Varyon Veinwright

Varyon Veinwright was the last king of Iskandar, and the only ruler of his line who tried to keep the dead in their graves.

The Veinwrights had held Iskandar for three hundred years on rites the rest of the realm called necromancy. They communed with their ancestors, kept the skulls of their kings above the throne, and were obeyed as much from fear as from law. Varyon came to the crown as a child, under the regency of his aunt, Queen-Regent Ysara, who taught him that mercy was useful only when it was remembered as a gift from the throne. He never quite learned the lesson. He grew into a quiet king, more at home with grain prices and road tolls than with the rites of his house.

His reign broke when the western provinces refused the winter levy, blockaded the tax road and declared themselves the Free Provinces under the rebel commander Darien Rusk. In the civil war that followed, Varyon did the one thing his dynasty was least expected to do: he forbade the raising of the dead as soldiers. He also forbade his army to burn villages or seize civilian grain, and he rode at its head rather than sending it. He was not obeyed. His commanders and his priests, led by High Mortarch Selkos, raised the fallen regardless, and the realm came to believe the king had ordered what he had outlawed. He had every Mortarch in the capital arrested, too late to change what Ashkar believed of him.

He was offered peace on the rebels’ terms — abdication, the dissolution of the royal cult, the surrender of his family’s tombs — and refused, out of a pride he admitted and a fear that defeat would not end with him. He saw too late that the war was being financed and steered from outside, by the Gilded Coven and the Shadow Weavers, toward the arrival of the Justicar’s Legion, the Supreme Ruler’s army of law. The Legion broke the rebels in a day and then turned on the loyalists and the crypts. When it came to search the Tomb of First Kings, Varyon stood before the doors and drew the ceremonial sword of the first Veinwright king for the first time. It broke against a Justicar shield.

The Legion never deposed him. It found him more useful seated: every decree he sealed made the occupation lawful, and he sealed many, among them the seizure of his own granaries and estates and a permanent law against necromancy. Most Veinwright families fled north into the ice of the Crystalline Conclave. He stayed, which some of them called courage and others betrayal, and ended on a throne that governed little more than memory.

Whether the kingdom could have been saved by the surrender he refused, the Archive cannot say. It has been argued in every generation since.