actual mahou shoujo Arturia Pendragon ♔ Ｓａｂｅｒ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
regalbearing) wrote2012-11-06 03:26 pm
regalbearing) wrote2012-11-06 03:26 pm
Entry tags:
[ ooc: ＡＰＰＬＩＣＡＴＩＯＮ ]
Player nickname: Fel
Player DW:tinfoiltennis
Way to contact you:
Email: fantasygirl@blueyonder.co.uk
AIM: hangswithtraps
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Tenfel
Other:
Are you at least 15?: no I am an adorable shotaro boy who has fooled you all this time. (okay no yes I am :’D)
Current Characters: the tenth Doctor, Pearl Fey, Lyle Dylandy, Roxas, Madoka Kaname, Castiel
Character: Saber ( aka Arturia Pendragon, King of Knights )
Fandom: Fate/Zero
Character Notes:
History:
Saber is one of the Heroic Spirits that may be summoned by a mage bearing the appropriate Command Seals to fight as the Servant half of a Master-Servant pair in the Grail wars, contests in which seven of these pairs in total compete for the chance to wish for a miracle from the Fuyuki Holy Grail. Before she became one of these spirits, however, in life she was known as Arturia Pendragon, or more commonly, King Arthur of Camelot, the Once and Future King of Britain.
Yes, King Arthur is a girl.
The King Arthur legend is pretty well-known, so I won’t take up too much time with it here. Arturia was born as the heir to the throne at a time when the island of Britain was pretty much falling apart at the seams with war and chaos brought about by the Roman Empire’s collapse. Her father, Uther Pendragon, was disappointed at the child being a girl, as he could not make her his successor. As a result, she was entrusted by Merlin to the care of Sir Ector, and raised as a knight alongside his biological son Kay. On the day the prophecy had foretold as the day that would reveal Britain’s rightful king, Arturia pulled Caliburn from the stone it had been set in, marking her as the true king. From the moment she pulled the sword from the stone, she ceased to age and became “something not human”.
The next ten years were marked by victory after victory in battle, with Arturia commanding many knights including those of the famous Round Table. Unfortunately, it was not to last. Arturia had married Guinevere due to the expectations for a King to have a wife; however, Lancelot, one of her most trusted knights and closest friends, had fallen in love with Guinevere. Although Arturia knew of this and didn’t blame either party, the affair would be one of the cracks that would cause the eventual downfall of her reign, and the repercussions from the affair’s discovery would come to affect both Arturia and Lancelot even after the two became Heroic Spirits. Arturia’s reign came to an end at the Battle of Camlann, where she was mortally wounded by Mordred (who incidentally is a homunculus created from sperm from when Merlin thought he’d turn Arturia into a dude and give her a penis for a bit for shits and giggles and just don’t even question the Nasuverse, okay.) As she lay on her deathbed, she began to regret her failures as King, and at that point made a contract with the world – in return for her services as a Heroic Spirit, she wanted a chance to gain the Holy Grail to save her country by undoing her kingship.
ENTER THE EVENTS OF FATE/ZERO.
Arturia is summoned under the Saber class by Emiya Kiritsugu, a chosen Master who wishes to use the Grail to save the world. However, as Saber and Kiritsugu’s personalities aren’t compatible, and also so that Kiritsugu can persue his strategy from behind the scenes, Saber is paired with Kiritsugu’s wife, Irisviel von Einzbern, as a proxy Master. The three of them travel to Fuyuki to await the start of the Fourth Grail War, and do not have to wait long; that night, Saber is challenged by Lancer. In the ensuing battle, the two gain a respect for each other, although Saber sustains a cursed wound from one of the other Servant’s weapons that leaves her unable to use her left hand, and thus unable to use the power of her Noble Phantasm (her ultimate weapon/attack, aka Excalibur. It’s kind of A Big Deal).
The fight quickly degenerates into chaos after that as Rider, Archer and Berserker arrive on the scene one after the other. Things only come to an end when after Lancer’s Master, Kayneth, uses one of his Command Seals to compel his Servant to help Berserker kill Saber; Rider intervenes to preserve Lancer’s honour and allow Saber and Lancer to finish their duel another time.
