Fallen Falcon

Stripped to his trousers and his beherit, Griffith hangs by the wrists in a lightless cell when the King arrives, whip in hand. Voicing his disappointment in the once-promising general, the ruler lays into him, yet Griffith takes the lashes without a sound, almost detached from the whole ordeal. Between strokes the King rambles about his love for his headstrong daughter and his own sense of defeat before the vastness of life, certain that fresh wars will follow the one just closed with Tudor. Griffith, he says, has robbed him of the one warmth he had left in the world.

Piecing together why no marriage was ever arranged for Charlotte, Griffith names the King's buried craving for his own child, then coldly reminds him that Midland's prosperity rested on the general's unbroken record of success, a matter he now finds worthless. Enraged, the King flogs him to collapse and hands him to a stunted, harelipped torturer with a jutting brow, ordering the man to do as he pleases so long as the prisoner survives another year. He decrees death for anyone who breathes a word of the scandal, then departs, calling the Falcon grounded for good. He next goes to Charlotte, drugged into sleep after weeping over the arrest. Fixated on the thought that Griffith knew every part of her, he trembles as he loosens her gown; she wakes to his tongue at her breast and screams in horror. Below, Griffith sits chained and alone, his mind again on how meaningless it all is.

The chapter is part of the Golden Age Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 14 on July 8, 1994, spanning twenty pages. It drives the King of Midland's descent and cements Griffith's fall from grace ahead of his year in captivity.