⚜ AUTHOR'S NOTE ⚜
Author here. 🥸
This is the second part of the edited version of "Of Death and Defiance", which I had broken into smaller blocks after editing, but with the changes are mostly to do with Mordred's characterisation, rather than the actual contents. 🙇
I'll try to do some more chapters in this hiatus, just to make up for my mistakes. Sorry. 🙇
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⚜ EVENING, 25TH JULY, 1990, THE ASTRAL PLANE ⚜
JASMINE DIDN'T RESIST. Stepping onto the train, she scanned its interior — only to find it flickering and shifting, just as it did outside. Models blurred together, designs overlapped, the very structure warping between eras, never settling on a single form.
"Why is it doing that?" Jasmine asked before she could stop herself.
Behind her, Mordred shrugged. "Unstable Probability."
Jasmine's eyes widened. She hadn't expected a direct answer. Glancing back, she found Mordred watching the shifting surroundings with an absentminded air — until their eyes met. Mordred raised an uninterested eyebrow.
"What?" she asked, her earlier malicious arrogance nowhere to be found, replaced by a strange nonchalance.
Jasmine narrowed her eyes slightly. "I just didn't expect a direct answer."
Mordred rolled her eyes but said nothing, sliding into her seat with effortless grace. Jasmine hesitated, then took the one opposite her doppelgänger, given the face-to-face seating arrangement.
The train began moving once more, and Jasmine felt the subtle lurch beneath her feet as it pulled forward. The soft hum of motion thrummed through the floor, steady and oddly comforting, like a heartbeat buried under layers of steel.
She glanced across at Mordred. The older woman reclined lazily in her chair with an air of practiced grace, eyes lifted toward the ceiling. Her expression was distant — not thoughtful, not watchful, just bored.
Jasmine studied her for a moment longer, unsure if she was waiting for conversation or deliberately avoiding it. But Mordred made no move, offered no words, not even a smirk. So, Jasmine turned away and looked out the window.
Outside, the platform slipped past, shrouded in mist and shadow. For a moment, the station remained whole — old-fashioned ironwork arches, flickering gaslights, and platforms that seemed to stretch endlessly into the fog.
Then, with a low, resonant hum, reality itself began to fracture.
The world outside them wavered, its form becoming less defined, a mere suggestion of its former self. The station's architecture melted into abstract, swirling patterns and shapes collapsing inward, almost like a singularity.
What emerged wasn't a landscape — it was a shattered mosaic of realities, a patchwork of ruined civilizations that seemed beyond mortal comprehension, like they had been built by beings on a scale far grander than anything human.
Celestial bodies hung disjointedly against a cosmic backdrop, as if suspended in a chaotic dance that didn't quite follow any natural law, twisting like fabric caught in a cyclone, folding over itself in impossible geometries.
Amid the ruins, cities half-formed and crumbling stretched endlessly. Bridges arched from nowhere to nowhere, suspended in the void. Roads writhed like serpents, spiralling into themselves before vanishing into the emptiness.
It was a maddening sight — beautiful, surreal, and terrifying all at once.
And it was not the Prison Realm.
As far as Jasmine knew, the Prison Realm — by both function and design — was static and oppressive, a dimensional cage built to isolate, suppress, and contain. Its laws were not merely absolute in a physical sense, but arcane as well: structured, codified, and inviolable.
Every known reliable record of studies on the Prison Realm described it as a construct of exacting magical discipline — a realm that operated under precise principles, regardless of how much disorder it attempted to fabricate.
This place, however, was something else entirely. It shifted constantly, not just in form but in essence. The magic here wasn't fixed or orderly. It trembled beneath her awareness, erratic and volatile.
Even if this was some elaborate illusion, it should have obeyed the Prison's rigid metaphysical framework — illusion required structure. This had none. The space itself felt wrong, as if the air had forgotten how to carry sound, or gravity only remembered to pull most of the time.
This was more like chaos pretending to be order, and failing at the seams.
Jasmine turned back to the woman sitting across from her, who now had her eyes closed. She hesitated, her words caught between curiosity and caution.
