The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “Took them away?” the king repeated, furious. “You mutilated my people!”

  The avatar shook its head. “They do not suffer. You have seen them happy and thriving…granted eternal rebirth by…the Moon’s mercy…” The figure reached out again. “My first and precious child, I wish I could take your wings too…You are owed peace more than any other…You have tried so hard for so long to do what is right. You deserve…rest.”

  The Once King recoiled from the golden hand. “I cannot accept this,” he spat. “There is no rest in an endless cycle! We must end. It is the only way to escape!”

  The avatar of the Sun moved closer, leaning in until the Once King’s long hair began to singe and crinkle.

  “You are not doomed…” it whispered. “And you were never alone…I loved my children always…watched you, always…I hear and answer your prayers. I put my light inside each of you, to protect your souls when they pass through the Lightless Realm. We are still together…always…Come home.”

  The Once King lowered his head with a sob. Even without seeing his face, James could feel the king’s longing, his desperation to run back into his creator’s light, but he did not move.

  “If you are right,” he said at last in a dark, quivering voice, “then I am wrong. Terribly, horribly, unforgivably wrong for so many years.” He took a shuddering breath. Then, to James’s almost mortal shock, the Once King’s arm flew up to point at him. “Even he knew it, and he hasn’t been here two weeks!” The king buried his face in his hands. “How was I so wrong?”

  The Sun said nothing. Instead, it turned its formless face to James, who was almost knocked over by the force of such direct, divine attention. Despite the burning terror, though, James knew why. This wasn’t something the god could say. There was too much anger, too much resentment. For these words to be heard, they had to come from another. The Sun, in its wisdom, understood that. James thought he did, too. He just hoped he was up to the task.

  “Even the Sun makes mistakes,” he said gently, breathing deeply to hide how badly he was shaking. “But you can move on. If a god can admit it is wrong and seek forgiveness, surely you can, too.”

  “How?” the Once King asked bitterly. “I am the enemy of all life. All this world sees me as such—you said so yourself. How can I come back from that? How can I be forgiven?”

  James shot a nervous look at the Sun, but the god remained silent, giving him no help. “That’s the mercy of rebirth,” James said at last, hoping he was right. “Everyone makes mistakes, everyone does wrong, but there’s always another day. We always get to try again.”

  “But the hatred lives on,” the king said, staring down at the ground. “I may die, but I will be hated forever.”

  “You can’t make people forgive you,” James admitted. “But you can forgive yourself, and you can stop doing the things that hurt everyone so much. You can’t change the past, but you don’t have to let it rule your future, either. You can always choose to be better. There is always a way forward. Time takes us all to new places eventually. You just have to let yourself go there.”

  The Once King said nothing, just lowered his head to the ground. Then, in a tiny voice, he whispered, “I am sorry.”

  James jumped in surprise and looked at the Sun, but the god shook its head. “That is not for me,” it whispered in its booming voice. “I am owed no…apology. It is for you.”

  James nodded, understanding the Sun didn’t mean him in particular. The Once King’s apology was for everyone, all the souls he’d trapped in the name of freeing them. But as the Once King had just told the Sun, words were not enough.

  “If you’re sorry, then fix it,” James said, crouching down beside the king. “Put out the ghostfire and let your followers rest. Stop the undead before they really do kill off the last of Bastion. Free the souls you’ve trapped so that they may be born again. Send home the players you trapped here. You may not be able to force people to forgive you, but you can give them a reason to try. If you are truly sorry, then mend your wrongs. Show it in deeds, not just words, and I think you’ll be surprised.”

  The Sun nodded in agreement. “He speaks…wisely.”

  The Once King’s head shot up at that. “You’re not going to punish me?” he asked, shocked. “But what of the monstrous things I’ve done?”

  “I could ask the same…of you,” the Sun whispered, its avatar wobbling. “I burned the Moon…I ended the Endless Sky…I did not mean it, but the fault was…mine. Can you still love me?”

