S03 · E14

Alistair

Vane can't sleep. His memory moves through his past the way memory does in the dark - without order, without mercy. A summer afternoon in 2003, his brother laughing at something he said. The lab. The blueprints. His brother's face in the moment before. The silence after, alone with 217 dead and a power he never asked for. The years of building the faction framed now not as conviction but as penance - the shape his guilt took when it needed somewhere to go. A compound in suburban London. A child left alone in the wreckage. He has never told anyone: that she died in his war, and he carries her. As dawn comes up he holds one thought - he has spent years building toward peace and is about to surrender every version of himself that could ever feel it. He goes to find Mordred. They stand in a corridor. "Are you ready?" Mordred, after a long moment: "I've been ready for three hundred years. I just didn't know what I was ready for."