Chapter #4Tryzantium King by: Yote   The feast is over. The guests flee. With the palace in chaos, you slip away into the King's solar to compose and clean yourself. The screams of noble women still echo down the corridor, but they seem distant as you scrub at the gore that congeals on your arms. The small handbasin soon runs red, though your hands still drip with royal blood. It had been a messy business. For a child, the King had had a lot of blood in him.
For the last few years, you'd watched as your King became someone you barely recognised. As he'd aged and his health had begun to fail, and his children and siblings and lords had begun to squable and scheme and divide up the Kingdom even while he still lived, he became gripped with an obsession - to live and rule forever. It had been an obsession, you regret to say now, that you had facilitated as the monarch's advisor of magic and in the interest of the future stability of the Kingdom. It had been you who personally got in touch with the Fey.
The Fey delegation arrived. They presented their offer to the King, and he sent them packing. But the Fey, being timeless creatures, are patient. When the King lay on his death bed, they returned .The King would receive their boon - eternal, undying youth - and in return, the elven forests would be allowed to spread, unchallenged, into human lands. This time, he accepted. His decrepit body was renewed into that of a healthy, young child.
In just a few months, the wilderness swallowed up nearly a third of Tryzantinium, and the oncoming winter showed no sign of slowing it down. In places, the elven borders spread faster than people could flee. Those trapped by the encroachment were transformed into mindless beasts or worse. Swiftly and efficiently, the new forests were dividing the human kingdom up into neat parcels of land, cutting them off from the capital before engulfing them.
Everyone could see it was an extermination. The King's advisers beseached him to break his bargain. In reply, the King had them hung. To break the deal would be to kill the king, and to suggest such a thing was treason. For with his childlike body had come a new personality; petulent, wanton, and cruel, like a child, but with the mind and appetites of a grown man. As the forests encroached around Lightgarde, the refugees began to flood in. The King, terrified of angering the Fey, executed anyone who resisted the wilderness. His sons fled, fearing his madness.
You should have acted sooner, made an end to the mistake you'd first made in involving the Fey, yet you didn't, partly out of concern for your family but your own skin too. Outside the King's protection, both the magi and the church would hunt you to the ends of the world. So you waited, hoping somebody else would act.
This evening the court had sat down to feast. As one of his last remaining advisers, you were seated at the King's table, even helping the childlike sovereign up into his chair now that it was too big for him. A prisoner had been carried in for judgement, naked except for chains. Johan Sellwin. He had been a Baron and a man once, until the forests had taken his land and most of his humanity. The short, red fur that covered his body was scorched in places by the fire they had used to burn their way out. His tail quivered between his legs as he begged for his life.
The King's mood darkened as he listened to the beast's pleas. When Johan ventured that aid be sent to recover his holdings, the King flew into a rage. "Skin him! I want his pelt! His family too!"
With a sudden sense of inevitability, you took a carving knife and drove it through the King's heart.
A group of armoured guards rattle down the corridor outside, bringing you back to the here and now, causing you to glance up at the door you forgot to lock. They're hunting for you. They pass by, but the odd sense of light-headed detachment you felt since killing the King begins to fade. Now you must focus on getting yourself and your family as far away as possible.
Before you could move, with five pops of displaced air, the council of Magi appeared in the room, surrounding you. Everything went black.
...
...
...
"Why is he just standing there with his eyes closed?"
"He thinks we're here to kill him."
"Kill him? Hah! I'm here to shake his hand," the Crimson Magus exclaims, thrusting his hot, leathery palm into yours. "I've never shaken hands with a Kingslayer before. What an honour! The way you set him up, earned his trust all those years, then tricking him into the body of a defenseless child. You, sir, are an inspiration. Though a little preemptive moving in, I might say," he said, gesturing around the solar. "You're not King yet."
You pull your hand free. "I wasn't planning on killing him. I didn't plan any of this! And I certainly don't want to be King."
"Actually that is something we must insist on," the Light Magus says, drifting forward. "There's never been a wizard sit the throne before. Such an arrangement would benefit us."
"You want to put me on the throne?"
"Yes. It may be the only way to save this Kingdom."
"It'll never work," you shake your head. "The Church will never go along with it. Nor the nobles."
"True," the Magus nodded. "However..."   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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