The Kings' War

by Fanless

Borlath has returned to an all-too-familiar host, and he wants the city. The world's Endowed are drawn to the place where it all began. War brews. This time, it's serious.

1. Prologue

Prologue

The city of the Red King has a long and shadowy history; it is speckled with betrayal, scored with underhandedness and over all splashed with blood. If you are of a certain persuasion, whether Endowed or not, and are strong enough to listen for them and retain your sanity, it may be possible to hear the whispers of long-forgotten deeds from its antiquarian stones. Whether or not you survive to pass them on is a different matter, for many of the most powerfully charged locations are near the ruins of the Red King's castle and therefore on the property of the Bloors, who don't take kindly to trespassers.

Not many are aware, but the King's elder son Borlath once was crowned himself and sought to overthrow his peaceful father's position. When he was twenty-one years of age, Borlath assembled a collection of bloodthirsty knaves seeking protection from his father's justice and renamed himself the Black King, after his mane of hair and the glittering sword of obsidian he carried to lead his lawless, dissipated army. They committed many a sickening crime to humanity over the five years of the rightful King's absence.

Upon his return, horrified to see the destruction of his home's livelihood but lacking the hard-heartedness to raise arms against his own flesh and blood—the only things he held dear above all others—the Red King abandoned the land of his happiness. So began the centuries of darkness.

Charlie Bone's uncle Paton Yewbeam, one who broke away from his family's tradition of malevolence and his comrades know more about these dark times than any professional historian. Paton in particular has made collecting the histories of the Endowed his life's work. Little by little he begins to shed light on the darkness of the past, and any light, however weak and wavering at times it may be, is all they need to stay alive.

But tonight the whispers in the walls of the city are louder than ever. Tonight something is about to rebirth itself that never should have lived in the first place. And no one has any knowledge of it, not even the Bloors wrapped in their towers of cold gray stone.

Tonight the curse that Borlath screamed in hopeless fury with his dying breaths comes at last to poisonous fruition.

Tonight is the night that the future historians will chronicle as the Awakening; the night that the King's War truly begins.

And no one knows but the whispers in the walls.