by Daryl Banner
The Twice King : an Outlier prequel novella
Copyright © 2018 by Daryl Banner
Published by Frozenfyre Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including but not limited to being stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover & Interior Design: Daryl Banner
Urban Photography By: Jan Behrens
OTHER WORK by Daryl Banner
The OUTLIER Series
Rebellion ∙
Legacy ∙
Reign Of Madness ∙
Beyond Oblivion ∙
Five Kings ∙
Kings & Queens: The Slum Queen ∙
Kings & Queens: The Twice King ∙
The Beautiful Dead Saga
The Beautiful Dead ∙
Dead Of Winter ∙
Almost Alive ∙
The Whispers ∙
The Winters ∙
The Wakings ∙
The Brazen Boys (M/M Romance)
Dorm Game ∙
On The Edge ∙
Owned By The Freshman ∙
Dog Tags ∙
Commando (Dog Tags 2) ∙
All Yours Tonight ∙
Straight Up ∙
Houseboy Rules ∙
Slippery When Wet ∙
New Adult Romance (M/M)
Bromosexual ∙
Hard For My Boss ∙
Football Sundae ∙
A College Obsession Romance
Read My Lips ∙
Beneath The Skin ∙
With These Hands ∙
Kings & Queens of Atlas
Year: Name & Title:
0000-0300 Birth Of Atlas / The Age Of Three Goddess
0300-0410 Aardgar, The Immortal King
0410-0445 Winley, The Everywhere King
0445-0483 Emelda, Queen Of Stones
0465-0465 Marshals Of Peace, Order, & Legacy Instituted
0483-0505 Gourde, King Of Shadows
0505-0521 Nylesandra, The Storm Queen
0521-0572 Unther Dreadland, The Smiling King
0572-0600 Ashe Lionbane, Queen Of Promises
0600-0636 Illiam Breeds, The Fell King
0636-0637 Ghesta Goldmore, Queen Of Faces
0637-0640 Council Of Elders ruled in the absence of an heir
0640-0690 Prymise Eastly, The Obsidian King
0690-0716 Borbar, King Of Wrath
0716-0716 The Decimation Of Twelfth Ward
0716-0804 Anarchy / The Age Of No Rule
0804-0804 The Prohibition Of Bombs / Balance Restored
0804-0852 Xen Lunaran, The Queen Of Pieces
0852-0872 Quilis Armlong, The Berserker
0872-0880 Penelo Armlong, The Unborn Queen
0880-0916 Everest Lastly, The Gold King
0898-0898 First Legacy Tour, by Royal Legacist Jennos
0916-0924 Phade, The War Bringer
0924-0930 Jennos, King Of Opportunities
0930-0995 Vivilan Rubylight, Queen Of Skies
0995-1022 The Undercity Rebellion / The Ghost Age
0999-???? Aardgar, The Risen Again King
“Live each day of your life as if you’ve already lived forever.”
The Twice
King
The Outlier
He lies like the dead in a tomb of permanent darkness.
He is certain no one remembers him anymore. What a thought that is—to exist, and yet for the whole world to know nothing of his existence. Would the legends still leap from ear to ear in the slums of the Last City of Atlas?—the legend of King Aardgar, the first King of Atlas? Do the people even believe the legend?
Perhaps he will sleep here forever, his only mercy coming when the world itself ends. His only solace in this eternal darkness is to dream of his life.
And to dream of her …
He dreams of a day long ago when a great and hungry fire burned at the stone feet of Cloud Tower, the heart of the Lifted City. It wasn’t always Lifted. The greedy Kings and Queens that followed him made it that way. Fools. It seems like just yesterday that the war cries bellowed at his feet while he sweat out the longest siege of his life in the tall, stony talons of his King’s chambers. Iron swords clanged and arrows hissed through the smoky night air … and all King Aardgar could think of that day was her.
Her … It was always her …
She called herself Evanesce, the woman of golden eyes and golden hair. He loved her, long ago. He worshipped her.
The battle waged on down below, but all the King did that day was kneel at the balcony of his bed chambers and clasp his hands together, his eyes closed as he begged, prayed for the woman with the golden hair to feel his plight, just as she promised she would.
Evanesce, the otherworldly woman of gold.
Evanesce, the love of his life.
I was such a fool back then—an ancient fool with a withered mind and weak soul, Aardgar remembers, thinking back to all of this as he lies in the darkness of his tomb.
He was put in this tomb. Make no mistake. He does not lie here because he is dead; far from it. He lies here because he was put here.
And he dreams not because he sleeps, but because it is the only way to be free from this tomb.
At least in spirit.
Long, long before the citizens of the Last City of Atlas took weapons to their hands and revolted against Immortal King Aardgar, he was just a dumb, curious little boy in one curious little village.
He is often called the Twice King, but really he only ruled once.
The story that has long since fallen to the ways of mythologies and spoken legends is one of the Three Goddess and their three hundred year reign. If one believes in them, they might also believe that during the rule of the Three Goddess—even before the Last City of Atlas existed—the generation who carried the first Legacies were born.
