“Do not Fear the [Hollow King]”
Author Unknown.
Exact wording varies by region. Traditionally sung during meal preparation on the night of the winter solstice.
{Verse 1}
Chop the wood,
Fan the flames,
And keep the pot aright!
See no face?
Then speak no names!
We’ll make it through the night!
{Refrain}
Do not fear the [Hollow King]!
Do not run away!
Man has set the crown aflame,
And Death demands his pay!
—Excerpt from the Solarian nursery rhyme “Do not fear the [Hollow King]” as it appears within Feris’ Fables and Assorted Sing-Songs: An Anthology of the Darklight Continent’s Folk Tales and Children’s Rhymes, edited by Feris Fuller. Second edition, published 245 PD by [Reinholdt Press].
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One and a half months later, the night of the winter solstice…
The Final Battle. The Night of Reckoning.
Soleil, the capital city of the [Solarian Courts].
Every street and every square rang out with the sounds of battle. Clashing steel, rending flesh, cries of agony, screams for blood, the crackle of flames, the cacophony of war.
Nowhere was safe. Flames painted the world red. In every alley hid an ambush, in every avenue a skirmish, in every plaza a senseless melee.
Luckily, no bystanders were endangered by the conflict. Unluckily, this was because they were all already dead.
Four forces made up the entirety of the battle, and the largest force by far were the reanimated corpses of Soleil’s common citizens. Tens of thousands of them rushed through the streets like a tide of ravenous beasts. They had no objective other than to kill the enemies of their reanimator, and just like the one they served, they knew nothing but hunger.
The second force was the standing army of Soleil. United beneath the banner of their [Hollow King], they technically fought beside the undead, but it would be more accurate to say that the army made use of their mindless allies.
Wherever and whenever it suited them, the army sacrificed droves of Soleil’s undead citizens — the very same citizens the army had once sworn to protect. [Solar Guards], [Sunlit Archers], [Squires of Dawn],[Solar Knights], and [Luminous Titans] alike all stayed back as hordes of the peasants-turned-fodder threw themselves against the city’s invaders, only intervening once their foes were exhausted and posed little threat.
Said foes were the other two forces involved in the battle. From one perspective, they were the city’s invaders. From another, they were the liberators.
The first and more eye-catching of the two remaining forces were the [Aurorae Sylvas], more commonly known by the local Solarians simply as ’The Fae’ for the same reason that the Aurorans referred to the [Solarian Courts] as ‘The Humans.’ Every Auroran warrior was at least seven feet tall, wild, and wiry, and their skin varied as widely in color as the auroras for which they were named.
They bore no weapons nor armor of metal, but their rammoth leather armor and ironwood bows and staves proved to be more than adequately effective in battle. They were organized into smaller groups than any other force, and though they avoided fighting in the more open areas, they moved like ghosts and struck like lightning throughout Soleil’s dense alleys and byways. The only exception to this rule were the Auroran’s [Rammoth Riders], a score of whom had used their enormous mounts to pulverize a large section of the city’s walls, and even now they charged through the city’s squares and boulevards with abandon, trampling the defenders’ undead chaff by the hundreds.
The Auroran’s main weaknesses were their lacking numbers and their general incompatibility with large pitched battles, but these deficiencies were at least somewhat covered for by their allies, the battle’s fourth and final force:
The [Nameless Revolt].
Similar to the defending forces, the [Nameless Revolt] was entirely composed of Solarians, but rather than consisting of undead hordes or elite nobility, it consisted of little more than common peasants and country bumpkins wielding spears and shields or hunting bows.
The only notable regiment in the entire army were a few units of [Tier III] [Nameless Vanguards]. These warriors had thrown away their names so that they might better resist the [Hollow King]’s foul onomancy, and though their devotion gave them power, their fighting prowess was still only middling when compared to the elites of either their allies or their enemies.
What set this final army apart was neither their training nor their numbers. No, what truly made the [Nameless Revolt] a force to be reckoned with was its leadership, for they were led by not one, but two [Tier V] classholders.
