The Troll Kings invisible hands..

..twitch, ghostly but for its rings; hoops and bands of Rheingold set with gems from plutonian realms. chalcedony, oryx, Martian pyrites, amber fossils from the toxic beds of Venusian seas.

The king half-slumbers, half-wrathful and half-sad, vast and earthlike, invisible but for silken robes stitched from the campaign tents of emperors, the barding of dead grail knights, the wedding dresses of a thousand brides woven with their golden hair.

Fat the troll-king is. Fat with eaten women and brave men, and bitter his cold breath.

Adored he would be.

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"Am I not... " he breathes out, in a murmur like interstellar static.

A pause.

The crown, a crown of splintered diamonds shining like glass, woven together with the unending labour of a hundred thousand enchanted spiders whose curse and purpose is only and entirely to weave their webs endlessly around the spiked crowns hoop and attach it firmly to the Troll Kings invisible head, that it might not fall, cascade down down down onto the sea-stone fall and there shatter, erupt like crystal waters, like a meteor of light, and drown the petitioners in a sea  of bloodstained gems.. (each spider was a hero once, the Troll Kings foe, this being his just punishment for those who would place limits or reductions on the Troll kings wealth), the crown, tilts, rises!

A gasp runs round the hall! The King is sitting up! He is, well not rising, but he is straightening his magnificent spine! Not for a century, not for two, has the Troll king even raised his head. Noble lines have lived and died and chronicles been written and been lost in the hundreds of winters since that last and mighty raising of the brow.

"AM I NOT..." (one thousand salt-stained copper-clad troll knights draw to rimy hunchbacked attention, some waking up for the first time in a decade).

".. a KING???" the Troll King cries.

The hall is silent. What does this mean?

One hundred ageless elf-maids languishing in one hundred gilded cages hanging from the Troll Kings stolen stars while their ever-gold hair grows ever down (for only when it grows long enough to stroke a goblins head below will they be set free), start, awaken, glance curiously amongst themselves. Is he having a stroke? they think.

The college of goblin sorcerers, so old and mad their ears have been plaited into mobius strips under their chins, shiver, shaking tomb-dust from their hunched backs, grit their sharp yellow teeth, one snaps their man-bone pipe, one has, unnoticed, at some point become a mushroom.

The gold bird captured in an onyx mirror held only by the shadow of a sleeping silver girl, herself locked within a crystal coffin which is locked within a crystal coffin which is itself so locked, seven-times-seven times, each lock made by a dwarven smith who was strangled with his own beard and the key given to a seperate deamon each, the gold bird chirps!

"WELL?????" the Troll-King whispers, barnacles crunching from his armpits and rear as he shifts in his cold and granite throne.

None speak, until one, the Crone Sycroax, the Troll-Kings mistress of maladies, the storm-stirrer and milk-curdler, the baby-stealing witch and his sanest advisor, hauls her sagging paps from her silver bath full of cold and curdled cheese and says;

"Aye. A King. King you be and so it is."

"AND YET..." the earth shakes, the murmur of weeping gods issues from the toothed vault behind the throne, thunder deafens. He is getting up! the Troll King is rising!

No. No it is safe yet. He is merely setting his great feet, slippered in ebony caravels which set sail for forgotten lands, as if he might stand, he is not standing yet.

But still! What a cataclysm!  What horrors? What if he stands up? What should be done? None there know for it has never been seen or recorded in even the glyphs of aeonic time.

"AND YET" the Troll King speaks, and ear bones shatter spontaniously in several adjacent lands "WHERE ARE MY ADORERS?"

Then. Slowly, horrifically, like the end of empires, the King stands!

Several go mad at the sight. 

Dust, virgin bones and unknown of Archean life cascade down his mighty silken gown. He stands! The hundred-thousand-diamond crown rises to the level of the lowest elf-maids cage. The invisible mitts sweep hanging elf-hair aside like a curtain of gold. The head turns! Slowly, like a cannonball rolling. This way! That way!

Where the invisible gaze passes, gold coins turn to wizards and run away cackling, teeth shatter or turn to stone, bones turn to glass, gain sentience or are engraved with impossible prophecies beneath the flesh.

"AM I NOT ADORED?" 

The Troll-Kings bitterness forms springs of raw vinegar which spurt up like geysers from between the sea-stone cobbles of his hall, (each a hill), picking some goblins and sweeping them away.

"I SEE NO LEGIONS. I SEE NO CHOIRS. WHERE LIE THE TRUMPETS AND ARMIES? WHERE THE POETS AND MANDOLINS? WHERE THE APES AND MAIDENS? 

The Crone-Thing Sycorax stands in her bath, dripping cold cheese. All who see her nakedness go blind and die.

"They are passed O King." She says.

"PASSED?"

The Crone coughs up a teratoma, examines is with one beady eye, smiles and puts it back in her mouth, chewing carefully.

"Those were the poets of your youth, O King. Those were the armies of the summer when the world was young, and the maidens of the dawn. Now is the night and the dark. Now is winter and the end of all but stone. Dust are your adorers. Forgotten is your name."

"DUST?" whispers the invisible king, "YET I SLEPT BUT FOR A MOMENT."

"Hggggh" grunts the witch, and shits a bloody stream into her bath of cheese. "Ahhhhh. No King. Worlds have burned in your sleeping. Towers fallen and been raised. New stars shine. But not for long. The world falls, soon to die."

"AH." Whispers the Troll-King, and sighs out a dozen ghosts who weave through the hall like streamers of pale fire. 

"AHHHHHHHH."

The Troll-King sits so slowly and tectonically that mountains nearby tilt by a degree towards his weight.

"IT WAS ONLY A MOMENT THEN. A MOMENT OF GOLD."

In other news, the Kickstarter is going... less well than hoped for..

Leading to some more modest and hopefully achievable goals..

Which you can find out about in Updates HERE!!!!