The voices whisper from around the tavern’s alley.

“They walked right inside and killed them all,” says the first. “All six belonging to that Vagrant King. No struggle.”

“Silent as rolling heads,” says a second. “I heard the servants just watched.”

“What else could six men do against the Hodshells?” asks a third.

Long before Seskone became known as the Vagrant King, he feared his friends would die for him. His own people. He had loved them all like his children. He still does. But slowly, inevitably, those friends are becoming blood and gore washed out of stone. They are fading to pyre smoke.

And it’s all because of him.

The city guards find him. They don’t recognize him. “Shoo!” they call. “No beggars here! Stay out of the walls and never come back!”

So, Seskone does, skulking around the lands surrounding Crystalline, the kingdom he once ruled. He hides in the forests and the trees, but the kapres force him down from their branches. He finds shelter underneath logs and in caves where even bears are too ashamed to sleep beside him.

The world’s ire hones in on him. He becomes ridicule incarnate. They remind him he is the king who revolutionized, who seemingly brought his people to power in a fortnight and then, just as quickly, faded into the shadows.

They claim he still rules from afar and that his influence has never left Crystalline. Even when he flees to the deserts, the merchant princes pass by and point him out, mistaking him for a dead body at first, only to see something worse: a man fleeing, wishing never to be known.

He awakes one morning to sand in his hair. He has been drinking.

“An assault, gentlemen, on my senses as much as on your bloody walls.” Seskone opens one eye and blocks the sun with it. “Oh my. Who in Crystalline’s baggy trousers are you?”

Quoreflux, soon to be the Crest’s strong-arm, is a humanoid construction of clay pottery assigned to patrol the palisade walls. He is one of thousands in Crystalline, and he should have brushed the Vagrant King away long ago, mistaking him for a beggar like everyone else. Instead, the potsoul kneels and places six orange clay fingers on Seskone’s forehead. “The Iconoclast, in the flesh.”

“You know me?” Seskone swats the huge hand away and sits up straight. “Well, that was ages ago, during the revolutions. Know me for what I am now, not what I once was, and grant me your mercy. I am hardly a threat to this city.”

“Mercy is earned, not given freely.” The potsoul continues to stand over Seskone.

“Oh, yes? And how much mercy have you dealt out in your time, potsoul?” Seskone takes in Quore’s jagged figure. “Does your sculptor accept feedback?”

“My master artisan has been dead for six hundred and forty-seven days.”

“Well, then, maybe you’ve heard this before. You’re a little rough on the edges. Your head is far too large for your body.”

“And your brain is far too large to be wasted outside Crystalline, Vagrant King.”

Seskone frowns. “Which is it, then? Iconoclast or King?” He shimmies to the shadow Quore’s body creates. Now, if you leave me be, I’d like to sleep for a long while—the longest while.”

“No, that’s not what you want.” Quore towers over the great ruler who once balanced all the ties in Crystalline. “It’s a ruse, isn’t it, Vagrant King? These clothes, your demeanor. You put yourself down so your enemies will underestimate you. You are nothing more than an ant to them, but even ants congregate from armies and form bridges with their bodies that can span precipices a hundred times longer than themselves. Even ants make viable opponents.”

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Seskone laughs, dry as the desert bordering the palisade. “Ants are easily squashed.”

“If they are noticed at all, Vagrant King.”

“Stop calling me that, Potsoul.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“Hmph. You’re a stubborn ball of clay, aren’t you?” Seskone perks his lips. “Or is that the only insult that can seep into your heart, for it is not a jib at you but your faceless master?”

Quore’s artisan was a woman he would never meet. “This is the place you call home?” asks the potsoul.

“I have accepted no home, though many have offered. I own no possessions, not even these clothes on my back, for tomorrow morning, I may roam these wastes naked.” Seskone nestles his head in his folded hands. “Leave me be, Potsoul. There is poison behind these walls.”

“Poison, yes, Vagrant King, and an antidote basking in the sun outside them.”

Recognition flickers. Memories coalesce, a time once true to Seskone. He recalls an era of stagnation, blissful security, and promises fulfilled. It was a time that existed because of Seskone’s doing. He had balanced the ties back then, hadn’t he?

“You can set the fabric of the world in motion once again,” Quore continues. “You led the uprising and appointed the correct leaders to run Crystalline. You brought peace, or at least the semblance of it, only for those same leaders to grow complacent and corrupt and stifle their dissenters’ words. You trusted them so much that you left, and they used your vagrancy as your trust in their actions. ‘The Vagrant King would have wanted it this way!’”

When Seskone abandoned Crystalline, he was a huddled, hooded figure. He thought he had left it in good hands. Now, as this potsoul espouses, the very rulers Seskone appointed are using Seskone’s own lessons to suppress the people he empowered. How could he let it have come this far?

Quore does not stray from his perch over Seskone. “You are, and forever will be, Crystalline’s true underpinning. Yet, even you were wrong in saying that your lessons would be enough to hold your people together.”

“My people.” Maybe they were still his people. “You can’t be serious in all this, Potsoul.”

“As serious as my artisan’s hands were in shaping me..”

Seskone lets loose an exhalation he’s been holding back for decades. “I’ve never met a potsoul in my life, you know. They say once they attach to someone, they won’t let go. Constructed loyalty.”

“A loyalty much stronger than any man or dog can emulate, yet you seem to know much about things you’ve never experienced.”

“A true vagrant, then.” Seskone stands up and wipes the dust from his lap. “I’ll tell you one last time, Potsoul, leave me be and don’t concern me, for I shall find my way.”

Quore senses a change. “You waver.”

“I what?”

The potsoul gazes upon the tiers of huts, several stories high, a desert oasis covered in civilization. “They are as safe as a caged animal is safe. Most do not fathom their predicament. Ignorance is happiness, yes. Most are comfortable before the noose tightens.”

Seskone lets loose another dry laugh, a puff of desert wind from the nostrils of a destitute man. How far he has fallen, yet how far he can rise.

“Complacency is the drug easiest swallowed,” says Quore.

Seskone doesn’t hear this. He walks out into the desert and looks up to those four suns above, the square of radiance, the four blazing corners. He holds his hands behind his back and says nothing, but in his mind, he hopes Crystalline’s downfall is not his fault. He knows it has, but knows, too, he can stop it. He can balance those ties once again.

Quore meets him under the blazing formation. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you, Vagrant King? You’ve seen the dominoes placed, the fingers ready to topple them.”

Seskone says, “I’ve seen the pieces but not the fingers, though I feel them press me, checking my pulse, seeing if I am awake, able, and ready to stop them.”

“And are you?”

Seskone glances down at the scars on both his wrists. Not slave brands, not self-inflicted, not even deliberate by anything at all, but burns from when he’d climbed the Scalding Dunes for the first time, crawled along their hot stones during this harrowing pilgrimage only to return again and again to the walls of the cities he had empowered, to see if the people he once raised to power were thriving. Those scars fade now. “You are a stubborn thing, Potsoul.”

The clay construction offers a hulking hand. “The most stubborn thing you will ever encounter.”

“More than myself?” Seskone shrugs. “Nay, nothing more stubborn than that.” Seskone places his hand in the potsoul’s, dwarfed at least threefold but exceeding in power and determination.

They clasp.

“We will be the Crest,” says Seskone, “and we will be its Killers.”