Witchbound Villain: Infinite Loop
300 – Camelot’s Bride

“Her Majesty said no water lilies for the wedding… uhh, actually no water lilies at all around the premise,” Bella said.

“Water lilies…?” Aroche paused mid-step in the corridor. The realization didn’t crash—it slid in with a slow, surgical precision. He nodded, controlled and composed. “Did someone order water lilies?” he asked, careful with the edges of his voice.

“Well, there’s a pond in the garden where the reception will be, and since everything else is going to be full of flowers, it’ll be weird if the pond is empty, right?” Bella answered.

“Mm.” His face stayed unreadable, but his gaze shifted—subtle, sharp, something folding inwards.

Bella noticed. She tilted her face upward, brows drawn in gentle tension, red-pupilled eyes catching his with open concern. “I didn’t know what it represented at first, but then I remembered that the Lady of the Lake used to use water lilies for her insignia.”

Viviane. Nimuë. The Lady of the Lake. Or, depending on the era and agenda, Little Morgan. A walking library of titles and enchantments. A mage so infamous she shared footnotes with Morgan Le Fay—not in reverence, but in warning.

She had also been the mother of Caliburn Pendragon, the infamous bastard emperor currently scheduled to marry the Infinite Witch Morgan Le Fay. The symmetry was insulting.

Fate really did have an impeccable sense of humor—one that made you want to walk into traffic.

The water lilies themselves, of course, hadn’t done anything wrong.

But when they stood in for a woman who had once swaddled Burn in lies and maternal detachment before depositing him into the arms of a man who wasn’t even his father, it became clearer than sunlight on steel why Morgan wouldn’t tolerate a single petal within the perimeter of her wedding.

Water lilies meant Viviane.

Viviane meant abandonment.

And this wedding—this hard-won, blood-soaked wedding—was not going to feature a single reminder of the woman who’d authored that beginning.

Morgan Le Fay, infinite and unaging, had loved only once. Just once, across all her eons, and it was enough to fracture the world. Caliburn Pendragon, forged of steel and parricide, had known only one woman who could stand beside his myth without crumbling beneath it.

Their love—tangled in near-incest, scorched by war, baptized in blood, betrayal, and the slow rot of history—had already survived worse than botany.

An ill-placed flower would not defile what ruin had already sanctified.

Aroche would see to that.

***

Three years ago, the sky over the magical world of Nethermere cracked, spewing spaceships from a so-called "superior" civilization. Their invasion? A spectacular flop. King Burn of Soulnaught—the most powerful man alive, a tyrant, and a genius—crushed them. Or so the legend goes.

But the invaders stayed, hawking shiny tech and worming their way into Nethermere’s future. Colonization loomed. Burn wasn’t having it. If anyone was going to conquer the world, it’d be him.

And he did conquer the world.

In every loop, in every doomed iteration, the world had bowed—its cities silent, its thrones empty but for him. But never like this. Never with this finality. Never with this peace.

With or without Wintersin, Nethermere was his.

And now, not only the world, but the Alliance itself came bearing reverence, not resistance.

The sky above Nethermere, once fractured by spells and war machines, was clear—unnaturally so. Only a single vessel crossed its silence: the flagship of Mahkato, the first Overlord to descend the land with slow, ceremonial grace. She stepped onto Camelot's soil with unshaken dignity, breathing deep the air of her enemy’s home.

And when the clock struck nine, across the span of nations and planes, the world did not tremble.

It watched—live, unblinking—as the wedding began.

The sky itself surrendered.

Clouds parted not by wind, but by spellwork—seams of silver light threading across the firmament. The air shimmered, and then the sky bloomed into a tapestry of vision: a live procession, seen not from above, but from within. From jungle cities to iron-kept towers, eyes turned upward—and beheld Camelot.

The palace grounds had never looked so immaculate. Marble archways bloomed with starshade roses and ether lilies, impossibly fragrant even through illusion. Trees bent gently under the weight of memory, and the reflecting pool mirrored the archway’s bloom with quiet, reverent symmetry.

No water lilies. Not one. But who would notice?

A thousand silks fluttered beneath the awnings, ceremonial guards standing between the living and the eternal. Everything had been arranged with obsessive care—not for grandeur, but for precision. For symbolism.

And beyond it all, behind a translucent screen of high enchantment, a woman sat.

Golden-haired. Unmoving. Haloed in silence and the soft, pale light that refracted off the enchanted veil draped over her head. The screen did not obscure her. It did not dare. It only framed her—Morgan Le Fay, or Saint Lucia Elle, or whatever name time hadn’t yet burned away.

But the world didn’t know that.

They saw only the bride. Clothed in white, seated in dignity so effortless it bent belief. The empress the emperor had sought, spoken of in rumor and gossips, now unveiled to the watching skies. She looked as though she had stepped out of a canvas—a painting, once crafted by his hand alone, now made flesh.

Young and old, not a single viewer could claim to have seen beauty so absolute. Her presence fractured realism. Her figure defied reason. No wonder, they whispered. No wonder the emperor waged a war. No wonder he conquered the world.

That must have been it.

That was the story now, wasn’t it?

Conquest rewritten as courtship. A holy war reborn as longing. Somehow, the reason for bloodshed had become romantic.

Then the trumpets rang.

The sky-screen tilted upward.

And through the veil of atmosphere came a shadow large enough to darken continents—a black dragon, vast and ancient, descending from the stratosphere with wings stretching from west to east, swallowing the horizon in a beat.

Atop its head stood a single man.

The Emperor.

Caliburn Pendragon.

When the black dragon touched down, lowering its massive head in submission, the ground trembled under the weight of legend. The man atop it dismounted, not with fanfare, but with inevitability.

And the world around him responded. One by one, the crowds below bent their knees, not to spectacle, but to the man who had made kneeling necessary.

The moment his metal heeled boots met earth, the dragon vanished in a shimmer of folding light. In its place stood a man. Seven feet tall, draped in black hair, horned, though one jagged stub betrayed a history of violence no one dared ask about. Isaiah, the Dragon Lord of the East, had arrived. Not riding beside the emperor. Standing behind him. That was all it took to remind everyone which man had tamed the sky.

From their places of reverent kneeling, the knights of the Round Table rose. Aroche Leodegrance. Landevale Leodegrance. Galahad. Gawain Agravaine. Percival. Bedivere. The old names. The ones written into wars and carved into temples. Groom’s procession, today. Ancient war machines, yesterday.

Inside the grand hall, behind the stage, the bride waited, sealed behind a screen of transparent silk and a polite circle of curtains that gave the illusion of privacy without actually providing any. Decorative modesty. Ceremony’s favorite lie.

Burn stopped walking.

His eyes narrowed. The curtains were barely curtains. Wisps, really. The veil on her head even thinner. Just a whisper pretending to be decorum. And behind it all: her. His bride. Sitting still in that unworthy cage of fabric.

It was an insult to restraint.

His vision swam. His pulse tripped over itself. His hands twitched. They’d gone to all this trouble for curtains that didn’t even try to conceal her. Why even bother? Why torment him with an illusion of distance when she was right there, close enough to devour?

He stepped forward—one pace, no more. A hair’s breadth from throwing dignity off the balcony.

“STOP!”

The voice cracked through the hall, small and slurred.

And so Burn did what no army could make him do.

He stopped.

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Let's gooooooo