"What's going on?" she asked, her voice soft but firm.
Mordred didn't immediately respond. The train continued its eerie, steady hum, but there was no sign of acknowledgment from the older woman. For a moment, Jasmine wondered if she had been ignored altogether.
Then, with a deliberate slowness, Mordred languidly opened one eye, as though Jasmine's question barely warranted her attention. She met Jasmine's gaze with the same detached arrogance she always wore.
"Reality is falling apart. Isn't it obvious?" Mordred replied, her voice dripping with a mixture of boredom and amusement, as if this was a conversation beneath her. She stretched indolently in her seat, as if she had all the time in the world.
Jasmine fought to keep her frustration in check, the weight of her growing curiosity and irritation overpowering her fear of Mordred. "I don't suppose you could at least elaborate? There has to be a reason you're here."
Mordred suppressed a yawn. "Isn't it entirely possible," she said, her voice laced with boredom, "that I'm simply here on my way to somewhere else?"
Jasmine stared at her for a long moment, her gaze narrowing as she tried to gauge whether Mordred was either genuinely indifferent or playing some elaborate, centuries-old game. Jasmine couldn't quite tell — and that ambiguity was starting to grate.
"That's your answer?" she muttered, incredulous. "You expect me to believe you're just… passing through?"
Mordred stretched slightly in her seat, posture still annoyingly relaxed. "No," she drawled, almost lazily. "I suppose I owe you some truth. My objective here is to explain a few things."
Jasmine shifted, tension crackling beneath her skin. "Elaborate."
Mordred's gaze slid toward the window, but it didn't feel like she was looking through it — more like she was seeing something beyond it. Something further away than space or time.
"You'll be standing where I once stood," she said at last, her tone flattening. "And so, I have to explain some things, whether I want to or not. There are rules. Old ones. Older and greater than you can imagine, darling."
Jasmine scowled. "Then why not start with that? Why the cryptic nonsense? The head games?"
Mordred's smirk deepened, the lazy amusement returning like a mask slipping back into place. "Because," she said sweetly, "there aren't any rules against a bit of bullying."
Jasmine glared at her, but Mordred didn't so much as bat an eye. Instead, she flashed a malicious echo of a Cheshire cat's grin, as if Jasmine's anger were little more than entertainment.
Then, with a careless flick of her hand, she gestured negligently to the warping surroundings. "What you're seeing," Mordred said coolly, "isn't some isolated anomaly. And it's not an illusion either, as I'm sure you've deduced."
"It's more like… the failure of a system trying to uphold an endless stream of inconsistent data," she continued, her voice dripping with a nonchalant amusement. "And at its heart is you, darling."
Jasmine's heart skipped. "Me?"
Mordred rolled her eyes, a look of exasperation crossing her face as though explaining this was a tiresome inconvenience. "Yes. You're the anomaly in reality. Or, more precisely, the curse that clings to you, Error."
Jasmine's jaw tightened, her eyes narrowing. That name again — Error. She had sensed something off about herself for years, something beyond the malediction that haunted her, but hearing it from Mordred made the unsettling feeling cut deeper.
Mordred ignored her discomfort, gesturing again to the distorted landscape beyond the window, her tone clinical. "This is the consequence. You're not just affected by the instability — you are the instability. A live incongruity in what should otherwise be a stable continuum."
Jasmine recoiled slightly, feeling a strange mix of disbelief and a creeping sense of dread. "Why should I believe you?" she demanded, her voice harder now, but there was a tremor beneath the surface.
Mordred tilted her head, her expression not quite sympathetic, but not dismissive either. "Why? Because I'm the one who's been here, seeing the pieces fall apart. I've watched this… fault unfold before. And I've seen how it all ends."
"…What do you mean, 'ends'?" Jasmine asked slowly, her voice quieter now, as if saying it too loudly might make it real.
"I mean exactly what it sounds like," Mordred said simply. "Collapse. Not just of this place, or this realm, but of every probability tethered to it. Entire timelines fray like threadbare cloth. Realities that could have been, that should have been, just gone. Dissipated. Vanished."