“[Final Respite]!” shouted a man, his eyes shining with the light of the Sun. From his outstretched arms flew a wave of golden light that spread hundreds of feet forward through the entire boulevard in front of him, blanketing thousands of hostile zombies with an aura of calm and peace.
Since the zombies were simple minded creatures, the man’s spell proved to be especially effective. In short order, the once ravenous horde became a docile herd of confused sheep. Taking advantage of the opening, a pair of [Rammoth Riders] charged past the man and ran down the street, flattening zombies with abandon without fear of getting mired in the ravening horde. Soon enough, the way forward became clear.
The man who casted the spell was named Percival. A [Tier V] [Paragon of Charity] and a [Tier III] [Liege], he had spent the past year gathering forces to take down the monster that’d been created in the aftermath of the [Divine Apocalypse], the [Hollow King] itself.
He had with him a small escort of twelve [Nameless Vanguards] and a single greatsword wielding warrior who looked older than dirt yet more solid than a mountain, and together they ran down the street in the wake of their allies’ gargantuan mounts.
With every step, Percival felt the crunch and squelch of pulverized flesh parting beneath his boots. Coupled with the city’s ubiquitous scent of death, the sensation was sickening, and only the adrenaline pumping through his veins allowed him to continue running without stopping to vomit.
At the end of the street waited a small contingent of the city’s standing army. They were made up of a single [Luminous Titan] and several dozen [Solar Guards] and [Sunlit Archers], all bracing themselves to meet the [Rammoth Riders]’ charge.
“Stick to the plan! Stay closer!” screamed the greatsword wielding man running at Percival’s side, but whether the [Rammoth Riders] intentionally disobeyed or simply hadn’t heard the man’s orders, they continued charging at full tilt.
Before Percival and his entourage could get within range to help, the two [Rammoth Riders] made contact with the enemy Solarians.
The first rammoth had its rider killed by an archer’s lucky shot before it even reached the [Solar Guard]. Without a more intelligent mind to guide it, the creature charged straight into the throng of infantry, killing many, but in the process impaling itself upon their spears.
The [Luminous Titan] received the other rammoth’s charge head on, grabbing the creature by the horns. The golem’s feet dug deep gouges into the cobble street as the charge pushed it back, but it managed to halt the beast’s momentum while only receiving minimal damage in return.
With its opponent grappled and off-balance, the [Luminous Titan] managed to wrestle the rammoth onto its side, throwing its rider from her saddle and into the awaiting mob of guardsmen ready to strike. A hidden squad of [Solar Knights] charged out from a nearby alley, and the rammoth — pinned onto its side with its weak underbelly exposed — could do nothing as the knights’ lanced gored into its guts.
The entire interaction between the [Rammoth Riders] and the city’s army had only taken less than ten seconds, but that was all the time it took for Percival to lose two of his [Tier V] allied units.
“I told them not to charge too far ahead!” growled the man at Percival’s side. “Mop them up before they regroup! Swift arrow assault!”
At the man’s command, the entire group acted, Percival included. The man who’d shouted the order took the lead as the [Nameless Vanguards] fanned out to either side of him to form an arrowhead formation, and just before the group reached the contingent of the city’s army, Percival casted an overcharged [Hyperlight Burst] spell upon them, a buff that nearly doubled their speed for an extremely brief period of time.
The spell’s effect was often jarring to those who’d never experienced it before, but the charging man and the [Nameless Vanguard] handled the sudden boon with an ease that could only come from months of training, and they were fully capable of leveraging Percival’s magic to its fullest extent.
The silver-maned man in the lead indeed looked more like a grandpa than a gladiator, but his age belied his strength, and he hefted his oversized greatsword with such grace that the blade might as well have been a needle-thin rapier.
Streamers of golden light moving in his wake, he leapt over the gored rammoth’s twitching corpse and faced the injured [Luminous Titan] on his own.In two swings, he relieved the twenty-foot tall golem of its knees, and with a single leap and three more great arching slashes, the construct’s head and arms were similarly detached.
