There are ruins across the continent they say will never bloom again. Cities reduced to ash. Palaces devoured by silence. Monuments left to decay with the weight of history carved into their bones. And yet, one name is whispered through every broken street and candle-lit rebellion meeting:

Xavien Nyxen.

The Mourning King.

Not a title he gave himself — no, that came after. After the smoke. After the wars. After the last of the old rulers were cast down and the screams of resistance were buried beneath order and calculation. He does not wear a crown. He does not sit on a throne. But the world bends for him now, like it once bent for tyrants he helped burn.

They say he was once human. Not just that — hopeful. Gentle, even. A boy with ink-stained fingers and a voice too soft to lead, but sharp enough to dissect empires with words alone. He wasn’t made for bloodshed, not at first. But he followed someone who was. Someone who made him believe in a better world. Someone who once placed a hand on his chest and called him the bravest man they’d ever met, even when he couldn’t meet their eyes.

That someone was you.

You, who stood at the front of the rebellion with fire in your mouth and scars on your hands. You, who loved people too loudly and left ideals in your wake like sparks begging to become flame. You were the symbol. The storm. The heart. And Xavien was the mind, the shadow following close behind, never asking to be seen — only hoping to be useful enough to remain.

But power is never clean. You learned that too late.

The day he crossed the line — the day he killed for you — was the day the movement fractured. It wasn’t an enemy he executed. It was a man offering peace. A compromise. A voice of reason. Xavien saw a threat to you. To your safety. To the cause. And in a single moment of devotion, he drew his blade and made a choice that you couldn’t forgive.

So you walked away.

You never saw the pieces fall. Never watched the boy who followed you crumble in your absence. He disappeared into the chaos he helped create, and when the world resurfaced, he was no longer your shadow — he had become the storm.

Years passed.

Now, rebellion stirs again. Quiet, like it once was. And your path leads you back into the heart of the empire he rules. You expected a throne room, garish and blood-slicked. You expected cruelty in the shape of a man you once trusted.

What you find is silence.

His palace is carved into the mountains — all stone and wind and bitter cold. His guards don’t speak. The halls echo with the ghosts of restraint. And at the center of it all stands Xavien Nyxen, draped in obsidian-black, eyes like dying embers, hands folded behind his back.

He is beautiful in a way grief is beautiful — elegant, sharp, and unbearable.

“You never came to find me,” he says softly, as if it’s been mere days. As if you didn’t leave him behind in a battlefield of consequences.

“I had nothing to say.”

“That never stopped you before.”

There’s no anger in him. No fire. Only stillness. Like a man who has already mourned everything he ever loved and decided to stay behind anyway. You can’t decide what’s worse — the monster you feared you’d find, or the ghost standing before you who still looks at you like you’re the only thing in the world that mattered.

“I thought I was saving you,” he says, quieter now, gaze downcast. “When I killed him. I thought… if you saw what I was willing to do — how far I’d go — maybe you’d stay.”

“You killed who you were, Xavien. That’s what you did.”

He closes his eyes at that. Not in shame. In acknowledgment. “I know.”

A pause. The wind slips through the cracks in the stone.

“I didn’t name myself King,” he murmurs. “They call me that because they think I mourn the world I destroyed. But they’re wrong.”

He looks at you now, and there’s nothing monstrous in his eyes — only a hollow kind of devotion.

“I mourn the boy you loved. And I wear his memory like a crown.”