The Once King Read online

  The room fell silent. The Once King sat still as a statue, petrified by his loss and guilt. James was struck just as dumb. The Once King’s story flew in the face of everything he’d ever seen, read, or heard about the Sun. Aside from what was happening right now, James had never heard a bad word spoken about the Sun god. All the lore from the game painted it as the ultimate benevolent force, and with the notable exception of the Once King, every actual denizen of this world sang its praises earnestly. Even the player Clerics he’d met liked the Sun, and it wasn’t even their religion. All that made the Once King’s story very hard to believe, but it was obvious to James that the king absolutely believed he was telling the truth. The only thing James could think was that there’d been some horrific miscommunication, but how did that end up with wings getting burned off? What had the Sun been trying to do?

  “So what happened to them?” Fangs in the Grass asked.

  The Once King and James both looked up in surprise. “What do you mean?” Ar’Kan demanded.

  “Your people,” Fangs clarified, lifting his chin stubbornly. “You said the Sun burned their wings to stumps, but all the elves I know have backs that look just fine. So where did the Celestial Elves go after this supposed betrayal? Did they all die?”

  James’s first instinct was to apologize for his rude brother, but Fangs had actually asked a very good question. Where had the Celestial Elves gone?

  “They did not die,” the Once King said, curling his lip in disgust. “They wished they were at first, and I tried my best to help them, but after a very brief period of time, they forgot.”

  James boggled at him. “What do you mean they forgot? Like forgot their wings?”

  “They forgot everything,” the king sneered. “As their burns healed, they became enraptured by the Moon and its ever-changing surface. Without their wings, they forgot the Sky and their destiny and became obsessed with making this world their home. They became like schtumples.”

  He said that like a curse, but several things James hadn’t understood before were now coming together, including the Grand Schtump’s claim that the elves had come down from the sky and taken everything. He didn’t know if that was exactly what had happened, but he was pretty sure the Celestial Elves hadn’t been peaceful refugees trying to find a new place to live. The fallen elves had probably been more like Jack from Nightmare Before Christmas—grabbing everything shiny and making a mess of it all. No wonder the local inhabitants had been pissed.

  “Still, everything might have been all right if not for mortality,” Ar’Kan went on, making him jump. “Even without their wings, my people were creatures of the Infinite Sky. Unlike the Birds, we were not built to handle all of this finiteness and gravity. Being trapped in the Moon’s ever-grinding grasp wore down my people’s souls. Since my wings were still intact, I was able to cling to my true nature and resist, but I could not save them. I was forced to watch, helpless, as my beautiful, immortal people were twisted into mockeries of themselves, eventually breaking down into the various lesser bodies you now call jubatus and humans and ichthyians and all the other descended races. And as their souls eroded, my timeless subjects began to age and die.”

  “Did you not die before?” James asked, confused.

  “We did,” the king admitted. “But not like this. In the Sky, an elf killed by a Bird could be mourned for all eternity, but their soul was free to fly back to the Sun. Here, though, even that was stolen from us. Elves who died bound to the Moon did not return to the Sun or even to the Sky. Instead, their souls were trapped in an endless cycle of rebirth. There was no more heaven for us, no more flight. Only a ceaseless hell of being born an ignorant child, growing up painfully, gaining the tiniest measure of our former power and glory only to almost immediately lose it again to old age, sickness, and infirmity. Even in death there was no escape, because the moment my people died, the Moon’s pull forced their souls right back to the start. Another weak mortal body. Another brief, painful life. Another death. Over and over, forever.”

  James blinked in surprise. It was common knowledge, at least on the wiki, that all of FFO’s humanoid races except schtumples were descended from Celestial Elves, but he’d never read anything about reincarnation in the lore or heard about it from Gray Fang. “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, holding up a hand. When the Once King scowled, he added, “Please?”

