Long May He Reign 2 (Patreon)

It was late May, when the moment of my empowerment happened. I was the Head of Hiring, in charge of making sure that the men had jobs to earn money so they could feed their families. At the time, the majority of those with powers in the city were divided into four factions: the Archer’s Bridge Merchants, the Asian Bad Boyz, the Empire Eighty Eight, and the Protectorate. The Protectorate served as the powered arm of a much larger organization called the Parahuman Response Team, typically shortened to PRT, and had a “youth” division called the Wards.

Brockton Bay was a port city, on the East Coast of what was then the United States, and in a constant state of cold war between the four factions. I wasn’t part of any of the four factions, as I mentioned, I was a simple man. But that day…

It started like any other, we had a shipment to move, and several of the men were unable to work due to being in the hospital, so I was down helping move the boxes of goods. We didn’t know what was in the boxes, nor did we want to know, because we were being paid more for this one job than we had in the previous two months combined. I almost refused the job, because I couldn’t think of anything good that such a shipment could have contained. But the men needed the work, especially with so many out.

I don’t know why the fight started, only that a battle between the foot troops of the Empire Eighty Eight and the Asian Bad Boyz spilled out into the section of the Docks where we were working. Several men died, including my friend Kurt, to a grenade carelessly flung in our direction. I too was in the blast, but I landed on one of the boxes we’d been moving. The box broke, and so did the glass vials within. I can only assume that the vials held some sort of power-granting substance, because when the glass pierced my skin…

Words don’t exist in any language to properly convey what happened next. I felt pain from when the broken shards of glass pierced my mortal flesh, then all I felt was raw power, as unimaginable energies coursed through my body, altering, changing, improving me.

I didn’t know until later how much time passed between when that happened and when I regained conscious thought, but when I did I was back home, in the bed I shared with my wife, Annette. Night had fallen, my mind a flurry with two sets of memories. One in a city that was slowly dying to the corruption rampant within the ranks of the city’s leadership and the various factions all trying to carve out larger portions of the city for themselves. The other, in a world that had no powers, no monsters destroying cities every few months, but a story, telling of one possible future.

That was why I was unconscious, not because of the accident, but because of two minds fighting for dominance. In the end, neither mind won. I wasn’t either one mind or the other, but both.

“Forgive me, Your Highness, but how do you mean ‘both’?” Christoph asked, confusion lacing his words.

“The closest comparison I can think of is genetic inheritance, though it is an imperfect analogy. Children are not exact duplicates of their parents, half of their genetics from their father, half from their mother to make a new whole. What happened to me was similar, but not equal,” The King explained, pausing to take a drink from his goblet. “Elements of both minds were kept, while different elements were discarded. Daniel Hebert remained the core, the foundation, but the other, his strength, his will, his drive remained.”

“I cannot say that I understand, Your Highness.”

The King chuckled, “I have more power and knowledge than any living man or woman and even I do not fully understand what happened. Shall I continue?”

“My apologies, Your Highness.”

I wasn’t alone in the bed when I awoke, my darling Annette was curled into my side. Her hair, one of if not her best features, spread across the pillow behind her head like a halo. A smile spread across my face, and I reached my arm across her back to pull her close. Even with the strange conglomeration that was my new sense of self, I loved her.

“Danny?” Annette quietly asked, the movement waking her. She always was a light sleeper, so it wasn’t a surprise. Instead of answering verbally, I leaned down and gave her a gentle kiss. She reciprocated, still more asleep than awake, before her eyes widened and she sat up.

“You’re awake! After the accident, the doctors couldn’t figure out what happened to you, the PRT experts couldn’t figure out what was happening, even the new healer, Panacea, was at a loss. How are you feeling?”

I couldn’t help the amused chuckle that escaped me. Annette had a tendency to ramble on when her emotions were running high, and seeing me awake certainly did that. Still, she deserved an answer.

“I feel fine. Better than fine even,” I told her, turning my gaze from her to look at myself. Whatever had empowered me, it had radically altered my physical form. I had always been tall, even as a mere mortal, but that height was that of a staff. Long and thin. Now I was not only taller, by at least a foot, but I was now built like a mighty tower: tall, broad, strong, and solid.

More than that, I could feel something coursing through me under my skin. Energies unimaginable, more power than either of the minds that made me had ever imagined. Power that was…

My head snapped up, startling Annette, my eyes gazing through the walls of our house into the distance. There, in the city, a girl my daughter considered a sister and her father were being pulled out of their conveyance. Members of the Asian Bad Boyz, threatening a girl that was like a niece to me. And so, I utilized the energy that would be dubbed the Kingsforce for the first time, its white energy crackling around my form as I rent space apart, burrowing through the rainbow swirls of the newly formed wormhole to appear in their midst.