The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “Idiot child!” the Once King bellowed when he realized what she had done. “Did you forget that you are no longer a stonekin?” He took a step forward, dragging her effortlessly with him. “You cannot stop me alone!”

  “I’m not alone,” Tina said, clutching the chains tight. “And even you can’t counterspell twenty-five people at once.”

  “I don’t have to,” the Once King spat. “I will break them instead. They cannot channel mana if they are dead!”

  “We’ll see about that,” Tina snarled, checking her internal count. Five seconds left. Good enough.

  “Sorry, pal,” she said, slamming her feet into the stone floor. “Buck stops here. Steady Ground!”

  The words were still leaving her lips as the terrace’s paving stones turned to bedrock around her feet, transforming Tina into an unmovable anchor. Realizing he was trapped with her, the Once King began to strain against the chains tying them together, denting her armor in the process. But sun steel was not broken so easily. Neither were the stone-enchanted chains, especially at this angle. She might not be as good at grappling as James was, but while she hated it with a passion, Tina hadn’t entirely escaped PvP as a stonekin. She knew how hard it was to get someone off your back when you were huge and they were small. Even when the Once King did manage to grab hold of her shoulder, he lacked the leverage to rip her free, breaking her collarbone instead as he roared in impotent fury.

  Zero seconds left.

  “Roxxy!” Richard screamed, his panicked voice coming right on time. “We’ve lost control!”

  “That’s fine!” she shouted. And then, because this was how one ruined surprise attacks, she yelled out, “Do it now!”

  The words worked like a charm. All at once, the Once King stopped thrashing and looked up. Tina looked up as well, peering between the king’s ashy wings.

  The multielemental storm filled the sky. Flame-lightning crashed wildly from cloud to cloud, striking not in single strikes but entire sheets. Black-gold clouds roiled with enough power to sink entire battle fleets, and the winds howled like the eye-wall of a category five hurricane. Below it, her casters had collapsed, their faces terrified as they screamed about losing control, but Tina didn’t see how such a giant storm could ever be in control. Already, the wind wall was spinning even faster, whipping up fire tornadoes whose points were already extending toward the lightning-lit mountain below. It was easily the most terrifying thing Tina had ever seen, and she’d seen some doozies over the last week and a half. She was still staring in wonder when the ancient king she was tied to began to laugh.

  “A marvel of casting,” he said appreciatively. “Truly, you players are masters of destruction. But while that storm is more than enough to kill all of you, it will not kill me.”

  “Maybe not like this,” Tina said, summoning up all her courage as she stared at the wonder her guild had made. “But that much storm concentrated down to a single point? That’s another story.”

  The Once King looked down in confusion, but Tina just clenched him harder, reminding herself that she was the glorious guild leader of the Roughnecks. Even when she’d gone from being Roxxy to Tina, they’d acknowledged her, listened to her. Several of them were probably dying for her right now. She would never let down that trust, and she would never allow them to lose. At this final moment, when it counted most, she would lead them all to the victory their bravery so richly deserved.

  With that, Tina turned her face to the sky and hurled all of that determination—her determination—at the storm, challenging the heavens themselves as she yelled out.

  “One For All!”

  The entire storm froze. For one terrifying moment, the enormous spinning clouds were as still as stones. Then, like she’d just kicked the whole thing into overdrive, they started to spin much, much faster. Already-hurricane-force winds began howling like band saws as the eye of the storm shrank in toward Tina, concentrating the flames, lightning, and holy power into a frantically spinning blender of blindingly violent power aimed straight at her…and the king she’d chained herself to.

  “Eat it, fucker!” she yelled as all hell and fury descended upon them.

  “No!” the Once King cried, his normally booming voice filled with panic for the first time. “I cannot perish here! Not yet!” Tina felt the universe itself heaving as the ancient elf reached for his mana, the last of the Eternal Sky that lived within him. “Great Pyre, your master commands you!”

