A teenaged boy stood before the throne room doors, a picture of brutal elegance. His curly black hair sat above a sharp skin fade. He wore wealth like a second skin: a black tunic alive with gold stitching, perfectly tailored pants, and leather shoes that gleamed. But the true focus was his hands, currently locked around the throat of a Kingsguard. The man gurgled, eyes bulging before rolling back, his body collapsing in a heap.
Flanking the boy were two silent guardians, their identities lost beneath the heavy, light-absorbing fabric of their cloaks and a wooden mask.
"Prince Rega, this is a coup," one stated, their voice low and rough. "But you can't kill everyone. You'll need people to run things."
Rega's grip was already tightened on a second Kingsguard. He let out a short, sharp breath. "They're loyal to the death. They won't serve me."
"I'll serve! Please!" the Kingsguard choked out.
*Snap.*
The bodyguards sighed in unison, a soft rustle of dark cloth.
"Can't have traitors," Rega said, wiping his hands on his exquisite pants without a trace of remorse. "Njiru's corpses will take care of the rest of this trash. Let's go." He pushed the doors wide, stepping into the light of the throne room where the king was waiting.
King Rega was once a man of legend.
Born Rega Liptus the 3rd, the son of a scholar and a warrior-queen, he rose to the throne in a time of great upheaval. Famine, rebellion, and foreign invasion pressed in from all sides. But King Rega was brilliant, charismatic, and ruthlessly efficient. He pacified the southern tribes through diplomacy, shattered the eastern rebellion with unmatched brutality, and made an alliance with the mystics of the High North—those who whispered of forbidden magic buried beneath the ice.
But it was his obsession with immortality and control that broke the spine of his soul.
In secret, King Rega made a pact with the Night Below, a nameless abyss of demonic power that promised him eternal life, arcane might, and dominion over all. The cost? His humanity.
Over the years, Rega stopped aging. His eyes began to glow faintly crimson. His once-compassionate speeches became ruthless manifestos of strength, conquest, and "necessary blood." His enemies called him Rega the Crimson. His own people whispered other names: The Winged Tyrant. The Starving King. The Demon in Gold.
His wars multiplied. Whole provinces were drained to fund conquests in distant lands. The western provinces, once fertile, lay dying under the weight of taxes, conscription, and hoarded grain.
His wife, Queen Yelena, vanished. Some say she was exiled. Others say she tried to stop him and was consumed in a fire of his making.
His only son, Prince Rega, was raised in shadow.
He was educated by the finest minds and tortured by his father's monsters. Taught statecraft by day and survival in the dungeons by night. Whispered to by the palace ghosts. Loved by none—except two: his guards, former assassins who defected to protect the boy for reasons unknown. They became his blades, his eyes, his family.
And now… his vengeance.
The throne room crackled with a palpable tension. Prince Rega stood before his father, King Rega, the ornate tapestries depicting royal victories seeming to mock the grim reality of the kingdom. Sunlight streamed through the towering stained-glass windows, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air, oblivious to the weight of the words about to be exchanged.
"Father," Rega began, his voice resonating with a steel that had been forged in the fires of his growing discontent, "your reign… it is bleeding this land dry. Unnecessary wars on every border, each one swallowing more lives and resources. The famine in the western provinces… your decrees have only exacerbated the suffering."
King Rega, a man whose once-regal bearing was now marred by a cruel arrogance, leaned back on his gilded throne, a dismissive smirk playing on his lips. "Sentimentality ill befits a prince, Rega. Wars forge strength. Famine… it culls the weak. These are the necessary burdens of a ruler."
Prince Rega's bodyguards watched the king with unwavering intensity, their hands never straying far from the hilts of the blades under their cloaks.
Rega's hands moved with a swiftness that belied his noble upbringing. From beneath his clothes, he produced two intricately crafted handguns, their barrels gleaming with an inner light. They were custom-made, a forbidden technology melded with ancient magic, loaded with bullets painstakingly infused with pure Light essence. The very air around them hummed with contained power.
The king's smirk widened into a booming laugh that echoed through the vast chamber. "Those toys? You think those trinkets can threaten me?" A visible ripple distorted the air around him, his features shifting, elongating, becoming sharp and monstrous. Leathery wings unfurled from his back, casting grotesque shadows on the marble floor. His eyes glowed with malevolent crimson light. King Rega was no mere man.