Sorpigal: The First False King

Previouslycut off from the rest of his brethren, a Guardian stopped waiting for orders — convinced that he protected his assigned world best when no one else told him what to do.

The thin thread of contact that still bound Sheltem to the Ancients finally trembled hard enough for someone to notice. One of the finest was sent after him — a being as mysterious as it was loyal, known only by the name Corak. The task was meant to be routine: locate the malfunctioning unit, bring it in for repair, take over its duties. Corak found Sheltem motionless, cut off from power — he had gone quiet on his own, knowing they would come for him. The capture turned out to be surprisingly easy.

Too easy. On the way back, Sheltem overpowered his escort and seized control of the ship. He never made it to his intended destination — he ran out of fuel, and the nearest land turned out to be a flat, artificial world named VARN, ruled by an ordinary mortal king named Alamar. Sheltem took his place and ruled in his name for months — doubling taxes, releasing creatures that had been kept in the dungeons beneath the castle, and crushing every act of resistance with a force no one would have suspected of a mortal. The real Alamar, meanwhile, rotted in his own dungeon, forgotten by everyone except a handful who saw more clearly than the rest that something was wrong.

A handful of adventurers, with no idea about wars among gods or rebellious machines, arrive in the town of Sorpigal.

All they want is to earn some coin from an expedition to a nearby dungeon. The simple job grows to a scale no one expected — they expose the false king, free the real one, and force the usurper himself to flee. They don't yet know that they have just become the first link in a chain of events that will drag consequences across the worlds still to come. Sheltem, meanwhile, is already on the move — and Corak, for the first time with real anger behind him, sets off after him.