Many decades ago I lived as a trader of fine cloths in a city whose name has long been erased from the annals of history. Together with my wife and sons I lived a frugal yet peaceful existence, trade rarely slowing down enough to impact us, at least until the King's war began. Bloated with arrogance, he sent forth his armies against his rivals to ransack their lands and force their submission. Having little backing from his captains in this, the battles took their inevitable turn, and soon enough word arrived of an invincible coalition of armies marching to our city. Trade slowed to a halt as the citizenry retreated to their private lives, content only to be in the company of their loved ones, perhaps in hopes of protecting them from the incoming force through sheer will alone.

Given there was no one left to purchase the goods I hawked, I too fell into this fearful and hushed life, and it was on one night as I was collecting firewood that I saw him. What at first appeared through my exhausted eyes as a shadowy mass oozing down the street became a procession of wolf headed, black furred men walking in a jagged formation under the full moons rays. Some bore banners of purest midnight silk that seemed to carry the darkness of the abyss itself. Scattered amongst this unholy congregation were mad eyed men and women, clothed in nought but rags and so engorged with fear that they seemed somehow more savage than the beast men standing tall beside them. Crouching there in the darkness, I waited with fear in my heart for the ghastly columns to end. Despite the oddity of what I had seen, I surely would have dismissed it as a nightmarish vision if not for the horror that I was yet to witness. Unfortunately for me, I happened to be glancing from my hiding place just as he came into view, the leader of this unholy procession. It was impossible to tell where his body stopped and the night began, so shadowy was his personage, yet he carried himself with an air of true authority the likes of which I had never seen even in the noblest of princes. Atop his head lay a crown of purest onyx engraved with the faces of men, the expressions of which I was lucky enough not to be able to make out in the darkness. He rode a horse of black velvet, distinguishable from the finest of purebreeds only by the stag like antlers protruding from its equestrian skull. Somehow through the fog of terror, a morbid curiosity as to the nature of this figure bubbled to the surface, a curiosity that was swiftly fulfilled as he turned his head in my direction. Suddenly I knew the identity of this figure, whose silver fanged grin and ember filled eyes now gazed directly into mine. The watcher in the night had come, Fear was returned to claim the throne rightfully due to him. After the decades of rule under the hands of man, finally the reigns of the City were to be returned to their rightful holder.

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I can not recall how I made it home that night, my next moment of awareness after that piercing glare was waking up to the suns rays beaming through my bedroom window, sweat frozen to my body. Whether it was terror driven hallucination or not failed to alter my decision to immediately leave the city. We brought everything we could with us, all of what meagre riches we had accumulated throughout a trading career of middling success. All the ships of the City had long since fled, bar one, owned by a man with a reputation for particular cruelty and abuse, and even one without the history in bargaining that I had could easily tell that his sympathy extended only as far as the fatness of purse offered. He demanded all our belongings as payment, hiding behind some vague excuse of a high demand for his services, and despite the pleas of my wife, I agreed. Though the price was exorbitant, we were to learn that it was a sound bargain, for I heard later that the day after we left, the prophesied army arrived at the gates, and the port was blockaded to any would be escapees. The bringer of this news was one of my fellow merchants of those days, who I happened to cross paths with long after the siege. He had managed to live through the months of panic that possessed the city during that terrible time, and he told me how the King had been slain the day of the army's arrival, presumably at the hands of a confidant for no enemy had yet breached the gates, and his throne was never again filled in the chaos of the coming months. The generals immediately entered peace negotiations but could find no quarter with their adversaries, thirsty as they were for revenge on the City that had ravaged their own lands. Such as it was, the siege continued until every soul lacking the skills of knife and blade had been cut down to serve the needs of his fellow man, from the tiniest of rats to the fattest of merchants. When the gates finally fell, the invaders found a populace of skeleton men and women reduced to the merest scraps of bone and gristle. Nevertheless they slaughtered many of those who remained merrily, and used the others in the sick games they had conceived in the boredom of the siege. My companion was lucky enough to be born with the ruthlessness necessary to survive the terror of his fellow man, and fortune provided him with a safe place to weather the sacking of the city, leaving him to find his own way from the burned wreck of his previous life. Telling him of the vision I had seen the day before the invasion, he was quick to agree with me that it had been no illusion. It truly was Fear who sat in the empty throne during the last days of that city, and he did not rule with a light hand.

These days I live alone on the farthest edge of a tiny hamlet, my wife long lost to the mortal world and my sons having since moved onto greater things. I pen these words in hopes that other people might know of him, and be afraid. His royal blood rules us all, despite what the priests and lawmakers say. Even out here away from all other authority, I occasionally catch his eyes staring out at me from under the blanket of midnight, his silver grin glinting in the pale moon's light.