  Glowering, the monarch motioned for him to go ahead, and James jumped on it. “The clans of the Savanna teach that our souls join the Wind when they die,” he said in a rush. “The Church of the Sun, on the other hand, says that good souls go to the Sunlight Heaven while the wicked sink into the Lightless Realm. Real Naturalists like Gray Fang and Thunder Paw—not me—are also priests of the Water and Wind, and the church has the High Priest who can talk directly to the Sun itself. What you’re saying about reincarnation contradicts all of these religious authorities, so how do you know it’s true?”

  “Because I was there,” Ar’Kan growled. “I’ve watched it happen! It’s true the Wind catches some souls, but they live with it only temporarily. It does this as a tiny mercy for those who praise it, but holding on is not the Wind’s nature, and it’s as trapped as the rest of us. In the end, nothing escapes the Moon, and all souls must pass through the Lightless Realm. As for the Church of the Sun…” The king sneered. “Their top clerics know perfectly well that there is no heaven, sunlit or otherwise. I know this for a fact, because the current high priest came to me.”

  “Whoa,” James said, eyes wide. “High Priest Raffestain came here?”

  The king nodded. “Decades before the Nightmare, right after he ascended to his current exalted position, Raffestain came and sat right there in the space you now occupy, and he was not the first high priest of the Sun to do so. Almost all of them come to me eventually in a desperate attempt to resolve their inevitable crisis of faith.”

  His voice changed as he spoke, the sneering tone changing into something that sounded suspiciously like jealousy.

  “You see, whenever they prayed to the Sun, it would answer. The god showered its blessing upon them, granting miracle after miracle. It even permitted the casting of the Resplendent Aegis, a spell that requires direct divine intervention. And yet despite their god’s clear and constant presence, whenever the priests asked about what happened after death, their beloved Sun became silent and cold.”

  “So they came to you instead?”

  The king’s lips curled into a superior smirk. “Who else could they ask? I am the oldest being in creation. They came to me for answers, and I told them the truth just as I have told it to you, but every single one of those wise men rejected my knowledge and left. Since new priests kept arriving at my door every few decades, I can only presume they all decided to keep perpetuating the myth of a sunny land where good souls go.” He shook his head. “I suppose one of the benefits of being mortal is that your life is short enough to choose the bliss of ignorance over the discomfort of reality. By the time you’re forced to confront the truth, you’re already dead.”

  He said that like it was a personal failing, but it didn’t take any of James’s imagination to guess why a High Priest of the Sun would never in a million years share this secret. The risk of irrevocably damaging their religion—or pissing off the Sun itself—was simply too high. It was also easy to dismiss such unpleasantness when it came from the lips of the enemy. Easy and not entirely wrong. James had to remind himself that, while the Once King was very authoritative, he was still just a person recounting his highly personal interpretation of events. His story was not a whole or even an unbiased picture but the recollections of an angry man with an ax to grind.

  Lacking any grains of salt nearby, James took a sip of wine instead. “So this world, the ground we stand on, is the Moon, then?”

  “It is,” Ar’Kan said. Then he frowned. “Though your word, ‘Moon,’ is not entirely correct. The magic that allows you to understand our languages chose that name because your planet’s satellite
resembles how this world used to look to us when we flew in the sky. A more accurate translation from the Unbounded Language would be ‘that which circles,’ and it used to refer to both the god and time, since the first instance of time was calculated by the Moon god’s turning. But that was long ago. Now, ‘Moon’ is just the name of a long-lost god. This thing, this corpse we live on is all that remains of a once beautiful divinity.”

  “But the Moon can’t be totally dead,” James argued. “It still has magic.”

  “Would that it had died,” the king sighed. “Then we would not be trapped, and none of this would have happened. Alas, in our efforts to save the god, we forced it into this lessened, crippled state, dooming it and ourselves. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.”

  He heaved a long, bitter sigh, and Ar’Bati shot to his feet. “Enough!” the head warrior cried, baring his teeth. “We did not come here to listen to you talk in circles! You promised to tell us the truth!”

