The training hall, at this hour, was a mausoleum. Not the ancient kind—stone and sepulchre, the living kept at bay by ritual and age—but a modern sarcophagus, all cold gloss and purpose-built silence, humming faintly with the energy that once ran through entire continents. At the exact centre of the room, Sir Marigold sat cross-legged, the gold of his armour seeming to siphon the faint blue of the early morning into itself and render it sacred.
He did not meditate in the traditional sense. Meditation required either the luxury of detachment or the certainty that something worthwhile lurked in the depths of one's mind. Marigold had neither. He stared straight ahead, through the panoramic window that curved above the training mat and framed the Atlantic in its endless, indifferent sprawl. He watched as the grey of predawn bled into a faint, vagrant saffron, and wondered, for the hundredth time since yesterday, why Lord Hideyoshi had left him here—why he had been assigned to "the backline," as if the world's last great hope for humanity's defence had an administrative rear echelon.
Perhaps the HQ simply needed the extra muscle. Perhaps Hideyoshi, sentimental despite his armour, thought the place would feel more like home with a knight or two haunting the corridors. Or perhaps there was some secret, tactical reason: Rook & Pegasus lacked the proper support class, the science wing was under gunned, and they needed a knight on hand in case the next Emergence made the ocean itself rise up and eat the sky. Maybe—just maybe—Hideyoshi thought Marigold could be useful for R&D.
He almost laughed. Research and development had never been his strength. In his prior life, before the Calamity, Marigold had been one of the quiet ones, a creature of libraries and wildflowers, a connoisseur of art who could list the canonical seventy-two techniques of printmaking but had never once made a print of his own. He had no patience for experimentation. He liked his answers neat, his proofs elegant. It was, he had once been told, an endearing flaw—until the world ended and left him with nothing but brute force.
Now, he was a knight. Now, the only proofs that mattered were delivered at the tip of a sword, and the only experiments worth running were the ones that left a crater.
He looked down at his hands, at the gold gauntlets interlocked and motionless on his knees. The sight was, even after a year, mesmerizing. The armour was heavy before but then, it become lighter the more he learned about how to become a knight, of course thanks to his master, Hideyoshi who become his teacher while battling anomalies from all over the world. On quiet days, Marigold would flex his fingers and watch the light catch in the channels between the plates, wondering if there was how such a sight there more beautiful.
Then, he closed his eyes.
A memory, fresh as a wound: Malaysia, the Kuala Lumpur camp, the stench of sweat and scorched plastic in the air. There had been no glory in that fight, just the raw panic of the cornered. An anomaly had been emerged at dawn from beneath the earth, three kilometers north, growing faster than any prior event. It started as a shadow on the skyline, then a column of blue-black smoke, then—impossibly—a pair of arms, longer than the commuter trains that once spidered through the city, reaching down into the slums as if to scoop the whole neighborhood into its palm. In instant, buildings, cars and people destroyed and killed.
It was chaos.
The evacuation failed before it began. Not many people are lucky enough to survive such attack. On that day, so many children become orphans and so many wives become widows. The streets choked with gridlock and abandoned luggage, screams rising and falling like police sirens, until even the sirens gave up and silence took over.
He opened his eyes. The ocean was still there, indifferent and infinite, but in the glass he caught a glimpse of his own reflection, the gold helmet an unblinking mask. He remembered how it felt, that first time—the agony of becoming, the way the world seemed to warp and refract as the armor claimed him. The codex had said nothing about the pain. The codex had said nothing about the voice.
He remembered, suddenly and vividly, the moment the voice spoke to him.
The voice echoed into his ears. It was a man reached out to him with pure light behind him, and he offered him a choice: to become the one who are capable of change his and other people fate. The phrasing was more elegant, more poetic, but that was the root of it. The world would end unless he stood in the breach. He had never been offered so little and yet been so unable to refuse.
He placed a hand on his helmet. The gold was warm, not with sunlight, but with the residual heat of memory.
On that very moment, he accepted. He said yes to him, yes to the agony, yes to the weight of a thousand generations of dreams and hope. The change was instant. A light engulfed him morphing into what to be an armor, every plate snapping into place, and when he opened his eyes again, the world was—different. Brighter, sharper, cut through with lines of power he had never imagined.