Retreating to the Einzberns’ Fuyuki castle, Iri and Saber have a run-in with the utterly batshit Caster, who’s under the delusion that Saber is his long-lost Joan of Arc; although she drives him off, she’s unable to convince him that that’s not the case. At the castle, more differences between Kiritsugu and Saber become apparent; she finds his decisions to kill Kayneth in an attempt to remove her handicap, and to avoid Caster (who has an unfortunate habit of torturing and killing children) in order to allow another Servant to kill him, totally deplorable. At that moment, Caster himself shows up at the castle, and Saber goes out to engage him. However, she is unable to get anywhere close due to her handicap and the endless supply of tentacle monsters he can call with his magic. Luckily, at that moment Lancer shows up, and the two manage to damage Caster’s Noble Phantasm and drive him back,flirting madly the whole time you cannot tell me that’s not what they were doing. Lancer leaves soon after to help his Master, sensing that he’s in danger from Kiritsugu, and Saber allows him to leave out of chivalry and due to the promise they made to finish their duel.
After the chaos settles down and Kiritsugu has left, Iri and Saber find the castle invaded once more, this time by Rider, who just rides in through the front door on his chariot with a huge keg of wine like it ain’t no thang. Turns out he’s there to hold an impromptu King’s Banquet, and so Rider, Archer and Saber all proceed to sit around drinking wine and arguing about kingship (or rather, Saber and Rider argue about kingship and Archer just sits there being amused. Or possibly bored. It’s hard to tell with him.). Saber almost has a heroic BSOD when Rider more or less viciously shoots her Grail wish down as the foolish dream of a little girl and then proceeds to completely annihilate the interloping Assassin using the army of supporters inside his Reality Marble.
Soon after, Saber, Iri, and Maiya move to a new base of operations, a traditional Japanese house. There, Saber discovers that Iri is growing weaker as a result of being the designated vessel for the Grail’s appearance. As they settle in to their new base, they sense a hideously strong magical presence coming from the city’s river, and upon arriving discover that Caster has magicked up what is essentially a giant river Cthulu I swear I am not making this up. Saber teams up with Rider and Lancer to fight the tentacley monstrosity and then follows three episodes of them fighting this thing while Berserker wrecks things and gets on Archer’s nerves and Archer mostly just watches everything disdainfully. Eventually, after Lancer breaks the curse that prevents her hand from healing, and with Rider using his Reality Marble as a distraction, Saber is able to unveil Excalibur and use it to defeat the monster – and Caster – in one fell stroke. Unfortunately in the process she unwittingly makes Archer think he has leave to creep all over her from afar.
Following a tip-off from Kiritsugu, Iri and Saber arrive at the hideout that Kayneth is using. Lancer and Saber decide the time is right to finish their duel, but Saber is shocked when, part way through their fight, Lancer suddenly impales himself on his own lance, cursing everyone around him; unknown to either of the Servants, Kiritsugu had blackmailed Kayneth from behind the scenes with a deal; Kiritsugu would put a Geas on himself that would prevent him harming Kayneth or his fiancée, if Kayneth used his remaining Command Seal to force Lancer to commit suicide. Naturally this doesn’t work out in Kayneth’s favour at all because Kiritsugu is a cheating bastard and Maiya shoots Kayneth and Sola from afar as soon as Lancer is dead, forcing Saber to mercy-kill Kayneth so he doesn’t die slowly and painfully. This has the added effect of driving a further wedge between Saber and her Master.
Iri’s condition continues to worsen as more Servants fall and the Grail nears completion, meaning that she can no longer accompany Saber when she goes to search for the remaining Servants to eliminate them. One day while Saber is out looking for Rider, she is suddenly compelled to return to their hideout by Kiritsugu activating a Command Seal, where she finds Iri has been kidnapped by Rider and Maiya is lying severely wounded. Saber leaves to follow the trail, but after catching up with Rider and his Master during a frankly mind-boggling motorcycle-chariot chase that breaks most of the laws of physics, she discovers that they were not the real kidnappers; it was another Servant in disguise. The two Servants still duel, however, which results in Saber blowing up Rider’s chariot before riding off.
On the final night of the Grail war, Saber finds herself attacked by Berserker. The fight is furious, but during it she realizes that Berserker must be someone she knew in life, as he’s able to catch her sword despite the length of it being hidden with Invisible Air. She’s shocked when Berserker removes his helmet and the spell concealing his identity to reveal none other than Lancelot. Although Saber is able to defeat him after the death of his Master, she is still shaken and preoccupied, believing it to be the fault of her mistakes in life that her old friend turned to madness.
