I know in my heart that the war has started. I hear my god calling to me and I answer, as is my custom. Oh Persephone, Xerxes, and Velbrava too. Forgive my indolence, but I have no arms left to give you and no toes with nails to pry. Though your names are great, I serve only one and he scares me above all others, for he has no throne and no crown, but you call him king all the same.
The struggle began in darkness, an unforgiving abyss that sheltered not light, sound, or the gentle breeze of a coming spring. In this place of boiling tar and coarse sand, he awoke. A fledgling, a larva without direction, he was driven by an unstoppable urge. An urge that made his fingers twitch and lip quiver, a line of drool running down his scaled jaw. An urge that drove him to his feet, ankles still soft with bones sticking through the webbing between his toes.
No matter the pain, struggle, and suffering, when the dinner bell rang, he rose.
But he didn’t rise alone.
In the darkness, he could smell their breath like diesel fuel and taste the sweat of their brow, salty and sweet. War was inevitable. Upon the abyssal dunes raged a nameless conflict, and it was in battle that he first tasted greatness. He was strong, claws tearing through his sister’s chitin and forked spine. He was nimble, untouched by the countless blows from his brother’s barbed knuckles. He was hungry, tearing into his cousin’s neck and gnawing on the ribbed tube between his shoulders.
Soon his siblings shook in the dark, unable to flee from his harvest. Thus, the strong consumed the weak until only the strong remained.
He was among the last, swimming in a pool of blood, ribs between his teeth as his fingertips hardened. Yet, it wasn’t just his claws that grew sharper, but his mind too swelled. Like a drop of clarity in an ocean of madness, a powerful force pushed back against the instinct that controlled him. Soon, a new desire took hold, an itch that scraped his spine.
There was something that all those born in darkness, clawing at their throats, lust after.
The nameless crave a name.
Names were scarce, a limited resource more precious than water. But, in the dark place, names burst forth from the Devourer’s belly like harsh light, and those without scrambled together, reaching into the void. When their hands touched, fighting ensued. He was caught up like the rest, swept away in a terrible current.
Suddenly, the void parted, and a formless soul peeked past the curtain, luminescent tendrils pulled towards ambition and strength.
This name wasn’t like the others. This one was old, so old the light produced hung like cobwebs and was as porous as cheese. Soon, the roots of their world sang of ancient prowess, and he saw visions of victory across brittle bones, tattered hides, and broken corpses.
He saw a king without a throne.
That scarlet hue, that dense, bitter taste, that shrill cry. No names remaining could compare.
This one was his for the taking.
None were left who shared the breadth of his mane, the curve of his claws, or the tightly packed muscle fibers in his arms and legs. Instead, his brothers lay in a heap holding their breath, sisters bowing in the darkness. He cut them open all the same, spreading ichor upon his brow and crying to the heavens with skulls between his toes.
“I am worthy!”
Indeed, he was the strongest, and the luminescent tendrils of an ancient spirit embraced him, sliding through the back of his skull, and fastened tight to pulsing pink tissue erasing what remained of his individuality.
Icarus, the Rat King, had returned.
Icarus clawed his way through the soft flesh that held his body. The tissue stretched and pulled until, finally, with a sickly crunch, he tore free. He slid from the cocoon, coughing up a black liquid yolk. All around him were the unopened caskets of those who failed to appease his desire for strength.
They would never wake from the black world. His vessel slew their spirits in the war for his name.
Icarus lifted his head, black fur bristling beneath the scales that coated his body. He tasted the air with a forked tongue and tested the strength of his arms thick with muscle, sinew, and bone. Forty-eight eyes rolled around in his skull, focusing on the curved calcified edge of his fingers and toes. These were tools for war, but he was more than just a sharp blade in the dark.
Beneath the dark purple tissue of his eyes, the spinning disks in his shoulder, and the truncated hairs along his vertebrae, were fragile luminescent digits. These were the tools of an engineer, born to mold the nameless horde. The horde who would obey him, who would be shaped by him, and who would go to war for him.
Yet now was not the time for war and, although he had walked this world thousands of times before, his body was young and trembled from the effort of birth. He needed to find shelter and needed to do so fast.
In the air, he caught the scent of a rival drawn to his own. Icarus knew this smell. It was thick, sickly sweet, and tasted like iron in his mouth. Could it be? Was the Pallid Throne so close? No, he knew better than that. This scent belonged to Fortessa, another engineer coming to claim glory against her betters.
Icarus shook his head and ground his teeth against the roof of his mouth. To be caught shambling after birth was unworthy of a greater name, but to take him out so soon would change the foundation of the war.
That was the only way a lesser name was going to claim the Pallid Throne.
To strike when one was weak, a sound tactic and one that he was not above using. After all, he had killed Fortessa the same way years before, and she was coming to turn the tables.