  “I never stopped,” the Once King said, his body sagging. “How else could I have been so mad?”

  “You forgive me?”

  The king nodded, and James felt the golden avatar smile. “If you can forgive me…after so…long. Then there is nothing that…cannot be forgiven.”

  The Once King took a deep breath. James did too, impressed. Truly, the Sun was a wise god. Even Tina looked like she was eating it up, and she normally hated this stuff. But while the god was beaming with a job well done, the Once King looked more lost than ever.

  “But what do I do now?” he asked the Sun, looking down at his hands. “I don’t…I don’t want to die. I was willing to do so for my people, but now…” He took a deep breath, his face conflicted. “I must die, though. How else am I to be reborn?”

  “You are already…born anew,” the Sun said, reaching out to touch his face, but careful—oh so careful—not to burn it. “My dearest child…every day is a new life. You do not have…to die. The only thing you have to do…is live.”

  With that, the blinding figure vanished, leaving them all blinking sunspots out of their eyes. The intense light faded next, leaving them standing on the broken mountaintop in the perfectly normal light of a bright summer afternoon. Even the chill of the Deadlands was gone, replaced by the refreshing cool of the high mountains. The Once King breathed it in deep, raising his face to the bright sky overhead.

  “It is gone,” he whispered.

  “I don’t think the Sun is ever really gone,” James said, approaching the huge king nervously. When the elf didn’t move, he glanced at Tina. This turned out to be a bad idea, because his sister started frantically motioning for him to do something, but James had no idea what. How did you follow up for a god? Fortunately for him, though, the Once King was still a king. Monarchs did not remain indecisive for long, or on their knees. It took a few moments, but eventually he got back to his feet, looking around at the players he’d been frantically trying to kill not five minutes earlier with an expression that—on a lesser face—James would have called sheepish.

  “It appears matters have changed,” he announced regally, brushing the burned blood off his armor self-consciously as he turned to Tina. “We have much to discuss.”

  “You bet your winged ass we do,” Tina said, folding her arms over her chest. “But let’s start with your army that’s attacking—”

  “Already stopped,” the king assured her. When Tina arched a skeptical eyebrow, he explained, “I control all undead, sentient or otherwise. My army stopped in its tracks the moment the Sun asked my forgiveness.”

  From anyone else, that would have sounded cocky, but from the Once King, it just sounded sad. Sad and heavy with the regret of a man who had just realized how much of his life he had wasted. James could absolutely relate, and he walked forward to put his hand on the king’s arm with a warm smile. “Well,” he said cheerily. “Since no one’s dying right this very second, we have time to talk. Let’s start with my brother. Is he…?”

  “Undead?” the Once King finished. “No. He was faking being dead when I passed, or perhaps passed out. Either way, I was in a hurry and didn’t consider him worth the effort, so I shoved his body into one of the zombie spawners.”

  James recoiled in horror. “You put Fangs in a zombie spawner?”

  “I figured it would save time later when he inevitably died and turned,” the Once King said with a practical shrug. “I didn’t feel his soul join the Pyre, though, s
o he’s probably still in there.”

  “Right,” James said, turning to his sister. “Why don’t you two find somewhere to negotiate. I’m going to rescue my brother.”

  “Don’t take too long,” Tina said, eying the Once King warily as James turned and started running toward the stairs.

  “Be careful with Angry Cat!” Neko yelled after him. “He’s going to die legit when he hears us players saved the world!”

  That was both more and less true than she knew, but James didn’t have time to explain. He was already loping down the stairs toward the throne room, scrambling to remember where all the zombie spawners in the Royal Quarter were so he could narrow down which one the Once King had unceremoniously crammed his brother into.

  Chapter 16

  James and Tina

  As the Once King had said, James did indeed find his brother in a zombie spawner. Thankfully, it was an empty one, and the warrior was unconscious. James made sure to drag him well away before he started the heals, though, because the hidden chute in the wall that dropped undead behind player raids was disgusting. Not as gross as it could have been—the Once King’s undead weren’t as drippy as movies would have one believe—but dead bodies were still dead bodies, and they got rank.

