11/07/2026
The Hivebreakers examined the rest of the throne room surrounding the boy trapped in the amber like substance, and found there was another individual trapped within, and she was slowly being released by a pair of Ziggurati who were eating away at the amber.
After slaying the creatures, the Hivebreakers were able to free the woman from the substance due to the wearing away the eating had done. She called herself Fia and claimed she'd been around when this city of Kingdom was still a thriving place, but couldn't remember much else.
When Fia saw the boy trapped, she knew that she knew him somehow, and remembered the title "Savior of Kingdom"
Hearing screams that sounded like the unnatural sounds the two Ziggurati had been making outside, the group exited and found a few humans who had qualities the Ziggurati within also had, namely the amber like substance coursing through their bodies, making them more zombie than person.
The Hivebreakers also dispatched these aggressive once-humans, and Fia had brief remembrances of an instructor telling children about how there was a war between gods raging above them, and Kingdom underground was safe from their destruction. He called themselves the Panta people, and said they did not start the war, but they still died because of it.
The Hivebreakers realized in order to free the boy from the amber, they needed to draw one of these creatures into the throne room to begin eating away at it. They did so with a large troll-like creature, once again with that amber in its veins and flesh.
The troll ate the amber, and then the group destroyed it, and released the boy from the weakened substance.
The boy called himself Horace, and claimed Fia had once been his bodyguard and assistant. He believed himself from another time, thousands of years ago, and had apparently been trapped in the substance he called Wickersin for all that time.
Horace claimed he had created Wickersin to help preserve food during the Constellation War while Kingdom was underground, but soon realized its sustaining properties in people, and began integrating it into his own body.
Seeming a pleasant enough fellow, and obviously knowing Fia, the Hivebreakers agreed to allow Horace to show them around Kingdom.
Horace took them to a sports arena where people played a game called Antlers where they bashed into each other with caps that had horn affixed to them.
He also took them to his alchemical workshop where he created Wickersin, and found it filled to bursting with preserved people, all with the Wickersin flowing through their bodies, mindless and zombie-like.
Horace finally took the group to a temple where he could contemplate what had happened and what he needed to do next, and the group learned it was a temple to no god they'd ever heard of: Negri.
Horace claimed the gods of creation and the multiverse were just people who became powerful, but they were still just people. It was just their power was so superior to mortals. He claimed true divinity was in an idea, or a concept. He said there were 6 concepts across the Maritus Movement, the planets that made up the worlds connected by White Gate.
Horace also told the group that a pair of twin brother learned how to embody the concepts of Chaos and Order, and Negri was someone who learned how to embody the concept of Death. Horace wanted to learn how to embody the concept of Life, and realized he needed to walk through White Gate to learn how.
With this, Horace asked the group to help him find and walk through White Gate, but a woman calling herself Penny arrived at the temple, having somehow been alerted of Horace's presence there.
Penny asked the group to destroy Horace, as he is not supposed to be in this time, and his plans are too dangerous, but she cannot destroy him herself.
Horace seemed to know that Penny was not who she says she was, and claimed she was a god. Penny hated this and her fervor for killing him increased.
At this time, Fia remembered her final moments before being trapped in the Wickersin, when the king of Kingdom, Ferranous, confronted Horace in the throne room, accusing him of destroying the people of Kingdom by poisoning their water supply.
Horace countered the King in this memory by claiming he only put a small amount of Wickersin in the water in an effort to make everyone immortal, as they refused to talk it voluntarily. However, something had gone wrong, and now all of Kingdom had been turned into the creatures that still persisted.
In the memory, the King threw a bottle of Wickersin at Horace, and it exploded, trapping both he and Fia in the amber-like substance.
In the present, Horace flees and the group follows him out of Negri's temple, but not in time to stop him from going to his alchemical workshop and freeing all the people trapped within, hungry for more Wickersin.
Due to his taking of the Wickersin, Horace is able to exert some control over them, and the Hivebreakers escape as the horde of thousands of zombie-like former residents of Kingdom descend upon them.
The group and Pebble fly back up into Walls and collapse the tunnel behind them, and General Spark appears, telling them they need to come with her to Love Letter and tell her everything they learned, though it is unclear how she entered Walls at all.
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