Making her way to the Grail’s stage, Saber finds Archer, who suggests that she surrender and become his wife instead. Saber refuses and prepares herself for a hopeless fight, but the two are interrupted by the arrival of Kiritsugu, who uses his remaining two Command Seals to force Saber to destroy the Grail with Excalibur without telling her the reason was that he’d discovered the Grail was corrupted by evil. Compelled against her will, Saber destroys it with her Noble Phantasm’s attack before vanishing. She abruptly finds herself back at the aftermath of one of the final battles of her life, regretting that she both failed to win the Grail and to understand her people, and still wishing that she had never become king.
Personality:
Saber is for the most part an outwardly calm yet determined individual. She possesses an incredibly strong will, and although she remains polite and dignified at almost all times, she also holds no qualms about speaking her mind to people, regardless of the situation. If she believes someone to have made a mistake, or if someone has done or said something that she finds personally offensive, she will tell them so without a second thought. One could go as far to say that she is very stubborn, and they would be right; Saber is one who holds fast to her path and her ideals, and her pride means she does not take kindly to any slights against them.
Her determination is combined with the strong sense of duty and chivalry that she holds from being the self-proclaimed King of Knights. To Saber, one’s duty, to either one’s country or one’s master, is among one of the most important things one can bear. As a result, she is loyal as well as stubborn, and values the traits of honour and chivalry, both in other people and in herself. Linked to her sense of honour, she has a strong moral code that she holds herself to rigidly, and finds it difficult if not impossible to see eye to eye with anyone who goes against it. As such, she is heavily against any course of action that would result in innocent people getting hurt, although she grudgingly accepts that there are some situations when this is inevitable. This is one of the main bones of contention between her and Kiritsugu throughout the series, as despite feeling some measure of loyalty to him as her designated Master, she cannot accept his methods (win by any means) to be either right or honourable.
Saber’s sense of duty and her strong morals are what led her in her human life to originally take up the mantle of kingship; although she knew that it would be a hard road and she would cease to be human as soon as she pulled Caliburn from the stone, she was resolute and claimed that she was prepared to make that sacrifice. For Saber, the prosperity and well-being of her country and people is paramount, and this is reflected in her views on kingship. For her, being a king is about offering one’s life to serve one’s people regardless of how lonesome the path is or the cost to one’s own desires, and this sense of self-sacrifice for the sake of others forms a central part of her identity. Indeed, she has stated that she would readily die for her ideals.
However, it also forms a great source of grief for her; due to the way her reign ended, Saber believes herself to have been a failure of a ruler. As a result of her guilt, her only wish is to save her country by undoing her reign so that someone more fitting can take up the mantle instead. Her past failures weigh heavily on Saber’s mind, although she still retains some of the traits that contributed to them. For instance, Saber’s reserved and almost cold appearance is not her true personality, but a result of her suppressing her emotions out of the belief that a King should be impartial; it hides a more gentle, lonely side of her that she can't afford to pay attention to. However, although playing the role of the perfect King brought her reign great success, it was also what caused its downfall, as one of the knights who left the Round Table commented that “King Arthur is a King who cannot understand anybody”. Her high-minded ideals are both her greatest source of strength and her greatest curse, having allowed her to help her country the way she did in the first place, but also inadvertently contributing to its ruin. Whether she will break under the weight of them, as Rider predicts will happen, or continue to successfully bear them with the inner strength she possesses, has yet to be seen.
Other: she has balls of orichalcum which she carries in her pocket and uses to hit douches in the face. it is known.
Additional Links: Her page on the TYPE-MOON wiki, detailing more about her history and her abilities.
First Person (entry type):
The longer Kiritsugu remains my Master, the less I find myself able to understand him. The actions he took tonight at the warehouse… I doubt I will be able to forgive him for that. It’s been several hours, and I still find myself furious. It would be bad enough had he only robbed both Lancer and I of our honour, but the way he deceived the Master was unthinkable. How can a man that claims he wants to save the world bring himself to act in such a way? He may blame whom he likes the state of humanity, but even wars require rules of engagement. That he would throw them away so carelessly…
Then, there’s Irisviel. Her condition continues to worsen the closer we get to the Grail’s completion. After Kiritsugu left tonight, she collapsed, and I don’t have any doubt she only held on so long so that he wouldn’t have to see it. She is resting now within the magic circle we prepared, so hopefully she’ll soon improve, but even so… I’m growing increasingly concerned. I’ve come to enjoy her company, but I doubt she will have the strength now to accompany me in any future battles. For now, I will simply guard her to the best of my ability.