  Trying not to gag, James dragged his brother to the center of the hallway that led to the Once King’s throne room and sat down to mana up. There wasn’t much dried meat left in his pack since he’d already done this once today, but he got enough in to cast a healing spell big enough to at least wake the warrior up.

  “Ugh,” Fangs said, his cat eyes blinking open. Then they spotted James, and the warrior sat up so fast he nearly passed out again.

  “Easy!” James said, helping him back down. “I only had enough mana to get you out of danger. If you crack your head open on the granite, we’re in trouble.”

  “My head is not afraid of floors,” Ar’Bati replied in such a deadpan voice that James had no idea if he was joking or not. “More importantly, you are here and alive. Does that mean we won?”

  “Yeah,” James said, smiling widely. “We did. We did win!”

  He got more excited with every word. There’d been so much going on that he hadn’t had time to fully realize what they’d just accomplished. The undead had stopped. The war was over. No one had died! They were all going to live!

  Whooping with victory, James grabbed his brother in a huge bear hug. “We won, Fangs!!” he cried, jumping up and down. “We did it!”

  “Ow,” was his brother’s only reply.

  “Sorry,” James said, releasing his hold on his brother’s chest, which still had a hole that was only minimally healed.

  “Never be sorry for celebrating a victory,” Ar’Bati said, clearly striving to be tough despite the pain on his face. “So the Once King is dead?”

  James frowned. “Not exactly…”

  “Defeated, then?” the cat warrior pressed. “Bound in chains to pay for his crimes?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain,” James said slowly. “But I’ll try.”

  ***

  “Let me be sure I’ve got this straight,” Ar’Bati said, tail lashing. “Your sister cornered the Once King into a trap that forced his surrender, and then you summoned the Sun to talk some sense into him?”

  That wasn’t how it had gone down at all, but they’d been here so long already that James had recovered enough mana to drop another heal on his brother, and he wasn’t telling this story again. “Sure,” James said, exhausted. “Whatever. The important thing is that the Once King’s agreed to stop attacking, and now we’re negotiating. We need to be polite and keep an open mind.”

  “I’m not forgetting what he’s done,” Fangs growled. “His lich tortured me for hours untold! My sister had to suffer undeath thousands of times because of him!”

  “I’m not asking you to forgive anything,” James assured him. “But I do need you to listen. This is important. What we do here and now will shape the future of this entire world. We just ended a thousand-year war. Let’s not start another one just yet, okay?”

  “If the Sun itself could forgive the undead, then I suppose I can be civil,” the warrior grumbled, lashing his tail. “But no more than civil.”

  “Good enough,” James said, rising to his feet. “Let’s go. Everyone’s waiting on us.”

  Ar’Bati lifted his hands for James to pull him up, and then, leaning on each other, the two brothers started down the long, far-too-large-to-be-practical hall toward the throne room, which was open and full of people. All of the Roughnecks were there, and surprisingly, so were the Red Sands. The PvPers were all injured, and several had the shaky, thousand-yard stare of the recently resurrected, but they were alive, which seemed like a miracle given how much blood was splattered across the hallway leading in.

  The throne room itself was clean, though. Someone had cleared all the rubble from the ceiling collapse and scoured the blood off the stone floor. They’d even righted the toppled throne, which made James suspect this was the Once King’s work. Strange as it was to imagine the giant king cleaning up, imagining him holding court in a filthy, wrecked throne room was even more implausible. His pride would never allow it. He was actually up on his dais right now, though he was not sitting on his throne, probably because it would be too awkward sitting on the cursed Eclipsed Steel after making up with the Sun. Or maybe he just felt like standing. Either way, the king was clearly tired of waiting, gesturing impatiently at James the moment he walked in to come and join him and Tina on the dais steps.