He remembered the first time he called the sword. His hand reached into the sky.
The sword was more gigantic than the average skyscrapers.
It appears from beyond the clouds and the sky, as he called the sword he can hear everyone, their dreams and prayers, and when it appeared it was so beautiful, so monstrously beautiful, that for a moment Marigold could only stare. The blade was bathed in golden light. It was the gold of a dying star, incandescent, humming, refracting every drop of daylight into a thousand rainbows.
The anomaly was an abomination indifferent to beauty, a monstrous tower of bone and shadow, with eyes blazing like floodlights and arms as colossal as radio towers. It reached for Marigold atop a skyscraper with a terrifying inevitability. In that moment, Marigold swung his hand down with a fierce command. The majestic blade, ablaze in a searing golden radiance, plummeted from the sky like a meteor.
The blade tore through the anomaly as if it were tissue. There was a sound, not quite a scream, not quite a thunderclap, but something that vibrated the world itself. The monster collapsed, not as a corpse, but as a concept—it simply ceased to exist, cut out of reality by the golden light.
"Then; my action caught someone attention"
Few days after, Hideyoshi arrived at camp, walking through the panic like a ghost. Behind him, Syr Lancelot, bleeding from a wound that would have felled any other man, carrying two children under his left arm and his own helm under the right. The sight was so absurd, so mythic, that for a moment the crowd simply parted, watching as the two knights strode past.
Hideyoshi stopped in front of Marigold. He remembered it perfectly: the way Hideyoshi's armour seemed to refract not just light but history, the lines of the suit speaking of centuries of discipline, of wars remembered by no one and strategies lost to every library but his own mind. Hideyoshi looked at Marigold, and in that moment, all the noise fell away.
"So you're the golden knight that I've been hearing about?" Hideyoshi asked, voice soft, as if they were the only two left in the world.
"Yes, I am. Are you also a knight?" Marigold remembered saying, even as his hands shook.
"Indeed I am. I hope you're ready…" said Hideyoshi. "To be more than a witness."
He hesitated. In that moment, but Hideyoshi was not looking for a hero. Only someone who could stand, for a little while, in the space between hope and certainty.
Marigold nodded. "Yes."
He came back to himself, to the present, and found he was still staring at the ocean.
He wondered, again, why Hideyoshi had left him here. Maybe it was for research, maybe for morale, maybe as a symbol—the last knight, stationed at the edge of the world, waiting for the final call. Or maybe, he thought, it was just that Hideyoshi knew he would stay, even when everyone else was gone.
He laughed, the sound muffled inside the helmet. "Some bodyguard I am," he said to the window.
The reflection stared back, unamused. He saw, in the glass, not just himself but every version of himself—the frightened boy, the new-minted knight, the legend-in-waiting, the man who had never really wanted to fight but did it anyway.
He wondered if that was enough.
He sat with the question, letting it breathe, letting it find its own answer.
The ocean did not reply, but the sky, at last, began to brighten. Somewhere out there, Hideyoshi and the others were already in the thick of their next battle, pushing the boundaries of survival one meter at a time. Here, in the stillness, Marigold waited—alone, armoured, a lighthouse to a world that no longer believed in the possibility of rescue.
He waited, because that was what Knights did. He waited, because someone had to.
He waited, because it was, in the end, the only thing left that still felt like hope.
"Still remembering the good old days, huh?" The voice is familiar, yes, that is the same voice that offered him to change fate itself. Gilgamesh manifests from a thin air, in the training hall—like a veil of magical curtain opens drop from his head to his feet.
Marigold opens his eyes. The ocean vanishes, replaced by the polished expanse of the mat, and there, standing precisely at the place where light and shadow collide, is Gilgamesh: resplendent in his own version of the knightly armour, gold where Marigold's is matte, crimson where the world dares not be, every inch of him a study in controlled violence and not-so-controlled ego. He grins, the kind of grin that would unnerve a god, and crosses his arms as he surveys Marigold's seated posture.
"Cannot forget the past just like I am," Gilgamesh says, tried to tease him a little. "You never were one for the victory banquets or the after-action celebrations. Always the philosopher and the ponderer." He steps forward, the floor vibrating with each footfall—partly the armour, mostly the attitude.
