story

From where do Kings gain their authority, that formless and ineffable thing that entitles their scions to rule? Ask this question across the hundred ancient kingdoms of the West, and you will receive a hundred answers in turn. They were the greatest warriors, and so will be their sons. They were the cleverest negotiators, and so will be their sons. They were heroes, they were geniuses. They were chosen sages of incontestable wisdom, they were anointed guardians of holy artifacts. And so the reasons go on, innumerable, though essentially identical: from naturally inheriting the duties and excellence of their mythologised forefathers.

But, it is only for the house of Asphodel, the monarchs to whom every western lord swears fealty, that the answer is truly ‘by the blood’.

Through the veins of house Asphodel runs the same godly ichor that the Demiurge himself once bled, bridging the mortal and the divine by simple pedigree. “God has given sons to save us!” some cried. “Governors from lost Heaven!” went others. Were a claim to godliness their only power, however, time — alongside inevitable ambitions, discontents, and familiarity — would have surely eroded the Asphodels’ rule. No. What kept them King was the miracles.

Their blood is not just a symbol; it is a genuinely miraculous substance with astounding supernatural properties. To the living, it is a quick, lethal venom. To contaminations, dirts, diseases, and poisons, it is a ruthless cleanser. But to the soul, it is succour — for it is only by an ablution in the blood of an Asphodel that a soul might be purified of rot.

That horrible rot! Rot is the curse upon the world that twists all dead souls into unthinking monsters. Nobody except the vassals of Asphodel know any peace from the rot, which turns one poor coffin into a townwide massacre, and forces families to murder corrupted mockeries of their loved kin. The pain of the transformation to the dead, too, is excruciating. But a single drop of Asphodel blood — and the soul calmly rests, in the relaxed sleep of a coma, eternal, unchanged, painless, and pure.

It is to this blood alone that a hundred ancient lords pledged their loyalty. A life in service for a death in peace. For 600 years, the house of Asphodel presided without any particular challenge or incident.

Peace came to thrive. Prosperity soon followed it. These twin hedonisms felt eternal.

They were not. Their unwinding began with Gallus.

The Crown Prince, soon King, Gallus Fidelis Peredur Asphodel.

Gallus was not a dumb man, though he was an irresponsible one. He loved his friends, loved his family, loved to eat and hunt and play and fart and had great rolling laughter that would light every nook of the room. He was ruthlessly friendly, would often mingle with commoners, and seemed to exist for merry adventure. The duties of princehood or kingship never constrained him. With decadence being the fabric of the era, the Kingdom was rich and productive enough to essentially run itself. So Gallus’s days were ones of studying princeship only to the minimum of what his parents demanded, then bolting out the palace like a dog off its leash, getting into misadventures, returning to the palace at evening, and partying well into nightfall. Sunset. Sunrise. Repeat.

It was in this manner that he made many friends, with two of particular note. The first: Toreas of Lacren, a proud and dutiful squire from a distinguished noble household of knights. The second: Faron Whitewood, a homeless guttersnipe urchin who lived by petty theft and pickpocketing. Toreas was more proper, but Faron was more wild and exciting. The intriguing social gap exhilarated Gallus for the sheer difference between his and Faron’s worlds. He and Faron soon became close companions, with Gallus eager to dabble in illicit circles that princes typically never touched, and Faron shockingly sincere in his plain loyalty and liking of Gallus.

Through Faron, Gallus discovered an underbelly in Asphodel rife with concerning practises. Drug rings, kidnappings, rumours of regional lords bending to bribes from thugs or exempting suspicious organisations from taxes. This worried Gallus, who was eager to act, but recognised recklessness could be self-defeating. If he went in, sword raised, to personally execute all these scattered miscreants, it would be a gross overstep of his authority on the regional lords. The most he could do was alert them to impropriety and trust them to manage it themselves. Given that some were complicit, though, this would not work as a flat answer. Further, as Faron advised, the first whiff of trouble would send the ne’er-do-wells scattering to regroup elsewhere. These were quite organised rackets, and tenaciously cowardly ones, too.

Rather than try to destroy them, Gallus contemplated the possibility of controlling them. If he could defang their worst practises, rein in their scope, and hoard up their profits and products for himself, he could minimise their impact substantially. Moreover, if he could use these groups to pressure certain lords in secret, he could bypass a lot of faffing and political meandering to get whatever things he may need done, indeed done. Sort of like mercenaries. Just sneakier. And shadier. And free. Either way the prospect was tantalisingly lucrative.