They’d also believe that King Aardgar was among that first generation born. And he was.
But he was not yet King. “With your power, you will come to learn many things,” his mother of no Legacy explained over a bowl of spicy rice to her two-year-old son, “but only if you guard your knowledge, Aardgar. One opened mouth becomes two closed ears.”
It wasn’t until one fateful morning a decade later when a band of no less than five Legacy-less Goddess zealots attacked his home that Aardgar’s faith in his mother’s words would be tested.
“Tell us your sorcery!” one of the zealots demanded of Aardgar. “Tell us or we’ll set your mother afire in the name of the Goddess Three!”
“Don’t say a word,” cried his father before the butt of a sword cracked into his big, bearded chin, freeing a tooth along with a spritz of blood and spit.
“Tell us your sorcery! Tell us!”
It was an unfortunate but expected state of things that those among the first generation of children born with Legacies were sought after, feared, or killed. The zealots had somehow come to believe that those with powers had stolen them from the Goddesses, and they were to be punished. Perhaps the zealots were jealous of the power, and they relentlessly hunted those who were gifted.
Outliers, those with powers were called back then.
And they did not use the term “Legacy” that h
as since come to describe the unique power the children of this generation and every generation thereafter wielded. They used another: “sorcery”. They saw the Outliers as threats to the very fabric of their society.
Perhaps they were right all along, Aardgar wonders as he recalls all of this from so long ago, detail by detail.
“TELL US!”
Little twelve-year-old Aardgar tried to keep his one mouth closed and his two ears open, just like his mother taught him over and over, but it was ever so difficult. His mother’s eyes beseeched him desperately from across the cramped, dusty room of their humble home. His father—bleeding, bruised—struggled feebly against the zealot’s hold.
“I …” croaked young Aardgar.
The zealots listened, hunger in their eyes.
“No, Aardgar,” begged his mother. “No, no. Don’t.”
And then something strange happened. In this moment, he saw a golden light. It startled him at first, and he thought that it was merely the sun poking through a spread of grey clouds outside the window. But when his eyes adjusted, he saw that it was no sunlight, and it did not come from the window; it appeared by their eating table. The glorious light grew into a soft, beautiful face—a girl’s face. She appeared to be his age, though little Aardgar could not be sure.
And she whispered his name.
How did she know my name?
The light glowed so strongly, yet no one in the house seemed to take notice. It made little Aardgar realize he was alone in seeing her. The golden light came for him and only him. It belonged to him.
“Tell us!” cried the leader of the zealots. The colorful silk robe the zealot wore wasn’t so colorful as it might have once been; the silk was torn, tattered, and his eyes burned with a mad hunger that reflected the frayed state of his robe. The zealot looked so exotic, so strange and unfamiliar, as if he was from a faraway village half a planet away.
“I … I was b-born without sorcery,” Aardgar lied.
Another zealot—his bald head shiny and his eyes wet with greed—gripped Aardgar’s father by his curly hair and pulled him back. A sharp found his throat and kissed it, but did not yet puncture. The sharp that the bald zealot held, gleaming in the light, was ever ready to make a glorious red love to his father’s neck.
“Once more, fool-child,” warned the zealot in the torn silken robe. “If another lie escapes your throat …”
“Not a word,” his father hissed.
“If another fool lie escapes that fool throat … then blood will escape your father’s.”
“N-Not a w-word, son,” his father sputtered again, this time with force, his lips red from his own blood. “Not a w-word to these rogues. Not a word.”
Rogues. If I only knew …
Aardgar looked toward the golden light, the face of the strange girl. She was forming a body. It wore no clothing, naked as her birthday, if such a being of light is “born” at all.
Quite suddenly, Aardgar felt the prickling of power in his fingertips. It startled him just as the light did. He lifted a hand, confused, staring at it, and then brought his twisted gaze to the girl. What was happening?
“Sorcerer,” another zealot by the window breathed, seeing the light in Aardgar’s palms. “SORCERER!”
Aardgar’s curly-haired father who raised him and cared for him and truly loved him blinked once, then opened his mouth to speak a word to his son.
The zealot’s sharp drew across his neck quicker.
Oh, Father …
His mother screamed. Little Aardgar didn’t know what he was looking at, watching as his father tumbled to the ground, a sickly, gurgling noise spilling from his mouth. Aardgar was confused, everything happening so fast. He wasn’t even sure at first that his father’s throat had been slit.
Then a golden light spilled from Aardgar’s shaking palms. The room became white hot. He feared he had somehow set the place afire, but the light went as quickly as it had come, and where there once stood five Legacy-less zealots in robes, there were now three tall skeletons—fleshless corpses charred and black. After one graceful second of standing upright, the bones then slumped to the ground with an oddly soft sort of rattling noise.
How did five skeletons become three? Did the golden light completely disintegrate two of the zealots, obliterating them from existence in one great flash?