  Ghostly screams exploded into Tina’s ears as the Once King’s entire body erupted in a bonfire of blue-white flame. Then Tina was screaming too, writhing against the chains in agony as the ghostfire ate her alive. It hurt like nothing had ever hurt before, but somehow she held on. Even when her flesh scorched and her armor superheated around her, turning the world white with pain, she did not let go.

  She would never let go.

  Roaring in fury, the king thrust his hands aloft, hurling a torrent of ghostfire at the eye of the still-concentrating storm Tina had called down on them both. The elemental hurricane tilted as the ghostfire slammed into it, but it didn’t stop spinning. Chest heaving, the Once King reached into himself again, pouring more and more of his mana into the ghostfire that was searing the sky. As it burned, Tina felt her One For All ability straining, pulling against his pushing as they fought over the storm. For several long seconds, the two of them hung in balance, and then the raging storm snapped as the ghostfire won out, blowing the spinning clouds apart in a flash of power that ate all sound and whited out the world.

  For a moment, Tina could feel nothing. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t see. The world was just white and stillness. If she wasn’t already so experienced with the feeling, she would have thought she was dead. But she knew death in this place, and this pale quiet was nothing like it. It was just shock, which meant there was nothing to do but wait it out until, in bits and pieces, the world began to come back.

  The first thing she felt was the chain. The enchanted links, once strong enough to bind the Once King himself, were now brittle as ash in her hands. They crumbled when she moved her fingers, leaving her slumped against the smoking armor of the Once King. Her armor wasn’t much better. The whole front of her suit was half melted and steaming, the inside hot enough to singe her flesh and turn her padding to charcoal. But for all the pain, she was still alive. And so was her enemy.

  “You have failed,” the Once King whispered, breathing hard as he broke away from her at last. Then he pointed up at the sky, which was once again covered in the Deadlands’ flat gray clouds. “Your ultimate attack is done, and still I breathe.” He sneered at her. “I’ve won.”

  “Not hardly,” Tina gasped back, sucking a breath into her ragged lungs for one last cry. “Hit it, James!”

  The Once King jerked and whirled around, his eyes landing on James a second too late. Her brother was already standing at the center of the circular terrace, his tall body lit up with the glare of all his mana as he threw his hands skyward, launching a spell. What spell, Tina didn’t know, and she didn’t care. The panicked look on the Once King’s face was all she needed. Desperately, he tossed her aside and extended his hand for a counterspell, but nothing happened, because they’d done it. They’d drained his mana dry, leaving him with nothing to stop James as his magic leaped up toward the heavens, splitting the Deadlands’ heavy clouds like a knife to let the golden sunlight through.

  ***

  James stood on the broken battlefield, his heart pounding. It had taken everything he had to get out here, to walk past dying friends without dropping even a tiny heal. Seeing Tina had been the hardest. His little sister looked like a burn victim, tiny as a sparrow in the Once King’s looming shadow. That had almost broken him, but then he’d seen the grin on her face. Heard the trust in her voice as she yelled for him to do it.

  How could he let her down?

  With that, James had grabbed his mana, all of it, and honed it to a point. The counterspell was an ability every caster class lea
rned. It was so simple in concept, just a spike of mana you used to pry apart your enemy’s magic, but even the easiest things became hard when you upped the scale, and James had never gone bigger. Even the ritual to summon the Bedrock Kings seemed trivial compared to the blade of magic he stabbed into the sky. The blade made from himself, for it was all his mana. There was no wind, no water, just the pure memory of the Unbounded Sky that lived inside him, inside every descendant of the Celestial Elves. How fitting, he thought, that that power should be what saved them all now, shooting into the sky like a spear to pierce the ghostfire-fueled magic binding the clouds together.

  And it was just enough.

