[ All of it and none of it. She assumes a woman, it is always a woman or country, and men talk about them in the same breadth in the same tone. They go just as mad, forsake themselves as dearly for a lover's sigh, their children's laughter, their countries soil. Which is to say, no, she doesn't know. But she knows those actions, those deeds, those words. I am a knight, sworn to protect the realm.

How far Galahad had fallen. To his knees and then down again. She isn't sure he can see any light anymore. His denial when she called him what he is. Knight. He looked at her like her touch hurt him for his need of it and he fought for her like she was his Queen, and he reminded her what words like fragile meant, but oh, how he could not bare for her to know such truths. Too much like Byerly, flinching from truths as she sees them.

A Knight no longer, he had said. Did he not understand that he would always be a Knight? He had stood taller than them all, he had risen far beyond their definitions of such. ]

No. But at times, we must go to the dirt, the dark, the grime, for that love and if that is what love asks of us. I know a man, Sir Galahad by title - [ she swallows, hurts, almost, she hasn't spoken of the greatest worry she has of her home, to anyone. She dare not, and she shouldn't not to someone like Byerly who would not forget. ] - his crest reads, Post Tenebras Veritas. [ She had never seen it save in embroidery upon his shoulders, not carved in stone of family estates, painted onto long lineages.

But she had seen it on his blade, seen it in his eyes when he looked at that darkness with her and strode into by her side. She sees it in Byerly now, caught as he is in the hold of her fingers. Brushed in the swipe of her thumb against the corner of his mouth. ] 'After darkness, truth.'