The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

As Crucis approached the throne room, he closed his eyes for a few seconds due to the brightness of the pale, golden glow of the door. Since the rooms on the way here were dark and had barred windows, the rest of the group also slowed their pace slightly as they approached the blazing light. Large, high windows were placed on each side of the throne room, and Crucis could soon hazily make out the tips of a few hills rising in the distance.

While the doors of the throne room were wooden, they were covered with paintings of local deities decorated liberally with gold. The deities seemed to be watching over and directing a large war between two different armies, with one army depicted wearing gilded armour and hence probably belonging to this Kingdom. This war might be an important part of this ex-Kingdom's history, perhaps against one of its local rivals.

Crucis recognised one of the deities from the shrines South of Kruxol, an aggressive blue deity with three long, red tongues and a lance. However, this depiction was slightly different. Instead of a machete, this deity was here depicted carrying a gem-encrusted book, and he had a third arm which transformed into a long, red snake which wound around his body and looked like a rash. Crucis guessed that this might represent subtle differences in the local religions of the area.

"Huh, is Thor on there? I didn't notice that one the last time," Akshel said, pointing to a deity holding a large hammer and leering over a part of the battlefield which was being struck by a lightning bolt.

"Not that surprising," DicingDevil replied, "The Norse gods are everywhere here. I'm tired of them. I quite like the god painted here with the head of a roaring crocodile, he looks like he's enjoying the war."

"Crikey, mate, what a beauty," Crucis replied, with a light impression of an Australian accent. "Anyway, so what are our plans for this fight?"

"Yes, yes. Well, we should approach in our usual formation with tank at the front. The King typically fights with a sword, but he's strong with his arms, so it might be difficult for Akshel to tie him down. However, the King doesn't use magic, so he's actually one of the more straightforward bosses in this area. Dionarcy can try to deflect blows, but if we can get the King to ground then we should be able to swarm him and do a lot of damage before he can get back up. Wait until his charge attack, after that he will be stunned for a couple of seconds. With previous groups, we could generally get him down to the ground easily during this time.

"I'll use [Stunning Dagger] to extend this. Crucis and Akshel should attack during that time period, and try to drag the King to the ground along with Dionarcy. Grisier can use [Mana Strike] once the King is off-balance, to help you guys out. Be careful at the start, the King hides behind curtains on the right side of the door. First, buffs."

The group waited as Grisier buffed them for this fight, casting buffs to movement speed, Dexterity, Strength and HP regeneration. After thanking the Mage, they heaved the right door until it opened slightly, and then made their way into the room.

As they entered, DicingDevil used [Stealth Cloak] and drifted out towards the right, then stabbed firmly into the curtains at a position he had memorised. However, his dagger collided with the wall. There was nobody in the curtains.

"Weird. He's not here," DicingDevil said.

"Not on the throne or near it either," Grisier reported.

"Strange. Everyone, carefully spread out and inspect the curtains and windows of this room. He might have switched to hiding behind another one. I'll check on the King's and Queen's rooms, they have doors on the sides of this room."

Crucis moved methodically around the room checking the curtains, but found that they were empty. This didn't surprise him: while the King could effectively hide behind curtains to set up an ambush near the door, it would be harder for them to play hide and seek for any longer in here given that a powerful boss with royal costume would be quite conspicuous. DicingDevil combed through two rooms, one on each side of the throne room, but as the group met in the centre of the dungeon they had all found no signs of the boss in this room.

"How are we supposed to clear this dungeon with no final boss?" Dionarcy vented.

"If we don't find him here, I guess we have no choice," DicingDevil replied, "We can try to find our way down and have a go at the Undead Queen, if we can find her. But the trapdoor in the King's study is locked because the final boss fight is not over, so we'll have to try another way."

"How long do we have left in here?" Akshel asked.

"Well over an hour, I guess they added some time on after we killed the other bosses. It's not crowded up here, so they're not stingy with instances. If we killed the final boss, we'd get some time added on, but I have no idea where it is."

"Alright, I guess we can try to look around here for some more time in case the boss appears, but you're right, we should try going downstairs."

"What if we got some kind of used instance, the game accidentally gave us an instance where another team had already defeated the final boss?" Grisier mused.

"That's unlikely," DivcingDevil replied, "If you kill the boss, then this room starts to break down, you have a few minutes to escape. If someone else had killed the boss already in this instance, then this room would be in ruins."

"That's a good point," Dionarcy said. "Still, if we try the other path to get downstairs, then we'll probably have to get past the Man-Bird thing again. So we should wait around here for a while, to make sure that this boss is definitely away."