  Once again, he whispered a silent thanks to his brother for his new armor. The level-eighty gear had increased his mana pool even more than he’d initially thought, giving him the capacity to hold all the power he was now using to rip open the sky. As his magic tore the clouds apart, all James could think was that the jubatus of Windy Lake had been justified in their fear. Players were terrifying. They were unspeakably powerful and unspeakably ignorant, but they could learn. He just hoped he’d learned enough to guess this right as his counterspell ripped the clouds apart, exposing the Deadlands to the light of the Sun for the first time in a thousand years. And as the golden light burst forth, the Once King cried out as he never had before, not even when Tina had slammed a zone-sized magical storm into him.

  “NO!”

  The king lunged forward, tossing Tina aside like so much trash to charge at James. “Never!” he roared, his ageless face a mask of fury. “I will tear you apart with my own hands before I allow you to—”

  “Resplendent Aegis!”

  The warbling voice was Anders’s, but the power inside it was something James had felt before only once, when the Bastion had activated. All at once, golden light surrounded him, stopping the Once King’s charge cold. The ancient elf cried out in pain and jumped away, abandoning his attack to flee back toward the stairs instead, but James was having none of it.

  “No!” he yelled as the sunlight poured down. “No more hiding in the shadows! It’s time for you to face this!” He whirled back to the remains of the caster camp, where Anders was the only one standing, his small fishy-form bathed in radiant light that did not belong to him. “Do it again!”

  The Cleric—a true Cleric now, James realized—raised his staff in triumph, his fish face bathed in the wonder and understanding of someone who’d finally found the answer he’d searched for all his life.

  “Resplendent Aegis!”

  Again, the golden light poured down from the sky, blocking the Once King’s escape back into his mountain. Stuck in the blinding light, the king roared with a fury greater than anything James had ever experienced. Great and deep, the sort of whole-self emotion that changes lives forever. As if it could hear the Once King’s anger, the sunlight streaming down grew even brighter, bathing the mountain in light so intense that the dark stone glittered like desert sand.

  But though it was easily the strongest sunlight James had ever felt, it did not burn. Quite the opposite. Wherever the golden light touched him, his body felt renewed. His mana was still empty, but the accompanying exhaustion vanished completely in the warmth of the Sun’s light, and he wasn’t the only one.

  Across the terrace, Tina stood up, her burns fading away before his eyes. The healing touched her golden armor as well. James didn’t know if that was because her suit was made from sun steel or if the god was simply that powerful, but the dented, melted plates turned to molten gold as he watched, flowing back into their usual perfect shape while Tina stared in awe. Others were getting up too now. Frank, SilentBlayde, Zen, all the Roughnecks who’d used their lives to block the Once King’s way rose back to their feet whole and unharmed.

  But as the light lifted all of them up, it sent the Once King to his knees. Crying, the king cursed the dazzling brilliance, using his huge wings to shade his face from the Sun riding at the zenith of the sky. This time, though, there was no hiding. Anders hadn’t cast the spell a third time, but James felt the power of the Resplendent Aegis slam down yet again, trapping the Once King in a sphere of golden light. As the barrier solidified, James felt something else condensing in the air.

  Something unfathomably immense was turning its attention to the mountaintop. From the horror on the Once King’s face, James had a good guess as to what, but he didn’t dare speak. He didn’t dare do anything but fall to his knees as the light grew stronger and stronger, brighter and brighter, until…

  “No!” the king cried, lifting his head at last to bare his bloody teeth at the blinding sky. “You can force me to kneel, but I will never acknowledge you again! You were our light, our hope, and our love, and you betrayed us! You burned the Moon! You cast your children into damnation! Your radiance may be enough to dazzle these short-lived idiots, but I know you! I know your evil, and I will never rest until I have freed this world from what you have done to us!”

  He was screaming by the end, his furious words echoing across the mountain, but the light did not answer. It simply bore down on them all even harder, filling the air with an emotion so huge, James thought it would break him apart.

  SORROW.

