Coda
So Gwyn survives, while Llywelyn does not. His codename, his title and mantle left behind in the Antarctic wastes. As he leaves APERIS, that spectral knight's proclamation follows:
“When the time is right, we will meet again. And I shall return this blow in kind.”
Gwyn returns home, battle-weary, mind-scarred. And before he forgets, before the impulses recede, he's booked a flight to Argentina, the ink barely dried on his resignation from GRAIL, effective immediately. A new life, yes: one without Arthur; one without the sword.
And as the plane takes off, Gwyn remembers his grandfather talking about his forebears, setting off for Chubut Province, Argentina—a new future awaiting them.
He makes sure to keep in contact with Alejo. An email sent off everyday, sometimes more, as the once-archivist returns to Santiago, before APERIS vanishes from their minds entirely. Even as they forget what they once knew about one another, their friendship flourishes again anew. They'll never remember how they met. Perhaps it'll become an in-joke. But come what may, Gwyn and Alejo remain friends.
It's quiet out here. Restful. Gwyn misses Caerdydd, sometimes. Maybe one day he'll go back. But for now, this is enough.
Between years of savings and a handsome severance package from GRAIL, Gwyn is able to purchase a plot of land and a small house nearby Gaiman. In a few months he starts to feel right at home. It feels right, continuing in his ancestors' traditions. Not as colonisers or conquerors, but as people who wanted respite, knowing to respect these lands and its people. His Spanish is faltering at first, but the Welsh glints in his accent are welcome in this place.
He's able to leave behind the past. Mostly.
Alejo invites him to Santiago for New Year's, 2012, nearly six months after APERIS. Gwyn's still not used to the burning hot weather in January, despite his standard choice of a Hawaiian shirt, but he doesn't mind. The warmth is wonderful to Gwyn. It is a perfect day. And Alejo shows Gwyn the city as he knows it. They endlessly wander its streets and alleys and murals, chatting freely, getting to know one other again. Sometimes Gwyn attempts to respond in staggering Spanish, and Alejo delightedly responds in kind—though struggles just as much when Gwyn teaches him words in Cymraeg.
It becomes something of a tradition for them, friends in spite of forgetting those horrors that once bound them together.
And while Gwyn comes to later divide his time between Cymru and Argentina, there is one year where he remembers—just a little. It's 2015—when moonlight dapples the sheets of his bed, and all the creatures outside are silent; when there is a preternatural chill in the wind rustling through the fields outside, that sings of steel-stirred stories—and he hears a creak on the porch outside.
PENSACOLA.
Long-unstirred fragments of a once-familiar refrain shiver and crackle through his mind.
SHACKLETON.
“… I shall return this blow in kind.”
ELLSWORTH.
Gwyn lunges for the shotgun next to him, throwing on a jacket, rushes outside, kicks the front door open, and—
Beyond that boundary Llywelyn stands,
Axe brandished, eyes flaring,
Blade barrelling towards Gwyn's neck,
Cackling laughter roaring in his mind—
And then he's gone. Gwyn is left, panting, swearing he feels a nick on his neck (but there's nothing there)—the crowing of Sir Llywelyn echoing through the halls of his empty house. Gwyn ap Nuddson never sees him again.