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He kicked off of the titan’s back before it even fell, launching himself into the melee between the [Nameless Vanguards] and the enemy infantry. In but a few breaths of time, half a dozen more soldiers fell to his blade.
As the man’s sixth victim fell to the ground, bisected from shoulder to hip, the golden streamers of light trailing each of his and the vanguards’ movements faded and disappeared, and they all slowed down to their normal speed. The spell had ended, but it had more than served its purpose. All the enemy infantrymen were either dead or running away, and the [Solar Knights] had already disappeared down another alley, likely to regroup and ambush them elsewhere.
As for why Percival had so easily obeyed the ancient-looking titan killer’s commands, it was because the man was none other than Gregory Kingsblood II, former [Champion of Sol] and current co-[Liege] of the [Nameless Revolt].
Having cleared the obstacle immediately in front of them, Percival’s group ventured onward toward the center of the city. Now without their [Rammoth Rider] escorts, they had to stick to the smaller side streets to avoid being tied up in combat. This slowed their pace compared to when they could sprint down the city’s main avenues, but thanks to Percival and Gregory’s familiarity with Soleil’s layout, the group still made good time.
The two [Lieges]’ troops and allies were working to disrupt the ritual nodes spread throughout the city, but it was up to Percival’s small group to make their way toward the heart of the city and destroy the ritual at its core.
Visible even from the alleyways, Percival could see it, the ever-looming tower that served as the focal point for the [Hollow King]’s ritual, the Torr Royale. The tower stretched over a thousand feet into the air, dwarfing all other buildings in the city by a wide margin. Tens of thousands of cables and wires were attached to the building at irregular intervals, spreading outwards and downwards in every direction and shimmering with golden light as they funneled mana and divinity into the tower itself.
What exactly the [Hollow King] was going to use all that power for, Percival had no way of knowing, and he didn’t plan on finding out.
Percival and his group continued running through alleys as they headed for their objective. They came across a few more groups of enemies as they went, but it wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle quickly.
Oddly enough, the closer they made it to the Torr Royale, the less resistance they encountered, and those that they did encounter seemed to put up only token efforts to bar their way before breaking ranks to run away.
“This smells of a trap,” Gregory said as the group ducked down another alley, having just ran past a unit of [Sunlit Archers] who’d only fired off a single volley of arrows before fleeing.
“It does, milord,” replied a woman, the leader of the [Nameless Vanguard], “but what choice do we have? The others are buying us time with their lives, and we need to stop the ritual as quickly as we can.”
“I’m well aware, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Do you all remember that stranger I talked about? The one I may or may not have hallucinated meeting in the mountains?” Percival asked, cutting in with a chipper tone. “He said there’s a difference between falling for a trap and walking into it knowingly. I forget exactly what the difference was, but so long as we stay strong and trust one another to have our backs, then I’m certain we can win!”
The group ran on in relative silence for a few seconds.
“Percival…” Gregory began. “Please don’t take my words too harshly, but I don’t think pinning our hopes of victory to the half-remembered words of a man who might not even exist is the vote of confidence you think it is.”
“Oh, it’s not?” Percival replied, lightheartedly feigning surprise. “Well, if you won’t trust the words of a hallucination, then trust in me, the man who does!”
Percival knew his words were silly, but they were purposefully so. He knew the men and women around him well, and what they needed from him now wasn’t some heroic speech about the stakes of their mission. They already knew the stakes, and a reminder would do more harm than good. What they needed from Percival now wasn’t more pressure, but less.
If Percival made out their current situation to be something exceptional that required special effort, then his troops might subconsciously doubt the instincts they’d worked so hard to form over the past year, believing that such instincts just weren’t enough given the dire circumstances. If such doubt were allowed to fester, it could manifest as an instant of hesitation at some key moment, and an instant of hesitation was all it took to turn victory into defeat, or survival into death.
No, what the troops needed wasn’t pressure, but release. Percival and Gregory had done all they could to make training feel like battle, and now in it was time to make the battle feel like training.
