#I’m actually trying to Write Leandro’s Grave at the moment so I can’t really do much

[toxictrannyfreak]

I wish to hear about infernal king

Oh damn I didn’t expect anyone to actually do this! Ok!

So, Infernal King was, like a ton of my stuff, a deconstruction of individualism and how toxic the idea of heroism and total self-sufficiency really is, with a lot of the revolutionary, fiery aesthetics of 21st century breakdown, which I was listening to a lot when I came up with it. I never nailed down a ton of plot or character stuff for it, but I had a ton of worldbuilding I really loved. Unfortunately without the character stuff it kinda fizzled out so I’m on hiatus for it while I work on stuff I think I can write right now. So here’s what I got:

Worldbuilding:

So the original idea was, like, a world that has eternally burning fires instead of oceans. They basically surround all the continents, so cross-continental travel/exploration is very expensive and limited, but it is possible through

Magic! Flame magic! Basically the idea is that everyone has some small amount of fire magic in them, called an Ember. As with most magic systems, the amount of magic a person has (the size of their Ember) is just random and inherent—some people can only light candles, others can make, like, self-sustaining massive fire sculptures or whatever, and very, very few naturally gifted and extensively trained people can control the flame-oceans, parting them with their minds to allow exploration

There are some flameless tunnels through the ocean. Most are manmade, with giant flameproof walls constructed from stone and permanent flame-mages on duty to keep the fires out. They connect the mainland to various islands. A couple are natural, just mysterious dead zones where the fires don’t burn, and those lead to nowhere. They just randomly end miles into the blaze. No one knows why, and no one knows how they got there.

The fire mages had a really complex magic system that I never ended up writing down, but basically there was this massive hierarchy of fires that started with normal fire that anyone could control pretty easily and slowly went up in difficulty to summon and control. Some burn hot, some burn cold, some are self-sustaining, others are all-consuming, and some, especially the most difficult ones to summon, are just plain weird. The smoke shows you things that don’t make sense, the flames dance in incomprehensible yet identifiable patterns, the ashes never leave your skin.

People are born able to use normal fire, but to use the magical ones, they need to have an ‘awakening ceremony’ where weird religious people do some weird religious stuff (never actually figured out what) and then light a small piece of wood with the eternal ocean fire stuff and hold the burning wood on whoever’s being awakened’s chest for a while. Sometimes people die but mostly people come out ok and can now use magic fire

Some people don’t have enough Ember to ever be awakened—no one’s quite sure what’s up with awakening but people with embers below a certain force always end up burning up, so it’s clearly related somehow, and they just are never able to used advanced fir magic

The weird religious people are members of this very big, main religion that basically worships this ancient figure, the God-Empress, who supposedly lived in a time where the fires raged across the land as well as the ocean-basins and who was supposedly such an incredible fire-mage that she was able to permanently consign the fires to the ocean, allowing humanity to thrive, but killing herself in the process

One problem with that: the fires have been very slowly advancing for generations, getting hotter, higher, and closer. Several tiny unimportant islands have already started burning, but the church is big and enormously powerful so they've been hiding it bc the idea that the fires Cannot Advance is like. an absolute core tennant of their religion and they's lose a ton of their power if that got out. this is also why they conveniently have not mentioned that both the rate of deaths from Awakenings have increased and that the average Ember of humans has massively decreased, seriously handicapping humanity's ability to control and fight the fires when they need it most

I can't find a way to organizally slip it in but I really liked the worldbuilding I came up with for names so I'm just putting it here/ Basically, the idea was that people have 2 names, one that is entirely theirs and that only they know and one that everyone else knows but that one's a title basically, based on their accomplishments and what they do and stuff so that one changes all the time and is only like. final on their death when their family and friends and stuff get together and look at all their accomplishments and what they did and decide what best encapsulated them and that's the name they're remembered by

Characters

again, this stuff is significantly Less than the worldbuilding because I never quite figured out what I wanted to do with them, but I essentially had two main characters:

The Infernal King. Title character, except he’s not an actual character, like, at all. Never got a concrete name, or any interests or character traits at all (you can see why I stopped with this I’m guessing) but the basic idea was that just around the time the church was starting to lose control of the whole fires advancing/more deaths from Awakenings/less Ember overall fiascoes they find this kid somehow (religious groups have orphanages. Idk) and he’s incredibly powerful, tons of Ember, way more than anyone on record, except maybe the God-Empress…

Yeah the church guys get REAL excited because here’s an easy solution to all of our problems: new God-Empress who will be firmly under our control and do whatever we say! (Hmm I wonder if this could backfire? Nah!) and basically they raise this incredibly powerful child to vanquish the flames and become a puppet leader for the newly restored church. Which causes several problems, especially considering that he actually cannot push the fires back at all. So there’s this incredibly powerful teenager with a god complex who cannot do the one thing he was literally raised to do. So naturally he runs away to find the power he needs to ~fulfill his destiny~ and that’s about where I lose the plot but like the idea is that he eventually goes rogue and forms a rebellion and like starts a giant civil war while the world burns down around him. Allegories!

And The Flameless Scribe, who was supposed to be revealed as the narrator of the whole story at the end. The thing with her was that, as the name suggests, she basically has no Ember at all. Like, she can’t even light a candle, which is kind of a major disability in a world where the norm is that even an unawakened person can pretty easily summon a campfire. She was actually expected to die pretty early because people without a lot of Ember don’t usually make it, but she survived and became a scribe for the church people, and was eventually sucked into the whole fake chosen one thing. She became the Infernal King’s best friend and confidant throughout the series, though it gets really toxic and conflicting at the end and she leaves him behind to find an actual solution for the fires

And yeah, that’s all, you can probably see why I put it on hiatus. There’s a lot here that I do like, but I think I’d have to completely rework it to actually write it, and I’m working on other stuff now. Maybe I’ll come back to it one day.

Sorry for waiting so long to respond, I have a lot of Thoughts on this and it took a while to get them down. Thanks for asking!