The Telling of Harasine, the Unremembered Sovereign

A fictional character Telling. Meet Harasine.

Listen, wanderer—though you will forget my face before the tale is done. Such is the curse of those who dwell beyond The Hollow Court's gilded lies. I was once a Neverking, though none now recall my name. My throne was carved from promises unkept, my crown woven from the threads of bargains left to rot in the sun. And yet… even shadows cast by forgotten kings still stretch long across the earth.

I fell not by blade nor treachery, but by law—the oldest and cruelest weapon of our kind. A merchant-trader learns early that all exchanges bear hidden costs, but even I did not foresee the price of truth spoken where only pretty lies were meant to grow. The Court does not forgive those who tally its debts aloud. So they unmade me—not with blood, but with silence. One does not kill a sovereign; one merely convinces the world he never was.

Ah, but exile is a curious thing. It does not simply cast you out—it unwrites you. The Hollow Court's censure is a living thing: it gnaws at memory like rats at rigging ropes until even your own reflection hesitates to recognize you. Yet here I stand (do you see me? Will you remember?), shaped anew in the crucible of absence.

The Dark Masons took me when I was little more than a whisper clinging to form—when even my shadow grew thin as old parchment. They are architects of what others dare not name: builders between realms, weavers of thresholds where doors should never be. Among them, I learned that to be forgotten is its own kind of power. What need has a phantom for reputation? What binds one who has already been erased?

In their lodges (which are neither here nor there), I found purpose sharpened by loss: if names dissolve like salt in water, then let me be the current that carries them away. If crowns are hollow things that rot upon unworthy brows, then let me be the quiet hand that measures each head before it rests too comfortably upon its throne.

You ask what wisdom an exile carries? Hear this:

The sea does not mourn lost ships; it simply swallows them whole and grows deeper for their drowning.

I chart my course now by darker stars than those that glittered above The Hollow Court's spires—stars whose light reaches us long after they themselves have burned to ash in distant skies.

And so I tell you plainly what no Fae law would ever permit spoken aloud:
Exile is not an end—it is an unraveling so complete that it becomes creation anew.

They thought they buried me beneath oblivion's weight.
Instead,
they set me adrift
in endless night—
where every direction
is mine
to claim.

(Do you see now?
Or have you already forgotten?)

Visual

Near-invisible figure in tattered sovereign's finery, moth-eaten ermine and a crooked hollow crown, face that blurs when looked at directly, skin like old parchment, fingers too long and too many-jointed, fading at the edges like a half-remembered dream.

Faction: The Hollow Court · View the Gallery