The King Who Never Was
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Overview
The King Who Never Was (Commonspeak), formerly known as Seans (Feytongue \ʃɑnts\ for coincidence), the Fortunate King, founded the Court of Circumstance, one of the Ancient Courts of Arcadia.
Among mortal scholars, The King Who Never Was is the least understood of the Fey Gods. Knowledge of him derives entirely from censored Arcadian histories, corrupted oral traditions of Orisons, and other less reliable sources. Lolth's erasure of the Fey God and his Court was so thorough that no complete record of him survives.
History
Origin
Before Arcadia, Seans was an Elf of the early Shattered Age, c. NIR 250, born into what can only be described as a cursed life. Every misfortune save death seemed to befall him and those near him. He exiled himself to the wilderness of Pelithos. There he began to explore the purpose of such a cursed life. This eventually entered his dreams, and he was transported to Arcadia, following whispers of meaning.
Seans was among the earliest migrants to Arcadia, arriving soon after the first two Ancient Courts were founded. He aligned loosely with the The Keening Women, from whom he learned the principles of philosophical power, though he never fully adopted the form of a Hag.
Ascension
Seans ascended c. NIR 420, founding the The Court of Circumstance. He taught that Meaning arose not from intention, action, or belief, but from circumstance, from forces beyond control. To him, luck was not randomness, but a hidden structure only visible in retrospect. His philosophy was popular among the lost, dispossessed, and unlucky, which swelled the ranks of his Court in the Shattered Age.
His followers became the Pucks, Fey who embodied mischance, coincidence, and near-misses. The Forgotten Court flourished quietly, its philosophy difficult to refute and impossible to predict.
War of Erasure
Seans was a pivotal figure in The War of Erasure. It was Seans who invented Cruthúnas (Denial), a form of philosophical warfare capable of disproving a Court’s theory of Meaning (though it is widely believed that he could only do so with help from The Keening Women. This form of warfare, when successful, would unravel the source of a Fey God's power and dissolve their Court.
It is unknown why he aggressed against other Courts with this tool of philosophical violence. Several Courts were dissolved in this way. Emboldened, Seans attempted to apply Denial to the Court of Alignment, seeking to disprove one of the other Ancient Courts.
He did not succeed. Where his prior targets tried to rebut the attack, Lolth was more clever by far and realized how to win. She accepted the argument, but then turned it against Seans own philosophy. Once she had the upper hand, she deployed her own terrifying form of philosophical violence that would become known as the Erasure.
This did not stop at stripping Seans of his godhood or dissolving his court. The Erasure removed the entire Strange Essence of Condition from philosophical consideration in Arcadia. The Forgotten Court ceased to exist. Seans was annihilated completely. A terrifying prospect considering no Fey had been known to be able to die.
Aftermath
There are no modern incarnations of this Fey God or his court. The Erasure ensured that what remains of Seans is only structural absence. Histories skip him. Philosophical lineages terminate without explanation. The Strange itself behaves differently where Condition once applied.
Fey scholars refer to him only as The King Who Never Was.
Description
In his anthropomorphic form, reconstructed from fragmentary accounts, Seans appeared as a genial elven man of unremarkable appearance, save for a persistent sense that he had arrived at exactly the right moment. His clothing and features were said to change subtly with circumstance, never drawing attention.
In his surreal form, called The Coin, the King Who Never Was appeared as a colossal coin of dull silver, spinning endlessly in place. No face is ever revealed. Around it orbit rings of combinatoric devices: dice rolling endlessly, spinning cards with changing faces, colored beads. The air is heavy with unresolved outcomes. To witness this form is to feel that something decisive is about to happen and never does.
Personality
Accounts of Seans describe him as calm, amused, and deeply patient. He rarely acted directly, preferring to wait until events aligned in his favor. He believed that control was an illusion and that true power lay in understanding inevitability after the fact.
He did not hate his enemies. Is is reported that he felt his war was an act of kindness to lost children.
Philosophy
Meaning is not found, it is bestowed by the whims of the universe.
—Forgotten Court adage
The Forgotten Court taught that meaning arose not from intention, effort, or structure, but from contingency. They believed that the universe revealed its truth through randomness. What survived chance and improbability possessed meaning precisely because the universe chose it to. They believed that only by embracing the uncertainty and lack of control would meaning be revealed, that all intentional attempts to find or impose meaning were illusions, tricksy dreams of Strange.
- Meaning emerges from chance, not design
- Embrace misfortune, for if the universe wants you to have meaning, you will endure
- Obsession with probability, odds, and coincidence
- Obsession with misfortune and near-misses
Those drawn to the Forgotten Court were gamblers, refugees, disaster survivors, diviners, and those who had outlived expectations. Mortals who had lost faith in merit or justice found grim clarity in the idea that meaning could only be assigned after survival. Among the Fey, this philosophy appealed to those disturbed by immortality’s guarantee, beings who longed to feel that existence still carried risk, even if only symbolically.
Orisons
- Caldrin the Almost-Crowned: Human, Man, Acrolon, Shattered Age, Dead. A noble whose coronation was delayed by a storm, then a riot, then a treaty, then a war. Each delay made his claim stronger in legend, though he never ruled a single day.
- Kalavera the Child of Seven Roads: Elf, Woman, Pelithos, Shattered Age, Dead. A wanderer whose life repeatedly intersected with historic events without ever altering them. Later scholars noted that every catastrophe narrowly avoided during the era occurred along a path she had just departed.