The Return of the King In Yellow
A vain ruler dares to name himself the Yellow King, unwittingly invoking the true, cosmic monarch of madness...
The Return of the King In Yellow by Mark Watson
One may trace the lamentable fashion of chromatic sovereignty to the blasphemous ascendancy of the so-called Crimson Emperor. A man, if such he may be called, whose very name seemed a dread incantation echoing through the vaulted gulfs of unreality. It was he who first wove into the fabric of kingship the madness of hue, proclaiming himself in tones as grandiose as they were unwholesome, and thus infecting the very notion of rule with a fever of colors.
In the wake of his proclamation, a pestilence of petty monarchs arose, each more deluded than the last. No matter how meagre their dominion, be it but a desolate moor, a ruined hamlet, or a crumbling privy astride some wind-blasted crag, they took upon themselves grand and ludicrous titles: The Red King, The Verdant Regent, The Monarch of Mauve, The Ebon Overlord. Even the void between stars, I daresay, did not escape the contagion.
Conflicts of a most lunatic nature erupted, wars not for gold or god or land, but for the sole, absurd privilege of calling oneself the White King, or the Dread Black Sovereign. Thrones were overturned, blood spilled in torrents upon cold flagstones, and long-forgotten crypts were opened to seat new, color-besotted tyrants upon worm-eaten thrones.
Far-flung provinces and half-imagined satrapies broke away from ancient unions, ruled now by creatures who had once been mere mayors or provincial magistrates, but who now, daubed in stolen paints and clad in ragged finery, styled themselves King Cerulean, Lord Umber, or, gods help us, The Violet Despot. Entire cities were sealed off with eldritch sigils and blood-drawn banners as these chromatic charlatans proclaimed dominion over their realms of madness and mildew.
Truly, the world had gone mad, or perhaps revealed its true face at last, one painted not in reason, but in the shrieking, unnamable pigments of cosmic absurdity.
Yet among the countless buffoons who draped themselves in chromatic vanity, none committed a folly so profound, so cosmically damning, as the self-proclaimed King of Carcosa. His real name, like so many others in that cursed lineage, is now forgotten, erased not by time, but by terror. It is enough to know that he named himself The Yellow King, and in doing so, tore a rent in the veil that keeps sanity from the howling gulfs beyond.
Carcosa, at that time, was a decaying city-state, its towers leaning like drunken watchmen over the poisoned waters of Lake Hali, its streets paved with salt and sorrow. Its people, already half-haunted by dreams not their own, whispered of strange lights that moved behind their eyelids, of songs heard only when one pressed an ear to the stone. It was a place perilously close to Elsewhere, and thus especially ill-suited for hubris.
The towers, though magnificent in their original design, had grown twisted with time, not eroded by wind or weather, but withered, as if shamed by their own impossible architecture. Their stones were carved with glyphs that shifted when unobserved, and no two doors ever led to the same place twice. Windows opened onto scenes from forgotten histories, or worse, from futures yet undreamed.
Lake Hali, whose waters lapped endlessly at the city’s edge, was not a lake in any natural sense. It did not reflect the stars above but showed instead dim constellations from an alien sky, a sky where twin suns pulsed in time with a heartbeat not of this world. It was said that to drink from its waters was to remember things that never happened, and to forget things that had. And yet some still drank.
Fog rolled from the lake nightly, not mist, but something heavier, almost conscious, like a slow exhalation of grief. It filled the streets and coiled around the ankles of passersby, whispering lullabies in voices they had heard only in dreams or graves.
The populace, such as it was, lived in a kind of perpetual twilight. Time in Carcosa was a suggestion, not a law. Days stretched into months without warning, and entire seasons passed in the span of a sigh. Children were born already old. The elderly grew younger and younger until they vanished altogether. The clocks, those that still ticked, ran backward, sideways, or not at all, their faces melted like wax left too close to a candle’s flame.
The people wore masks, not for vanity or disguise, but because faces had become unreliable. One’s own countenance might dissolve in the mirror, or rearrange itself into that of a stranger. Even names were unstable, prone to slippage. A man might be called Emrek in the morning and Emeron by dusk, and by midnight he would be no one at all.
And yet, despite all of this, or because of it, there was beauty in Carcosa, the kind of terrible, aching beauty found only in ruins built atop unquiet ground. Statues wept blood not from sorrow, but from having glimpsed something beyond understanding. Gardens bloomed with flowers that whispered secrets in the voice of dead lovers. The air smelled of wine and rust and rain on stone, and sometimes of nothing at all, which was far worse.
