Ravka was a country built on superstition.

From the first days of its conception, flying down from the wings of a firebird, its mysteries sustained it, lurking in the jagged mountainsides and the deep forests, leaving an air of doubt and mystery among its people.

The same was true for its new king.

With a mother and father somehow missing after the Darkling's terrible reign, Nikolai Lantsov ascended the throne, coming straight from the withering Shadow Fold, fresh from the Darkling's tortures, and had pieced the country back together by hand in the time it would have taken any king before him to get dressed.

But with his victory came the rumors.

He had been tortured by the Darkling, saved by the Sun Saint. Killed by the Darkling, resurrected by Sankta Alina. The Bastard King. The King of Scars. His new policies would save Ravka. His ambition would raze it.

But it didn't matter to him which story was told. Nothing could separate them from the pain that the merzost had left inside of him, the pain of darkness that he could not seem to repress.

It haunted him.

Physically, he was as well as he could be. Breaks and cuts healed perfectly before he made his triumphant return to Os Alta. Healed perfectly, except for those damned scars. He could operate with the physical pain, go for days without sleeping or eating, work through sickness and broken bones as long as his country needed him. As long as he was kept busy he could push away the darkness,

The only pain he now felt was more than any broken bone could bring, more unforgettable and harder to heal than anything that could be done to his body, brought about by any idle time that he might have had, by his mind wandering to places where it should not have had to go.

The darkness inside of him was something he could hardly force himself to think about, something that crept up on him when he wasn't busy. So he filled his days with work to the point that he was too tired to do anything but sleep in the night, for the long hours of darkness, literally and purposefully running himself into the ground behind the semi-truthful image that he was saving the country.

Most commonly, he was his usual self, charming anyone and everyone who he met, laughing and telling jokes as he always could. As king his people adored him, handsome and true, and the savior of Ravka. As long as he was working hard and forgetting himself for the good of his country, he could come close to happy, even if he was never quite there.

But then moments would come when he lost Nikolai, and something else would take his place.

There was something that he was missing that the Darkling had taken and would not return, something dark left lingering both in his soul and on his fingertips.

His heart would beg for the light to last just a little longer, for the night never to fall, so that he wouldn't again be left alone in the night.

But in the dark was where he was the happiest, away from the stress of how broken he was, away from the prying eyes asking why he always wore the gloves. Asking what price the hero had paid to defeat the monster.

When he was in the light, the other part of him, the broken part, would come without warning and bring with it a glimpse at the beast behind his eyes. It was a darkness that made the rest of the court quickly realize that he was not the same boy, not the puppy prince that they had pushed around for so many years. Something new and powerful and deeply different from the young prince who had loved living and adventure, something worrying.

He would, on rare occasion, lose the most careful part of him that kept his royal appearance up, making small changes to his attitude, his temper shortening, his tolerance more limited, sometimes giving way to the temptation to let his anger take over for a moment, when people pushed him too far.

The members of the court more than just recognized this change.

They feared it.

As Alina had pointed out, fear could be a good thing.

More often, Nikolai just felt like a scared and lonely child.

Weak. Pathetic.

He loathed the fact that he was now just as lost as any boy was, as fragile and scared as a bird trapped in a cage. He was worried for what this would bring to the future, how long it would take for him to be consumed by the madness living at the edge of his thoughts, and how he could possibly stop it.

But he never, ever showed it.

Kings, at least decent ones, Nikolai knew, seldom showed what they really felt to their people. It was vital that they never saw how truly desperate he'd become, how far gone he was and how the scars haunted him. So he wore the gloves and lived with the rumors.

The country adored him, its savior, although it took them some time to adapt to the changes that he proposed to make.

Dismissing the officials he knew to be corrupt, re-instituting the power of the monarch from the state that his lazy predecessor had allowed it to fall to, and restoring the Grisha and the Second Army.

For the first time in more than a hundred years, Ravka was at peace. It was strong, bold, and powerful. The Shu Han and Fjerdans stopped their raids on the border as King Nikolai made a point of showcasing his military power. The people could go back to their homes and families, could farm the land. The draft was made much less stringent, so that the army was not one made of children. The Fold was gone, and trade could continue all the way to the True Sea. Nikolai had succeeded.

The people cared deeply for his welfare, and kept him in their prayers each night.

But prayers could not stave off rumors, or fix broken people.

Korol Rezni they called him.

King of Scars.

He wore his gloves everywhere he went, and did not remove them for anything, the black tips of his fingers remaining a reminder of his sufferings and his separation from humanity.

Some said it was a fashion statement, like his impeccable clothes, but some did not believe so much, he knew.

His nickname just went to isolate him more.

He had scars that no other man could claim to have, he was broken in some way beyond repair.

Sobachka was gone, and Nikolai sorely missed him.

When it came time to choose a queen, Nikolai's mood darkened more dramatically than it had previously, especially as the Apparat began to appear in every spare moment Nikolai had, insisting on finding a bride. How could he ask someone to bear his burden? How could any woman ever understand what he had been through? How could he learn to love again?

He was the only one that the Darkling had tainted with merzost, he knew, and no one could even so much as begin to understand him. He could only bring pain and misery, not love.

He could not, he knew, marry for love. He did not think that he was capable of loving anything any more, not in the way that he had before his heart had been blackened. So he would marry for political gain. That was probably for the best anyway. It bothered him that he couldn't manage to trust anyone any more. There was too much for them to gain, too much for him to lose. And besides, who would want to share a bed with a monster? Something that had eaten raw flesh and liked it? He couldn't begin to describe the experience, what it had done to him.

No one would understand him if he could describe it. The pain. The strangeness. The war in his head that he often lost.

He was truly alone in this world.

Or so he thought.

XX

NIKOLAI, FINALLY. It feels weird to me to write for him though. Maybe its because I haven't done it before. *Shrugs* Oh well. Thanks for reading and reviewing! xx