Third Person:
Irisviel didn't say anything, but Saber could still feel the weight of her gaze as they made their way out of the cold night air and into the castle. The other woman was worried, she could tell, but as grateful as Saber felt for her concern in spite of herself, she was still more grateful that Irisviel chose not to voice it. The anger and shock that she had felt at hearing Rider's words not even half an hour earlier had left her, but the shame... the shame still remained.
Because as much as she wished she could deny it, she knew he had been right; at least on the matter of her knights. Despite appearances she had loved each one of them dearly, though she hadn't shown it. No, because as she'd seen it, she couldn't show it; a King had to remain distant and impartial at all times. She'd been preparing herself for that since she was a girl, she'd known she would have to lay her own emotions aside in order to lead her country out of the chaos it had been drowning in. But had she been wrong after all? Should she have been more open? After all, even one of those she'd thought among her closest friends had--
Saber shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. It had been her own failings, both as a friend and as King, that were to blame. Rider's words had hardly affected her position on that. If anything, the reminder of how she had failed her people so badly only reminded her of how important it was to obtain the Grail. The rule of Britain could be given to someone better, then. Someone who would truly save it, not allow their knights and their own pride to lead a circle back to its downfall. Which meant, of course, that she didn't have time for guilt. That would distract her, maybe even long enough to be fatal.
"Saber?"
She didn't start, but she did let out a soft breath at Irisviel's words. She supposed she must have been truly deep in thought. The white-haired woman smiled softly, almost in understanding.
"I was going to have some tea prepared. Would you like some? I thought it might do us both good."
It did not take long to consider. Servants may not have needed to eat or drink strictly speaking, not if they were supplied with sufficient enough power from their Master. But nonetheless, Saber still enjoyed it, and the tea she had taken with Irisviel on their first morning together had been pleasant. After what had just happened, she couldn't help but find herself agreeing with her.
She nodded, a small smile crossing her face in return. "That would be very kind."
She couldn't allow a few well-chosen words from the King of Conquerers to dissuade her. She had made a contract with the world, and Saber was determined that it would be successful. She would win the Grail, and her country would be saved. She swore it on her honour as a knight.
Player DW:
tinfoiltennisWay to contact you:
Email: fantasygirl@blueyonder.co.uk
AIM: hangswithtraps
Plurk:
Other:
Are you at least 15?: no I am an adorable shotaro boy who has fooled you all this time. (okay no yes I am :’D)
Current Characters: the tenth Doctor, Pearl Fey, Lyle Dylandy, Roxas, Madoka Kaname, Castiel
Character: Saber ( aka Arturia Pendragon, King of Knights )
Fandom: Fate/Zero
Character Notes:
History:
Saber is one of the Heroic Spirits that may be summoned by a mage bearing the appropriate Command Seals to fight as the Servant half of a Master-Servant pair in the Grail wars, contests in which seven of these pairs in total compete for the chance to wish for a miracle from the Fuyuki Holy Grail. Before she became one of these spirits, however, in life she was known as Arturia Pendragon, or more commonly, King Arthur of Camelot, the Once and Future King of Britain.
Yes, King Arthur is a girl.
The King Arthur legend is pretty well-known, so I won’t take up too much time with it here. Arturia was born as the heir to the throne at a time when the island of Britain was pretty much falling apart at the seams with war and chaos brought about by the Roman Empire’s collapse. Her father, Uther Pendragon, was disappointed at the child being a girl, as he could not make her his successor. As a result, she was entrusted by Merlin to the care of Sir Ector, and raised as a knight alongside his biological son Kay. On the day the prophecy had foretold as the day that would reveal Britain’s rightful king, Arturia pulled Caliburn from the stone it had been set in, marking her as the true king. From the moment she pulled the sword from the stone, she ceased to age and became “something not human”.
