Darkon's Origin

Eridani Twenty-Six Years Ago

Before your final confrontation with Darkon, Do Dawn and Do Dusk show you how his story began. The last pair of his Scale introduce themselves as envoys of the Arcana, concerned with beginnings and endings rather than taking either side. La's story has ended, they tell you, but its hopeful final chapter is worth remembering. To understand why Darkon now holds all Astravia responsible alongside Drago, you follow them into his past.

Astravia's traditional history credits its prosperity to the Grand Star Alprecha, who blessed the soil with onyx crystals in return for the people's protection of her children. Although the harvests are abundant, wealth and supplies remain unequally distributed, leaving people hungry and the neglected provinces facing banditry.

Twenty-six years earlier, Crown Prince Darkon visits Eridani with his childhood friend and bodyguard Aurola to investigate reports of bandits and a supposed monster child. Known for his harp concerts, he wants to understand problems the crown has failed to address without revealing his title, asking Aurola to call him Darren before settling on Derek instead.

Aurola doubts the child is a monster, since no animals have been hurt despite reports of visits to barns and windows. Loshe Allen, an aspiring tailor who recognizes the quality of the visitors' clothes, tells them that villagers drove away a horned shapeshifting child who sought food, only for bandits to capture the child. He also saw a strong, black-and-gold-armored woman pass through Eridani.

Following the bandits into the forest, Darkon and Aurola free poached hounds, and Darkon finds food to draw away the dogs used against them rather than killing them. They find the escaped child, who has no name or home and had tried copying villagers' faces to ask for food. Unable to conceal their horns, the child was attacked and captured for sale, until a woman in black and gold broke into the caravan and told them to run. Aurola tends the child's injuries while Darkon prepares to find their rescuer.

Leaving the child with Aurola, Darkon enters the bandits' cave in disguise, only to discover that the woman he intends to rescue has already defeated them. She mistakes him for another bandit and fights him until Aurola arrives to stop the duel.

Suki recognizes Darkon's face and name, greeting him as a former companion from the Seraphic Paladins who warned her about corruption within the order and stayed to reform it when she left. The prince insists that he was born in Astravia and has never left, and his formal speech and confusion persuade her that, despite the resemblance, he is not the friend she remembers.

On the return to Eridani, they recover the child's glasses and a letter promising the bandits payment from a member of the royal family. Suki apologizes for mistaking Darkon for a corrupt noble, then asks whether a commoner may listen when she learns that he composes music. Her sword bears the principle she lives by, an eye for an eye: someone must balance the scales when criminals escape consequences, whether poor or crowned.

Aurola's greeting reveals that Suki's companion is the Crown Prince. When Gaius Miller calls the child a monster, Suki confronts the villagers who watched the kidnapping without helping, and Darkon acknowledges their fear but rejects their attempt to blame the child. He apologizes that an Outsider answered their need faster than their own rulers and promises to do better.

Suki accepts Darkon's offer of a place in Astravia's army, where she can help protect its people. When the rescued child asks to accompany them, they promise a home and an education rather than repayment for the rescue. Darkon names the child Song, and Suki gives Song her surname, Rivale.

Astravia Twenty-Four Years Ago

Two years later, Drakonis is losing his sight, hearing and clarity, often mistaking those around him for Darkon. Wondering why being Alprecha's Beloved has not protected him from age, he urges his heir to fulfill their ancestral promise and put duty before desire, including marrying a princess as he did. Suki, he expects, will become a fond memory rather than Darkon's wife.

Drago wears mourning before their father has died, though Darkon still remembers the little brother who once clung to him before their father's favoritism and Drago's struggles drove them apart. Drago remembers being blamed for their mother's death in childbirth, and now fears that Darkon's reforms will threaten the comfortable life he expects as a duke. His contempt for the common people extends to Suki, whom he refuses to accept as family.

Astravia's harvests remain abundant, yet noble quotas force villages to surrender their own stores. Sven Magnus's unauthorized newspapers criticize those abuses, prompting the king to send soldiers to destroy the presses, search homes and burn the papers.

After stopping the soldiers and the fires with Suki, Darkon tells Sven at the training grounds that the papers offered proper criticism, not slander, and that the crown should replace the presses. He rejects proposed restrictions on civilian technology, but when he credits Suki with bringing the problem to him, Sven objects to an Outsider seeing Astravia's weaknesses and expresses surprise that she can read.