"Sure, sure. Guys, feel free to explore the rooms thoroughly before you finish, maybe we can find out some information about this place or any secret rooms where the boss may be hiding."

Crucis saw that the rest of the group were mostly searching near the throne, so he approached the King's study. The door to the study was covered with a painting of a golden sword and helmet overlapping. This room was L-shaped, and contained a large, wooden desk along its right side, as well as a small, black piano placed neatly on the left side. A few drawers were laid around the corners of the room. Crucis saw that there was no paper on the desk, only three pens, so he crouched down and began rummaging through the drawers.

DicingDevil entered quietly behind him, stepping comfortably over a locked trapdoor beside the door, and said, "We don't usually get the chance to search this area much. Have you found anything?"

"There's some pages of writing here, but in their language. I can't read it, but I don't see any drawings or symbols like the other writer's," Crucis replied, while still scanning across pages in the drawer.

"I see. I'll have a look around as well, I think there's a small cupboard hidden just behind the piano."

Crucis moved towards the right side of the room, to allow DicingDevil to turn to the left without stepping on him. As DicingDevil moved through, Crucis inspected the desk. It had a lot of scrawls and small scratches along its surface, an indication that it had been used extensively by the King. What was the King writing about with such excitement? However, the lacking decorum seemed to suggest that what the King was writing was urgent and important to him, as otherwise Crucis would expect more restraint and formality from the monarch.

Looking around the desk carefully, Crucis noticed a few pieces of paper had got stuck behind the back of the desk, which had a thick wooden panel along the wall. Crouching down, Crucis managed to pull two of these pages out, but couldn't reach the others. He drew a spare [Artisan's Epée] which the [Statue Faux] boss had dropped, and used this thin, blunt sword to tease some of the other papers out from behind the left side of the desk. One of the pieces of paper was quite long, and Crucis had to make some effort to filch it out. The sword got jammed behind the desk as Crucis tried to remove it, but he wasn't that concerned because it wasn't a sword with any actual use in combat. He left it there, and picked up the pieces of paper.

"I found a few English notes behind the cupboard," DicingDevil said from the left side of the room. "They seem mostly ordinary, some letters, but nothing much of importance. What's up with the racket you're making?"

"I thought you'd enjoy my avant-garde blackened death metal album," Crucis frowned. He continued more seriously, "There's two English letters in here, and also what seems to be a spell scroll. But it's torn and barely anything is left, you couldn't use it to learn the spell."

DicingDevil inched closer at the mention of a spell scroll. "Is it advanced magic? Is it associated with a specific sub-class?"

"It is definitely advanced magic, that tends to have a few runes at the top of the spell scroll. There's still a few clear traces of such runes, in blue ink. It was clearly used at some point, because those runes have become inert and started to fade into the paper, with three black dots appearing over them on the top of the paper to show that the spell was learnt. When you learn a spell, magical symbols or enchantments on the scroll fade and stop functioning."

"Does blue ink signify what class of spell it is?"

"Probably, but not sure. Maybe Grisier will know."

"Right."

DicingDevil began typing a message in party chat, and Crucis used this time to inspect the scroll further.

"The spell is called [Reborn], it's a Necromancer spell," Crucis reported. "A rare sub-class, because the trainers are really out-of-the-way and it's dangerous to find them. I've heard about the spell occasionally. But you said that the King didn't use magic, so why would he keep this scroll in his personal study?"

"Not sure. Can you make out any of the writing?"

"There's very little left. But there is some. Here's what it says." Crucis read out from the scroll:

You desire a life renewed, directed under your hand. Life has no meaning, but you seek a life with meaning. A life that does not voyage recklessly into the unknown void, but is designed and put together in order to pursue your ambition. Your old life must be sacrificed, that the new one may rise from its ashes.

"That accords with the hype I heard around this spell," he continued, "it lets you be 're-born' according to your preferences, with a much higher growth rate in terms of levels and stats.

"There's also some scrawling here, in what looks like the King's handwriting. He seems to be disputing with the scroll's text, scrawling a bit hastily. One of his marginal comments says, 'Fool! I have found many dear lives with meaning. Studying necromancy shut me off from a glorious world which we must embrace, it imprisoned me for decades,' another says, 'Life should be welcomed, not directed.' A King might well have such a rosy view."

"I know quite a bit about this King's court from previous runs here. He was a King from a young age, and a public one," DicingDevil said, "Why would he complain about being shut off for decades to study necromancy?"