Marigold doesn't rise immediately. He studies the reflection in the visor—two figures in gold, one looming, one small. "Well," he says, voice modulated by the rebreather, "are we going to speak on what happened a couple of days ago, or do you have some other lesson in mind?"
Gilgamesh scoffs, as if the answer is self-evident. "You're still dwelling on the decision, aren't you? Hideyoshi's split—scattering the Knights, sending everyone off alone, like pieces on a board. Not the way we did it, back in the glory days."
Marigold shrugs, and only then does he allow himself to stand. The full height of his armour brings him nearly even with Gilgamesh, though the Original's presence still dominates the space. "I suppose I just want to understand. I was never the leader. I don't see all the variables."
"That's why you'll be a better knight than any of us," Gilgamesh says, and there's a warmth to it, a genuine pride beneath the bravado. He drops the arms and gestures at the window, the ocean, the entire impossible vista. "You want to know the real reason for all this? It's because you, and Lancelot, and even the dour ones like Agravain—never give up. Hideyoshi sees it. He trusts you to endure."
Marigold considers the compliment, unsure whether to accept or parry it. "And if we fail? What does that make us, then?"
Gilgamesh doesn't hesitate. "Knights are hard to kill, Marigold. And even if they fall, they don't break. They just become part of the legend." He laughs, the sound reverberating off the walls like thunder. "It's why I picked you. You'll march until the end, and even if the end comes, you'll turn around and dare it to do better next time."
Marigold smiles. He can't help it. "You have a high opinion of your successors."
"I do," Gilgamesh replies, and the bombast softens, just for a moment. "I've seen a lot of candidates, boy. Most crumble. Some turn inward, or chase glory, or get lost in the power. But you? You're still here, still asking questions, still worrying about the right way to do things. That matters."
The compliment lands heavier than Marigold expects. For a moment, he lets himself feel it, the pride, the relief, the sense that maybe all this waiting is not a sentence but a trust. "Thank you," he says, voice barely above a whisper.
Gilgamesh nods, pleased. "Now that we've done our little dance of mutual respect, it's time for the next lesson." He cracks his neck, the vertebrae popping like distant gunshots. "You need more meditation."
Marigold tilts his head, the motion comically exaggerated by the helmet. "You're serious?"
"Of course I'm serious!" Gilgamesh booms, and the old swagger is back, uncontainable. "Your mind is a mess. You let your thoughts chase each other in circles, never resting, never committing. If you want to master 'My Power', you have to start by mastering yourself. Otherwise, the sword will always be heavier than you are."
"Fine", Marigold turns his head from Gilgamesh as he does not want to do any more meditations.
The words are a rebuke, but also a challenge. Marigold accepts it, as he always does, and folds himself back to the floor, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees. This time, he keeps his eyes open, watching Gilgamesh as the Original paces around him like a drill sergeant and a proud father all at once.
"Good," Gilgamesh says. "Focus on the sound of your breath. Feel and hear their dreams and hopes. They are your soul and power; without them you will be weak."
Marigold tries. It isn't easy—the mind wants to wander, to replay every mistake, every failure, every moment of doubt. But he does as instruct, and after a while, the noise in his head recedes, replaced by a steady, golden hum.
Gilgamesh circles him once, twice, then stops and leans in. "You're getting there," he says, voice softer now.
Marigold nods, the movement slow and deliberate. "I heard them…"
"Good," Gilgamesh says.
Gilgamesh smiles in return, and for a moment, he looks not like one of the Knights' Predecessor, but like a man who has fought a thousand battles and still found a reason to laugh. "Until next time, then," he says, and with a flash of light and a ripple of displacement, he is gone.
The training hall is silent again. Marigold sits in the centre, breathing, watching the ocean and the sky and the endless horizon.
He knows he is not alone, not truly. The world turns, the battles rage, and somewhere out there, the other Knights are holding their own lines, just as he holds his. But for now, in this moment, there is only the silence and the gold and the promise that, whatever comes, he will meet it—not as a myth, but as himself.
He closes his eyes, and this time, the meditation comes easy.