  “I have,” the king said, his regal voice dripping with displeasure that Ar’Bati—in classic Angry Cat style—completely ignored.

  “You have told us complaints and old wrongs!” Fangs snarled. “But aside from the gods themselves, everyone you’ve ever known is long dead, so why are you still here? You go on and on about saving your people, but by what you have just said, we are your people! If you have indeed spoken the truth, then we—all peoples of this world save the schtumples and the Birds—are what the Celestial Elves became, but we are the very ones you are killing!” He stabbed his finger at the Once King. “How can you call yourself a king when all your works and powers are bent toward slaughtering the very people you should be protecting?”

  That wasn’t how James would have phrased it, and it certainly wasn’t the right tone, but his brother’s questions were good ones. They had indeed learned much, more even than James had hoped, but nothing had actually changed. The Once King was still their enemy, and James still didn’t understand why.

  “My brother’s right,” he said, standing up to take Fangs’s side against the increasingly furious king. “I believe everything you’ve told us, but that just makes what you’ve done—what you’re still doing—even more wrong! What kind of king kills his own people and then enslaves their corpses to form an army so he can keep killing? What good monarch tends a fire of hate? What do you think salvation is that this”—he stabbed his finger at the ghostfire torch flickering on the wall—”is your answer?”

  “Ignorant children,” the Once King sneered, his handsome face pulling into a furious mask as he shot to his feet. “I have told you everything, and yet you refuse to learn! You speak of enslavement, but there is no freedom in this world except for what I bring!”

  “All you bring is death!” James cried. “Worse than death! I’ve seen what your ghostfire does. I watched it ravage a child! An innocent little gnoll pup who did nothing to deserve so much suffering! How can you call that freedom?”

  The king stared at them in shock. “You still don’t understand,” he whispered, sinking back into his chair. “You still don’t know what the ghostfire does, how it works.”

  “I know,” James spat. “It burns souls and turns beautiful living things into undead monstrosities!”

  Ar’Kan scowled. “I’ll overlook your rudeness because I see now that it comes from an even deeper ignorance than I realized. I should have known, but it is so difficult to keep in mind just how much you have forgotten.” He shook his head in despair and then straightened up. “Sit,” he said, gently now.

  Looking warily at each other, James and Ar’Bati sat back down on the sofa. When they were still, the Once King removed his black armored gauntlet and lifted his hand, summoning a candle flame–sized wisp of ghostfire into his bare palm.

  “This is death,” he said, holding the blue-white flame up for them to see. “True death, not the tragedy of ever-cycling mortality. After the Sun’s second betrayal, some of my people retained their sanity. They were not seduced by the Moon’s call, but without their wings, they could not escape the grasp of age. Grieving, I rallied everyone who would listen and led them deep underground, away from the cruel Sun. At first we thought only of finding shelter, but down there, deep, deep in the dark, I found something greater. The solution to our problems.”

  He pushed the ghostfire at James, who flinched away. “You found the ghostfire?”

  “No,” the king said, stroking the flame like he would a cat. “This was a complicated creation of my own hand. What we found was an ember left over from the Conflagration. After the Sun burned the Moon, we learned just how hard it was to extinguish sunfire. It is the oldest magic, so primal and eternal that even the Wind and the Water could not fully destroy it all. I mourned that fact while we were fighting, but that wretched tenacity proved to be our salvation.”

  He cupped the flame in both hands. “I took that ember just like this, and I turned to my people—my poor, dying, wingless people ravaged by mortality—and I told them my plan. When they heard it, they rejoiced and sang my praises once again as I fed each one of them into the fire. As they were consumed, I used the magic of the Sky—magic that still lives in all of us—to merge their deaths with the flames, creating this.” He smiled lovingly at the tongue of blue-white fire. “A pyre, death made flame. I took my enemy’s power and made it my own. With the ghostfire, I could burn the souls of my followers to create magic more powerful than anything ever seen in the whole of the Boundless Sky, but even that was only a byproduct. A highly useful but ultimately unnecessary side effect. The true purpose of ghostfire is the destruction of souls.”