"The scroll says that the caster must sacrifice an 'old life,' maybe he was a powerful Necromancer before he turned into a King?"

"True, yes. By the way, Grisier said that blue runes being on top of spells signifies that they are high-tier spells with out-of-battle effects. I was sort of right."

"That would make sense. Those are some of the most valuable spells, instead of just affecting combat they can transform how the user plays the game."

"OK. I think that this King was from a volatile time with a power vacuum, so he was allegedly able to seize power due to multiple successes at war, and was widely considered a child prodigy even before his reign. Sort of a Mozart King."

"That backstory seems to imply that he had a high amount of strength and experience from a young age, so it would line up with what we've already seen."

"He also says that in one of these pages, an unsent, incomplete letter dated near the beginning of his reign." DicingDevil read out the letter.

My strength is growing ever more keen, and it was enough to conquer this Kingdom at a young age. I am sure that there are restraints on human life, but I feel unshackled for now. I have wasted none of my years here. Without accusations of witchcraft, I can engage with the world around and fulfill any passion freely. I cannot use magic, as I chose to become a fighter instead, and so I do not care about the persecution of magicians. Let them die, I will have no rivals here!

"I see. But not everything turned out so well, here's a coroner's note saying that the King's children were found dead after a heavy storm." Crucis handed the note to DicingDevil.

"Strange, 'we can find no cause of death, perhaps it is witchcraft'?"

"The King seemed to feel slightly estranged from magic in this life," Crucis mused, "he was seemingly just doing it before out of greed or to satisfy his thwarted desires. But perhaps he also came to resent it because he wanted to believe that his new life was real and deserved, not artificial? Life formed by a reanimator's power is unlikely to be able to do just anything it wants, because it is always on the cusp of the grave. Like, it sounds like what happened to his children might be related to the strictures of the spell, isn't necromancy here sometimes associated with storms?"

"Yes, Darys told me about that. Players aren't allowed to access areas with stormy weather, but necromancers can gather increased power by being near those areas. Allegedly they extract some sort of energy from the lightning to reanimate corpses with."

"Alright. But it's hard to tell for sure what happened to the children. Anyway, his strength seemingly didn't last later into his reign, I found a letter here which is asking him if he was in good health, since he fainted the previous day. He scrawled in a corner of the page, 'I am weak now, I can barely stand, my skin is full of rashes and sores. I nearly died in a brief joust with blunt weapons. Why does an ambitious courtier want to know, does he wish to usurp me? Insolent question!'"

"That's strange, most of the letters which I found were from earlier in his reign, seemingly he used English more often then. Not as much later on. Only in a couple of letters welcoming foreigners to the court, in English."

"Maybe this courtier was a 'foreigner.' Do any of these letters mention the Queen?"

"Yes, one warns a visitor away from the Queen, it seems to be a draft of a letter. The King says that he had spent most of the last two years with her, but now she was starting to wander elsewhere in search of affection, due to him being suddenly ill. Seems that the King was paranoid."

"Is that all? Strange. So what we've got so far is that the King may have used the necromancer's [Reborn] spell, and started a new life here with highly increased stat growth and level gain. Since he was no longer a stigmatised magician, he was able to win over the people with his prowess in war, and conquer the other upstart Kingdoms in this region. However, 5-10 years later he had lost his strength, and was coming apart at the seams. Before this happened, he spent a lot of time with the Queen. He also seemed determined to enjoy the pleasures of this life, in spite of the constraints of the spell."

"Alright, good summary. Tell the others that, I think they should be able to get the gist of it. Let's return to the throne room."

Crucis nodded, and followed DicingDevil out of the King's study. They found the rest of the group gathered around next to the King's throne. The red throne was bordered with sculpted gold, and was embroidered with a slightly torn silver image of a lotus. DicingDevil asked the group what they had found.

"No clue where the King is," Grisier replied, "but we found a few court documents in this room. Seemingly, the King had to miss a lot of meetings later on due to illness, and the Queen was allowed to take charge instead because she was in very good health. There were also many courtiers who died during the later period."

"The court here sounds like a game of chess, the Queen rushing everywhere. Even our first enemy was a statue or something, I think," Akshel laughed.

"Yes, it was," Crucis replied, "Well, a creature hiding in a statue, and apparently the King was a similar creature living in a sculpture of his own design. But go on."

"Alright, we also found this hidden beneath the King's throne."

Dionarcy held up a red gem, labelled [Genliduor's Ruby].