The funny thing is, when you''re talking about Arthurian lore, there’s no one story that’s central to the whole thing. There’s no neat, universal canonical text that everyone who likes this sort of thing agrees is essential reading.


    To be honest, it’s all basically a massive, tangled pile of half-remembered myths, propaganda, and medieval poetical fanfiction, where every storyteller over the past thousand years has taken a turn at throwing their own personal spin into the pot.


    I mean, even if you just want to focus on the Big Beasts—your Arthurs, your Merlins, and your Guineveres—if you find one version where events play out one way, there will be another, equally famous one, that swears the exact opposite happened. And yet another where a key protagonist is a time travelling-alien in a blue box and Mordred is Dr Samuel Beckett.


    Most people agree, though, that if you want to get a handle on the broad strokes of all things Camelot—the names, the faces and most of the usual story beats—you can do worse than start with The Once and Future King by T.H. White. For those of you who are visual learners, this is basically just Disney’s The Sword in the Stone but with extra existential crises.


    After that, if you’re feeling intellectual, you can dive into Le Morte D''Arthur. Don’t get fazed by all the fancy French, there are some really solid translations out there - especially if English with too many vowels and a pathological fear of punctuation makes your head hurt. Then, once you’re fully Red Pilled, there’s a bloke called Geoffrey of Monmouth who did a lot of heavy lifting back in the day, and weaved together some very creative liberties into his History of the Kings of Britain which he convinced pretty much everyone was cold, hard – ever so well researched - facts.


    Now, all of that might make it sound like I know a little of what I’m talking about here. Not a bit of it.  Don’t get carried away on the tide of my erudite bullshit. Basically, I cribbed most of that from a battered copy of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s King Arthur Trilogy that my dad gave me one Christmas—most likely a panicked charity shop purchase after he remembered he had two daughters and needed to even out the gift pile some.


    Well, that, and spending far too much quality time hanging around a bunch of No Day Passes Without Me Thinking About the Roman Empire types who would go absolutely feral at the slightest mention of the Saxons.


    In short, for those who skipped all of that, what I’m saying is: anyone who tells you they definitively knowhow the stories of Arthur are supposed to go is chatting all the shit.


    Which segues nicely—or at least, I think it does, I’m quite drunk—into Merlin asking me what I know about King Lot.


    Or, more accurately, King Lots.


    I should note, my dear, that although you seem to be doing your best to convince yourself you are . . . is the term ‘buzzed?’, there is no alcohol in existence which can overcome your current level of cultivation.


    Merlin . . .


    Fucking off right now, my dear. Enjoy your monologue.


    Cheers. Now, where was I?


    Ah yes. King Lot.


    King Lots.


    Plural. Because, somewhat worringly, I have a number of very distinct, very different memories of the role that King Lot plays in Arthurian Lore in my head.


    There’s, potentially, a couple of good reasons for this.


    The first is, as mentioned above, there’s no really definitive version of the stories of Camelot and King Arthur. And, when it comes to King Lot, there’s a whole lot of people who play a bit fast and loose with that particular name. You''d think someone would have sat down and gone, "Look, we''ve already got enough Lancelots, Gawains, and Mordreds running around stabbing each other in increasingly baroque family dramas. Maybe let’s try to keep the actions of the back character reasonably settled. You know, just to create a sound frame narrative that doesn’t piss people off. "


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    But no. Because medieval storytelling conventions apparently followed the logic of a pub argument that got wildly out of hand.


    Depending on which account you read, King Lot of Orkney is either a respectable warlord who marries Arthur’s sister and fathers the entire Knights of Problematic Nepotism, including Sir Gawain. Or he’s a petulant upstart who rebels against Arthur, gets trounced, and dies in a way that strongly suggests that particular author had some unresolved sexual tension around him. Or he’s a weirdly passive figure who exists solely so more important people can use his name to justify their own melodrama. Or, and this I think is my favourite, ‘King Lot’ is not even a real character, but a convenient place-holder for "generic Northern King who gets involved when convenient."


    Kind of like Sean Bean, and with exactly the same long-term survival instincts.


    So, it’s not all that surprising that there are an awful lot of versions of King Lot in my head and there doesn’t seem to be much agreement in any of them whether he was a good guy, a bad guy, or just there to hold a place in the plot until something more interesting happened.


    I kind of know how he feels.


    However, that isn’t the reason why I’m halfway through a bottle of Celtic moonshine.


    No, the biggest problem me and the Big M are having right now isn’t just contemplating whether I should just accept that Arthurian canon is a mythological house party where nobody’s checking the guest list.


    Our biggest issue is that we’re trying to decipher how much of this confusion is just some medieval monk shrugging and going ‘fuck it, someone else in a few centuries can straighten all this out’ and how much is the bloody timeline changing.


    And, let me tell you, that’s a pretty big Either/Or for me right now.


    The whole reason I’ve been playing along with Merlin’s crapshoot thus far – touch harsh, my dear – is for the sole reason that my actions are maintaining the integrity of my own timeline and keeping my sister well and happy. Sure, there’s been a few bumps and scrapes along the way – sorry for the whole conflagration thing Exeter – but, by and large, I think I’ve been able to keep my part of the show on the road.


    “What the fuck’s going on, Big M? Arthur’s on the throne, Guinevere’s up the duff and Lancelot is training up a banger of a Knight of the Round Table crew. Things are about as consistent with the way I remember things as I think I could reasonably have been expected to keep them.”


    Oh, am I allowed to talk again?


    “Fuck’s sake! Stop being such a drama queen. If the timeline is intact, why have I got so many different versions of King Lot in my head? And why is he suddenly central to a quest to allow us access to Stonehenge.”


    Rhyddrech Hael met King Lot once.


    Both I and Merlin paused, giving Drynwyn the chance to expand. It felt like the silence stretched on for the length of an opera.


    “Was there any more to that, Drynwyn?” I said, eventually.


    No. Not really. It just feels like we’re doing an awful lot of chatting and not so much stabbing lately. I was feeling left out.


    I don’t know what I found more alarming. Being in possession of a suddenly extremely needy magical sword, or that Drynyn had just delivered five sentences without swearing. I tried to summon the emotional reserves to deal with that, but came up wanting. Whatever was going on with it, would have to wait.


    “Big M, back t you. Spill, what’s occurring with King Lot?”


    Okay. Please bear in mind that this is just speculation – albeit, as it is coming from me, likely to be extremely well-informed and accurate speculation.


    “Yes, yes, yes. All hail Merlin the Great.”


    Quite. Well, it strikes me as somewhat interesting that you are on hand for the manifestation of the Nemain who, as they explain, are very interested in King Lot’s spear. Both in terms of there being a prophecy I have never heard of being connected to him – “His crown lies broken. His grave sealed. His spear remains bound” – and that it seems we cannot complete our own quest to make use of the Meridian Stones to destroy the Saxon cultivators without recovering Lot’s spear for them.


    “Is it just me, or are our quests getting much more complicated? I remember when the most I had to do was simply rock up at Camelot and cultivate a bit to get the job done.”


    Indeed. Well, we can spend some time discussing that or we can deal with the problem before us. Which would you prefer, my dear?


    “You know, I’d kind of love it if we could do both.”


    I wish we were fighting something right now.


    “Fuck’s sake. Okay. So, what are we saying here? That there’s something timey-wimey around King Lot?”


    That’s exactly what I’m saying, my dear. But don’t take my word for it. Because, if my calculations are correct, our next fast travel destination should be his throne room.