The train gave a low, guttural hum beneath them, like a groan from the bones of the universe. Jasmine barely noticed.
Mordred's posture shifted. She leaned forward ever so slightly, and for the first time, the lazy detachment melted into something else — something sharper. Focused. Her gaze locked with Jasmine's, and her voice dipped lower, taking on a conspiratorial edge.
"Darling," she said, almost sweetly, "this isn't the first time reality has tried to erase you. Or seal you. Or forget you."
The words hung in the air like smoke — insidious and impossible to wave away.
Jasmine blinked. "You're saying this has… happened before?"
Mordred's smile turned wolfish. "Oh, in so many shapes. Sometimes you're locked away. Sometimes you're rewritten. Sometimes you're simply removed — like tearing a page from a book. But no matter what's done, no matter how thoroughly the system tries to scrub you out..."
She tilted her head slightly. "You come back. Or rather, the anomaly does. Again, and again, and again. Like a ghost in the machine. A memory the universe can't quite delete."
Jasmine stared at her, a thousand unspoken questions boiling beneath her skin. But she only managed one. "Why?"
Mordred chuckled, almost malevolently. "Because even if history can be rewritten, consequences can't always be undone."
Jasmine said nothing. She couldn't. Her thoughts felt scattered — like a mirror cracked from the center.
"You said timelines were fraying," she managed eventually. "Are you saying... I lived them all?"
Mordred gave a slow, theatrical shrug. "You, or what's inside you. It's hard to tell where the distinction lies anymore. That's what happens when you're not just a person, but a recursive event — an incarnation. One the universe keeps trying to correct."
Jasmine swallowed, remembering what Mordred said earlier — 'ancestral incarnation'. "And you were one of them."
Mordred's smile didn't fade — if anything, it deepened, but the arrogance in her expression now held the weight of something older, heavier. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and carrying the gravity of an ancient secret.
"More precisely," she said, her tone almost nostalgic, "I was the last true incarnation before you."
Jasmine frowned, confused. "The last?"
Mordred nodded absently. "But that was only one chapter in the long, tangled story."
Jasmine's fingers curled slightly at her side. "Historical accounts say you died fighting your father, Arthur Pendragon. That you were at the centre of Camelot's fall. Is any of that real?"
"All true," Mordred replied, almost bored. "But history is less a record than a rehearsal. And the system likes clean narratives. So, it rewrites. It prunes. It edits. Not everyone gets to stay in the final cut."
Jasmine's eyes widened. She had always suspected there was more to her place in the world than the stories told. A sense that her very existence was a disruption in the natural flow of things. But hearing Mordred speak about it, so matter-of-factly, was something else entirely.
"Also," Mordred added indifferently, breaking Jasmine's train of thought, "her name was Artoria, not Arthur."
Jasmine frowned, briefly befuddled by the correction. Why did that matter? The way Mordred had said it, like the distinction meant something deeper, caught her attention for a second. But it was a fleeting thought; her mind was already moving on.
"What else should I know?" she asked, voice low, edged with strain.
Mordred sighed unenthusiastically and glanced out the window of the train, though her gaze didn't seem to register the outside world. "There were others. Between you and me."
Jasmine's brow furrowed. "Others?"
"False incarnations," Mordred said. "Echoes. Shades of what could have been. Personas that should have carried the anomaly — but didn't. They lived their lives untouched by the true weight of the curse. No warping of fate, no recursion. Just... fragments."
"What happened to them?" Jasmine asked.
"They lived relatively normal lives," Mordred answered. "Figures scattered through history like half-remembered dreams. They bore the resonance, but not the recursion. They were never triggered."
"Triggered?" Jasmine echoed.
"The curse, the anomaly — it didn't activate in them," Mordred replied casually. Like a spell that failed to cast. They were sketches, not the painting. Echoes of you. Of me. Of what we were meant to be."
"And what kept them from triggering?" Jasmine asked, voice low.
