A Kingdom Unmapped
In the far northeast, upon no chart and known by no compass, there lay the realm of Santhayyanakhron.
The air was filled with hymns of praise, sung to the vanished king. Some swore he yet lived, others whispered that the very system that governed them was his immortal hand, ever present, ever unseen.
Before the great gates of the capital, they gathered. They danced and rejoiced, peasants and soldiers alike, beneath the stone effigy of a man who bore in one hand a reaper's sickle heavy with grain, and in the other a blade of sanctity pointed toward the horizon.
He wore tattered garments that cloaked him from head to heel. No armor graced his flesh. Only the crown of thorns, which he never set aside.
"Praise to the King!"
"Though his name be forgotten, let our song reach him still!"
So they cried, so they sang. Meat roasted upon the fires—giant bear-flesh, the beast armed with claws like crab's pincers and a skull stretched long. Its fat dripped into the coals and rose as fragrant smoke. Spices burned sweet and sharp. Vegetables dredged from the black deep of the encircling seas were set upon the tables. The land was rich beyond measure, and pilgrims came from many faiths, sages from alien lands, wandering knights from distant marches, all to bend the knee to the absent sovereign.
But elsewhere, under a sky split by light, a thing fell upon the earth on the far side of the world. And in its falling, memory itself was fractured.
A soldier who had walked alone all his years now remembered a wife awaiting him in a home that had never stood.
A father, tilling the fields beyond the outlying town, looked upon the blurred faces of children he could no longer name, and the last he saw of them was the blood upon his own hands.
A stargazer wept beneath the heavens, believing himself friendless—yet grief came upon him for a companion who had perished in his embrace, though no such companion had ever been.
A maiden bent to pluck white cotton from the fields and bled though the plant was without thorn, for in some memory she recalled the cruelty of a noble child that had scarred her in youth—though she had never known nobility at all.
In the great hall of paintings and chronicles, a voice rasped like stone upon stone, as if the throat that uttered it had been unwatered for a hundred years.
"Thousands of stars shift their places. Even the moon has crossed its shadow. Can such things be?"
The speaker was clad in black, half his face hidden by an iron mask still warm with blood, its heat steaming through the slits. From the other half shone a sorrowful eye, too pure for fear.
He spoke though no soul stood beside him. Yet he knew there was one listening—the spirit that bore the light of a day no one any longer desired.
"For centuries the maps have broken and reformed. Still I say: we should not intervene."
Only moonlight gave shape to his figure, as if he were a revenant risen from countless deaths. He turned from the cracked window, its pane unkept through long ages, and fixed his gaze upon the ancient map unfurled upon the great table.
It was no true record of the world. Kingdoms vanished, towns erased, as though the parchment itself devoured them. Common men never noticed what was lost, nor the strange additions their memories stitched into their past. But he—he remembered all.
His gauntleted hand, clad in barbed iron, touched a point where new light had kindled upon the canvas. A small star burned there, hemmed round by wilderness. No sovereign claimed it. No man recalled it.
"I do not deny what you once told me. This soul has traveled far. But why has no one sought it? A year gone, and still it has not moved, nor been consumed. I cannot fathom it."
He withdrew his hand. The hall smelled of dust and old paint, of stone long dry. His blood welled suddenly from his eye, steaming through the mask, yet he did not cry out. He only stepped toward the broken glass where a white bird with wings tipped gold alighted on his shoulder.
"Fear not, Channel," he whispered. "I will bear the forgetting. Let them erase my face, my name. I must remain."
In the window's reflection stood another: a man clad in white, face hidden by his shroud, crowned with thorns.
"When you find the soul, I shall return. Until then, farewell, my captain."
The black-clad man knelt, steel ringing on the stone floor, the small bird perched still upon his hand. Then the reflection was gone, and the bird with it.
"If I had been left whole," he murmured, "perhaps I would not hate the gift you gave me."
A thunderclap split the chamber. Red lightning surged from his form, crimson as spilt blood, and with it came the shrieking of crows and carrion birds unseen. When the storm fell silent, nothing remained but the scorched black feathers scattered on the floor, and the emptiness where the captain had stood.