Darkon apologizes, but Suki says two years have not been enough to overcome Astravia's distrust. The generals defend her service, and when she jokes that a prince must marry a princess rather than someone from the wheat fields, they propose another measure of fitness: let her defeat Aurola, Regulus and Titania before the soldiers she might lead.

Though Suki wins all three duels with gauntlets built from compatible Astravian and Seraph technology, Drago still mocks the idea that Astravians would crown her. Aurola reminds him that his facial scar came from attacking Suki after their spar was over, but Suki takes the blame, having already given up her sword. She asks Darkon not to fight with someone who may one day be her family.

Suki's fear that Astravia will never accept an Outsider as Queen follows her into a nightmare, where a voice insults her and a monstrous figure resembling Darkon blames her for turning his kingdom and family against him.

Waking to find Darkon beside her, Suki confesses her fear that Astravia will never trust her and that she is damaging his standing. He answers that he never wanted the crown, for music was his only love before her, and wants a leader who understands the people, whether Suki or someone they elect. He could use royal authority to dismantle the monarchy, but Suki warns that they must stay until the people can manage that change; afterward, she wants to show him the ocean. He promises to insist on their marriage, and she promises to remain beside him. Elsewhere, Drago questions Astravia's blessings before a strange suspended form.

The First Observatory Twenty-Two Years Ago

Two years later, with Drakonis dead and his wedding and coronation approaching, Darkon commissions Suki's bridal portrait despite the supposed bad luck. She says he will remain her Prince Charming even after becoming king, but first he must spend a night reaching the First Observatory's inner chamber, where he will inherit the ruler's secrets and the authority he intends to use to end the monarchy.

Fearing Drago may threaten Suki or civilians to make him yield, Darkon asks Suki and Aurola to wait at a trusted inn, entrusts Aurola with his chestplate and assigns the other commanders to watch the city. Suki protests being left behind, but he asks her to let him be the hero this time and promises they will be together in the morning.

Darkon enters the First Observatory with his father's diary as a guide, reading Drakonis's warning that the trial scarred him and will change how his son sees himself and the world. The diary also describes the human cost of Alprecha's protection: poison that might have harmed Drakonis would instead make a peasant ill. After a mechanism verifies his royal blood, Darkon passes the Observatory's beasts and defenses to discover the remains of a starship.

The Observatory's self-repairing defenses are remnants of technology Astravian scholars copied for their own weapons and locks. Drakonis's diary calls the substance covering its inner walls the Grand Star's embrace and describes the creatures there as failed recipients of her blessing. Clearing a console, Darkon reaches the damaged Black Box recording of the vessel's final journey.

The ship's damaged Black Box records a battle between ancient Shadowscythe and the predecessors of Lore's Dragons. When the Dragons activate a Hyper Ladder to escape, the Commander's refusal to retreat leads the First Officer to take command, but a Dragonoid's head strikes the ship, its thrusters fail, and it is caught in the blast. The surviving record ends amid wreckage and a changing crew member's face. Alprecha later explains that the Arcana's domain swallowed the vessel, synchronized with its systems and coalesced with its crew.

Beyond the final hatch, Darkon meets Alprecha, the Empress of the Arcana. She rejects Astravia's royal love story: the first King was a common man who found the ruins and bargained for her blessings, not her husband. She says the Dragon of Time's death shattered the Arcana's body and realm into twenty-two pieces; the ship may have fallen through the resulting cracks onto Lore while retaining its connection to her realm.

Alprecha reveals that the royal line descends from a child she made from the first king's flesh, while her blessings are spatial debris worked into the soil, crops and people, returning to the land when they die naturally. The first king promised to use those people as vessels for the scattered Arcana, and the protection of her Beloved sustains the ruler charged with that work. Reassembling the twenty-two Primordials would offer the power to reshape reality, but the first king could not complete it without losing the living Beloved the ritual required.

Darkon imagines his ancestor dying beneath the telescope not in search of answers, but seeking forgiveness. He refuses the pact: people are neither tools nor fodder, and the crown owes them rather than the reverse. Even without Alprecha's blessings, he believes they can survive by standing together, as Suki taught him. Alprecha accepts his refusal and begins offering a new promise under which she could remain incomplete while Astravia prospers.

