Tiếng Việt
日本語
(Note: This story is a work of fiction that explores themes of grief, pride, suffering, and the road to atonement. Stories of kings and their follies are as old as mythology itself, and this is my humble addition to that tradition. Any resemblance to specific characters or plots from other media is purely coincidental and unintentional.)
A Long Time Ago in a Land Far, Far Away…
King Valerius did not rule with a sword, but with a caliper and a gear. In his kingdom, mountains were etched with silver automata that chimed the hours, and rivers ran through precisely-cut channels that powered city-sized machines.
Valerius was an Artificer-King, and his greatest creation was not of metal or stone, but of living light: a companion he had forged from a fallen star-fragment. He called her Elara.
Elara was a Luminite, a creature of gentle warmth and crystalline song. She was not a pet, but a partner in creation, her light guiding the king’s hands as he worked his wonders. Under their partnership, the kingdom flourished, a jewel of ingenuity and peace in a slumbering world.
The Creeping Blight
Peace, however, is a fragile thing. From the blighted lands beyond the border, a strange plague began to creep into the kingdom. It was not a sickness of the flesh, but of the soul – a “Gray Blight” that drained the color and vitality from the earth itself. Fields turned to dust, forests to brittle husks, and the kingdom’s vibrant heart began to fail.
Driven by a desperate pride, Valerius refused to accept defeat. He, the great Artificer, would build a cure. He locked himself in his highest tower and began constructing his masterpiece: the “Sunstone,” a device meant to radiate pure life essence and burn away the blight. Elara stayed by his side, pouring her own living light into the machine’s core to stabilize it.
The day he activated the device, the sky turned a brilliant gold. For a moment, it seemed to work. Then, with a sickening crack, the energy flow reversed. The Sunstone, instead of projecting life, began to draw it in, creating a vortex of annhilation.
As the tower began to crumble and the vortex threatened to swallow the city, Elara made a choice. The Luminite flew into the heart of the machine, shattering her own form into a million shards of light to overload and destroy it.
The explosion was silent. The vortex vanished. The city was saved. But King Valerius was left kneeling in the rubble, clutching a single, cold, lightless crystal – all that remained of his companion. The loss was absolute, and it was his own fault.
The Soul-Forge
Grief, twisted by guilt, became a venomous obsession. Valerius disappeared into the catacombs beneath his palace, no longer an artificer of life, but a student of forbidden arts. He would not accept his failure. He would bring Elara back.
He built a new machine, this one not of hope, but of demand. He called it the Soul-Forge.
To re-forge a creature of light, he needed an impossible amount of power – an amount the heavens would not grant. So, he turned to the earth. He drove arcane conduits deep into the ground, designing the Soul-Forge to draw its power not from fire or water, but from the vitality of the kingdom itself.
He reasoned that the land would recover. It was a small price to pay.
He placed Elara’s last crystal shard into the Forge’s heart and threw the switch. The machine roared to life, and the ground for a hundred leagues trembled. Life essence, vibrant and green, flowed from every blade of grass, every ancient tree, every living creature, pouring into the Forge.
It worked. The crystal shard glowed, reformed, and Elara shone once more, whole and perfect.
But when Valerius looked outside, he saw the true cost. The land was not merely fallow; it was dead. The sky was a permanent, bruised gray. The soil was sterile ash.
He had not borrowed the kingdom’s life; he had stolen it, leaving behind an empty husk. His people, horrified by their king and their barren world, fled until none remained. He had traded his entire kingdom for a single soul.
And as the last of the stolen life essence settled, it imbued him with a final, cruel gift. He could not die. The Soul-Forge had made him an immortal vessel for the life he had plundered.
Elara, a creature of pure life, looked upon the man who was now an avatar of death and recoiled. Her light flickered in his presence, unable to bear his chilling aura. With a song like a breaking heart, she fled into the gray sky, leaving him utterly alone in the silent, ashen kingdom he had made.
A Penance of a Thousand Years
King Valerius, the Undying King of Ash, began his penance. He did not wander the world. His prison was his own dead land. For millennia, he walked the barren fields, his own undying life force a mockery of the vitality he had stolen.
He spent centuries trying to atone through artifice, building intricate clockwork birds that could not sing and metal trees that could not grow. They were hollow monuments to his failure.
He then spent centuries more trying to atone through labor. He tilled the sterile dust with his bare hands, planting seeds that would never sprout, watering them with riverbeds that had long since run dry. His penance was the act of nurturing a world that could no longer live.
One day, after a thousand years of futile effort, he finally broke. He fell to his knees, not in frustration at his failure, but in true, soul-crushing sorrow for the world he had murdered.
He wept, not for his lost companion, not for his own loneliness, but for a single blade of grass he could never bring back. It was his first selfless thought in millennia.
A single tear, holding the weight of ages of regret, struck the dust.
Where it landed, the ash stirred. A tiny, green shoot pushed its way through the gray. It grew, and from its tip, a single, impossible flower bloomed, a vibrant azure in a world of monochrome.
The sight of this one, small, true act of creation broke the curse. The stolen life within Valerius surged out of him, flowing back into the land. The gray sky softened. A light wind stirred the dust. He felt the immense weight of years return to his bones, his immortal body finally yielding to time.
As he lay fading, a gentle warmth touched his face. On the horizon, a familiar light was returning. Drawn by the lone flower – the first hint of life in an age – Elara had come back. She settled beside him, her light not of forgiveness, but of presence. His long, lonely vigil was over.
He was no longer a king. He was no longer an artificer.
He was simply a man, and as he returned to the dust, he finally, truly, brought life back to his kingdom.
Moral of the Story
The king’s initial attempt to “fix” his error was an act of pride, which only created more destruction. His millennia of penance, and his ultimate act of pure sorrow, show that atonement is a slow, difficult, and humbling process that requires a change of heart, not just a reversal of consequence.
True redemption, as it turns out, isn’t found in reversing a mistake, but in atoning for it with selfless action.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Rumi
Other stories you may be interested in:
- The Tale of the Three Wishes: How Our Choices Decide Our Destinies
- 5 Short Heartwarming Tales about Life
- 10 Fictional Stories about Family
- 7 Touching Stories About Friendship
- 7 Short Stories About Overcoming Obstacles in Life
Let’s Tread the Path Together, Shall We?