Mordred's gaze became distant for a moment. "Me," she said. "A binding I took on after Camelot fell — after the duel with Artoria. A final act, a seal meant to stop an Armageddon. It worked, in a way. But it also… jammed the mechanism. Blocked the line, so to speak. The curse couldn't fully pass on. Not until now."
Jasmine stared at Mordred in confusion. "So those false incarnations… they were never me, were they?"
Mordred shrugged. "Depends on your view of things. Regardless, they were close enough that the system kept trying. Like a skipped record, scratching over the same groove, waiting for the real track to resume."
"So…" she began slowly, "those identities. They were… what — prototypes?"
Mordred gave a short, sharp laugh. "That would be generous. They were placeholders. The universe's way of buying time — stalling the recursion, until the conditions were right again. Like sending out paper lanterns in the dark, hoping one would reach the shore."
Jasmine's throat felt dry. "Did they know?"
"Not consciously," Mordred said, tilting her head. "But something always haunted them. They felt it — in dreams, in mirrors, in the hollow between heartbeats. A sense of being observed by something older. Like they were borrowed pages in a book that was still being written."
She paused, then added, "Most of them died young. Or vanished. Or lived lives that seemed off-script, even if no one could explain why."
"Because the story wasn't really theirs," Jasmine said.
Mordred looked at her, pleased. "Exactly. They were caught in a recursive draft. A misfire. But each one left a mark — subtle shifts in the weave of history. The ripple of a skipped stone."
Jasmine's fingers flexed slightly, as if reaching for something she couldn't quite touch. "And I'm supposed to be… the real version? The full incarnation?"
Mordred's smile thinned. "You are the recursion. You're not in the story. You are the story. A nexus where past anomalies converge and begin bleeding forward again. It's already started, hasn't it?"
Jasmine's heart skipped a beat.
People still whispered about it. The birth of the Potter twins, two being with such latent power that the world itself had seemed to reconfigure around them, as though reality were a script being hastily rewritten to make space.
Wards in ancient and powerful places had flickered for days. Spells collapsed mid-chant or surged beyond control. Rituals backfired. Ley lines trembled. Creatures mutated. Cursed spirits evolved.
She looked at Mordred, a flicker of uncertainty crossing her expression. "The world shifted when Ivy and I were born."
Mordred nodded imperceptibly. Jasmine's voice shook slightly as she tried to steady herself. "But why come to me now?"
Mordred leaned forward once more, the light above casting harsh shadows across her face. "The binding I placed — the one that stalled the anomaly — is unraveling. My seal was never meant to last forever. Reality is correcting itself, shifting the script."
She held Jasmine's gaze a moment longer, her eyes cold, calculating. Then, with a quiet finality, she added, "How do you think the Prison Realm Cube slipped past your estate's wards?"
The thought settled into her like a stone in water. It made a kind of terrible, poetic sense. No intruder, no thief, no saboteur — no one short of Merlin himself — could have slipped past the Gojo Estate's defenses.
The wards had been reforged after the renovation — not merely by wizarding standards, but by something older, deeper. Runecraft folded into geomancy, spirit-binding interlaced with celestial seals. The kind of protection meant to hold against time itself.
Jasmine swallowed. "Is that the reason why Voldemort was able to breach the Potter Estate? Back in 1981? Fate was helping him?"
Mordred didn't answer right away. She didn't need to. The silence between them was too heavy not to mean yes. Jasmine's pulse quickened, the chill of realization creeping up her spine.
The attack on the Potter Estate had never fully made sense, resulting in many speculations. The chief assumption was that Voldemort had used some form of powerful, obscure magic to breach the wards, but that explanation always raised more questions than answers.
Mordred said softly. "He was a pawn, an instrument, a catalyst. Events like these require more than power. They need narrative. They need probability. A logical sequence of events that fulfils the laws of cause and effect."
Jasmine paused, the weight of it sinking in. Her throat felt tight, dry. When she spoke, her voice was barely more than a whisper. "So... what am I supposed to do now?"
Mordred's gaze sharpened, her eyes glittering with an unsettling light. "Decide on your course of action," she said, her voice low and final. "Because the cycle is about to begin once more."
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