  “Now that we are all here,” he said, his voice back to its usual imperiousness as James leaned his still-wobbly adopted brother against a pillar and took his place on the stairs. “Let us begin negotiations.”

  There was a long pause, and Tina leaned over to James. “That’s you,” she whispered.

  “But you’re the great general,” he whispered back.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’m the stick, not the carrot. You’re the one who always wanted to be a diplomat, so diplomat him!”

  James didn’t think she could use “diplomat” as a verb like that, but he cleared his throat anyway. “Your Majesty,” he began, trying not to think about how terrifying it still was to be the object of the Once King’s direct attention. “You have already ended the war in the Savanna, and for that we are very grateful. However, much damage has been done. The city of Bastion lies in ruins, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. Many of those souls are trapped in your ghostfire. I would ask that you release them.”

  “And send us home!” a raider from the back yelled out.

  The Once King scowled at the outburst, and then he sighed. “What you ask is complicated,” he said, his ash-gray wings twitching like drumming fingers. “The ghostfire was created to keep souls out of the Moon’s cycle of reincarnation, which I now understand to be folly, but it is also the source of my power. I used it to bring you all here in the first place. Without it, I do not have the magic necessary to send you home.”

  “That’s fine,” Tina said. “You’re quitting the Evil Undead Overlord gig, right? If you’re not running zombie armies and doom fortresses anymore, what do you need ghostfire for? Let’s burn it up and get us home!”

  “What do you think it burns?” the Once King asked coldly. “It is ghostfire. Its necromantic flames are fed by the very souls I now know I must free. If I ‘burn it up,’ as you so crudely suggest, I’ll be continuing the wrong actions that led me to this point in the first place.”

  Tina’s face fell in despair. James didn’t blame her. That was a pretty big catch, but he wasn’t giving up. “How do we free the souls from the ghostfire?”

  “That is…tricky,” the Once King admitted, his expression grim. “When I created the ghostfire, I did not plan on ever reversing it. I do not honestly know if it can be reversed. It is a combination of the Sun’s fire and death, neither of which is simple to undo. Just as a log fed into a blazing hearth cannot be pulled back out a
gain whole and uncharred, a soul fed into the ghostfire is forever changed. I don’t know if I can retrieve them.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Tina said, throwing up her hands. “We’re screwed.”

  “Don’t give up hope yet,” James said, thinking the problem through. “’Changed’ is different from ‘gone.’ The pile of Celestial Elves in the Great Pyre proves that souls can burn for a really long time without being destroyed. Those are the bodies of Ar’Kan’s very first followers, the ones whose deaths created the ghostfire in the first place. If they’re still in there, then everyone else must be, too.”

  “But how do we get them out?” Tina asked. “And if we do, how does anyone get home?”

  “I don’t know,” James said, turning back to the king. “We saw you in Bastion, but you only appeared briefly. According to the wiki, you’re trapped in this mountain because you can’t go far from the Great Pyre. Is that correct?”

  The Once King nodded. “The flames require constant tending. If I leave it for too long, the Pyre will burn down, and my powers will fade.” He turned to glare at Tina’s Ranger leader, Zen. “You clearly know this.”

  The green-haired elf smirked, unrepentant, and James hurried to get things back on track. “But that’s good!” he said quickly. “If the Great Pyre is full of souls and the flames are constantly in danger of burning out, that means there must be some part of those souls that the ghostfire can’t burn. I mean, you’ve got people who’ve been in there for a thousand years! If they haven’t been consumed yet, they’re not gonna be. They’re just trapped in there. But if you stop stoking the fire and let it burn out, there will be nothing holding them down anymore, and they’ll be free to go back into the Moon’s cycle.”

  The Once King looked down, clearly deeply disturbed by this idea. “I….I see no technical reason this would not be true,” he said at last. “But you must understand, those are my people’s souls. I’ve tended the fire for so long, I don’t know what will happen if I stop. The souls trapped inside could be consumed entirely and be gone. That was always my intention, the reason the ghostfire exists. I don’t know if it can be thwarted.”