#unpredictably-ghostly

But they weren't always the inseparable king and hand. Once upon a time, there was a simple blacksmith in his hilltop forge, and a bard that came along the bend.

The bard had been travelling far and wide, telling fantastic stories to the people he boarded with, and the blacksmith was no different. But the blacksmith was also a charismatic storyteller, and they clicked so easily. He had exceptional talent within his forge as well, with special magic to apply to the armour, weapon and tools he created. Pots that never sprung holes. Gauntlets that bore twice the damage before they broke. When the bard left again, he came back, not long after having told surrounding villages about the blacksmith's talent. But talent and skill is always sought after, hunted down for one's own gain.

The blacksmith never wished to be a lord. The bard never wished to be a hand. But when threat approached their home, where people had settled around the forge, they had to take a stand one way or another. Along side them, a small army of trusted men and militia from their lowly village. A demolitionist, a braveheart, a mountainman. Fear begun to set in for Dogwarts and its citizens when a planted explosion rattles the gates of the township, the lord caught in it and heavily injured.

There's rumours of snowfall one spring, on the night of a full moon. When the king had called his most loyal hand to the courtyard and placed upon his hands the finest of Dogwarts' forge, a crystalline axe. Two young men stood beneath the eyes of the stars and the hard, unblinking stare of the moon, the whispers of the night, hopelessly in love and running out of time as enemies close in on their territory.

That night, the lord of Dogwarts fell with the symphony of his lover's wails, but the Red King rose. A chill swallowed the courtyard as snow fell like blossoms, and the Lord, cold to the touch and bleeding from the head, helped his Hand to his feet. Deep, ancient magic thrummed through them like the beating of their hearts. They lose. It was in their fate to lose, left to decompose in the fields of their village.

The enemy was not unfamiliar with magic. Perhaps it is why they hunted the mage king so ruthlessly. The young wizard who had struck down both the King and the Hand entombs their souls within storybooks. History books, even, written by the winners. Scriptures that detail the two young men as beasts fuelled by bloodlust, blinded by war and vengeance, described as not an ounce of humanity in their blackened hearts. Sealed in separate books, one burgundy and the other forest green, the ghosts of the King and the Hand are locked away apart from each other for the next several centuries.

However, that wizard was only in the beginning of his magical career. His powers were amateur, and little by little, fractions of soul seeped from the spines of the storybooks as they travelled between libraries until settling in the archives of Spawn, a central neutral kingdom in the present timeline. And those small portions of soul found their way back into the life cycle, eventually forming Sir Ren Digenty of the Shadowlands and Councillor Martyn Littlewood of the Southlands.

Here's normal Stacy again:

Inverted Stacy:

Switch Stacy:

Horror septics Stacy:

Stacy from the Bad End ask blog:

Stacy from the Rift arg--aka, the break-between-the-walls blog:

Stacy from the Facility JSE blog (she hasn't appeared there yet):

Fantasy Masks Stacy:

And finally MerMay Stacy: