The king, old and sickly, sat beneath the chandelier of Berkimhum's throne room like a shadow trying to remember its own weight.
Henry Von Roxweld.
The last hammer of the throne. The spider that wove the web of a kingdom now crumbling beneath its own gold. He had ruled not by sword or faith—but by cold brilliance, scheming across decades like a man who never needed to blink.
But now—his body betrayed him.
Sleep no longer obeyed. Dreams, once his secret council, had withered in the drought of the Dreaming's fall. His skin sagged with the exhaustion of fifty sleepless hours, and the voices that once whispered clever plots to him had turned to 'murmurs of madness'.
Was it guilt?
Or was it magic?
He didn't know. And part of him—a part that once laughed beside firelight with a little boy who loved books more than blades—no longer cared.
