Chapter Text
Many centuries ago, carved into the heartland of the continent, there lived a kingdom called Havikheim, the fairest rose of all the lands.
What happens next is what happens in all stories of great lands: there came a great evil which rotted it from the inside out, wilting its petals and choking its blossoms with thorns. This evil has taken many forms in many kingdoms–sin, prejudice, the violence of passion. Scholars spend centuries dissecting their downfalls, never able to pinpoint one precise cause for the destruction of a nation.
In the future, scholars need not fret over such trite details with this story. In the future, should things continue down their current path, they will know what began the downfall of Havikheim:
The Malevolent One.
No one quite knows where he came from; he himself claims to hail from one of the southern hovels of the kingdom, a backwater town known mostly for its drunks and prostitutes, a mere stop on the way to a military outpost on the border. Though his origins are largely opaque, his current existence has been made known to all by his divisive rhetoric, theatrics, and tendencies towards violence. It had begun with his supposed hometown, when a troop of soldiers had marched through to find the entire town dead. Its grass was so dry it might as well have been dirt, the trees curled over in supplication, its homes and establishments hollowed out.
Worst of all had been the vines.
When the soldiers had finally arrived at the outpost, they’d all been mad with grief, spluttering and teary-eyed over the vines, the brambles, the thorns. Everywhere they’d looked, they wove in and out of the ground, through windows and doors and walls, seeking the blood of men. The bodies of the townspeople were strung out along the main road of the town, skewered onto the vines, branches of thorns weaving in and out of their skin, stabbed through their eye sockets, threaded into their ears. It had been several days since the massacre, judging by the bloat of the victims, their blood crusted against their skin in shades of icy purple, and in the eerie silence of the town, the soldiers swore they could hear the echoes of the townspeople’s screams.
It wasn’t the last.
After the fourth town’s massacre, King James and Queen Joyce of Havikheim began to seek help, to call upon their guards to discover the root of the issue and weed it out immediately. Not only was their kingdom at stake, but with a young son in their household and a newborn pair of twins having just arrived, they had a family to look out for, too: a future to promise their children.
As the military and intelligence apparatuses grew more involved over the years, the massacres stopped, but the vines and thorns continued to spread across the kingdom. They began with small incursions on farmland and in riverbeds before slowly dispersing like an infection through the rest of the kingdom, a toxin injected into its bloodstream. Entire plots of crops became devoured by briars, the well waters poisoned with thorns, and as more people from the outlying villages began to crowd Havikheim’s citadel in search of work and resources, King James and Queen Joyce took to sending spies throughout theirs and the surrounding kingdoms, looking for whichever magic-wielder could be the one behind such attacks.
Their answer came not in the form of a written report, but a visitor, a hermit who lived so far in the wilderness of Havikheim that he might as well have been in exile. His burgundy robes had shifted about him with great importance despite their shabby appearance, his beard knotted and unruly compared to the shiny bald spot crowning his head. He called himself a grand wizard, though many referred to him simply as that crazy man who lives in the shack, but Murray had made it clear that evil was running amok in the kingdoms, bent on the total destruction of Havikheim, and that evil had a name: Vecna.
Just saying it had made shivers run down the king and queen’s spines; Murray had said it with a flinch, as if he’d been expecting the bristle of discomfort but still unable to avoid it. He explained that the name had been cursed, most likely by its bearer, and thus, despite his insistence that everyone say it, those in the outlying villages had taken to simply referring to him as the Malevolent One.
“You know, like how they call me that crazy man who lives in the shack,” Murray had explained with an eye roll.
It hadn’t stopped there, though. The Malevolent One had been trying in vain to build up an army to little success–after all, most peasants are too focused on their own survival for a man’s wild ramblings about power to mean much to them. As such, the Malevolent One had taken over a part of the forest that hugged the eastern border of Havikheim, sucking the life out of the trees and grass with his corrosive power and twisting the dead branches into a tower made of vines, thorns, and brambles, a fortress only he could enter. His corruptive use of magic–selfishly wielding it for his own needs above all else–had taken a physical toll on him, cratering half of his face with lesions and cicatrices, running webs of charcoal and ash down his limbs and twisting him into something neither human nor creature. According to Murray, this poisoned and sickly man spent his days in his tower, using his vines to peer further into the heart of Havikheim, looking for something, though nobody knew exactly what.
Which meant that, until they could find a way into the tower without alerting the Malevolent One, they would have to prepare for a future of droughts, crop failures, and dependency on the surrounding kingdoms.
Knowledge holds its own kind of power, but it does not dispel the tangible harms presented by things known. Despite having a firmer grasp on their target and a fiercer determination to disarm him, the years wound on for the king and queen of Havikheim with no end in sight. Their children grew older, outgrowing their clothes faster than the maids of the castle could wash them, and it hadn’t been more than a few years after their birth that the twins began to exhibit signs of magic. The torches would flicker in their presence if upset, and instead of throwing unwanted objects out of their hands like any normal toddler would do, they’d only need to glance at an object to send it flying across the room.
It was a curse to know what awaited their futures; it was a joy to watch them grow.
Despite how easy it was to get lost in their childhoods, danger still lurked. It hid in the shadows of the castle at night, spread rot in the fields of crops meant to feed the people of Havikheim, left wells and riverbeds parched. The Malevolent One clearly had a desire to see the kingdom blighted from the face of the earth, and he was taking every measure he could to achieve that goal.
But, most of all, the Malevolent One had a plan, one bent on clawing at the heart of the kingdom, striking with a dagger where one should be most guarded. Given the current state of the nation’s dwindling food supply and its increased dependency on its neighbors, its armor has been slipping by the day, and just when it is most vulnerable, the Malevolent One will be ready to strike.
Havikheim is slowly approaching its downfall, yes, but one question remains:
Can it be saved, and if so, how?