Fantasy
The Uncrowned
By Camille Mussman
The first night, King Aldric wept.
He sat beneath an ancient oak, still wearing the velvet cloak they'd allowed him to keep—a final mockery of mercy—and listened to the forest breathe around him. No courtiers. No guards. No torches burning in sconces along marble halls. Just darkness, and cold, and the weight of everything he'd lost.
They'd found him in the tower room at dawn, levitating three books and a quill, practicing the small magics he'd taught himself in secret since childhood. His chamberlain's scream had echoed through the castle like a blade scraping stone. By noon, the council had convened. By sunset, he was gone.
"A wizard-king," they'd called him, voices sharp with fear. "How long has he deceived us? What darkness might he bring?"
He'd tried to explain. The magic was gentle—parlor tricks, really. A way to light candles without flint. To warm his hands on winter mornings. Nothing harmful. Nothing dangerous.
But fear has no patience for nuance.
The second week, Aldric discovered silence.
Not the silence of a held breath or a tense negotiation, but true silence—the kind that settles in your bones like honey. He woke one morning to find a deer watching him from between the birches, utterly unafraid. When he lifted his hand, barely thinking, wildflowers bloomed from his palm in a cascade of purple and gold.
He laughed. The sound startled him—he hadn't laughed in years, perhaps decades.
That afternoon, he coaxed water from a stream into a shimmering sphere and held it suspended in the air, watching it catch the light. No one shouted. No one gasped. The forest simply continued its ancient work of growing and living, entirely unconcerned with his strangeness.
For the first time in his life, Aldric's magic felt like breath. Natural. Right.
By the end of the first month, he'd stopped counting days.
He built a small shelter from fallen branches—or rather, he suggested they arrange themselves, and they obliged. He learned which berries were safe, which roots could be roasted, how to call fish gently to the surface of the pond without hooks or nets. The magic flowed easier now, uncoiling from the tight fist he'd kept it wrapped in for forty-three years.
Sometimes he created light simply to watch it dance between the trees. Sometimes he sang to the wind and felt it sing back, playful and warm. Sometimes he did nothing at all, just sat on a sun-warmed stone and listened to the forest's thousand small conversations.
He thought of the throne room less and less. The memory of crown and court felt like a story about someone else—a man who'd spent his whole life pretending to be smaller than he was, dimmer, simpler. A man who'd feared his own gift more than any enemy.
On the morning they came to find him, Aldric was teaching a family of ravens to form elaborate patterns in the sky—purely for the joy of it.
He heard the horses first, then voices calling his name. The delegation emerged from between the trees: his former steward, three council members, and the young queen-regent who'd been hastily crowned in his absence.
"Your Majesty," the steward began, voice trembling. "We were wrong. There have been... complications. The treasury, the border disputes, the harvest failures. We need—"
"You need a king," Aldric finished gently.
The steward's face crumpled with relief. "Yes. Please. Will you return?"
Aldric looked at them—these frightened, fumbling people who'd cast him out in terror and now wanted him back in desperation. He felt no anger. Anger required investment, and he'd divested himself of all that.
He gestured to the clearing around him, where his magic had coaxed wildflowers into a riot of color, where water ran in impossible spirals through the air, where light danced like living creatures. "I am exactly where I belong."
"But the kingdom—"
"Will find its way," he said. "As I have found mine."
They tried for an hour to change his mind, offering apologies, explanations, promises. He listened with the patient kindness of the forest itself, then sent them away with conjured provisions for their journey and a blessing that shimmered like morning dew.
That evening, Aldric sat by his fire and felt the magic pulse through him like a second heartbeat—steady, strong, unashamed. Tomorrow, he might try to understand the language of the mushrooms, or perhaps convince the moon to tell him its secrets.
For the first time in his life, he wore no crown.
For the first time in his life, he was utterly, perfectly free.
And in the quiet woods, surrounded by beauty he'd helped coax into being, the uncrowned king smiled.
The End