A Monarch No Better

He Who Watches, From the Consuming River

There was once a being indescribable.

Hair a distant memory. Eyes smoldering and scorched. A disposition closed off and buried under cruel invincibility. A soul plagued by the guilt afforded a survivor.

He sifted in the nothingness, watching the world pass by, the sun rise and fall, his own world hidden from light and darkness. He fashioned his mangled body in memory of what he once was. A head of gray, smooth hair. A face sunken and forlorn, yet glowing with wisdom. A frail body, one afforded to a scholar.

The essence of eternity, of inevitability, burning wood, painted a cruel perversion of that image. A mouth of jagged branches, sifting with fire and the cold. Skin strong as steel, and just as heavy. A mind rotting with anger and regret.

He saw sacrifice in those he watched. The undead trudged along on their quest, shackled by fate, by a sinner's mistake.

His brother one of them. A king. A monarch. Had only he known, his brother could have ended the cycle. Instead he became it's prime victim. The being would watch as those he loved stayed in the cycle, far from his grasp, far from hope.

Until there came a man of white.

The being watched this one as well. As the man of white corroded, his memories rose of what he had been in his final days. Crestfallen. Desperate. Angry. Determined.

The man of black found his brother, a magnificent monarch with a hollow soul and an despairing ring, and recalled his brother in his youth. A prankster at first, a warrior next, a man endowed with wisdom, then a king besieged by regret.

The man of black took the jewel of the old lord of stone, and sat with the man broken by his soul of nothingness. Watched the sun, instinctively grasping the fold in his armor where the feather lay.

The man of black ended a being of black, and sat on the throne with the aid of Shanalotte. His old creation, a woman unnatural and built to crush fate. A failure.

And yet, the being thought, a success as well.

The being indescribable thought back on every undead he had ever watched, from the cruelty of freedom. Pawns, monarchs too weak, monarchs no better. And yet, there was a chance.

After so long, the being felt something he had not remembered since he lived in the cycle. Something cruel, something that had crushed him in that cycle and abandoned him on the outside, the everlasting river of nothingness.

Hope.

That feeling rushed from that mangled body of burning wood, through his soul, from his veins of chaotic flame, to his mouth beset by cold and remorse, into the mind of the broken king, as a single whisper, the flicker of a candle's flame, a single opposing caress on a river immovable. A single sentence.

Fate can be beaten.

And the throne's doors, ever so slightly, slid open.