The Last King of Äncale
Prologue: The Wandering Soul

Hepius flung his arm across the stone study table and sent scrolls and tomes skidding to the floor. The crash echoed through his chambers in Erobor’s castle at Äncale—the heart of Kalébar—and came back to him like an accusation.

He stood trembling, cowl thrown back, breathing too fast to swallow the taste of rage.

How dare King Erobor choose her.

Not him. Not after Felbarre—the trials that hollowed his sleep and stripped him raw. Not after Halafarin’s letters, sealed and carried to court like offerings, declaring him worthy in ink that could not be unsaid.

Halafarin had been dead four days.

And still, Hepius caught himself listening for his master’s step in the corridor—half-expecting the old mystic to appear, mild-eyed and tired, and say this was all some test. He hated himself for it.

Erobor had chosen Tára Istea, a northern cousin with snow in her blood and distance in her name. She wasn’t even in Äncale. She likely didn’t yet know she had been named the king’s sorceress.

Hepius threw back his arms, tilted his head—and screamed until his throat burned, until the sound emptied him. When the silence returned, the walls pressed closer, narrowing the space to a cell.

He forced his breath into steadiness—slow, deliberate, disciplined—then yanked open the door and strode into the hall. An elvish servant polished a gold candelabrum, eyes trained on the work, not daring to look up. Hepius passed without a glance. His boots snapped against stone. Torchlight skittered over white walls that had once meant honor and now read as mockery.

Stone gave way to hedges and moonlit garden paths.

There, on a bench under open sky, sat his brother.

Telesphorus smoked a curved pipe like the world had not shifted on its axis. He knocked ash against the stone and said, almost lazily, “I could stay here another year and still not know which halls lead where. Too much roof. I breathe better under the open sky.”

They looked alike enough that strangers sometimes mistook them for twins—same line of jaw, same dark eyes, the same mark of Felbarre’s training in the way their hands never quite rested.

But that was where the resemblance ended.

Telesphorus was content to master healing and to follow the Ancients wherever they whispered. Hepius had never understood how someone could be given a door to power and not press his shoulder to it.

As Hepius descended the garden steps, Telesphorus rose to greet him. The instant their eyes met, Telesphorus’ expression softened.

“I’m sorry,” Telesphorus said, quiet as pipe smoke. “Erobor should have chosen you.”

Hepius’ laugh was sharp and humorless. “And the Ancients know it.”

They began to walk. Tonight the gardens of Äncale offered no comfort. The scent of clipped hedges and roses sharpened Hepius’ irritation—the city daring to pretend everything was still beautiful.

“They watched,” Hepius muttered. “The courtiers. Measuring how far I’ve fallen.”

“They always measure,” Telesphorus replied. “It keeps them fed.”

“They’ll starve on my scraps,” Hepius snapped. Then the thought slipped out, truer than he intended, before he could stop it. “I bled for this.”

Felbarre. Halafarin. The years of bending his will until it didn’t creak. The endless quiet work no one applauded because no one could see it.

And now a northern cousin.

“Erobor is not unwise,” Telesphorus said. “Kings choose what makes them feel safe.”

“Safe,” Hepius echoed bitterly. “I would have made him safe.”

“No,” Telesphorus corrected, gentle but firm. “You would have made him dependent.”

Hepius stopped so abruptly that gravel shifted under his boot. And there, Telesphorus saw it—the hunger beneath the anger, the desperate need to be necessary.

“And is that not what kings want?” Hepius said softly.

“They want many things,” Telesphorus replied. “Most of them at once. And rarely the same thing.”

The tension eased. Hepius held it in check. He always had.

Come,” Hepius said at last. “Halafarin’s rooms. We’ll begin the inventory.”

The late mystic’s chambers waited like a sealed mouth.

Hepius unlocked the thick wooden door. It opened with a sigh.

Inside, afternoon light spilled through three arched windows. Dust floated in it—slow, patient, indifferent. The bed was made, the linens changed after Halafarin’s body had been removed, but cleanliness could not rewrite death.

Halafarin’s staff leaned in the corner like a witness that refused to leave.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Hepius stood very still. His anger faltered, and a colder truth tried to rise—grief, perhaps, or guilt. He pushed it down.