The next ten years were marked by victory after victory in battle, with Arturia commanding many knights including those of the famous Round Table. Unfortunately, it was not to last. Arturia had married Guinevere due to the expectations for a King to have a wife; however, Lancelot, one of her most trusted knights and closest friends, had fallen in love with Guinevere. Although Arturia knew of this and didn’t blame either party, the affair would be one of the cracks that would cause the eventual downfall of her reign, and the repercussions from the affair’s discovery would come to affect both Arturia and Lancelot even after the two became Heroic Spirits. Arturia’s reign came to an end at the Battle of Camlann, where she was mortally wounded by Mordred (who incidentally is a homunculus created from sperm from when Merlin thought he’d turn Arturia into a dude and give her a penis for a bit for shits and giggles and just don’t even question the Nasuverse, okay.) As she lay on her deathbed, she began to regret her failures as King, and at that point made a contract with the world – in return for her services as a Heroic Spirit, she wanted a chance to gain the Holy Grail to save her country by undoing her kingship.
ENTER THE EVENTS OF FATE/ZERO.
Arturia is summoned under the Saber class by Emiya Kiritsugu, a chosen Master who wishes to use the Grail to save the world. However, as Saber and Kiritsugu’s personalities aren’t compatible, and also so that Kiritsugu can persue his strategy from behind the scenes, Saber is paired with Kiritsugu’s wife, Irisviel von Einzbern, as a proxy Master. The three of them travel to Fuyuki to await the start of the Fourth Grail War, and do not have to wait long; that night, Saber is challenged by Lancer. In the ensuing battle, the two gain a respect for each other, although Saber sustains a cursed wound from one of the other Servant’s weapons that leaves her unable to use her left hand, and thus unable to use the power of her Noble Phantasm (her ultimate weapon/attack, aka Excalibur. It’s kind of A Big Deal).
The fight quickly degenerates into chaos after that as Rider, Archer and Berserker arrive on the scene one after the other. Things only come to an end when after Lancer’s Master, Kayneth, uses one of his Command Seals to compel his Servant to help Berserker kill Saber; Rider intervenes to preserve Lancer’s honour and allow Saber and Lancer to finish their duel another time.
Retreating to the Einzberns’ Fuyuki castle, Iri and Saber have a run-in with the utterly batshit Caster, who’s under the delusion that Saber is his long-lost Joan of Arc; although she drives him off, she’s unable to convince him that that’s not the case. At the castle, more differences between Kiritsugu and Saber become apparent; she finds his decisions to kill Kayneth in an attempt to remove her handicap, and to avoid Caster (who has an unfortunate habit of torturing and killing children) in order to allow another Servant to kill him, totally deplorable. At that moment, Caster himself shows up at the castle, and Saber goes out to engage him. However, she is unable to get anywhere close due to her handicap and the endless supply of tentacle monsters he can call with his magic. Luckily, at that moment Lancer shows up, and the two manage to damage Caster’s Noble Phantasm and drive him back,
After the chaos settles down and Kiritsugu has left, Iri and Saber find the castle invaded once more, this time by Rider, who just rides in through the front door on his chariot with a huge keg of wine like it ain’t no thang. Turns out he’s there to hold an impromptu King’s Banquet, and so Rider, Archer and Saber all proceed to sit around drinking wine and arguing about kingship (or rather, Saber and Rider argue about kingship and Archer just sits there being amused. Or possibly bored. It’s hard to tell with him.). Saber almost has a heroic BSOD when Rider more or less viciously shoots her Grail wish down as the foolish dream of a little girl and then proceeds to completely annihilate the interloping Assassin using the army of supporters inside his Reality Marble.
Soon after, Saber, Iri, and Maiya move to a new base of operations, a traditional Japanese house. There, Saber discovers that Iri is growing weaker as a result of being the designated vessel for the Grail’s appearance. As they settle in to their new base, they sense a hideously strong magical presence coming from the city’s river, and upon arriving discover that Caster has magicked up what is essentially a giant river Cthulu I swear I am not making this up. Saber teams up with Rider and Lancer to fight the tentacley monstrosity and then follows three episodes of them fighting this thing while Berserker wrecks things and gets on Archer’s nerves and Archer mostly just watches everything disdainfully. Eventually, after Lancer breaks the curse that prevents her hand from healing, and with Rider using his Reality Marble as a distraction, Saber is able to unveil Excalibur and use it to defeat the monster – and Caster – in one fell stroke. Unfortunately in the process she unwittingly makes Archer think he has leave to creep all over her from afar.
