - and perhaps something worse - would follow, and in greater numbers. There were always more big, dumb brutes and people who wielded them like clubs.

And so she nudges, when she’d rather shove.

I couldn’t recall the feeling after it happened; it flitted away from me like an insect I had only noticed when it was already gone. The only thing that remained was the bone-deep feeling that I needed to rethink some things.

“We are more than our biology. We’re more than our choices,” Morgana’s eyes glimmered, full of wonder and optimism, “And everything you do in that lab of yours adds to what we are. Makes us better. Makes us more.”

The silence that lingered as she held my hand across the table was more peaceful and hopeful than anything I’d ever felt before. Distantly, something told me that what I felt may not have been my peace. I might not have been that whole, that mature yet.

But it was peace nonetheless.

“So, tell me about Darkchaser,” She said, withdrawing her hand and reclining into her chair as she settled in for the long, technical explanation. I smiled. It was good to have a friend who really cared.

******

“Witchcraft,” Edward mumbled, “Witchcraft. Witchcraft.”

There had not been a single night of uninterrupted sleep since the massacre. The dead came to him in his dreams, and he felt what it had been like to die at his hands. The sensation of acid burn started in his gut and expanded outward. His chest heaved as his lungs suddenly filled with shards. He soiled himself as his knees buckled. As time slowed to a crawl, leaving him to drown in the pain, all that was left to do was scream.

But the screams weren’t his. The pain he was feeling wasn’t his pain. That was somehow worse: the full knowledge that what he felt wasn’t his own, and that it never could be. One’s own pain could be minimized, suffered through, given purpose, but that of others? It just was. The time to ease their pain passed long ago. He couldn’t change it. The very real echoes of it would linger for the rest of his long life.

Edward had gone to the enclave of another Hunter clan. Less dogmatic and radical than the one that had weaponized him, the clan had thoughts of casting him out. Edward’s massacre had been an atrocity that wasn’t supposed to happen in the modern day. The Mythicals may not have been friends to the Hunters - that was still a long way off, but the millennia-long Blood War benefitted neither side, and could only end in mutual annihilation, given the deadly technology of the modern day. In the end, the only thing that swayed the adoptive Hunter clan from putting Edward out on his own, ironically, was Morgana’s curse upon him.

Or at least, Edward saw it as a curse.

“I am right,” He still told himself, “I was right. I am virtuous. I am righteous. I am right!”

Everything he had been whipped into believing was still embedded in his mind. All the violent creeds he knew by heart, the memories of traumatic physical conditioning he came to cherish, and the hyper-focused hatred of all monsters, none of it could be erased without erasing the man himself. That hadn’t been Morgana’s aim.

None of the Hunters could say what had been done, not exactly. The results were dramatic, that was true, but when examined by the Hunter’s resident Seeker, it seemed there was no spell over the man at all.

The other Hunters observed him with pity when they came to the basement with his meager meal. He had become rail-thin, though the enclave’s residents never failed to offer him food. Whenever he stood, he paced the room, muttering to himself. When he sat, he curled into a ball, rocking himself and professing weak assurances of his goodness. And when he slept, he cried out in horror and guilt.

They knew the signs of a guilty conscience when they saw one. For all his gifts, for all his elite training, for all that he had made himself into a holy warrior, what wracked Edward's body and soul was the overwhelming grief and mind-devouring turmoil that any well-adjusted human, H- and M- genes be damned, would feel after taking so many innocent lives.

Perhaps Morgana had given him that empathy, the other Hunters thought, or maybe she just awakened a sense of humanity that never should have been sleeping in the first place. Either way, it seemed so ingrained in the man that it couldn't be undone, and none of them wanted to try anyhow.

But a few of Edward’s hosts, upon further reflection on their ward's pitiful state, came to a chilling revelation. If Morgana really had awakened the dormant humanity in a zealous murderer…

The power to make someone see that they were wrong? Not just a definition of wrong, but really, objectively wrong? That wouldn't be the power of a witch; it would be the power of a god. If that's what it was, it was the most powerful magic that ever existed, and Morgana Le Fay truly was the most extraordinary Mythical to ever live.

And they feared to think what she might find in their hearts.