Telesphorus whistled softly, eyes flicking over the shelves. “I loved his library. I could spend hours here and still be starving.”

“Well,” Hepius said, his voice sharpened and controlled, “it’s mine now.” He said it like a claim he needed to be true.

He crossed to the nearest shelf and pulled the first volume free, opening it only long enough to mark it before setting it aside.

“Start there,” he said without looking back.

Hours slipped by. Candlelight replaced sun. The inventory stretched across page after page, and the familiar weight of Halafarin’s books gave Hepius a thin, fragile comfort—until Telesphorus’ voice cut through the quiet.

“Well, hello there. What’s this?”

Hepius looked up.

Telesphorus stood on a stool at the wardrobe’s top shelf, reaching into a dark corner where dust lay thick. He drew out a scroll wrapped in age—vellum, not paper—bound with two locked leather straps and sealed three times.

Halafarin’s seals.

Hepius’ pulse quickened.

He had never seen it before.

Which meant Halafarin had never wanted him to.

Telesphorus handed it down. The vellum felt cold in Hepius’ hands, as though it had been waiting. A familiar thrill pricked his spine—an old sensation from his apprenticeship days: the moment before knowledge becomes irreversible.

And beneath that thrill, a darker thought took shape:

So there were secrets after all.

He stared at the seals.

If Halafarin had lived, he would have known if Hepius touched them.

Halafarin had been wise enough to tie a warning to his own essence.

He was also dead.

Hepius laid the scroll on the desk and let his hand rest on it, lingering. He looked down at the indecipherable script.

“Telesphorus,” he said, his voice steadier than it had any right to be, “do you remember the lingua chant we learned in Felbarre?”

Telesphorus nodded slowly. He already knew what Hepius was doing.

They recited the chant together—Hepius in low, rolling tones; Telesphorus murmuring the dwarf cant—and the pressure in the room changed. The air thickened around the scroll.

The script on the outside of the scroll shimmered, the letters sliding into new shapes, resolved into common Dwarvish.

Hepius read the title beneath the seals.

The Wandering Soul.

Telesphorus went still. His hand lowered from his pipe. The name snagged on a memory he could not quite place.

“Brother,” he said quietly, “it would be wise not to open it. I’ve seen references… in Felbarre. My heart—” He swallowed. “My heart warns me.”

“What do you fear?” Hepius asked.

“I don’t know enough,” Telesphorus admitted. “But I know Halafarin. If he hid it from you—if he sealed it against you—there is a reason.” He took a step back. “I’ll ride to Felbarre. I’ll search the archives and return with truth instead of conjecture. Promise me you won’t break the seals.”

Hepius almost said yes.

Almost.

He respected his brother. He did. He even loved him, in his way. But love had never given Hepius what he wanted.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Hepius said, eyes on the seals. “We’ll finish inventory. We’ll have supper. I’ll see you off in the morning.”

***

Telesphorus left Äncale the following morning. He promised Hepius he would return within four weeks—sooner, if the Felbarre archives yielded quickly. But the promise sounded bare even to his own ears, the way promises do when they are spoken against a shadow you can’t name.

At the stable gate, he tightened the saddle straps twice, then a third time, working the leather longer than necessary. Stoutheart shifted beneath the pressure and threw his head back, forcing Telesphorus to step away. It did nothing for the weight in his chest. Before he mounted, he caught his brother’s forearm.

“Patience,” he said again—quiet, urgent. “Not out of pride, Hepius. Out of wisdom. Don’t disturb the scroll. Don’t break the seals. Let me come back with truth instead of conjecture.”

Hepius’ expression was smooth, almost bored, but his eyes followed the road beyond his brother’s shoulder, already tracking it east.

“Of course,” Hepius said. “Go then.”

Telesphorus hesitated.  There had been a time when he and Hepius had spoken without armor—when they had shared bread and stories and the simple, untested certainty that the world was meant to be ordered and healed.

Now his brother wore ambition like a second skin.

Telesphorus wanted to say what might reach past it—what might land in the part of Hepius that still remembered Halafarin’s kindness, what might remind him that being denied a title was not the same as being denied worth.

But the words did not come. Or perhaps they were there—and he was afraid to speak them.