  “But…but why?” James demanded.

  “Because a soul consumed by ghostfire cannot be reborn,” the Once King said simply. “Those my ghostfire turns undead are freed from the Moon’s eternal cycle. No longer are they forced to endure the pain of birth, life, and death, making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Instead, their souls are simply gone. At peace. No more.” He smiled. “That is how I will save my people. That is how I will save you. By sending your soul to oblivion, I will finally free you—all of you—from the Moon’s grasp. Even you players. If you stay here for more than one year, your souls will be trapped as well, but you don’t have to be afraid. You are not my people, but I will save you all the same. With my ghostfire, I will save everyone, all the souls in this world. Then, when you are all free, I will feed myself to the flames, and I, too, will have peace at last.”

  James shrank back into the couch. The beatific smile on the Once King’s face was a thousand times more terrifying than his rage had been. Anger, sadness, righteous fury, those were things James could fight, but he didn’t know how to respond to this eagerness. He’d thought the Once King was hopeless, but the man in front of him was doing all of this because he had hope: hope for his people, hope for himself, hope for a future in which no one suffered. If it hadn’t meant the death of the entire world, James could have gotten behind it. But no matter how good the Once King’s intentions, his plan was madness. He had to be stopped, but how?

  “Your first followers,” James said cautiously. “The ones you killed to create the ghostfire. What happened to them? Are they gone?”

  “I didn’t kill them,” the king said, insulted. “They threw themselves on the fire of their own accord. There were six who said I was tainting the Sun’s fire and refused. Those fools I cast aside, flinging them even deeper under the ground, but the others saw what must be done as I did, and they serve me still. They are my generals and advisers, my commanders in the field. While I am trapped here tending the ghostfire, they are already one with the flames. So long as I keep the fire burning bright, they can go wherever they are needed to do my work in the world.”

  James nodded. Of course. Those first dead Celestial Elves had become the powerful sentient undead bosses like Sanguilar or the Lich of Red Canyon. He’d suspected as much, but knowing for certain that the Once King’s original followers were still alive confirmed an important fac
t: souls fed to the ghostfire weren’t consumed immediately. Maybe Celestial Elves just burned very slowly, or maybe the Once King controlled which souls got consumed and which simply smoldered. Either way, the fact that beings like the Lich existed at all proved that souls fed to the ghostfire weren’t necessarily gone, and that gave him hope. If they could destroy the Great Pyre, maybe the souls of those who’d already been turned could still go back into the cycle and be reborn.

  It was definitely worth a try, but James still had to figure out how they were going to get to the Pyre. It was now clear that convincing the Once King to stop fighting was not going to happen, at least not through him. He didn’t know if there was someone the Once King would listen to, but so long as the ancient elf saw him and Fangs as foolish children, he wasn’t going to take anything they said seriously, which meant their usefulness here was done. He’d learned a ton, not that he knew how any of it could be useful yet, but he still needed to get the information back to Tina. His sister was smart, and so were her people. Together, James was sure they could find something in the Once King’s history to use against him. Before he could escape, though, there was one last thing James had to try.

  “Thank you, Ar’Kan, for telling us so much,” he said, bowing respectfully. “My heart breaks for your history of tragedy, disaster, and betrayals.”

  The Once King smiled, banishing the flicker of ghostfire with a wave of his hand. “It is I who should thank you. I am glad I let you live, James of Claw Born. It is good to be understood at least once before the end.”

  “I understand you very well now,” James said, bracing himself. “I just don’t agree.”

  The ancient king froze, his huge body going perfectly still. For a terrifying moment, James thought that was that, but the elf didn’t lash out. He simply slumped in his chair, shaking his head in despair.

  “I am disappointed,” he said at last. “I’d thought here, at last, I’d found someone wise and open-minded enough not to reject the truth.”