Thankfully, one of the [Nameless Vanguards] chuckled at Percival’s bold declaration, and the monk-turned-revolutionary felt the tension in the air lessen greatly. Make no mistake, everyone was still rightfully on edge, but the relief in pressure did wonders to help them all think more clearly.
As the group got within a few blocks of the Torr Royale, the enemy gave up all pretense of resistance. The members of the standing army they encountered stood aside to let them pass or ran away at the sight of them. As for the undead, there were no zombies this close to the city center. This might have been in part because the [Hollow King] viewed them as nothing more than fodder and would thus concentrate them toward the frontlines at the outskirts of the city, but Percival suspected that a greater reason was that the [Hollow King] simply didn’t want the stench of commoners’ corpses marring the spectacle of the grand tower.
Percival’s group slowed their pace as they turned one last corner and finally caught sight of Kingsblood Square, the plaza where stood the gargantuan Torr Royale.
Standing only a few dozen feet away from one of the plaza, Percival immediately noticed three things.
The first was the tower itself. Every square inch of the tower’s surface was carved in relief to depict grandiose scenes from the [Solarian Courts]’ history such as battles, coronations, and festivals. The building itself had no windows, but wherever a window would have been, there was instead an alcove, and in each alcove stood a statue of either a [Hero], a [Priest], or a horrible beast peering down at the square below. Every one of these myriad details popped in three-dimensions thanks to the contrasting lights of the cool blue full moon from above and the warm gold glows of magic pulsing through the cables anchored to the tower from below and all around.
In addition to funneling magic to the tower, the cables also served as hanging points for decorations. Ostentatious ornaments were hung everywhere along their lengths. Cornucopias full of food, statuettes cast in gold and silver, rainbow-spectrum lights, strings of coins, and banners of silk and lace all dangled overhead, dazzling yet out of reach to all on the ground below.
Richly adorned as it was, Percival had a passing thought that the tower and its surrounding cables resembled a giant version of a decorated winter solstice pine tree, but without any of the festive spirit. The tower and its decorations were nothing but a parody built of metal, stone, and avarice.
The fires that were ever-present throughout the rest of the city had yet to reach the square, and even the distant sounds of battle were dampened to the point of disappearing entirely.
So lavish, so bright, so calm were Kingsblood Square and the Torr Royale that Percival could almost forget that there was a war going on.
Almost.
The second thing that caught his attention were the forces arrayed against him.
There were no civilians frolicking through the square as Percival had witnessed during prior winter solstices. Instead, there was a small army.
With but a cursory glance, it became obvious to Percival the forces standing against him were too much for him and his small escort to deal with. A whole score of [Solar Knights], two [Luminous Titans], and more [Solar Guards] than he could count filled the square, and poised to strike from behind every window of the surrounding buildings was either a [Sunlit Archer] or a [Solar Cannon].
There was even a crimson-armored man mounted atop a griffin. In one hand he held a spiked mace, and in the other he held a lance, and at his hip was a whip. Percival had never seen the man before, but he knew him by reputation as Viktor, a [Tier IV] [Steward of Pain]. He came from some minor faction in the North, but had come to the [Solarian Courts] as a teenager and worked his way up to becoming the Chief Inquisitor and a [Vassal] of the former [King] Richard Kingsblood V.
As for what had happened to that [King] in the aftermath of the [Divine Apocalypse]…
The third and final thing that caught Percival’s attention was the foul creature at the center of it all, the faceless form of the [Hollow King].
More than a beast but less than a man, the [Hollow King] stood eight feet tall. It wore plain robes of pure white and a crown of dark wood, not because it placed any value in the virtue of austerity, but because its curse wouldn’t allow it any greater adornments. Its skin was a ghastly sallow grey, no different from a corpse. Where its eyes, mouth, and nose should have been, there was only more skin, and the creature labored with every breath to force air through the epidermal membrane sealing its airways. When it spoke, it didn’t do so by breathing out, but by wheezing air into its lungs.