So he nodded once, mounted his horse, and rode.

As the gates of Äncale fell behind him and the road bent east toward Felbarre, Telesphorus slowed Stoutheart.

He looked back.

Hepius still stood where he had left him, a solitary figure framed by stone and shadow. He had not turned away. Had not moved. He did not raise a hand in farewell.

He was… there.

Watching.

That sight unsettled Telesphorus more than anger would have. More than shouted vows or broken promises. It was the stillness that frightened him—the sense that his brother had already crossed some inner threshold.

Telesphorus turned his horse east and did not look back again.

An unease crept into his chest with the familiarity of a sickness returning. He had done what he believed was right. Still, he wondered—quietly, and without answer—whether caution and cowardice sometimes wore the same face to those who already decided.

***

Hepius could not remain in Erobor’s castle. Every corridor pressed like a reminder. Every gilded threshold a silent verdict. He didn’t even bid farewell to the king, though outwardly they were still on “good terms”—the kind of terms men keep when they expect betrayal later.

He found a small house beyond the press of court: a kitchen and dining room joined in one space, a study and bedchamber in the other, and a narrow washroom that smelled faintly of lye and cold stone.

A minimal place. Almost insulting, for someone who had been next in line to become the King’s mystic.

What was he now? Nothing, as far as Erobor was concerned.

Tára Istea still hadn’t arrived when Hepius left. It should have comforted him—proof that the king’s choice was distant, uncertain, reversible.

Instead it sharpened his resentment.

No matter.

The scroll had come to him.

And the scroll did not feel distant at all

***

One week after his brother’s departure, Hepius sat at his desk with the vellum before him. Storms had rolled across Kalébar all evening. The droning rain and the thunder’s long, cracking voice should have been unsettling, but Hepius found it comforting. The sky matched his own thoughts—restless, insistent, righteous in their fury.

A lone candle flickered on the desk. The fire burned low in the hearth, throwing the sparsely decorated room into an uneasy glow. Shadows stretched and shifted across the floorboards like slow-reaching hands.

Unlike his brother, Hepius had recognized the title the moment it revealed itself.

The Wandering Soul.

The name had weight—age, reputation—something spoken in Felbarre with lowered voices and careful eyes. He did not know the full nature of the power inside the seals. But he knew what it promised. Since the day he had touched it, it had not let go.

He sat now like a man at the edge of a cliff. He placed his fingers on the first seal.

“This is mine,” he whispered, an argument meant to silence his last small doubt.

He cracked the first seal.

A wisp of power rose visibly from the broken wax, curling into the air like breath in winter. A sudden gust swept through the bedchamber, billowing the curtains in and snuffing the candle.

Smoke curled from the wick.

Hepius smiled—small, satisfied.

Of course Halafarin had set wards. The old mystic would have tried to frighten away thieves and fools.

Hepius was neither.

He lit a taper from the hearth and relit the candle.

He broke the second seal.

This time the hearth answered. The fire flared sharply, then dipped—a great breath drawn from the room. Shadows leapt across the walls, stretched, then collapsed in. The air went cold against Hepius’ skin, and the floorboards creaked, the house shifting its weight

It came to him then—the unmistakable sensation of having been noticed.

Then the second seal called. Across wind and land and living water, down through root and stone into the deep places beneath the world. It called into the realm of the living—

and down into the realm where living voices did not belong.

And was answered.

A shimmer gathered at the wall. A coldness moved through the space. Then an elven shade stepped through stone, as the surface of the world gave way.

Hepius did not look up. He already knew who it was.

A moan escaped the shade, grief and fury knotted together. “Hepius… what have you done? Your ambition has already given you much to atone for. What have I done to you to deserve this fate?”

“My former master,” Hepius said, eyes fixed on the scroll, “you hid truths from me.”

“Truths I knew would tempt you,” Halafarin’s shade rasped. “I knew your temperament. Your hunger.” The pleading drained from the shade’s voice, replaced by something colder—command. “What do you think you are doing?”

Hepius reached for the third seal.

“Stop!” Halafarin thundered. “You do not know the disaster that waits if you unleash what that scroll contains!”

Hepius broke the third seal.