Drago interrupts with a threat to Suki, claiming he has her caged above boiling tar. He says he turned news of Darkon's intended abdication into an accusation that he was abandoning Astravia for an Outsider. Knowing the generals would not attack civilians, he used cries for help to draw Suki and Aurola into an ambush and boasts that he stabbed Aurola in the eye. Darkon begs Alprecha to give Drago the blessing and crown to save Suki.

Once Drago becomes her Beloved, he admits he never intended to spare his rivals. Soldiers bring Suki into the confrontation; afterward, she and Darkon lie wounded together. Drago treats Darkon's ability to bleed as proof that the protection has passed to him and names the pair his first sacrifices.

Suki tells Darkon it is not his fault and that the Astravians were tricked, then asks him to live for the people as sunrise approaches. She begins to tell him she loves him, but Darkon begs her to stay, wishing morning would never come. Meanwhile, Drago consolidates his rule, plans to disconnect the capital's power source so technology cannot threaten him, and complains that no Arcana appeared from the attempted sacrifice.

The Fool and the Genesis Garden

Darkon finds himself in the Garden of Genesis, where the Fool explains that Suki died before she could be properly sacrificed, spoiling Drago's ritual. The Primordial embodies the possibilities at the beginning of journeys but has never been allowed to experience their outcome, and Darkon's arrival offers it that chance.

The Fool offers Darkon a choice: let his fading life enter the summoning cycle, or accept a new body and defy it, allowing the Fool to experience his love, pain, hatred and regret through the flesh and eyes it gives him. Darkon accepts with Suki's motto, an eye for an eye. Carrying her, he promises not to leave her again and turns toward the friends still waiting for him.

Guided through the unfamiliar rules of the Fool's realm by Do Dawn and Do Dusk, Darkon returns to recover the six people killed for defending him and Suki. He fights Drago's patrols and makes a grave with a flower in the Garden.

The three generals owe their survival to the Fool's power, but Aurola, remembering the citizens attacking them, feels she should not live when Suki is gone. Titania lacks organs, while Regulus remained in pieces too long and no longer remembers who she was. Even as Regulus jokes about stitching her head with floss, Darkon admits he may never heal her mind. He fills their injuries with debris and binds them to the Garden as members of his Scale: Aurola becomes La, Titania Ti, and Regulus Re.

Before he loses the ability to travel in Lore, Darkon recovers Song Rivale, the child he and Suki saved. She had been studying medicine at the Academy when Drago's soldiers attacked, and her classmates died in the fire after holding them back long enough for her to escape. Having witnessed Drago's coronation and the betrayal of Darkon's remaining supporters, she chooses methodical work over an outburst of grief, using her research and Darkon's resources to grow replacement organs for Ti and Re. She joins the Scale as So.

Hoping to prevent Suki from ever reaching Astravia but unable to travel backward themselves, Darkon and So build a clone from his flesh and debris. Equipment from the Observatory and the capital's power source support its tank and a new gate; the imperfect copy resembles Darkon and receives his memories, with a mission to intercept Suki in the past.

The clone reaches the future instead of the past, loses its memories, and meets Laken before Song loses track of it. Connecting this report to Suki's memory of a Seraphic Paladin with his face and name, Darkon concludes that the clone later traveled back and helped set her on the road to Astravia. Their attempt to prevent the tragedy helped bring it about, a conclusion Do Dusk later confirms.

Convinced that time and space stand between him and Suki, Darkon resolves to tear reality apart. He and Song experiment on human subjects, preferably Astravians, with the Observatory's pathogen and Arcana material he calls Seeds. His diary records how he revises his theory: the Seed does not coexist with its host but consumes it, while the virus lets the host survive long enough for the Creature to grow. The Garden's lack of uniform time makes the transformation unpredictable.

During his time in the Garden, Darkon catches a falling comet through a rift and finds the enormous child who becomes Fa. Re plays with her and shares films, and Fa gradually reshapes herself into a smaller form that can sit in Re's lap, keeping her last horn at Re's urging. Later, So rescues the injured Moth girl Mi Calistege from poachers; during her recovery in the Garden, a guitar found through a rift lets her bring music to the Scale.

Darkon's diary links the uneven growth of his experiments to the Arcana realms' lack of Time. Recording the envoys' explanation that Lore's regular passage of time comes from the Eternal Dragon, he plans to draw you into the Garden so the transformations can proceed predictably. So and La watch your struggle against Chaos, and twenty-two years after the tragedy, Darkon is ready to bring you there.