Eventually, over decades, Gallus and Faron reshaped this national underbelly. Groups were syndicated. Their contracts, regulated. Semblances of legitimacy and honour grew within certain factions, who would autonomously destroy or absorb their freelance competitors. There came codes of thieves, codes of assassins, codes of smugglers. The coordinator of this underworld, mediator of disputes, and broker of contracts was Faron Whitewood — now a very rich man, and welcome in court as minor nobility.

Toreas, witness to this, was appalled. It disgusted him that Gallus would legitimise criminality rather than stop it, and he found it insulting that a common criminal would ever be raised into nobility for, well, being a criminal. Though he tried to discourage Gallus from the scheme, he failed. Fuming, and feeling too betrayed to stay at Gallus’s side, Toreas dismissed Asphodel as corrupt and left the nation, soon becoming a mercenary for the traditionally hostile country of Ordanz, instead.

It was a painful rift for Gallus, but not one he could mend. He pushed Toreas out of his mind, returned to the court’s raucous parties, and raised his shining goblet with a smile.

Gallus soon met and married his lover, an uncontroversially high-bred woman named Rhea. She was quiet and gentle, with a slightly anxious seriousness that counterbalanced Gallus’ more rambunctious demeanour. Still, it was with confidence that she ascended into her new position, and with trust in Gallus’ control that she accepted most of his questionable dealings. Though she could be either when needed, she was more eagerly a wife than a politician, anyway.

Within the two years of Gallus’ parents dying, and of Gallus himself consequently becoming King, he and Rhea produced two children. Their heir and firstborn, Aquila, then a daughter, Columba.

Aquila plainly took after Gallus. He was fiery and prone to adventure, very charismatic and personable. But he was also devious. He enjoyed mocking others and deceiving them, enjoyed misbehaving while knowing himself untouchable. Alongside Faron’s twin sons, Morgan and Mason, he pushed limits — bad limits. But between the smoothness of his tongue and quickness of his wit, people rarely realised just how great a delinquent he was, much less that he’d ever been cruel.

Columba more mirrored Rhea. She was quiet and composed, with great empathy and compassion for life. But she was bitter. She resented Aquila’s manipulations and hooliganism, his filial warmth towards her be damned. Her father’s cavalier attitudes grated at her, and she loathed Morgan and Mason as thugs. The silent expectation that she marry one of them — likely Mason — revolted her. Court was a crucible of vipers. Though only one step removed from the most influential position in the country, she felt herself impotent to change, fix, or escape the dark veil inexorably weaved into the monarchy’s practises.

And that was where Gallus and Rhea stopped. To birth children from the miraculous bloodline of Asphodel imparted an immense strain on mothers outside the pedigree, shearing their souls into pieces. Some queens would be bedridden after siring only one heir. In Rhea’s case, after Aquila and Columba, she could no longer walk and suffered from epilepsy. But her mind was still sound, her physical health was still good, and her energy levels were still high. She could live a long and still quite satisfying life, she and Gallus discerned, provided they had no more children.

Everything would have been fine.

Except that 16 years later, with little joy, Rhea once again became pregnant.

All Phoenix knew about the circumstances of his birth was what the photo albums testified. Pages upon pages of smiles — where his mother playfully fussed with Aquila’s hair, or of Columba guilelessly laughing at some joke of her father’s. His siblings’ growth had been catalogued so extensively, that if each photo were bound into a flipbook, their transformation from toddlerhood to adolescence would be practically seamless.

Then it stopped.

The curtain was one last snapshot of his mother. She was wearing a white sungown as she gazed over the lake from the garden balcony, smiling, but without the joy that teemed from the previous photographs. Despite the bright sun and blue sky, a quiet sense of doom lingered between her crooked lips and wet eyes.

Phoenix imagined her hopelessness only ever got worse, given that was the last photo.

Well, to call it the last one was not quite correct. It was simply the last natural one, where someone had spontaneously decided the moment was precious, and wished to hold and revisit it the way that Phoenix did now. Everything afterwards was purely official. Once a year at the beginning of the first month, one formal photograph of the Royal Family, posed to the aesthetics of the nation’s most esteemed photographers.

One: himself as an infant in the arms of his father, whose strained smile went uncomforted by the conspicuous void beside him. Aquila and Columba were in front, where they couldn’t see.

Two: himself now in Columba’s arms, with her and Aquila’s shoulders cradled by their father. Aquila looked to her with a sly grin that she didn’t return.

Three: himself standing at Aquila’s feet, grasping the tail of Aquila’s coat. Aquila grinned helplessly to their father, who wasn’t smiling. Columba was gone.