The shade vanished. 

Hepius’ smile widened, and it was not joy. It was vindication. So Halafarin had hidden secrets from him. Now, at last, Hepius would claim them.

He unrolled the vellum.

A dry leather pouch tumbled free into his hand. He untied it and spilled its contents into his palm: a few leaves and seeds he did not recognize. He set them carefully into a small bowl, handling them like relics.

He returned to the scroll.

The lingua chant had rendered the text into common Dwarvish:

I, Idoviar of the Yára Elves of Yalúmëa, 

write this by my own hand.

I, a master of sorcery, have discovered 

the path to domination. 

The following incantation allows my discovery 

to flow from me to whomever recites it 

and imbue him with supremacy. 

I have crafted and bound it. 

May the mighty speak it and prevail.

The original incantation remained inscribed beneath:

“Kjom, eth rik avor Idoviar.

kjom oz lje evor.

bevinja en orhim e etta inoth kjol

avor vanr, bloth, oz fjergt…”

The meaning resolved: the speaker would become vessel and master both—shielded by hellebore while others bent beneath a mist of control.

Beneath it, the translation read:

“Come, the power of Idoviar.

Come and dwell within.

Find refuge in this vessel mine

Of bones, blood, and skin.

You alone will remain sound

Through the power of hellebore.”

A smile crept across Hepius’ face as he read. Here, at last, was proof that his years had not been wasted. That Halafarin had known more than he ever admitted. That power had always been within reach, withheld not because Hepius was unworthy, but because others had been afraid of what he might become.

He would no longer need Erobor’s favor. With this, he would show the court—and Tára Istea—that wisdom without courage was nothing more than ornament.

He stepped back from the desk and drew the incantation circle with chalk, each line deliberate, each curve exact.

The symbols came too easily.

Not learned—given.

His hand moved, and he followed.

Raising his hands, he began to recite, his voice low and steady:

“Kjom, eth rik avor Idoviar…”

The words fell into space and did not echo. When the last syllable faded, Hepius remained kneeling, listening to the storm’s fury outside—applause meant for him alone.

Then the sensation began. A tingling at his knees—almost pleasant—crept upward, threading through muscle and bone. It spread into his torso, his chest, his throat. His breath caught as the feeling deepened, turned heavier, intent.

A presence pressed against his mind.

No—into it.

Pain exploded behind his eyes, sharp and resolute, and Hepius cried out as his body struck the floor. Terror flared too late, as his essence was wrenched backward, shoved into the farthest corner of his own mind—awake, aware, and suddenly powerless.

From somewhere beyond himself, he heard a voice speak through his mouth.

“I, Idoviar, come and dwell within this host. I have been reborn. And as wielder of this power, I will subjugate and rule.”

Hepius screamed—

but no sound came.

His body rose without him.

Idoviar flexed unfamiliar fingers, studying them with mild curiosity. He turned his hands, watching candlelight slide over skin not his own. He crossed to the washroom and regarded his reflection in the looking glass.

A dwarf.

He tilted the head, testing its weight.

“So be it,” Idoviar murmured. 

He returned to the study and gathered the leaves and seeds from the desk with care that bordered reverence. In the kitchen, he filled a kettle and set it on the coals. When the water boiled, he added the leaves, watching the liquid darken.

The scent was sharp. Bitter.

He poured himself a cup and drank. The taste made his mouth work instinctively, a faint grimace flickering across the borrowed face. Idoviar swallowed it down.

“No matter,” he said softly. “You will not suffer what the others will.”

He examined the seeds in his palm.

These would be planted—quietly, carefully. Old magic would hasten their growth, coax fruit where none should yet exist. From that fruit, a powder. From that powder, a mist.

Not everyone needed to be touched.

Only enough.

Fear would finish what magic began. Those nearest would bend first, their eyes turning green, their skin mottled. Panic would carry the rest—friends fleeing to friends, children clutched to chests, hands touching hands.

Anything living would serve.

And in the deepest, most distant corner of his mind, Hepius understood then that this was never truly about Erobor.

Or Tára Istea.

It was about being seen.

About making the world to answer.

Idoviar stood at the window and waited for the break of day—aware that dawn would not come cleanly to the world again.