Aardgar wished the light had disintegrated all five.
His mother held her husband and wailed as he choked out his last, desperate tendrils of life. Aardgar watched, stunned. He didn’t cry.
When he turned about, the girl in the golden light was gone. And he was now fatherless.
His mother was a strong woman who spent but that one single minute grieving before, with hands still bloody, she began packing their most vital things. “Hurry, Aardgar,” she whispered, tears hanging on her high cheekbones, unfallen. “There will be more. They will come for you.”
They covet you. They fear you. They want to end you.
Outlier.
Those are the words he remembers most from his loving, powerless parents, his Legacy-less mother and now dead father. They instilled in him a deep sense of self-preservation—but a deeper sense of fear.
The two of them made a home out of a tent in the woods on the outskirts of the village that night and the few to follow. They were so close to the Oblivion that Aardgar felt he could smell death with his every breath.
Those born with Legacies stopped sleeping at the age of two, so when his mother lay down to rest, Aardgar found himself standing on the bank of a nearby river with only his nightmares to keep him company through the long night.
It was under the sharp edge of a crescent moon on that riverbank that the golden light found him again. The same beautiful girl with long golden hair emerged from it, her whole smooth body aglow, and then she stood there on the riverbank, waiting.
But Aardgar was not pleased to see her. He had taken too much time to bitterly resent her interference with the zealots. We all should have died that day. “Go away.”
The girl was sad. “I’m sorry about your—”
“Why did you save me?”
She considered his question. “You … needed saving.”
“No, I didn’t. You should have let me die.”
“You have your life.” It was as if she felt he needed a polite reminder. “I … I came to your house that day to save you. To save … all of you.”
“You came too late,” Aardgar spat back.
She frowned and looked away, hurt. Then she plopped down on the bank and hugged her knees to her chest, sulking suddenly.
Little Aardgar glared at her. Why didn’t she leave? he wondered then and still wonders now, dreaming all of this in the eternal darkness. “I said to go away.”
“No,” she stubbornly retorted.
“It’s dangerous to be near you, anyway.” His voice was harsh. “It’s foolish to be near each other. They are hunting people like you and me.” His little eyes narrowed. “Outliers. People with powers. Sorcery. They want us dead and they want us gone.”
“Is that what they call us?” The girl sucked in her lips, which made her glow more brilliantly. Was that her Legacy? To glow obnoxiously? He hated it, no matter how beautiful it was—or how beautiful she was. “Outlier … What an odd word. Out … lier. Outside of what are we lying …?”
Aardgar sighed, deciding he wouldn’t easily be rid of this girl. Part of him wondered if he truly wanted her to go, or if he in fact needed her company. Despite his anger, he didn’t blame her for his father’s death, not truly. Yet he was just as angry at her, as if she might as well have been the one to pull the blade over his throat.
Aardgar bitterly blinked away the image. He kicked at a stone near the bank, sending it flying into the calmly flowing water of the river. No matter how many stones he kicked, or how many people he yelled at, or how many times he gritted his teeth, he’d never unsee his father’s split-open neck. Each day, he tried to blink it out of existence, but then
the sound of his father dying—the nasty gurgling, the discomforting rasps—filled his ears.
“Death,” muttered Aardgar miserably. “It’s all I know. It’s all I see.” And he couldn’t make it go away, no matter how many times he blinked.
“I can take that from you,” the girl insisted, her voice pained as if she saw his mental images just as vividly as he.
Aardgar flinched, then scowled at the girl. “Take what?”
“Death. It is my … ‘sorcery’. Is that what you call it?”
Aardgar wrinkled his brow, a flicker of hope betraying his dark mood. After what he’d seen, he was prepared to believe in anything. “Death? Y-You … You can undo death?”
She sighed. “Sadly, I cannot unkill a woman or a man. Death has already fast claimed them.”
She lifted her gaze. Her brilliant, golden eyes struck Aardgar. They were dazzling, and they glittered somehow, just like her long, silky hair.
“But,” she said, “I can keep death from coming again.”
Aardgar was confused. “How?”
“Whatever my hands hold onto cannot die.” She patted the bank next to her. “Sit.”
Aardgar was cautious, but he felt pulled by her beauty. He was just a week short of being thirteen years old, and his body was beginning to react to the presence of pretty girls. He sat by her, but he did not sit awfully close, keeping at least a body or two of distance between them.
“That … is your sorcery?” he asked, wary. “Whatever you hold cannot die?”
The girl nodded. “Yes. Now tell me yours.”
The lie came to him as fast as a breath. “I … I have no sorcery.”
She frowned at that, frustrated. “You’re lying to me.”
“I am not.”
“You have a sorcery. It’s why the men came to your house,” she argued. “You have one just as I have one.”
“I said I have no sorcery! Go away.” Once again, he closed himself off, scowling and looking away.
Of course she would not give up so easily. “You still do not trust me.” She reached out. “Take my hand and feel my protection. I promise you will feel it.”