#ghost zone

When Danny beats Pariah Dark and becomes the ghost king, it isn’t on accident. The Infinite Realms themselves wanted Danny to win. You see the Realms are made of ectoplasm which is notoriously known to give sentience or even sapience to just about anything. Inanimate objects, the souls of the dead, abstract concepts, and even imagined entities. If you can think it, there’s a good chance the Realms can bring it to life. What no one thought of before was whether or not this applied to the Realms themselves.

No one knows the specifics about Pariah Dark’s story. He’d ruled with an iron fist and had ruled for so long that no one remembered where he came from or who the previous ghost king was, or if there even was a ghost king before him. He’d been entombed for almost as long as he had reigned. This is all to say that by the time that Pariah Dark was released almost no one knew anything about him anymore. The only beings that might know something were the ancients or Clockwork and neither were very willing to share for their own reasons.

What is known is that it took all of the ancients working in tandem to beat Pariah. The combination of the Crown of Fire and the Ring of Rage gave Pariah nigh-omnipotence. The crown allowed Pariah to call upon the Tealms themselves as a well of energy and considering that the Infinite Realms are, well, infinite, he had infinite power at his beck and call. The ring gave Pariah complete control over all the ectoplasm at his command. These two points, combined with the varying powers afforded to ghosts, made Pariah near unstoppable. He was able to call upon the very fabric of reality itself to bend to his whims. The only, and I do mean only, reason the ancients were able to stuff Pariah in that box was due to the Realms themselves rejecting Pariah. The struggle between Pariah and the Realms gave the ancients just enough time to steal the ring and shove him in the box.

Cut to uncountable millennia later, Vlad releases Pariah from his box after stealing the Ring of Rage. Things happen and Danny ends up being the one to take on Pariah. The Realms, seeing Danny leading an army on his way to face the king one on one decides it likes him more. When Danny issues a challenge to Pariah the Realms takes the chance and makes the challenge binding. Whoever wins gets the title of ghost king. And, thanks to the Realms resisting Pariah’s control and Danny knocking the crown off, he’s able to just barely manage a win.