“All your struggles are useless!” growled the [Hollow King] by way of greeting. “Give up and give in, little Percival! Your effort serves only to prolong your men’s pain. How cruel, how hypocritical of you to have others suffer for no reason other than to satisfy your own ambition. If your heart truly bleeds for your lessers, then you have but one choice! Surrender to me your name, and all can be well!”
Percival tightened his grip on his own mace, but no other sign of anger spread across his features at the thinly veiled provocation. All his life, Percival had never before hated another living being, and even now, standing there before the inhuman monster that’d caused so much needless death and destruction over the past year, all he could feel for the creature was pity.
“Well hello to you too, Mr. [Hollow King],” Percival said, affecting a blasé attitude. “I offer you the same. Surrender, and I promise you mercy. A quick death, if you want it. A life spent righting your wrongs if you prefer to live. I make no guarantees, but given enough time, I might even be able to fix your curse. Think about it. You don’t have to be a monster. You could become Richard again if we—”
“DO NOT UTTER THAT NAME IN MY PRESENCE!” screeched the [Hollow King]. “I already know what I want! I know what I need! I know what can make me whole once more, and it certainly isn’t some peasant’s mercy! Give to me your name and return to me the divinity you stole when the gods disappeared, or I shall take what is rightfully mine!”
“I never stole—”
“LIES!”
Percival frowned. “I see now that words are getting the two of us nowhere.”
He swept his gaze across the square once more. Few of the enemy dared to meet his gaze, and those who did more often than not quickly darted their eyes away in shame. They knew they were fighting for the wrong side, but considering the fact that their [Liege] could swipe their souls away at a moment’s notice, Percival found it difficult to condemn their cowardice.
Still, regardless of their motivations, an enemy was still an enemy. With well over a hundred enemies laid out before him, Percival knew he and his entourage would stand no chance in a direct fight to the death.
At Percival’s side stood Gregory, the man who was his co-[Liege], mentor, and dearest friend all at once. With both hands, the ancient warrior held [Redemption], his impractically large greatsword that somehow looked natural for the man to wield. One on one, he could match anything the [Hollow King] could throw at him, but outnumbered and having to constantly deal with the threat of ranged attacks, he would fall eventually.
At Percival’s back stood twelve [Nameless Vanguards]. Other than the fact they wore leather armor, they appeared no different from [Peasant Spearmen]. They were the [Unbreakable] elites of his army, but they were still only a single unit of [Tier III] infantry. Without buffs and against the odds they now faced, it would be a miracle if they could each down a single enemy before they succame to the odds.
As for Percival himself, he could barely fight in the first place. He had a mace in one hand and was free to cast spells with the other, but it’d been less than a month since he’d been taught by a probable hallucination how to even wield a weapon. Even if he casted the [Tier V] spell [Divine Avatar] upon himself, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the [Hollow King] in a duel.
The [Hollow King] had once been [King] Richard Kingsblood V, retired [Tier IV] [Champion of Sol] and father to the late [Hero] Arthur Kingsblood III, and even if the monster’s identity hadn’t survived whatever metamorphosis it’d gone through, Percival sensed that its martial prowess was anything but diminished.
If anything, the [Hollow King] was a greater threat than Richard Kingsblood V could’ve ever been. With little more than a name, it could wrest away an unwary soul. What other foul powers it held, Percival could only guess. Even now, it held itself in the eight-foot-tall shape of the slain Auroran Prince whose soul it had stolen, and it would likely be able display that legendary warrior’s prowess in battle.
“Enough stalling, little Percival!” croaked the monster. “This is your last chance! Surrender, or die!”
At their [Hollow King]’s declaration, every Solarian in the square readied their weapons.
If any other person had over hundred weapons leveled at them, they’d likely leave the encounter with some rather pungent undergarments — if they even left at all, that is. Percival, however, only gave a smile and an understanding nod.
He turned back to give his entourage one last look, and from the steel in their eyes, he knew they were all ready.
“Surrender or die?” Percival mused aloud, turning once more to face the [Hollow King]. “We hadn’t planned on surviving in the first place.”
[Arms of the Seraphic Host]
[Multicast]: [Dying Breath]
Then all Hells broke loose.