Following a tip-off from Kiritsugu, Iri and Saber arrive at the hideout that Kayneth is using. Lancer and Saber decide the time is right to finish their duel, but Saber is shocked when, part way through their fight, Lancer suddenly impales himself on his own lance, cursing everyone around him; unknown to either of the Servants, Kiritsugu had blackmailed Kayneth from behind the scenes with a deal; Kiritsugu would put a Geas on himself that would prevent him harming Kayneth or his fiancée, if Kayneth used his remaining Command Seal to force Lancer to commit suicide. Naturally this doesn’t work out in Kayneth’s favour at all because Kiritsugu is a cheating bastard and Maiya shoots Kayneth and Sola from afar as soon as Lancer is dead, forcing Saber to mercy-kill Kayneth so he doesn’t die slowly and painfully. This has the added effect of driving a further wedge between Saber and her Master.
Iri’s condition continues to worsen as more Servants fall and the Grail nears completion, meaning that she can no longer accompany Saber when she goes to search for the remaining Servants to eliminate them. One day while Saber is out looking for Rider, she is suddenly compelled to return to their hideout by Kiritsugu activating a Command Seal, where she finds Iri has been kidnapped by Rider and Maiya is lying severely wounded. Saber leaves to follow the trail, but after catching up with Rider and his Master during a frankly mind-boggling motorcycle-chariot chase that breaks most of the laws of physics, she discovers that they were not the real kidnappers; it was another Servant in disguise. The two Servants still duel, however, which results in Saber blowing up Rider’s chariot before riding off.
On the final night of the Grail war, Saber finds herself attacked by Berserker. The fight is furious, but during it she realizes that Berserker must be someone she knew in life, as he’s able to catch her sword despite the length of it being hidden with Invisible Air. She’s shocked when Berserker removes his helmet and the spell concealing his identity to reveal none other than Lancelot. Although Saber is able to defeat him after the death of his Master, she is still shaken and preoccupied, believing it to be the fault of her mistakes in life that her old friend turned to madness.
Making her way to the Grail’s stage, Saber finds Archer, who suggests that she surrender and become his wife instead. Saber refuses and prepares herself for a hopeless fight, but the two are interrupted by the arrival of Kiritsugu, who uses his remaining two Command Seals to force Saber to destroy the Grail with Excalibur without telling her the reason was that he’d discovered the Grail was corrupted by evil. Compelled against her will, Saber destroys it with her Noble Phantasm’s attack before vanishing. She abruptly finds herself back at the aftermath of one of the final battles of her life, regretting that she both failed to win the Grail and to understand her people, and still wishing that she had never become king.
Personality:
Saber is for the most part an outwardly calm yet determined individual. She possesses an incredibly strong will, and although she remains polite and dignified at almost all times, she also holds no qualms about speaking her mind to people, regardless of the situation. If she believes someone to have made a mistake, or if someone has done or said something that she finds personally offensive, she will tell them so without a second thought. One could go as far to say that she is very stubborn, and they would be right; Saber is one who holds fast to her path and her ideals, and her pride means she does not take kindly to any slights against them.
Her determination is combined with the strong sense of duty and chivalry that she holds from being the self-proclaimed King of Knights. To Saber, one’s duty, to either one’s country or one’s master, is among one of the most important things one can bear. As a result, she is loyal as well as stubborn, and values the traits of honour and chivalry, both in other people and in herself. Linked to her sense of honour, she has a strong moral code that she holds herself to rigidly, and finds it difficult if not impossible to see eye to eye with anyone who goes against it. As such, she is heavily against any course of action that would result in innocent people getting hurt, although she grudgingly accepts that there are some situations when this is inevitable. This is one of the main bones of contention between her and Kiritsugu throughout the series, as despite feeling some measure of loyalty to him as her designated Master, she cannot accept his methods (win by any means) to be either right or honourable.
Saber’s sense of duty and her strong morals are what led her in her human life to originally take up the mantle of kingship; although she knew that it would be a hard road and she would cease to be human as soon as she pulled Caliburn from the stone, she was resolute and claimed that she was prepared to make that sacrifice. For Saber, the prosperity and well-being of her country and people is paramount, and this is reflected in her views on kingship. For her, being a king is about offering one’s life to serve one’s people regardless of how lonesome the path is or the cost to one’s own desires, and this sense of self-sacrifice for the sake of others forms a central part of her identity. Indeed, she has stated that she would readily die for her ideals.
