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**“All My Love: A Father’s Song”**
*A Fictionalized Account Inspired by True Events*
The final light of the stage dimmed, casting long shadows across Robert Plant’s figure as he stepped backstage. The roar of the crowd still rang in his ears, but it no longer thrilled him the way it once had. His body, drenched in sweat and emotion, moved like a phantom through the haze. Another show. Another city. Another high far from home.
It was 1977, and Led Zeppelin was riding a towering wave of success, selling out arenas across America. Yet, for Plant, the tour felt hollow. He was restless, his thoughts always thousands of miles away, anchored to a small boy with golden curls and a laugh like birdsong.
Karac Pendragon Plant — just five years old, with the name of a mythical knight and the heart of a lion — had transformed Robert’s world. Amidst the madness of stardom, Karac had given him something sacred: fatherhood. No screaming crowd, no platinum album, could compare to the magic of that little boy bounding through the garden at home in Worcestershire, sword in hand, calling his father “my king.”
The boy brought balance to a life spent on tour buses and under spotlights. He was joy in its purest form — wild, unpredictable, brilliant. Robert would carry pictures of Karac in his suitcase, smiling at the photos before going onstage. He wrote letters home constantly, postcards scrawled with love, promises of return, silly doodles of dragons and castles for Karac.
It was in Kansas City when the call came.
Robert had just finished the final encore, the stadium still echoing with “Kashmir,” when he was ushered quietly to the side by their tour manager. The look on the man’s face was unlike any Robert had seen before — pale, hollow-eyed.
“Robert…” he began, his voice tight. “There’s been an emergency.”
The next few minutes were a blur — garbled words, disbelief, denial. Karac was ill. A virus, they thought at first. Then complications. The hospital. Doctors trying everything.
Then silence.
Robert stood frozen as the words hit him: *“He’s gone.”*
The world spun, then collapsed. The walls of the dressing room closed in. The air was thick and unbreathable. He dropped to his knees and screamed — a sound so raw it sent shivers down the spine of everyone who heard it. That night, the golden god of rock was shattered.
—
Back in England, the house felt colder, emptier. The toys lay untouched in corners. His son’s laughter had evaporated, leaving an eerie stillness. Robert wandered the halls like a ghost, searching for echoes, hallucinating Karac’s voice around every corner. His wife, Maureen, bore her own sorrow, and they leaned on each other in fractured silence.
The press tried to cover the story respectfully, but even then, the myth of Led Zeppelin overshadowed the man who had lost his child. Fans sent letters, flowers, poems. Some meant well; others hurt. A few called it karma — the cost of fame, of living fast and wild.
Plant didn’t care. Music no longer mattered. Nothing did.
He didn’t touch a guitar for weeks. The band gave him space. Jimmy Page, usually the enigmatic wizard of Zeppelin, showed uncharacteristic tenderness, but there were things beyond even friendship’s reach. Robert talked of quitting — of retreating to the countryside, raising his daughter Carmen in peace, and leaving the chaos behind forever.
But grief, he discovered, is not a clean wound. It festers. It claws its way into the soul and demands to be heard.
—
It was in a quiet moment, months later, that a melody came to him.
He had been sitting alone in his study, going through Karac’s drawings — crude dragons, wobbly castles, a smiling stick-figure father with long hair. One picture was captioned: *“Me and Daddy, forever.”*
A lyric surfaced:
*“Should I fall out of love, my fire in the light…”*
The rest followed like rainfall — sudden, relentless. He scribbled lines, his tears staining the paper. The words didn’t heal, but they honored. They gave form to the ache in his chest, the scream he could no longer voice. He called it *“All My Love.”*
When he brought it to the band, John Paul Jones understood immediately. The keyboards, lush and ethereal, gave the song its wings. Jimmy, ever the master of mood, hung back, letting the words take center stage. There was no guitar solo — just a quiet storm of emotion, building, cresting, fading into loss.
Robert sang it differently than anything before. There was no bravado, no wail. It was a conversation with the void. A lullaby for a spirit. A farewell whispered through the static of grief.
*“Yours is the cloth, mine is the hand that sews time / His is the force that lies within…”*
Every note bled pain, but also love — vast, unconditional, eternal. In the studio, silence often followed each take. Even hardened engineers were moved.
“All My Love” wasn’t just a tribute to Karac. It was Robert’s way back to life.
—
Years passed. The band dissolved, as all legends do. Robert reinvented himself, explored new genres, shed old skins. He never tried to resurrect Zeppelin’s glory, and many wondered why.
But Robert knew. The boy who had danced in his arms, the son who had named his father a king, was gone. And with him, something essential had been taken — a fire that would never burn quite the same.
Still, Karac lived on.
In the way Robert sang certain lines — softer, more reverent. In the quiet pauses during interviews when someone asked about his children. In the solitary walks he took through fields near his home, whispering thoughts to the wind. In the notebooks he still kept, filled with letters never sent.
And sometimes, in dreams, Karac returned.
Not as a child lost to time, but as the brave knight he’d imagined himself to be. Armor gleaming, sword in hand, calling out to his father: *“Come, ride with me, King Robert!”*
They would run through meadows, chase dragons, laugh until the sky turned violet.
Then Plant would wake, eyes wet, heart full — and go about his day with quiet purpose.
—
In 2018, Robert performed at a small venue in Wales. The crowd was intimate, reverent. As he took the mic, he hesitated, then spoke softly.
“This next song… I wrote it for someone very dear to me. He’s not here in body anymore, but I feel him in every note.”
He didn’t say Karac’s name. He didn’t have to.
When the opening chords of *“All My Love”* began, a hush fell over the room. And as Plant’s voice rose, cracked but unwavering, time seemed to fold. For a moment, the years disappeared. He wasn’t the rock god, the frontman, the legend.
He was simply a father, still singing to his son.
—
**Epilogue**
Decades after Karac’s death, Robert Plant remains a man marked not just by fame, but by fatherhood. He has spoken rarely of that time — the pain, the loss — but when he does, it is with a depth of feeling that silences even the most jaded journalist.
He has grandchildren now. He watches them with quiet awe, each smile a reminder of the boy he lost. Sometimes he tells them stories — of dragons and heroes, of far-off lands, of a brave little knight named Karac Pendragon who once called a rock star his king.
And when they ask if the stories are true, he just smiles and says, “Every word.”
For Karac’s memory isn’t trapped in the past. It lives in every song Robert sings with heart. It echoes in every choice he’s made since that day in 1977. It shaped the man he became — not in spite of the loss, but because of the love that preceded it.
And in the quiet spaces between verses, when the crowd goes silent and the stage lights dim, Robert Plant still sings.
All his love.