And always, always, hanging above the city like a wound in the heavens, there loomed the twin moons—one pale and distant, the other vast and yellow, so close it seemed to press down upon the rooftops. It watched. It listened.
It remembered.
Carcosa was never meant to endure. It was a city built not in defiance of the cosmos, but in mocking imitation of it—a copy of something that had never existed. And in such places, stories are not told so much as they are relived, again and again, like a cursed play no actor can quit, and no audience can bear to see twice.
Yet the fool sat his throne, draped in yellow silks that shimmered like diseased sunlight, and declared, before a crowd of hollow-eyed courtiers, that he was the true Yellow King. He even commissioned a banner, dyed in hues that no earthly loom should produce, and stitched with an inscrutable sigil that he claimed came to him in a dream. He had it raised above the highest tower, where the moonlight could strike it at the precise angle to make it sing.
And it did sing.
That was when the real one noticed…
The King in Yellow, that eldritch sovereign whose name should not be spoken, whose tattered mantle drips madness into the minds of men, turned His unseen gaze upon Carcosa. It began subtly. Dreams rippled. Faces forgot their names. Reflections began to move of their own volition. The sky over Carcosa bled into a shade of amber that had no warmth, and the stars above it blinked in a pattern that could drive a philosopher to suicide.
The courtiers who once praised their Yellow King tore out their own eyes to unsee what they had seen in the folds of his robe. The lakeshore receded, revealing twisted pylons carved with runes not of this Earth, and voices began rising from the depths, singing verses from a play that had never been written, yet always existed: The King in Yellow.
At last, when the bells began ringing backwards and shadows bled upwards into the air, the Yellow King of Carcosa tried to renounce his title. He cast off his robe, burnt his banner, and hid beneath the throne like a child. But it was too late.
A visitor came.
None saw Him arrive. None heard His footsteps. But all felt the presence, the collapsing of reason, the sudden vertigo of standing at the lip of infinity. The King in Yellow had entered Carcosa, not in wrath, but in recognition. For to claim His name is to invite His audience. And He always arrives to see the performance.
When the King in Yellow descended—if descent is a word that can be applied to a being untethered from direction or dimension—the air thickened with an unseen gravity. Light itself recoiled, turning jaundiced and sour. Time staggered like a wounded beast. The throne room of the false king, once gaudy and threadbare with sickly banners, became something else entirely: a stage.
A stage for the Final Act.
The usurper, once full of theatrical pronouncements and self-applauding decrees, was reduced to a shivering wreck. Gone was his yellow robe, cast off in desperation like a snake shedding its skin to avoid the knife. He crouched beneath the throne, his mouth leaking the same yellow ink he once used to sign declarations in his stolen title. He whimpered apologies to no one, or perhaps to the ancient bones that lined the foundations of Carcosa itself.
But The King in Yellow did not speak. He never speaks.
He reveals.
And so He lifted one arm, if that branching, rotted tendril of shadow and parchment could be called an arm, and gestured toward the cowering man.
Then the performance began.
The courtiers, long since mad, were jerked upright like marionettes, faces blank masks of lacquered terror. The pillars of the throne room shifted, stretching impossibly high, dissolving into a fog of script and cipher. The walls uncoiled into curtains of tattered silk, and a hush fell over the world.
A play was performed, one that no one had written, and everyone had dreamed.
The King of Carcosa became its unwilling star. He stood, compelled by threads of golden light that danced from the fingers of the Real King, and acted, his limbs moving against his will, his mouth uttering lines in a language never meant for flesh. He danced, he declaimed, he screamed, he wept, while the King in Yellow looked on from the audience, faceless beneath His ancient mask, utterly still.
At the climax, when the script demanded his soul, the King of Carcosa tore open his chest with trembling hands and pulled out his heart, offering it like a child with a drawing for a parent. But the King in Yellow did not applaud.
Instead, He entered the stage.
And everything changed.
The false king fell to his knees, begging for death, for mercy, for madness to take him completely—but there are fates beyond even madness. With a sweep of His cloak, the King in Yellow unwrote him. Not killed. Not consumed. But edited, as one might strike a name from a script and scrawl another in its place.
His flesh peeled back into pages, torn vellum inscribed with mad verse. His screams became punctuation. His bones formed the new binding of the dread volume that the King always carries with Him, a script ever-changing, ever-consuming. And so the Yellow King of Carcosa became a footnote, a stage direction in the great cosmic drama that never ends.
His throne remains empty now, and yet eternally occupied.
For any who look upon it too long may find themselves mouthing lines they never learned, stepping forward into a role they did not audition for, donning a tattered robe that waits patiently in the wings.
Because the show must go on.
And the true King in Yellow is ALWAYS watching.
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