However, it also forms a great source of grief for her; due to the way her reign ended, Saber believes herself to have been a failure of a ruler. As a result of her guilt, her only wish is to save her country by undoing her reign so that someone more fitting can take up the mantle instead. Her past failures weigh heavily on Saber’s mind, although she still retains some of the traits that contributed to them. For instance, Saber’s reserved and almost cold appearance is not her true personality, but a result of her suppressing her emotions out of the belief that a King should be impartial; it hides a more gentle, lonely side of her that she can't afford to pay attention to. However, although playing the role of the perfect King brought her reign great success, it was also what caused its downfall, as one of the knights who left the Round Table commented that “King Arthur is a King who cannot understand anybody”. Her high-minded ideals are both her greatest source of strength and her greatest curse, having allowed her to help her country the way she did in the first place, but also inadvertently contributing to its ruin. Whether she will break under the weight of them, as Rider predicts will happen, or continue to successfully bear them with the inner strength she possesses, has yet to be seen.
Other: she has balls of orichalcum which she carries in her pocket and uses to hit douches in the face. it is known.
Additional Links: Her page on the TYPE-MOON wiki, detailing more about her history and her abilities.
First Person (entry type):
The longer Kiritsugu remains my Master, the less I find myself able to understand him. The actions he took tonight at the warehouse… I doubt I will be able to forgive him for that. It’s been several hours, and I still find myself furious. It would be bad enough had he only robbed both Lancer and I of our honour, but the way he deceived the Master was unthinkable. How can a man that claims he wants to save the world bring himself to act in such a way? He may blame whom he likes the state of humanity, but even wars require rules of engagement. That he would throw them away so carelessly…
Then, there’s Irisviel. Her condition continues to worsen the closer we get to the Grail’s completion. After Kiritsugu left tonight, she collapsed, and I don’t have any doubt she only held on so long so that he wouldn’t have to see it. She is resting now within the magic circle we prepared, so hopefully she’ll soon improve, but even so… I’m growing increasingly concerned. I’ve come to enjoy her company, but I doubt she will have the strength now to accompany me in any future battles. For now, I will simply guard her to the best of my ability.
Third Person:
Irisviel didn't say anything, but Saber could still feel the weight of her gaze as they made their way out of the cold night air and into the castle. The other woman was worried, she could tell, but as grateful as Saber felt for her concern in spite of herself, she was still more grateful that Irisviel chose not to voice it. The anger and shock that she had felt at hearing Rider's words not even half an hour earlier had left her, but the shame... the shame still remained.
Because as much as she wished she could deny it, she knew he had been right; at least on the matter of her knights. Despite appearances she had loved each one of them dearly, though she hadn't shown it. No, because as she'd seen it, she couldn't show it; a King had to remain distant and impartial at all times. She'd been preparing herself for that since she was a girl, she'd known she would have to lay her own emotions aside in order to lead her country out of the chaos it had been drowning in. But had she been wrong after all? Should she have been more open? After all, even one of those she'd thought among her closest friends had--
Saber shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. It had been her own failings, both as a friend and as King, that were to blame. Rider's words had hardly affected her position on that. If anything, the reminder of how she had failed her people so badly only reminded her of how important it was to obtain the Grail. The rule of Britain could be given to someone better, then. Someone who would truly save it, not allow their knights and their own pride to lead a circle back to its downfall. Which meant, of course, that she didn't have time for guilt. That would distract her, maybe even long enough to be fatal.
"Saber?"
She didn't start, but she did let out a soft breath at Irisviel's words. She supposed she must have been truly deep in thought. The white-haired woman smiled softly, almost in understanding.
"I was going to have some tea prepared. Would you like some? I thought it might do us both good."
It did not take long to consider. Servants may not have needed to eat or drink strictly speaking, not if they were supplied with sufficient enough power from their Master. But nonetheless, Saber still enjoyed it, and the tea she had taken with Irisviel on their first morning together had been pleasant. After what had just happened, she couldn't help but find herself agreeing with her.
She nodded, a small smile crossing her face in return. "That would be very kind."
She couldn't allow a few well-chosen words from the King of Conquerers to dissuade her. She had made a contract with the world, and Saber was determined that it would be successful. She would win the Grail, and her country would be saved. She swore it on her honour as a knight.