Prologue
Blood trickled from the king's mouth. It flowed quickly, in a dark stream that had begun to separate, becoming as divided as the very kingdom he now ruled over.
"RASTORIS, YOU TREACHEROUS FIEND!" he spat, his eyes wide with rage.
The man whom he had addressed, now stepping towards him with a manner so carefree and devoid of urgency he might have been taking a stroll in the park, grew ever closer to his king he had just betrayed. Rastoris, as he was named - the most fatal error King Grafheim would live to realize he had ever made - was also once his highest general and chief advisor. And yet, only a mere ten seconds ago, the man whose trust had steadily been earned, whose reputation had preceded him, whose favour with the royal barons of the land had risen high above all others, had now just attacked the very king whom he had so loyally served. In a swirling, ominous dark vortex of crackling energy, Rastoris had unleashed, as though a starving dog from its cage eager to tear at the flesh of his highness, a terrible blast of what can only be described as "black magic".
This in turn, sent the poor king corkscrewing through the air, a feather caught up in a ferocious storm, before landing with a sickening crack on the cold stone floor beneath him. His insides felt charred, his vision swam mockingly before him as blood relentlessly made its way up from his shaken core to his mouth and reinforced a metallic, bitter taste of defeat. There, slumped lifelessly against a wall, he had never felt more helpless in his entire existence, which itself seemed to be sand slipping through his fingers.
"Only a matter of time," snarled Rastoris, as though reading the king's mind.
His pale face had been contorted into an unearthly twisted smile; his foreboding shadow swallowing up the miniature monarch.
"Where is your queen?" he suddenly enquired, the smile disappearing in an instant and being replaced with a look of disdain.
"Leave her out of this," choked Grafheim, showing his teeth which now resembled stained rocks in a red, overflowing sea. "Why, Rastoris? I trus-"
"Trust can be misleading, it seems", interrupted Rastoris with a smirk, although rapidly appearing to grow impatient.
He continued: "However, I must say, after I have destroyed every living man, woman and child in your kingdom, my race, the Zedirans, will rise again and claim this land for their own!"
At this, his tiny black eyes started to change briefly like beads, as though someone had waved a lantern into two never ending tunnels.
"Now, my king... I bid you goodnight."
Somewhere in the most lonely, bleak part of the universe, the king's tortured screams of regret still echo through eternity, long since they were formed at the moment his body was engulfed in a raging inferno of black flames, brought to being by a dark wizard he should never have trusted with his dear kingdom.