The Green Knight

When axes bite the trees of a sacred glade or invaders ford a blessed stream, the mists thicken, the water goes glass-still, and the Green Knight comes: a towering rider in armor of verdigris and living leaf, mounted on a shadow-dark steed, bearing the Dolorous Blade that shears through mail as though it were wet parchment. He speaks seldom and fights like the anger of the land itself, and when he is cut down he simply comes apart into mist, to be seen again, whole and waiting, at the next threatened shrine.

To Questing Knights he is the final examiner. Somewhere on every road to the Grail the Green Knight waits at a ford or a chapel gate, and the seeker must face him: not defeat him, for no mortal can be certain of that, but stand. Those who hold their ground with a clean heart find the way onward open. Those who flee are never offered the Grail at all.

Who he is, the Lady's cult will not say. But peasants and prophetesses whisper the same guess: that when Gilles the Uniter took his death-wound and was borne away across the water, he did not entirely die, and that Bretonnia's founder keeps still the watch he swore, green now, and patient, and forever.