Story 1195: The King That Wasn’t

They once whispered his name around dying hearths—a king without a throne, without birth, without bones. His story was a puzzle of half-truths and deliberate forgettings. In children’s tales, he was a protector. In cultist chants, a betrayer. In the scriptures buried beneath the Lantern Chapel, he was something far worse: a placeholder for a god that never came.

They called him the King That Wasn’t.

And now, he walked.

It started when the bells rang backward.

Evelyn Blackmoor stood atop the city’s highest tower, watching as the cathedral’s silhouette shifted in impossible ways, doorways folding into themselves, windows blooming open like ulcers. The clock face beneath the great bell shattered—not outward, but inward—sucked into a hole that pulsed with a regal heartbeat.