She had killed herself that winter. Phoenix found her note hidden in his room come spring.

She wanted him to resurrect her, it said.

This was a more obscure power of the royals. Unlike the unique properties of their purifying blood, the ability to manipulate the bonds that tied dead souls to matter — tying them back into some vessel — was a common trait of occult magicians and witches. The stories of how such practitioners used it, or more often abused it, were horrible. Resurrecting dead children in the bodies of goats and returning them like that to their parents. Souls bound to inanimate objects — plates, chairs, mats, dustbins — that could perceive people using them, and perhaps feel pain if made to, but could not move or scream in any way their inadvertant torturers would hear. Or the more conventional practice of enslavement; binding souls as familiars under torturous geas that would inflict agony should they disobey their witch. It was all called soulsmithing.

The art itself wasn’t inherently evil, but its pitch-black reputation fouled any thought of it. The royals, though they vowed to use it responsibly, were often not above surreptitiously resurrecting their friends or allies. The scandal if anyone knew would be immense. Fortunately, these occurrences were sparse enough, and secretive enough, that no drama had yet come of the practice.

Phoenix, at three years old, was already an unmatched soulsmith. If something was theoretically possible to be achieved with soulsmithing, Phoenix could do it with ease. It was almost a game to him, and he may have treated it as such if it weren’t so inherently serious. Witches who had studied all their lives would pale before his talent. And so did Columba.

She wanted him to resurrect her, the note said. She wanted a new body that would free her from the pressing obligations of her family, and particularly from the obligation of marriage. Her old body had been thoroughly destroyed in the process of her suicide, so that if Aquila or Gallus had any ideas, that vessel wouldn’t be an option.

As it was, though, they had no ideas. Aquila accepted the news soberly even after Phoenix revealed the note, interred her soul in the national crypt with all the other dead Asphodels, and never touched it again. It was around this age that Phoenix was old enough to remember these things with clarity.

So there was little need to reference the albums, past that point. They all melded into the same composition anyway. Aquila in the middle, then Phoenix and their father on opposite sides of him. Inevitably.

Though his father never raised his voice or said anything unkind, Phoenix knew Gallus hated him. Whenever Phoenix entered a room, Gallus would shortly leave. If Gallus and Aquila departed on an outing, Phoenix wouldn’t be invited. Court, where Gallus spent his time socialising and partying, was completely forbidden. Gallus never spoke to Phoenix, or even went near his section of the house. Dinners were so oppressively silent that Phoenix knew by age 5 to just eat in his room. He had that sort of laissez-faire freedom, where he could do anything he wanted — provided his activities never overlapped with Gallus’, and the illusion of Phoenix’s non-existence was maintained.

Really, most people in the house didn’t like Phoenix. Though he was young, he was smart, rude, and mean. He often accused his caretakers of incompetence, and because of his obviously advanced mental development, never bonded properly with peers. He fussed over little things and quibbled about flaws. The fact he withdrew into solitary pursuits — reading and piano — if left to himself only crippled his social skills further, until it became a truism that there was no point approaching Phoenix, unless mandated to by some job, task, or chore.

Aquila was the exception. Though, it wasn’t that Phoenix treated Aquila more amicably so much as Aquila was just ridiculously patient. He would find activities for himself and Phoenix to do together, urge Phoenix to pursue his hobbies, drag him out of his room, listen to him when he wanted to speak, and routinely check in on him. But the obligations of princehood limited Aquila. Whereas Phoenix had almost no expectations placed on him to ascend, Aquila did, and with age he’d come to regard those obligations seriously. Still, even though work made Aquila frequently unavailable, it was Aquila that Phoenix leaned on whenever he wanted help, guidance, or company.

From the outside it just seemed Aquila was indulging a bossy little brat. Aquila’s friends, that being Morgan and Mason, often bullied Phoenix whenever circumstances put them in each others’ presence. With Morgan it was always sly little comments addressed to no one, things that were worded neutrally but spoken like insults. With Mason it was more direct — shoving, harsh noogies, chinese burns. He’d laugh about it as fun boyish roughhousing then just flat call Phoenix a dipshit. Phoenix feared them, particularly Mason, and though tattling to Aquila stopped the worst of it, the anxiety that Mason would one day randomly drop-kick him over a fence never truly abated.

Though uncomfortable, it wasn’t unlivable. Provided he kept to his own business and repelled malicious sorts quickly, he could get by with little drama or trouble.

So that’s what he did, for 11 years.

But trouble, of course, found him anyway.