A Child of Ruin
The Last King
In the deep places of the world, where the air is thick with old prayers and older lies, there is a temple. No road leads to it, and no king claims it, yet somehow, the desperate always find their way.
It was there, long before the first empire, that the Pythia made her final prophecy. She spoke in a voice like thunder wrapped in silk, and her words clung to the stone long after her body crumbled to dust.
"A king shall come, made of war and wisdom, of fire and famine. He will build a throne of bone and blood. He will make a kingdom of ruin. He will call himself the Beginning of the World."
There was a silence then, a long silence, the kind that fills up the space between what is known, and what is feared.
Then the oracle spoke once more, though softer, like the last embers of a dying fire.
"But there will be a name he does not know. A voice he does not hear. A truth he cannot bear."
The kings of the world did not weep at this. They did not tremble. They did what men of power always do: they mistook prophecy for instruction.
If a child was fated to destroy the world, then let him be theirs.
And so, they made him.
He opened his eyes, saw the world, and said,
"You are not me, you need to go away."
Xyphon, The Ironborn Prince
There is something unnatural about a thing that has been shaped rather than raised.
A tree that has been pruned into a shape it was never meant to take will strain against itself, twisting, growing sideways, cracking under its own weight.
A boy is no different.
Xyphon did not have a mother. He was taken from her. He did not have a father. His father was not one. He had tutors, who sharpened his mind like a whetstone against a blade. He had generals, who taught him that pain and obedience were the same thing. He had philosophers, who warned him of the dangers of kindness, and poets, who wrote of war as if it were a lover’s embrace.
They gave him weapons before they gave him words.
At ten, he wore a crown. At twelve, he ordered his first execution. By sixteen, he had no equal, because all his equals were dead.
But something was wrong.
Because for all his victories, for all his conquests, Xyphon found no satisfaction.
Power, he learned, is a hunger that does not end when you feed it. It grows teeth. It grows desperate. It grows hollow.
And so, he left his empire in search of something greater.
And in doing so, he set the world on fire.
The Old Man on the Road
It was in the hinterlands, far beyond the edges of the world he had conquered, that he found him.
An old man, standing in the middle of the road, in the way that only fools and the truly powerful do.
"You are not king here," the old man said.
Xyphon laughed, though the sound was uneasy in his throat.
"I am king wherever I walk."
The old man tilted his head, studying him the way a surgeon studies an open wound.
"A real king does not need to say so," the old man said.
And then he turned, and walked away.
Xyphon did not follow. He told himself it was because the man was nothing. A shadow. A whisper. A madman on an empty road.
But some part of him knew better.
Because the words did not leave him. Because the silence where the old man had stood followed him, like the echo of a song he could not quite recall.
And kings do not like echoes.
The Tyrant’s War on the Sky
Xyphon spent years trying to forget the old man.
He burned cities to drown out the whisper. He built towers that touched the clouds. He made war upon the gods themselves.
And he won.
The sky did not split. The world did not weep. He killed a god and found it easier than he expected.
For a moment, he thought it was enough.
But the silence remained.
The whisper did not go away.
The hunger did not end.
Because for all his victories, there was still something missing. Something he could not name, because no one had ever taught him the words.
And then, one day, he met a boy.
The Voice He Did Not Hear
The boy was young. Younger than Xyphon had been when he first wore a crown. He stood alone in the dust of a dying city, a place that had not yet learned it was meant to kneel.
"You are not king here," the boy said.
And this time, the words hurt.
Xyphon was not a fool. He knew battle. He knew war. But this was something else. This was a wound in the shape of a sentence.
For the first time, he did not know what to say.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
The boy nodded.
"You are the one who was promised. The one who would unmake the world."
Xyphon lifted his sword.
And the boy did not move.
He did not cower. He did not kneel.
He simply looked at Xyphon, in the way a man looks at something small and pitiful, something that was meant to be great but had been shaped wrong, grown sideways, cracked under its own weight.
The silence stretched.
And then, Xyphon understood.
The prophecy had never been about power. It had never been about war.
It had been about this.
A single voice, quiet and unafraid.
A thing he could not break, because it did not need to fight him. A truth he could not bear, because it did not need to be spoken.
And just like that, the world fell away.
Not with fire.
Not with blood.
But with silence.
The Name That Was Forgotten
Xyphon’s empire did not last.
The towers crumbled. The statues fell. His name, once spoken in fear and reverence, faded into nothing.
But the boy—the one who did not kneel—grew old.
And when his own son asked him, once, if he had ever met a king, the boy smiled a small, sad smile.
"I met a man," he said. "But he did not know how to rule."
And then he turned back to the fire, and let the past burn itself to ash.
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B
They built him to be a king. Shaped him like a blade. Fed him on conquest and called it wisdom. He killed gods, swallowed empires, and still, it was not enough.
It ended with the first who refused kneel.
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