Now the taste in the air shifted, sour and bitter with a dash of iron, the scent of blood. Then came an ear-piercing sound, a shrill cry that caused the dunes to shutter, pale sand collapsing around him like an avalanche.
Fortessa had found him.
Icarus answered her challenge, sucking in stale air until his chest heaved and bellowing a cry that shook the earth beneath him. The sound traveled for miles, echoing off both the living and nonliving alike. His ears, like open caverns, caught the returning pitch bouncing around his tympanic membrane and taking shape. In his minds-eye, he now saw an army of thousands with bleached skulls, twitching serrated fingers, and tiny hollow tubes filled with bubbling toxins.
He was nearly surrounded and had no time left to lose.
Even exhausted, his body moved with such speed as to blur the horizon and betray his unnatural size. Then, driving his heels into stony crags, he leaped across a ravine as the first of Fortessa’s horde broke out of the shadows. With bristling talons, gnashing teeth, and claws, they lunged after him, tumbling off the edge with screams and a sickly crunch below. A few grabbed hold of him, sinking bent purple barbs into his neck. Icarus reared up, driving one’s skull into the cliff face, black ichor splashing across the rocks, arms and legs still flailing, urged on by Fortessa’s will.
From the hills behind him came an ear-piercing scream, a howl from the engineer herself. She had reached the birthing site and found the corpses he had abandoned. She would take advantage of Icarus’s yolk, molding the bodies into new puppets. They were supposed to be his, the first of his brood.
He clenched his teeth, tearing another skittering horror from his back and splitting it in two, black ink showering down from his claws.
She was going to pay for that.
After having waited a decade in the dark world, Icarus wasn’t going back without a fight, especially not after acquiring such a powerful body. Still, Fortessa would not make it easy.
Her horde was persistent, creating bridges from their bodies to cross ravines and catapult themselves onto the sides of mountains. From the rocks, they ambushed Icarus, tearing off his scales and breaking a finger or two. Such losses were minimal, and the enemy was weak, but their strength was in numbers, and minor injuries added up.
Icarus ripped off their limbs, broke their skulls, and decorated the Overworld with blood, but many more waited in the shadows as his pace slowed. He looked behind him. The wind whipping past his snout, seeing not the glittering fangs, empty gray eyes, or curved yellow stingers, but a thin luminescent net cracking like a whip above their heads, the digits of an engineer. That bundle of glowing fiber was pulled so tight the strands gave way like pulling bread from both sides.
Plink!
Fortessa’s influence broke apart, and her creations lost focus, fighting each other in the dark. They were animals now, and Icarus had something they did not, a brain.
Breaking through the valley of Kath’le Kal, he came upon pools of boiling tar and dove in headfirst. The liquid stung his open wounds, and he stifled a cry before emerging to carry on past the rocks. Flaring his nostrils, he could only smell that vile, putrid liquid now coating his hide. The rest of Fortessa’s horde scattered, searching every dune, cliff, and upturned rock. They were lost no longer guided by his scent.
Even with the pursuing hive losing ground, Icarus ran past the whirling dunes, the sunken rivers of pus, and a split blackened mountain where Xerxes ended the last war. Finally, with the last of his strength all but spent, Icarus leapt towards an empty cliff side and through the opening of a hollow cave, well hidden by the salt deposits that formed jagged teeth like prison bars.
Icarus collapsed on the cave floor. Even the jagged stones against his cheek felt like velvet. It took time to slow the rhythm of his hearts, tightening the loose fibers in his chest until the beats were steady.
He recognized this place, the curved shape of the walls and the deep dome-like atrium at the cave’s center. How many years had it been? One, two, three hundred? He lost track of the last time he built his hive here. Icarus was still the only engineer who knew about this place—a perfect hideout when in need.
As his breathing slowed and vision blurred, Icarus saw memories flashing before his eyes. Memories of sitting upon the Pallid Throne, a sea of nameless bowing before him. Memories of despair as he knit a spine for his brother, a heart for his sister, and a banquet for his mother. Then he heard Xerxes howl, a deep guttural noise that made his fingers and toes twitch as he held his head high—the start of an endless revolution.
Icarus lost the war all those years ago. He could still feel a searing pain across his back where they tore his wings out at the nub. No matter how many bodies he claimed, those bloody stumps always manifested across his spine, a solemn reminder of the position he once held. Icarus wasn’t the same anymore. A king only to rats.
Now all engineers claim rights to the throne, and every decade a new world war begins. Icarus could already taste the nectar in the soil. That sickly pale fluid was sticky like a spider’s web, catching between his teeth and causing his jaw to ache. The Pallid Throne would soon open, and only one could claim it as their own.
How many wars had passed since last he held the seat? Several at least, but this time his brothers and sisters were in for a nasty surprise. This time, he was going to push them to their limits, crushing their skulls between his teeth.
And who better to start with than Fortessa?