Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

Set in Larnia, a fantasy world shaped by a cataclysm called the Descent, in which a godlike entity destroyed an advanced technological civilization and replaced it with magic, the story opens 40 years before the main narrative. A sorcerer named Merulo appears before Chancellor Felix Noor, advisor to the King of New Albion, and announces his intention to kill God and destroy all magic. He demonstrates genuine power by animating wooden constructs and deflecting a spell from Elder Beth, a representative of the Church of Order, the theocratic institution governing Larnia.

Four decades later, Sir Cameron Vaillancourt, a tall, golden-haired knight, narrates from an Order outpost near Merulo's territory. Vain, charming, and consumed by an obsessive fear of death, Cameron has survived the Order only by avoiding battles and relying on Glenda, his elven companion. His father sent him to the Order expecting he would die so Cameron's brother could inherit. After a secret meeting with the Elders, Glenda reveals that they burned the last dragon heart to fuel a prophetic vision of the sorcerer's defeat. The prophecy requires Cameron's death: A tall, golden-haired knight must die with a sword through his throat in a specific meadow, and Glenda has been assigned to carry out the killing.

Unwilling to die, Cameron strikes Glenda unconscious and flees toward Merulo's territory, reasoning that the sorcerer is the only person who benefits from keeping him alive. Constructs slaughter the pursuing knights and carry Cameron to Merulo's castle. Merulo, gaunt and pale with one stone eye that connects him to his constructs, chains Cameron to a wall and uses a truth seal to interrogate him. Cameron reveals the prophecy's details, including that he would betray Merulo to save himself. Merulo realizes he need only prevent Cameron from dying in the prophesied manner and transmogrifies Cameron into a vulture.

Cameron adjusts to his bird body, teaches himself to mimic human speech, and returns to pester Merulo, forming a grudging rapport with the hostile sorcerer. When Cameron flies to the outpost hoping Glenda will direct him to a witch who might restore his humanity, she shoots him with arrows, having stopped taking Passionweed, a drug that counteracts her emotional numbness. Cameron escapes wounded, and constructs carry him back to the castle.

Merulo heals Cameron again and, after hearing the full story of his falling-out with Glenda, delivers a blistering speech cataloging every privilege Cameron has squandered. He brings Cameron to a trade meeting with Chancellor Noor, exchanging a pre-Descent relic for forbidden physics textbooks and publicly revealing Cameron's identity to demonstrate that the prophecy's key component is under his control. Merulo explains the textbooks contain pre-Descent knowledge essential to his mission.

Cameron proposes Merulo transform him into a human woman, since the prophecy specifies a male knight. On a disguised trip to town, Cameron encounters Sir Gareth, a knight from the outpost, who reveals Cameron was universally despised as a hollow coward. When Gareth turns aggressive, Cameron draws a sword to defend Merulo. Outside a church, Cameron and Merulo share their first kiss.

Meanwhile, Glenda leverages her noble elven family to bolster the Order's forces. She and Elder Beth arrest Chancellor Noor for his dealings with the sorcerer. Cameron settles into domestic life at the castle, where Merulo teaches him about the pre-Descent world: The ancients had space travel and colonized the moon and Mars before God destroyed their civilization. Their attraction deepens. After Cameron experiences menstruation for the first time and panics, Merulo restores his male body through transmogrification.

Cameron discovers that Merulo's plan will cost the sorcerer his life. Merulo intends to sacrifice his arm and leg, which contain concentrated dragon magic, while his sister Hydna, a full-blooded female dragon, will contribute most of her remaining power. After the spell, both dragons will revert to "computers," the pre-Descent equivalent of their species, and survival may not be possible. Cameron begs him to abandon the plan. Merulo orders Cameron to leave, but Cameron refuses.

A portal opens and Glenda seizes Cameron, dragging him to the prophesied meadow. She offers a reprieve in exchange for intelligence about Merulo. Cameron refuses, saying he cannot betray his friend. He begins to say he loves Merulo, but Glenda plunges the sword into his throat before he finishes. Cameron dies, experiencing the nothingness he has feared his entire life. Blank chapters represent his death.

Glenda impales Cameron's corpse on a pike and carries it as a banner into battle. The Order breaches Merulo's castle for the first time. Glenda finds Merulo alone in a pentagram; he reveals the spell's final ingredient is "dragon blood," connected to Cameron's death, and activates a time-reversal spell that resets the world.

Time resets to moments before Cameron's death. Cameron, alive but traumatized by the memory of nothingness, refuses to betray Merulo again. A black dragon, Merulo in his true form, breathes raw magic across the battlefield, transforming knights into shrubbery. He snatches Cameron and flies into the fog. After crash-landing, Merulo reverts to human form and reveals he is a dragon, not a human sorcerer. Hydna opens a portal to Poseidon's Family Fun Resort, a pre-Descent underwater city in a dome where electricity still functions because God's magical influence thins at depth. Merulo reveals the Church burned their mother's heart to fuel the prophecy.

Cameron grapples with the trauma of having died while Merulo works obsessively on his spell. Cameron tries every strategy to dissuade him, documenting schemes on a chalkboard that Merulo discovers and mocks. On a moonlit beach, Merulo reveals that before reversing time, Glenda told him Cameron's dying word was "loathe." Cameron corrects him: The word was "love." Merulo weeps.

Glenda recruits Domitia, Merulo's half-elf, half-dragon sibling known as "the mongrel witch," to track Cameron. Hydna performs surgery on Merulo, removing his arm and leg, which are replaced with enchanted prosthetics. Domitia projects her consciousness into the underwater city and announces her intent to stop Merulo. Using storm clouds shaped by magic, Merulo broadcasts to all of Larnia that God will die. Hydna departs to position a global pentagram, and Merulo gives Cameron a blood-powered wand. Drawing on the only spell he knows, a levitation spell once used by the Church to drain children's magical reserves, Cameron holds off Domitia to buy time.

Merulo and Cameron portal-hop to a desert, where Merulo burns his remaining eye in a vision spell. Both plunge into the void Cameron experienced in death and discover God is already dead, having expended its life during the Descent. Domitia catches up and argues Merulo has no right to impose change on millions. When he refuses to stop, she destroys his wand and prosthetics. Hydna's pentagram activates, walls of red light towering across the sky. Domitia sings a counter-spell, burning herself alive. Her sacrifice preserves the world's existing magic, but the barrier isolating Earth from the rest of the solar system shatters.

The SMS Lunatic Freak, a sentient mining ship, detects Earth's reappearance. Cameron uses the wand's last power to write coordinates in the clouds. A shuttle arrives, and Cameron carries the dying Merulo aboard. Merulo dies briefly during ascent but is resuscitated. On the moon, they are received by Ambassador Speakwell, a lunar official, who reveals that the pre-Descent civilization created Legends of Larnia as a video game, and that Merulo was modeled on its villain. Merulo is shaken. In their shared quarters, familiar bickering dissolves into intimacy. In a final scene, Glenda watches metal ships cross the changed sky from a Larnian forest and considers that the new world might not be so terrible after all.