  The world went blurry as his eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t even his sorrow, but the god’s feeling was greater than any sadness he’d ever experienced, breaking his heart even as he struggled to understand why. There was no context, no reason, just a secondhand sadness so strong it threatened to drown him. Struggling to hold himself together, James pitied the Sun in that moment. He knew instinctively that it had no words with which to explain itself, no way to translate such divine emotions into something lesser beings could understand. It could only show them, beaming its great sorrow down from the heavens in the hope that its target would understand. Since the Once King had the same tears in his eyes as the rest of them, James hoped he did.

  Then the king spoke, and all his high hopes fell.

  “It is too late for petty regrets,” the first born of creation growled, glaring up at the sky with a hate so old and deep even the sorrow of a god couldn’t move it. “And not even you can stop me now! Your chosen king has lost! The armies of Bastion are being defeated even as we speak, and these players are all but dead. Your light may have healed their wounds, but mana belongs to the Sky! Theirs is gone, and you cannot restore it! Without it, I will kill them easily. I will kill everything, and you will be forced to watch, as helpless as I was when you burned my people and threw them to the ground!”

  He started crying then. A great king on his knees, sobbing in fury like a child. It would have been pathetic if it hadn’t been so sad.

  “I will free them,” he whispered, fisting his hands on the sun-warmed stone. “I will take back my people, the souls you stole from me! I will free us all, and then I will never have to see you again.”

  The king was still crying when a beam of sunlight struck the ground in front of him. It grew brighter as James watched, its golden hue turning yellow then white. It shivered as it changed, glittering like sunlight on water. Then, in a move James’s mind couldn’t wrap itself around, the light grew solid, taking on the form of a person.

  Not an actual person. This shape was vague and featureless and even taller than the Once King. But there was something unmistakably human about the way it dropped to one knee, reaching out a brilliant golden hand to touch the ancient elf’s soiled wing.

  The Once King froze. Then his ashen face lifted, his teary eyes wide as a child’s as his wings folded flat against his back in awe. “How?” he whispered, his voice so breathy and quiet that James had to strain to hear. “I’ve never heard of… Never seen…How are you here?”

  “For…you…”

  James clapped his hands over his ears. The golden figure had no mouth that he could see, but its whisper was as huge as the mountain. The figure’s edges blurred as it spoke, obviously holding itself together with great difficulty. Given what he’d learned of the gods, James suppo
sed it would be very difficult for something so huge to make itself this small, but the Sun was trying, crouching closer to its kneeling creation as it struggled to form the words.

  “I…am…sorry,” it said in that world-sized whisper. “For…what…I did.”

  The words came out halting and slow, each one clearly the product of great work. It was trying so hard, but the Once King was having none of it.

  “Why?” he demanded, his vaunted royal composure shattering as he stabbed an accusing finger at the avatar. “Why did you burn us? What did we do?!”

  “Nothing,” the Sun said. “You…did…nothing wrong. It was…accident.”

  The Once King’s face went from furious to horrified. “Impossible,” he spat. “It can’t be that simple.”

  “But…it was,” the god whispered, the strained golden voice so sad. “I…loved the…Moon…too much, I loved. My partner. My balance. So much, I loved....that I flew too close. I only wanted to be nearer…but I….I burned.” The golden avatar dropped its huge head, bending down almost to the ground. “… I am so sorry.”

  “How can you be sorry?” the Once King asked, but not in accusation. He seemed truly baffled, as if his world had just been turned upside down and violently shaken. “You are perfect. You are the Sun!”

  “I am finite,” the Sun replied. “And therefore…fallible.”

  “But I trusted you to save us!” the Once King cried, clenching his fists. “You told us to fly up to you, and then you burned off my people’s wings! Was that an accident?”

  “No,” the Sun said. “That was trying to…fix. I could not return you to the Endless Sky…Without the Sky, your wings were a curse. I did not want you to…suffer…So I took…them away.”